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[On Scott Morrison’s 2021 Opening Speech at the National Press Club] It was the speech of someone who doesn’t think deeply and whose vision extends only to the bathroom mirror.

Dennis Atkins
February 6, 2021

In the Australian of the Year ceremony a man, whose cruel refugee policies still disgrace Australia, presented an award to a refugee advocate. Then a man who trivialises Indigenous objections to the date of Australia Day presented an award to an Aboriginal woman. Then a man whose political party doggedly opposed GST exemption for tampons for 18 years presented an award to a young Australian who supports international distribution of female sanitary products; and finally, a man who has consistently refused to criticise a co-religionist who failed to report child sex abuse presented an award to a sex abuse survivor. Next year, instead of insulting award-winners in this way, how hard would it be to find a presenter who actually cares about some of their causes? (Sydney Morning Herald, January 27, 2021)

Steve Cornelius
January 31, 2021

Just 12 months before Grace Tame accepted her Australia Day award for giving voice to survivors of sexual abuse, the committee gave an honour to Bettina Arndt who sympathetically interviewed Tame's convicted abuser portraying him as the victim of female manipulation.

Virginia Trioli
January 30, 2021

Wall Street and [the] stock market are metaphors for a society rotting from self-indulgence, greed, widening inequality, and financial entrepreneurship that builds nothing, improves nothing, creates nothing, and solves nothing, but merely moves money from one set of pockets to another.

Robert Reich
January 28, 2021

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on ‘biblical law’, and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and ‘Christian’ America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social ‘deviants’, beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these ‘deviants’ are removed, other ‘deviants’, including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as ‘nominal Christians’ — meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible — will also be ruthlessly repressed. The ‘deviant’ government bureaucrats, the ‘deviant’ media, the ‘deviant’ schools and the ‘deviant’ churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed.

Chris Hedges
January 21, 2021