human rights
Showman Mel’s river of dreams
Mel loves his job. He doesn’t love it quite as much as acting on Broadway, which he did for 33 years, but there can’t be that many more genuinely, infectiously enthusiastic tour guides across these United States as TourMobile’s Mel. He might be the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.
K-Dudd: The heartless wonder
Kevin Rudd gets far too much credit. Those who say he is being dragged to the Right – that he takes a more cautious, more conservative approach to appeal to John Howard’s battlers – discount the increasingly obvious reality that Rudd is already there. Certainly, as we’ve seen over the last few days, on refugee policy. Is there hope for this Prime Minister?
How faith, and America, can heal
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is many things Australians dislike about Americans: political, patriotic and preachy. But unlike the worst of the United States, the play is also deeply questioning of its place in the world. It prosecutes American exceptionalism and the greyness of, and uneasiness between, faith and justice.
Forget marriage, it’s in the vows
Like many political debates, the outcome is less important than the debate itself. And like debates on all the other progressive issues in society, the ones that so rile and consume conservatives, the issue of gay marriage once again got hijacked. The words used in the debate – and the words that weren’t used – were much more hurtful.
How Bartlet made me an idealist
The juxtaposition between the fictional White House of The West Wing and the real-life geopolitical events played out on the news stoked a burning cynicism of the political process. More than that, it planted the seed of romantic idealism of how the world should work that continues to nag me every day.
A symbolic step means so much
Today we celebrate another ‘birthday’ of our reigning monarch. The old biddy turned 83 in April, in fact, but generously gives us a June holiday each year. It is an annual reminder of the really big symbol the country has been on the verge of adopting for over a decade yet can’t quite make happen. It is a symbol, yes; tangibly immeasurable in its impact like most. But it is a symbol so brilliantly bright as to potentially embrace all Australians under one flag like nothing before.
The Right does love you. Mostly
The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen writes of the myth – “based on lazy and crude logic” – that conservatives lack compassion. But her brand of tough love isn’t love at all. At least not the inclusive style of love the Christian Right likes to preach. Conservative compassion comes with many conditions.
Life, art under Belarus’ iron rule
Real democracy never came to Belarus. When the USSR collapsed and the landlocked race declared sovereignty in 1990, its people were subjected to more Soviet-style uncompromising rule. It is the only dictatorship left in Europe, with a human rights record to match it would seem. The clampdown on civil society by the ‘elected government’ has, for many, been brutal. And yet a small theatre group risks prison and beatings to speak out.
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