Keywords: Public Interest
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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AUSTRALIA
- Binoy Kampmark
- 16 April 2020
4 Comments
The opacity of the Australian public service, and its disposition to secrecy, has left journalists in a bind. Leaks constitute the oxygen of the secret state, but publishing that material remains a dangerous affair.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kate Galloway
- 15 April 2020
5 Comments
Who knew that the greatest moral debate of our time would be whether or not to wear a mask? Having sewed my first mask many weeks ago, I’ve been following the millions of words written and spoken on the efficacy of masks, whether to wear them, who should wear them, how to use them, and how to make them. In a genre that is already bending my brain, there is a special sub-category of mask-shaming.
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EDUCATION
I don't want to sound too ungrateful, because there isn't a playbook for this scenario, but if all it took to build a passable digital schooling ecosystem was a week of hard work, we'd have done it long ago. We haven't been asked to turn on a dime, we've been asked to pirouette.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kate Galloway
- 17 March 2020
18 Comments
How to make sense of what is going on? I think that there are ostensibly competing discourses at play. Apart from widespread community concern, or even fear, I see three different spheres of risk that are melding together in the collective (non-expert) consciousness: public health, personal health, and workplace health and safety.
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MEDIA
- Isabelle Oderberg
- 13 March 2020
6 Comments
Most restaurants don’t grow all their own food. Of course, they can and may grow some produce, but their expertise is on the preparation, cooking and plating of the dish. They look to farmers to supply the raw ingredients. This is a pretty good analogy for the role of the national newswire, Australian Associated Press (AAP), which will be closing mid 2020.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 26 February 2020
22 Comments
One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 25 February 2020
7 Comments
Approaches to governance are in flux within church agencies, sectors, dioceses and at the national level, either driven by the demands of state regulations or in response to the challenging new situation the church finds itself in. There is so much change going on that it is difficult to follow.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 05 February 2020
7 Comments
The great significance of the change may lie in its confirmation that the churches no longer have the central place in Australian society they once enjoyed. This is now being reflected in public ceremonial. The public sphere is now more thoroughly secular and loosed from the moorings of its historical traditions.
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MEDIA
- Celeste Liddle
- 30 January 2020
20 Comments
At what point is the media going to realise that the Invasion Day rally, which has been going on in some form or other since 1938, is not going away and, indeed, is growing? I'm convinced the media don't want to report Invasion Day, as reminding the public to fear Indigenous people and our rights has been their practice for centuries now.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Binoy Kampmark
- 24 January 2020
10 Comments
New Zealand's judicial channels found against the Kiribati national, claiming he did not satisfy the definition of refugee within international law. He was deported. This month, the UNHRC did not find the deportation unlawful, a move that former Fleet Street editor Damian Wilson said had 'piled on the misery in the climate change mess'.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kate Galloway
- 20 January 2020
16 Comments
For our society to function responsively to what is now a dynamically changing context, we urgently need differently oriented governance. This will, no doubt, be unpalatable for some — both in government and in the general public. But without re-setting how we are governed, our land and our society will suffer further destruction.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Cristy Clark
- 19 December 2019
10 Comments
Toxic air, dwindling water supplies, extreme heat: it's bleak stuff. And yet, on Sunday, COP25 finished with very little progress. Our planet will warm to +3C or higher, unless we also do something about the vested interests that continue to profit from our demise. And they aren't going to give up their power (or profits) just because we ask nicely.
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