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Keywords: Southeast Asia

  • Reshaping the public space: Lessons for Australian refugee, Aboriginal and climate policy

    • 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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  • The politics of popular evil and untrendy truth

    • 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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Future shock is the new normal

    • Brian Matthews
    • 24 July 2015
    8 Comments

    They are ‘coming to get us’, warns our Prime Minister, adapting the ‘bogey man’ mode of our childhood fears to the contemporary narrative of terrorism and violence. The effect of related intrusions on our daily lives is being gradually dulled. The neoliberal dispensation under which we now live both relies on, and encourages, new episodes of normalisation that go far beyond what we've known in the past.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Abbott's foreign policy flops

    • Tony Kevin
    • 12 September 2014
    11 Comments

    Since Richard Casey was External Affairs Minister in the 1950s, the three pillars of Australian foreign policy have been: a genuine reaching out to our Asian neighbours, adherence to UN-based multilateral values and institutions, and a firm but self-respecting defence partnership with the United States. All those pillars look pretty shaken now.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate denial tide is turning

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 04 November 2013
    47 Comments

    With the publication of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Los Angeles Times made the bold decision to no longer publish letters from climate change denialists saying climate change is a matter of fact, not opinion. While this might seem like a small victory, the more substantial issue on the horizon is the global campaign for divestment in the fossil fuel industry. As it gains momentum and fossil fuel companies will be forced to reassess the value of their assets.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia falls for a fistful of fibs

    • Elenie Poulos
    • 17 July 2013
    52 Comments

    If there's one thing Bob Carr's recent comments on asylum seekers demonstrated it was that our politicians think they can say anything they want about 'boat people' and not be held to account. As a society we have been captured by the lies and easy phrases; our view of the world bears too little resemblance to the truth of it, and in this we are doomed to live small and impoverished lives.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope for a Malaysian Spring

    • Lily Zubaidah Rahim and Sven Schottmann
    • 29 April 2013
    1 Comment

    Amid democratic transitions in Asia and protest movements in the Middle East, a growing number of Malaysians are unwilling to countenance any further their government's paternalistic politics. Whoever wins next Sunday's election will have the task of forging a new consensus on what it means to be Malaysian. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    In Thailand, the land of snarls

    • Simon Roughneen
    • 24 May 2010

    Standing amid the burnt-out ruins of southeast Asia's second biggest shopping mall, it becomes clear the Land of Smiles has become a land of snarls. The uncompromising quashing of the anti-government redshirt rally by the Thai army may have sown the seeds for more conflict later on.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Palestine's heavy metal revolution

    • James M. Dorsey
    • 19 April 2010
    5 Comments

    Boosted by technologies that facilitate mass distribution without government control, the heavy metal and hip-hop music scene in the Middle East recalls the role music played in the velvet revolution that toppled regimes in Eastern Europe and Indonesia.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Irish radical Jesuit's life down under

    • Val Noone
    • 04 September 2009
    7 Comments

    At the height of Willam Hackett's republican involvements, the Jesuit provincial offered him a choice of silence or appointment to Australia. Through a combination of personal memoir and public history, Brenda Niall unravels the riddles of Hackett's life.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Shariah's threat to beer in Malaysia

    • Simon Roughneen
    • 01 September 2009
    1 Comment

    Shariah law in Malaysia has seen Muslims banned from attending a Black Eyed Peas RnB concert, and a woman sentenced to be caned for drinking beer in public. All's not what it seems in this slickly-marketed, 'moderate Islamic' tourist magnet.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Malaysia's threat to Rudd's Asia Pacific Community

    • Greg Lopez
    • 07 July 2009

    Kevin Rudd's visit to Malaysia this week reminds us of stormy bilateral relations under former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. With Mahthir's son now serving as an important deputy minister, some now fear a return of 'Mahathirism'.

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