Law Commons^™

Quality Of Politics And Political Reporting Is A Two-Way Street, Stephen J. Tanner

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese recently bemoaned the decline in the quality of political reporting in Australia. Albanese is not the first current or ex-politician to question the standard of reporting. Many politicians – federal and state – have accused journalists and the organisations they work for of bias and incompetence, or both.

But Albanese’s statement is interesting in that it links the decline in the reporting of politics to the enormous technological and structural changes that have transformed the media in recent years.

It is further interesting in that it comes now that Albanese is in opposition. Would he be …

A Secular Australia? Ideas, Politics And The Search For Moral Order In Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Century Australia, Gregory Melleuish

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article argues that the relationship between the religious and the secular in Australia is complex and that there has been no simple transition from a religious society to a secular one. It argues that the emergence of apparently secular moral orders in the second half of the nineteenth century involved what Steven D. Smith has termed the 'smuggling in' of ideas and beliefs which are religious in nature. This can be seen clearly in the economic debates of the second half of the nineteenth century in Australia in which a Free Trade based on an optimistic natural theology battled …

'Medieval' Makes A Comeback In Modern Politics. What's Going On?, Clare Monagle, Louise D'Arcens

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

According to Hansard, in the parliament of John Howard's first term of government the adjective "medieval" was used eight times. In the following term, however, it cropped up 46 times. What happened? Why did our members and senators suddenly need to describe things as medieval? What happened was 9/11. The spectacle of planes crashing into skyscrapers prompted myriad politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, to denounce the perpetrators as "medieval" What we have seen in recent weeks is medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology. Abbott is not alone; it has become commonplace to describe Islamic State …

Cinema Of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking In The Season Of Image Politics By Yuriko Furuhata (Review), Michael Leggett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy, the character connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome are relative, nuanced and complex.

Picnics And Politics, Kate Bagnall

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

IN FEBRUARY 1912 Chinese around Australia celebrated the founding of the new Chinese republic following the downfall of the Qing dynasty. In Perth, a chartered steamer flying the republican flag took a group of more than 300 on a river excursion to Applecross. In Townsville, a day of celebrations began with fireworks and flag-raising, followed by a picnic lunch and foot-races at Cluden. Adelaide’s Chinese drove out to the hills, where they lunched, competed in sports races and listened to tunes played by a Chinese string band. The streets of Melbourne’s Chinatown were festooned with flags and electric lights, and …