Keywords: St James Centre
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Simon Smart
- 01 February 2023
5 Comments
With the launch of ChatGPT, my initial amazement quickly gave way to unease and a sense that something essential could be about to be lost. We will need help to navigate such complexity and considering what is essential to our human nature would be an important place to start.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 14 December 2022
What the failed attempt to crush Russia’s economy has revealed is that America’s and Europe’s dominance of the global financial system is something of an illusion; more like money changing hands in a giant casino rather than actual wealth.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 28 October 2022
Who wields the most power in the world? If one follows the money trail, it becomes clear that Western societies have become ruled by a new type of aristocracy: a management aristocracy.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Juliette Hughes
- 07 September 2022
4 Comments
So far it hasn’t been easy to find a review in Australia from someone who has actually read the sixth and latest book in Rowling/Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike crime series, The Ink Black Heart. l wonder if it is too much to ask for people to simply read books (any books) before holding opinions about them.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 17 August 2022
2 Comments
We need to be able to do more than simply give notional assent to the Uluru Statement. We need to be able to contribute to the hard thinking and difficult discussions to be had if the overwhelming majority of our fellow Australians are to be convinced of the need for a Voice in the Constitution.
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AUSTRALIA
- Damien Linnane
- 27 July 2022
Two months into a 10-month prison sentence, I was placed in solitary confinement after having a nervous breakdown. I’d originally made a fruitless attempt to keep my breakdown to myself, because I’d been told what would happen if Corrective Services found out I was having mental health issues. One of the first friends I made in prison, like many of the inmates, was suicidal. ‘The best advice I can give you if you’re struggling with your mental health’, he told me, ‘is to do everything you can to keep it from the officers.’
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AUSTRALIA
- Melinda Tankard Reist
- 20 July 2022
2 Comments
Exposure to pornography has been linked to an increase in in sexually aggressive behaviour and adolescent dating violence. This mass, industrial-level grooming of our young is causing lasting damage to their social and sexual development and leading to even more women and girls being viewed as less human.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 08 November 2021
4 Comments
The Glasgow United Nations Climate Change Conference has been advertised as an effort to focus on sustainable environmental solutions. What got much less attention, if any, is that it is probably at least as much about having a sustainable financial system. Many noted that China, did not send its leader: Xi Jinping, president of the world’s greatest CO2 emitter. There was also another significant absence: the financiers who are hoping to profit from the trillions allocated into climate change projects.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 18 October 2021
11 Comments
The High Court decision has been confusing for many people because it both upheld Ridd’s right to intellectual freedom and the university’s entitlement to sack him for breaches during disciplinary proceedings which had followed upon two wrongly argued censures. Basically, Ridd won on the point of intellectual freedom but he lost on the other aspects of his behaviour which had nothing to do with the exercise of intellectual freedom.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 29 July 2021
6 Comments
The despair induced by daily infection and death tallies would be, in normal times, ameliorated to some extent by one’s workaday routine. And the crisis would be borne in togetherness — an impossible response, since the pandemic calls on us to withdraw into ourselves rather than draw together.
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MEDIA
- Jeremy Clarke
- 10 September 2020
7 Comments
The China story, described this week by the ABC’s Director of News Gavin Morris as ‘the story of our times’, defies simplistic renderings, however much a significant part of Australian-based commentary masquerades as such. The rapid revolutions of the modern media cycle do not permit much nuance or lengthy historically informed pieces.
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AUSTRALIA
- Najma Sambul
- 09 July 2020
12 Comments
Donations flooded the centre. Volunteers from across Melbourne arrived ready to support any way they could. Key volunteers came from Carlton and surrounding suburbs, mostly young African people were on the frontlines. They had used social media to reach out to friends, relatives and others locked in the housing estates to ask what they needed and then got to work.
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