Recent polls have shown a rise in public support for former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd returning to The Lodge. After an appearance on the ABC’s Q&A television show widely seen as possibly preparing…
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Displaying 13401 - 13425 of 13497 articles
Every year since the early 1990s, thousands of visitors have invaded the Gallipoli battlefield. The rise of this sad, starkly beautiful and melancholy place as a tourist destination is of course related…
When Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 he offered some reflections on just war theory and sought to justify, partly in its light, the war he inherited in Afghanistan. He did not apply…
The man in charge of the My School website says schools may discriminate against students with special needs because they drag down results. The head of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting…
Expected cuts in health and medical research in the May Federal budget have led to a predicable backlash from vested interests. We are informed that any cuts will detrimentally affect standards of healthcare…
Easter, ideally, is the time when we should turn our attention to the grandest themes of existence. The Easter sequence of Christianity interweaves four wonderful ideas. One: cultivation of the will through…
In a recent speech presented at the Sydney Institute, Julia Gillard reaffirmed her commitment to welfare reform aimed at full employment. This was justified not by the need for the government to cut its…
The patently obvious was stated by Allan Myers QC, when he called for abolition of time-billing by lawyers in the Weekend Australian on Saturday. Politicians and judges have been calling for such reform…
Towards the end of the ABC-TV historical drama Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo,* a party is thrown to celebrate the magazine’s third anniversary. Cleo had launched in November 1972, the same month that…
Multiculturalism is back. At least it would seem that way. The Immigration Minister Chris Bowen is speaking about it, a parliamentary inquiry is looking into it, and the government is producing pamphlets…
In her paean to the virtues and benefits of paid work, Prime Minister Julia Gillard fails to acknowledge the complex intersections of paid and unpaid work in social and individual well being. Good jobs…
If you are in any way exposed to computer games on a regular basis, it won’t have escaped your attention that Australia does not have an R18+ classification for video games. This is particularly strange…
In 1981, way back when Charles married Di in that big hoopla ceremony with the meringue dress and the Dame Kiri numbers, a less remembered, less valorised, element was the virginity thing. Di needed to…
The Pacific Islands are powerful icons in the politics of climate change. Headlines such as “Sinking islands, vanishing worlds”, “Climate refugees in a drowning Pacific”, “Rising seas … washed an inhabited…
Over the last few days, union officials past and present have strafed the Gillard government. Senator Doug Cameron felt compelled to attack the free trade agreement with the USA that Gillard’s government…
When disaster strikes, people step up to help. But all too often the management of those willing volunteers becomes a disaster in its own right. We need to improve our emergency planning now, because we…
The News Of The World phone-tapping scandal continues to escalate, presenting media proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp managers with what is the most damaging issue they have faced since The Sun’s…
We’ve all seen the TV cop shows where a wonderful bit of technology allows the police to analyse a criminal’s voice and solve the case. And while the technology doesn’t allow us to do that just yet, serious…
This year’s Archibald prize has gone to Ben Quilty’s portrait of Australian artist Margaret Olley. It’s an award often criticised for being populist or irrelevant, and there’s no reason to think that this…
In 1998, Professor Muhammad Yunus was the inaugural recipient of Australia’s only international award for peace, the Sydney Peace Prize. Almost nine years later, in December 2006, he received the Nobel…
Twenty years since the handing down of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody there is still no system for genuine independent investigation of prisoner fatalities. Yet one central element…
Australia could be doing more to regulate the activities of Australian companies operating abroad. In the past decade a handful of troubling cases have been reported connecting Australian mining companies…
Recent rumors of looming cuts to the National Health and Medical Research Council budget have jump-started a much-needed national discussion about health and medical research policy in Australia. Unfortunately…
The professional Australian Rules football season is underway and the better part of the nation is now transfixed until early October by its myriad machinations. At this early point in the season, it is…
Something remarkable has happened: 1000 economists have agreed with each other. In Washington, civil society groups will present a letter signed by 1000 economists from 50 countries to the annual G20 finance…