What is most striking about Chinese national identity is its stability in the pre-modern past and its fluidity in the modern era. Its dramatic transformation since the mid-19th century is part of China’s tumultuous socio-political change under the impact of traumatic encounters with foreign powers. (more…)
Hundreds of ancient Brush Box and other rainforest trees, many over a thousand years old, have been felled in the head of Terania Creek, their bases eaten out by fire. While the community stepped up to stop the loggers 40 years ago, this time nothing could stop the assault initiated by human-induced climate change. (more…)
Kellie Merritt first met Bernard Collaery in mid-2005. She had not long returned from England, with three young children, recently widowed from the war in Iraq. She was still in shock and anxious about returning to attend a coronial inquest into the circumstances of the shooting down of an RAF aircraft, her husband was flying in. Bernard flipped through the pages of a dense, extensively redacted folder she couldn’t make sense of. He put it aside and looking at her 2yr old he said, “I have a lot in common with your daughter, and I’m going to help you. I grew up not knowing my dad, my mum was a war widow, he was killed in action, flying an RAF plane, it was also shot down, its design diminished survivability too, and he was brave…” (more…)
China is in the ‘news’. But it is not always well informed news. In addition much of our news and views about China are shaped in Washington and London.We don’t really know much about China, our major trading partner by far and the rapidly rising power in our region. This is occurring as US influence is declining.
Tomorrow Jocelyn Chey will introduce a twelve part series,What,Why and How about China.The twelve parts will be written by informed Australian experts. (more…)
This sounds so obvious and innocent. However, in times of raids on journalists and the national broadcaster, moves to substantially curtail the liberty to protest, the prosecution of Witness K and his lawyer, and many other clashes between the law and our liberties, do we not have every reason to be suspicious and ask what politicians really mean when they lecture us that ‘no one is above the law’? (more…)
The Kurdish-Iranian journalist left Manus Island after six years, but the bureaucratic hurdles still lie before him.
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A HIGH-level Australian Catholic delegation has met with former Manus Island asylum seekers and refugees now in Port Moresby, and heard shocking stories of their detention. “It was shameful to hear how our government has treated them on Manus Island and how some of them would feel safer in some totalitarian prison back home rather than what they had been subjected to,” Brisbane priest and delegation member Fr Gerry Hefferan said.
Corbyn is not an anti-Semite. His real sin is to fight against injustice in the world, including the version Israel perpetrates. (more…)
Canberrans were shocked to read on the front page of the Canberra Times on Saturday 23 November about a mystery prisoner, referred to as ‘Alan Johns’, who was prosecuted and jailed for charges unknown to the public or the Alexander Maconochie Centre (the ACT prison). (more…)
Scott Morrison likes using the phrase ‘delicate moment in time’ to describe the international dynamics Australia is now faced with. It’s a time to build friendships on many fronts, as the government understands well. But the task is challenging—even in the case of countries that we expect to be ‘natural partners’, such as India. The Australia–India Roundtable held in Melbourne this month highlighted the need for a sophisticated knowledge of the different players in our region—something which Australia still has to develop. (more…)
We have come to think of homelessness as something normal or an inevitable part of everyday life. It is anything but. In a country as prosperous, generous and as committed to the fair go as Australia, we ought not to accept it. For those who want to end homelessness, one of the most important things we can do is change the way we think about the problem.
On 20 November, nine days after Armistice Day, the federal Attorney General laid out a battle plan sanctioning new discriminations against citizens needing hospital care and against older Australians needing aged care. Hospitals and aged care will be included in the Religious Discrimination Bills. (more…)
The rabbi said he is ready to spend 50 years in prison for burning a church. (more…)
Sometimes an analogy to something old yields an insight into something new. That is the case with the idea of “data as labor,” promoted by Glen Weyl and Matt Prewitt of RadicalxChange. (more…)
For over fifteen years I have been pointing to the failure of PHI both in terms of efficiency and equity. Not once have the executives of major firms or their lobbyists joined in a public discussion. They prefer to strong-arm ministers and officials in private. It’s a classic example of crony capitalism, using private influence to obtain public benefits. PHI is a scam. (more…)
Of all the horrors that might befall the burnt out, the flooded, the cyclone ravaged and the drought stricken Australian this summer, perhaps none could be viewed with more dread than turning from their devastated home to see advancing on them a bubble of media in which enwombed is our prime minister, Scott Morrison, arriving, as ever, too late with a cuddle. (more…)
The bomber pilot didn’t know. His commanders who gave him the orders also didn’t know. The defence minister and the commander in chief didn’t know. Nor did the commander of the air force. The intelligence officers who aimed at the target didn’t know. The army spokesman who lied without a qualm also didn’t know.
Research by social scientists at City University in Hong Kong in 2013 could help explain why in 2019 some young Hong Kong protesters have turned to violence in their anti-China campaign. This 2013 article by Dennis Chong of the South China Morning Post summarises the research findings. (more…)
Gregory Clark has claimed that we “badly” need more “context” on the situation in Xinjiang before criticising the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Clark’s claim both ignores the weight of evidence as to the nature and scale of Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang and the implications of that repression (more…)
Our historical unsung heroes are generally impressive figures. But there are very few one might accurately call “cool.” This is an exception. Václav Havel, the founder of the modern-day Czech Republic (also known as Czechia) is undoubtedly cool by any definition of the word. (more…)
We’re only human. We hang on to lies that comfort us. A big consoling lie that still hangs around this history of slaughter and dispossession is that we can’t apply the outlook of the 21st century to killings on the frontier.
Tell that to those who denounced the crimes as they were being committed. Theirs was real time rage. “It is a fitful war of extermination waged upon the blacks, something after the fashion which other settlers wage war upon noxious wild beasts,” wrote Carl Feilberg, editor of the Queenslander in 1880. (more…)
Neoliberalism has been a catalyst for an abysmal state of politics characterised by political gamesmanship – played with issues of fundamental public interest – and the rise of populist authoritarianism. The many groups working for a better future in Australia need to come together around some shared principles for political change. (more…)
Had it not been for the empire, Britain might have lost the second world war, says William Dalrymple. The war certainly lost Britain the empire.
For the second year running, independent research by two philosophically opposed Right and Left think tanks finds that public policy making at federal and state levels is rarely evidence and consultative based. Unlike last year, none of the 20 case studies this year got close to a perfect score of 10. Only four case studies got a sound score of 8 or 8.5. Sadly eight case studies got rated below 5.0. (more…)
EU’s top court rules that consumers have a right to know if goods they buy come from Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law.
The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that goods from Israeli colonies on occupied Palestinian land must be labeled as originating from settlements. (more…)
Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne: “I have previously raised Australia’s strong concerns about reports of mass detentions of Uighurs in Xinjiang. These disturbing reports today reinforce Australia’s view and we reiterate those concerns.Australian politicians have traditionally had a hard time making up their minds over China’s distant Xinjiang province. (more…)
Former PM Paul Keating has accused institutions of failing to grasp the magnitude of shifting power in the Asia Pacific and has warned Australia’s approach to China has been supplanted by the phobias of security agencies and the hysteria of “pious” and “do-gooder” journalists.
I very recently conducted a poll on my blog following the latest over-done propaganda outburst from the Australian Digital Health Authority (ADHA) in their recent Annual Report. Here is what is showed. (more…)