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It is unfortunate that Labor’s Universities Accord gives so little attention to the actual situation of Australian universities. These are institutions in crisis. Many are in financial difficulty. Even where income is holding up, many academics feel alienated from the institutions they work for. Universities have become businesses first, and …
The Spirit guides us as we see
a new day dawning bright.
However lost our hearts may be
the Spirit guides us as we see
last stars receding into night
the gentle trees accepting light.
The Spirit guides us as we see
a new day dawning bright.
Jenny Stewart
When you’re more than half-way there
you may as well push on.
You know the score, you’ve paid the fare
when you’re more than half-way there.
You could be famous or anon
sing in parts or unison.
When you’re more than half-way there
you may as well push on.
Jenny Stewart
Whatever specific findings the Robodebt Royal Commission makes, the main outlines of the story are now clear. Between 2015 and 2019, the Coalition government, keen to make savings, undertook a data matching exercise with the Tax Office and Centrelink, designed to flush out welfare fraud. The government was convinced many …
As humans, we are prisoners of the frames we use for bounding and understanding reality. Despite abundant evidence that we need to reconsider, the world’s obsession with economic growth continues. If our economies do not grow we are convinced they must, by definition, be declining. Even climate change has not …
I wish I could write more about grieving, but as others have found, by the time you are conscious of having moved through a stage, another has come upon you – or memories you thought had passed, re-invent themselves, over and over again.
The end days came so quickly. For months, the doctors kept saying there was something wrong with his heart. But it was the cancer, so laboriously excised, that had come back. Or perhaps it never left.
I am almost (although not quite) beginning to feel sorry for Scott Morrison.
Since his unlikely victory at the polls in 2019, his prime ministership has been one damn thing after another – bushfires, Covid, predatory ministerial staffers and compromised ministers, vaccine issues – and underlying it all, and exacerbated by the pandemic, the continuing problems in aged care. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which reported in March this year, did not tell us much that was new, but it gave his government plenty to work with.
Overall, from the vantage point of April 2021, Australians are in a self-congratulatory mood about the national response to COVID-19.
Are we being realistic, or a touch hubristic? Infection rates have been kept very low, but then, we had a lot going for us – Australia is an island, our settlement pattern is relatively low-density, and the population is younger and healthier than in many European countries.
I was walking home from the shops the other day, when I encountered a man using a leaf blower to eject leaves from his driveway onto the road. The leaf blower was an electric one, so at least the noise was not as deafening as the petrol-driven ones produce.
While the ACT has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic well, it is unusual for a week to go by without the ACT’s most prominent health institution, the Canberra Hospital, being in the news. The headlines are often negative: costs are higher than in other jurisdictions, emergency waiting times have proved hard …
As a nation with interests but not much power, Australia has produced many strategic assessments, both official and unofficial, over the years. Until relatively recently, the working assumption behind these analyses was that Australia faced no direct threat to its interests, at least none that could not be handled through our alliance with the United States.
As we walked in Namadgi National Park towards the end of last year, the terrifying dryness of the bush was everywhere apparent. Everyone in the group was thinking the same thing – please, may there not be a fire.
The remarkable thing about the COVID-19 pandemic was not that it happened, but that no country on earth, with the possible exception of Taiwan, was prepared for it. This was despite the fact that medical scientists and public health professionals had been telling us for a long time that a pandemic was on the way.
It’s time to take the environment seriously, and I don’t mean climate change. Climate change is a significant threat, but it can be tackled only at the global level, with each country contributing its agreed share of emissions reductions.
It’s said that every generation has misgivings about the next. I know I do. It’s probably a natural part of growing older. Not only do the young seem younger than ever before, but those in charge, those now in their forties and fifties, seem, in ways both mysterious and self-evident, …
At about the same time, in 1992, the government’s inquiry into ecologically sustainable development (ESD) released its final reports. The ESD inquiry, while wide-ranging, was focused on specific economic sectors. Despite the previous work of the National Population Council, population rated only a brief overview as one of a number of ‘inter-sectoral’ issues
Christianity is for believers, right? This is certainly the message that Christians send to those outside the church. Christians of all denominations project their faith through liturgy, song and prayer. The message, whether stated through the recitation of creedal liturgies or not, is unmistakable: ‘I believe, I believe, I believe’. …
You can be an atheist, or a believer. But what if you are neither? What if you want spiritual growth, but jib at the idea of organised religion? What if, like so many, you are a religious battler? (A battler, for those who do not know the term, refers to someone who persists doggedly at a task, or in a role, for which they feel total commitment, but have no real talent).
This little book is Jenny’s attempt at both, from the perspective of an aspiring Christian. Seeking a spiritual home that so many others have left is in some ways the hardest path of all to tread. We are told we should be casting Christianity to the past, yet how can we? Our yearning might just be weakness in the face of the big questions, or it might be a kind of strength. All that is needed is to suspend disbelief, put our fear aside, and take the first steps.
Available on Amazon.com
The relationship between church and state has always been uneasy. In the policy world, there are many points of intersection and, often, friction between secular and religious values. As Western societies become progressively more liberal, we can expect this friction to increase, as we see in the current conflict between …
