Keywords: Public Servants
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Patti Miller
- 14 October 2015
13 Comments
I have always felt guilty about an inability to commit to any belief system. So when Montaigne said 'Only fools have made up their mind', I felt an enormous sense of relief. He knew that those who are certain are the ones to shut down newspapers, lop off heads, blow up planes, burn books. There is a thread throughout his essays, too, of him finding sex undignified and therefore unfitting for grown men and women. It is one of his many contradictions and confronts me with my own contradictory attitude.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kerry Murphy
- 28 September 2015
10 Comments
Hamid is stateless, and came to Australia by boat in mid 2012. He will never get permanent residence, because of his age or because the law states that if you ever held a TPV, you can never get the permanent protection visa. When I explained this to him, I thought might cry. He is now unable to see a way of getting a long term solution for himself and his family, all because of the need to punish refugees who arrive in Australia by boat.
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- Frank Brennan
- 18 September 2015
Pope Francis's concerns are not narrowly dogmatic or pedagogical but universally pastoral. He knows that millions of people, including erstwhile Catholics, are now suspicious of or not helped by notions of tradition, authority, ritual and community when it comes to their own spiritual growth which is now more individual and eclectic. He wants to step beyond the Church's perceived lack of authenticity and its moral focus on individual matters, more often than not, sexual. He thinks the world is in a mess particularly with the state of the planet — climate change, loss of biodiversity and water shortages, but also with the oppression of the poor whose life basics are not assured by the operation of the free market, and with the clutter and violence of lives which are cheated the opportunity for interior peace. He is going to great pains to demystify his office. He wants all people of good will to emulate him and to be both joyful and troubled as they wrestle with the probl
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- Frank Brennan
- 01 September 2015
1 Comment
If you want to form government in Australia and if you want to lead the Australian people to be more generous, making more places available for refugees to resettle permanently in Australia, you first have to stop the boats. If you want to restore some equity to the means of choosing only some tens of thousands of refugees per annum for permanent residence in Australia from the tens of millions of people displaced in the world, you need to secure the borders. The untrendy truth is that not all asylum seekers have the right to enter Australia but that those who are in direct flight from persecution whether that be in Sri Lanka or Indonesia do, and that it is possible fairly readily (and even on the high seas) to draw a distinction between those in direct flight and those engaged in secondary movement understandably dissatisfied with the level of protection and the transparency of processing in transit countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The popular evil is that political
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EDUCATION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 06 August 2015
56 Comments
It seems absurd to hold schools responsible for the way Shorten, Abbott, Joyce, Pyne and Hockey behave. Schools have influenced them in good and bad ways, but ultimately they are their own men. So we Jesuits have no call to apologise, nor to take pride. We are not responsible for them. But we are responsible to them, as we are responsible to all our alumni, even if they languish in public life or public prisons.
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ECONOMICS
International Monetary Fund prescriptions have a long history of failing, and countries that ignore them are often the ones that do surprisingly well. Few have been asked to be more servile than the Greeks. When the IMF came in with what is amusingly referred to as its austerity 'plan', the Greek economy was expected to grow at over 2 per cent. After the 'plan' had taken effect, the country’s economy had shrunk by a quarter.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 01 July 2015
6 Comments
Those Aborigines who are most at home in modern Australia tend to be those with a secure foothold in both the Dreaming and the Market. Those who are most alienated and despairing are those with a foothold in neither. Constitutional change alone won't make things better. But a good Constitution is a better complement to other measures – such as a statutory charter – than a bad one.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 22 June 2015
10 Comments
The interdependence of human beings on one another underlies the Catholic insistence that the dignity of all human beings must be respected, so that the test of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. Laudato Si extends that solidarity to the natural world.
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- William Morris
- 15 June 2015
7 Comments
'Frank points out that the Church cannot credibly proclaim a message of social justice in a pluralist democracy when its own processes fall short of ordinary community standards of justice. It needs to turn its teaching about human rights and human dignity back on itself, the Church, insisting on due process within the life of the Church community.' Bishop William Morris helps launch Frank Brennan's new book Amplifying That Still, Small Voice.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 28 May 2015
5 Comments
We gather on the 48th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. All major political parties to an agreed referendum question when going into the next federal election, with the understanding that the new government and the new parliament would proceed to put a referendum to the people, perhaps on Saturday 27 May 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the successful 1967 referendum.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 19 May 2015
7 Comments
Our Constitution is premised on the outdated notions of terra nullius and assimilation. It is more than three years ago since the Gillard Government set up an Expert Panel, and the Abbott Government is waiting for consensus. Noel Pearson is right to insist that Aboriginal leaders need a place at the table.
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- Simon Caterson
- 02 April 2015
4 Comments
In contrast to the sectarian suspicion expressed by elements of non-Catholic Australia towards Melbourne’s Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who opposed military conscription during the First World War, his Perth contemporary Archbishop Patrick Clune was lauded during the war as ‘pro-war effort, pro-conscription, pro-empire and pro-crown’. Clune travelled from Perth all the way to the Western Front so as to minister to the Catholic soldiers sent there, and he enjoyed warm relations with Protestants and Jews.
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