Ideas
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The proportions of Aboriginal children and young people placed in a relative or kin placement or with an Aboriginal foster carer have decreased, and the proportion of Aboriginal children who were reunified with their families has declined.September 9, 2024
18 mins
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We are in the middle of an unprecedented civilisational experiment, and to restore any kind of vigour and optimism to Western civilisation, vigour and optimism must be restored to the family.August 29, 2024
24 mins
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Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”August 29, 2024
16 mins
The latest
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This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?August 29, 2024
13 mins
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Put shortly, a progressive, left-leaning Sydney-based artist visits her archaeologist brother in Bolivia. She is told that Che Guevara fought his last campaign in the wilds of Bolivia and that one of his lieutenants came from the utopian colony nearby founded by William Lane and other Australian radicals. Inspired by what she has heard, and well aware of Che Guevara’s popularity on university campuses in the United States and Australia, the progressive artist decides to enter a portrait prize for an image to be installed over the entrance to the New South Wales Gallery. Her image, linked to Che’s supposedly heroic campaign, will symbolise the victory of progressive thought down under.August 29, 2024
25 mins
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Altogether, auteur theory sounds fascinating and, no doubt, develops excellent skills of analysis for students of film, as they dissect and discuss this or that auteur director’s body of work. But what is it doing in an English course, in high school, in Year 10?August 29, 2024
15 mins
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Magee began with the conviction that “to anyone thinking like this the only human activity that seems to have any importance at all is the search for meaning in life”.August 29, 2024
25 mins
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I fled the living room on July 1 when new Governor-General Samantha Mostyn delivered a genuinely harrowing swearing-in speech. “These testing times call for an unstinting focus on kindness, on care and on respect,” our national Political Compassion Lady said. Kindness! Care! Respect! Even a few nearby bees, resting on the window sill between pollen excursions, immediately sprinted skywards.August 29, 2024
9 mins
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The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery.August 29, 2024
19 mins
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The life of John Clancy as a squatter, the land he had to walk off due to poverty, and the Overflow where he worked, a wealthy squatting sheep run that remains today, are emblematic of the settlement of rural Australia in the nineteenth century.August 25, 2024
12 mins
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Powerful though Jefferson was, Tocqueville, blessed by a stronger-yet connection to philosophy’s ancient task, could go beyond the Jeffersonian critique of governing systems, to unveil a deeper, more personal, source of the malaise in the democratic age.August 25, 2024
19 mins
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There is something very dystopian and peculiar about our present dispensation, but this has developed out of our embracing liberal principles as much as any departure from them; and this should be obvious without the state requiring everybody be locked at home and encouraging experimental injections.August 25, 2024
21 mins
