keywords: Welcome Stranger
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AUSTRALIA
- Greg Foyster
- 20 June 2011
22 Comments
One day a stranger knocks on the door. 'Help!' he shouts. 'The people in my house are trying to kill me!' Instinctively, you reach for the door handle. A wrinkled hand, old yet firm, grabs your wrist. You look up and see your landlord, a bald man with thick rectangular glasses and bushy eyebrows.
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INTERNATIONAL
In Melbourne, 2000 Indian students gather to protest a lack of Government response to a spate of violent attacks. I am
with them because I am ashamed that a white Christian woman is safer
in the military capital of Rawalpindi than these students are on a
train in Melbourne.
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AUSTRALIA
Mark Raper on Australia’s changing attitudes to refugees
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AUSTRALIA
- David Glanz
- 24 April 2006
The ‘right to return’ to Israel does not mean that all Jews visiting there for the first time will like the reality they find.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 07 October 2020
47 Comments
Pope Francis’ latest encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti is, as we might have anticipated, a reflection on our times. The burden of the encyclical is to commend fraternity and social friendship and deplore selfishness and hostility in the response to the crisis.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 07 May 2020
5 Comments
For comfortable communitarians among us it is tempting to lament the loss of the solidarity displayed in the first response to coronavirus. That would be a mistake. Solidarity is not a mood to be looked back on with nostalgia, but a commitment to be built and defended.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Georgia White
- 28 April 2020
5 Comments
I keep going back to a short story, by Carmen Maria Machado in her book Her Body and Other Parties, called ‘Inventory’. In its simplest terms, the story is a narrator’s list of her lovers loved: boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbours, strangers. From this inventory emerges, bit by bit, the story that has made the list necessary: an epidemic is ravaging the world’s population.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 28 April 2020
13 Comments
We have done a lot right as a nation during the pandemic, but on the whole we have not treated foreigners as well as we might have. The inequality of treatment has been in evidence during the twin health and economic crises brought on by COVID-19.
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AUSTRALIA
Several incidents in Australia this week highlight the inherent challenges of undertaking travel which people in the Australian disabled community have long understood. Travel is neither completely accessible nor inclusive, even in 2019. I know this from experience. I have low vision and I'm profoundly deaf in one ear.
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RELIGION
- Stephanie Dowrick
- 06 March 2019
85 Comments
My relationship to Catholicism can be summed up as: I am on the outskirts, yet close and invested enough to care how the Church evolves. Because, it seems to me, how it evolves and the speed at which those urgent and essential changes take place will significantly determine whether it will survive — and whether it deserves to survive.
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AUSTRALIA
- Carolina Gottardo and Nishadh Rego
- 20 August 2018
13 Comments
This remarkable policy of what Dr Eve Lester calls 'planned destitution' combines the most extreme instincts of neoliberal, nationalist and authoritarian thinking. Fundamentally, it derives from the Minister for Home Affairs' far reaching powers to determine the rights and entitlements of non-citizens such as people seeking asylum.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 26 June 2018
35 Comments
Just in time to arrest ponderous musings about Western Civilisation, up jumps Denniss' cheeky funeral oration for the neoliberal settlement. His target is the assumption that an economy based on unregulated competition between individuals will benefit society. He does not spend time arguing with the theory, but points to the results.
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