Word: australianness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Greg Combet "We need as a nation to develop a new democratic consensus." Experience: Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary The modern face of Australian unionism has been an effective spearhead of the fight against the government's IR laws. Combet won the admiration of Labor's grassroots for his role in the 1998 docks dispute and in winning compensation for asbestosis sufferers from multinational James Hardie. He is making his political debut at this election, contesting a safe seat in New South Wales' Hunter Valley...
...Bill Shorten "We are a party of hope and innovation and change." Experience: Australian Workers' Union national secretary Widely touted as a future Labor leader, Shorten shot to national prominence as the public face of efforts to rescue two trapped miners in Tasmania last year. He's young, smart, articulate - and well-connected on both sides of politics: his wife is the daughter of former federal Liberal M.P. Julian Beale. Running for a safe Labor seat, he is destined for a ministry...
Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the hot emblematic issue in Australia's politics, as in America's, was communism. We feared Stalin and subversion by the enemy within; the "red menace" was played on, crudely but efficiently, by conservative politicians. Today all that is gone. Australian politics has a new emblematic issue, a different moral center. It has nothing to do with ideology. It is race: the politics of identity, of Aboriginal rights, and the obligation to face a murky and cruel history...
...Australia's economic links to Britain, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union, and will act in accordance with its interests there, giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British because they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer "be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are too far apart...
About 2% of Australian citizens are black, roughly the same percentage of Aborigines as there are Jews in the U.S. This amounts to roughly 390,000 people out of 20 million, a tiny minority. Unlike American Jews, however, Australian blacks have very little power, economic, political or cultural. There are no rich Aborigines, no Aboriginal-owned newspapers, no Aboriginal CEOs of Australian companies. Out of the 224 elected members of the Senate and House of Representatives, which form the Australian Parliament in Canberra, only one is Aboriginal, the brilliant and resolute young politician Aden Ridgeway. Aboriginal influence is exerted mainly...