Word: australian
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...husband and three-year-old twin sons, Ferra Kambu says she found divine guidance. Surrounded by plastic bags containing their meager possessions in the Melbourne hotel room where the family is staying, the 36-year-old women's rights activist, one of 42 West Papuan asylum seekers released from Australian immigration detention last month on three-year protection visas, says the realization came to her clearly: "I was shown by the Lord that Australia has been given a role as the hand of God in helping to finally resolve the issue of Papua...
...That's not a message Australian officials want to hear as they try to mend the worst breach in relations with Indonesia since Australian peacekeepers were sent to East Timor six years ago. Nor will it calm Indonesians who claim that, by giving all but one of the group visas, Australia is meddling in their country's affairs and stoking separatist fervor. The men, women and children landed in a homemade outrigger canoe on the far northern Queensland coast in January. Since then, their case has led to the recalling of Indonesia's ambassador, prompted an increase in Indonesian naval...
...doesn't mean that the Papuan situation has been resolved." Wrong, say both Jakarta and Canberra. With a displeased Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono offering to guarantee the safety of the asylum seekers if they were sent back, Indonesian protesters urging trade boycotts and newspaper cartoonists trading insults, the Australian government has repeated its longstanding opposition to an independent Papua. Manne says the relative speed of the visa decisions - read by some Indonesian observers as a sign of political intervention - simply reflects recent reforms in the asylum application process...
...fair to ask why, as a society, we assume that a minimum of 10 years at school is appropriate for all children any more than a spell in the Army is right for all 18-year-old males. Homeschoolers are not "school bashers," says Terry Harding, principal of the Australian Christian Academy, the country's largest homeschooling organization. "They see schools as a wonderful community service. But they also want what (homeschoolers) do recognized as a new educational phenomenon." Others say homeschooling is more than that - a glimpse into the future of education...
...John Barratt-Peacock has looked more closely than any other Australian into why parents choose homeschooling. Religion (or "world view") plays a role as often as not, says the former teacher, though its influence isn't straightforward. He tells of two fathers who each withdrew their daughter from the same Year 4 class in northern Tasmania: one felt too much time was being wasted on Easter and Christmas frippery; the other objected to the humanistic curriculum, "so that teacher was damned either way." Some parents act on the view that the drudgery of school dulls children's desire to learn...