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Electing the President
There is something fascinating about the “contest” which elects the President of the United States. The 2016 election is no exception. Candidates who weren’t imagined before the election year have come to the fore and with them the discourse and the “contest” has been thrown open. Issues of gender are right on the surface. And the fact that a women has never been elected as President is one of the issues. Gender issues are present in other ways. Women’s bodies and women’s rights have repeatedly surfaced as a political football. Issues of race are prominent, who is allowed to belong – who needs to be locked out. Who can claim…
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Reality
Not seen, Not heard. Not smelt, Not felt. Unspoken. Undone. Unthought. Not known. Not loved. Not no thing. Beloved.
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Agora movie – seeing ourselves through an alien past
The movie Agora (director Alejandro Amenábar) is not history, but perhaps, it rises to allegory. It is well worth watching, despite its ‘interpretative’ approach to history. It is a movie which captures deeper truths about human relationships and its fictionalized past helps us understand the challenges of our conflicted present. The struggles of Agora’s characters are enriched by Dario Marianelli’s haunting film score and the movie’s epic intellectual and scenic setting. Agora takes us to the unfamiliar world of fourth century Alexandria. It is a world being overtaken by change. Certainties of a pagan past are fading as new Christian ways of being emerge. It is a world beset with…
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2048
Will the future of human rights look like this? After a century of unimaginable suffering in which hundreds of millions of human beings lived in slave like conditions; wars killed millions; millions more fled – many condemned for generations to squalid “refugee” camps; millions starved; where national democracies collapsed under the weight of sectional interests and armed conflict and the environment was stripped of sustainability for wealth for the few, humanity amended the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and issued the new Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2048 Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, the directly and democratically elected representatives of all humanity, proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS 2048 as a…
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Australia’s refugee intake at historic lows
Update November 2016: Since this post back in 2015, Australia has announced a special humanitarian intake for Syrian refugees. According to information published by the Department of Border Protection, in the 2015-16 year, 17,555 humanitarian visas were issued including almost 3800 to Syrian refugees. In a discussion paper issued for the 2015-16 year, the Department estimates that the 2019 program will be no less than 18,750 places. Meanwhile the global situation for refugees is no better. Such improvements while welcome are insufficient to the need. Australia cannot solve the problem alone. Yet, it is important to continue to ask if we are doing all we reasonably can and should in…
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Racism – a daily reality
Racism is an almost daily news item. For many, its a terrible lived problem. But, many have trouble believing it exists, except perhaps at the the margins of society. If we don’t see the obvious symbols of racism: arm bands, hate flags, white hoods, we may think the problem is no longer there. We have a curious situation where “racism” is almost a taboo word. It is politically incorrect to call racism, well, racist. As a consequence we sometimes see heated debate over whether this or that is an example of racism. A recent example from my own country was the treatment of Adam Goodes on the sporting field. He is a…
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Patriotic Cosmopolitanism
Can we, at the same time, love our family, our neighbours, our country, our people, humanity and the world we live in? Surely we can. And to love any of them, properly considered, is to love them all: for their welfare is intimately interwoven. There is no contradiction in speaking of patriotic cosmopolitanism – understood in this sense. The dichotomy between community and the world is a false one. We can love our history, our language, the good in our traditions, values which have proven their worth in peace and prosperity, our own family stories. And we can also, without contradiction, delight in the history, languages, stories, good in the…
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Parliamentary Committee: Law to Strip Citizenship Lacks Proper Justification
The Human Rights Committee of the Australian Parliament has expressed serious concerns about human rights compatability of the proposed law to strip citizenship from dual nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism. (Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015) The Committee, which has the job of making sure Australian laws are human rights complaint, made its findings in its latest review of Bills before the Australian Parliament. The Bill (which is expected to be adopted by Parliament) proposes to automatically strip citizenship from a dual national where the person is involved in a terrorist act or in supporting terrorism. The Committee notes that removal of citizenship has broad ranging human…
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Pitch Perfect 2 – Feminist Storytelling
Warning, this one has some plot spoilers. Pitch Perfect 2, is a great dose of quirky, catchy and exuberant musical fun. And just for fun here are the Barden Bellas with their re-mix of Just the Way You Are from the first Pitch Perfect movie. But this fun movie has a serious message, not far from the surface. The explicit and implicit feminist sub-texts of Pitch Perfect 2 are gracefully woven into the latest adventures and music of the Barden Bellas, an all female a capella group, for whom the label ‘misfits’ is spelled with a capital “M”. The characters of the Barden Bellas are a collective challenge to…
