Keywords: The National Conversation
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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AUSTRALIA
- Fernanda Fain-Binda
- 27 August 2020
When I read Jess Hill’s piece in The Monthly which calls the coronavirus lockdown a ‘gendered pandemic’, I felt heard. I wanted everyone to read this article, to understand that feminist wins were being erased in the name of a national emergency, and that women were stepping up to the now larger domestic workload with a career cost further down the line.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 20 August 2020
7 Comments
I would like here to reflect on the relationship between accountability and other essential aspects of public life: reflection, responsibility, and praise or blame with their attendant punishment and reward. The order and priorities within these need to be respected both in government action and in public comment.
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AUSTRALIA
- Cristy Clark
- 30 July 2020
9 Comments
The need to contain the spread of COVID-19 has led to a raft of emergency laws that have challenged us to deeply consider the appropriate balance between community and individual rights.
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ECONOMICS
- Nicola Heath
- 30 June 2020
2 Comments
It turns out that the COVID-19 economic crisis is disproportionately affecting women — so much so that some have dubbed it a ‘pink-collar recession’. Unemployment figures show that since February, 457,517 women have lost their jobs compared to 380,737 men.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Bree Alexander
- 16 June 2020
5 Comments
I am now more than ever re-thinking borders and my relationship to them. The word seema in Hindi means border or limit. I learnt this as I often ask the meaning of someone’s name when I meet them. It is a way to start a perhaps unlikely conversation and learn language simultaneously; a way of challenging personal borders.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 June 2020
10 Comments
This year Refugee Week has been swallowed by the disruption caused by COVID-19, and by the fracturing of society in the United States. In a world where people naturally turn inwards, those who seek protection from persecution receive little public attention or sympathy. It becomes all the more important to reflect on the world of which refugees are part and why their lives matter to us.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 June 2020
19 Comments
With churches closed throughout much of the world, many events and dedicated weeks have passed us by. One of those weeks was the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Catholics who paid attention to Pope Francis’ engagements may have noticed it through his references to the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s Encyclical on Christian Unity, Ut Unum Sint.
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MEDIA
- Binoy Kampmark
- 15 May 2020
12 Comments
Alan Jones has never shied away from controversy. Relentlessly pounding various positions for decades, he has remained, till his recent announcement that he would be retiring, immoveable. He ducked accusations; he prevailed in the face of storms and juggernauts. At Sydney radio station 2GB, he maintained a degree of authority from the fear of politicians.
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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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INTERNATIONAL
- Binoy Kampmark
- 03 February 2020
11 Comments
This is cosmically far from saying that these are equivalent matters to the death camps of the Holocaust. But if we are to be serious about acknowledging the depravity of Auschwitz, we can at least take the lead from Katz on starting the conversation on why such events take place and do remain chillingly relevant.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 21 January 2020
17 Comments
Australia Day would be wasted if it were devoted simply to self-congratulation. In the wake of the catastrophic fires we need to ask questions about how Indigenous Australians before settlement managed the land and how our agricultural and economic practices have contributed to the perilous situation in which we now find ourselves.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 10 December 2019
17 Comments
To nominate Greta Thunberg the most significant person of 2019 is not to canonise her, still less to say that her way of pressing for action to address climate change is the only way. But her intransigence and single-minded focus are needed to mobilise the support necessary to make politicians act responsibly.
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