News
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John Delmenico
The Aussie gambling billionaire funding bigotry and abuse to advertise to teens
Earlier this year, the panel on ABC’s Gruen spoke about a dystopian future in which gambling companies take the hundreds of millions of dollars a year they spend on TV advertising and instead start exploiting Australia’s inadequate gambling advertising laws to get TikTok creators to do sponsored content for teens. Scary stuff. But luckily that…
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Dave Milner
Whatever happens tomorrow, that truly fucking sucked
What is there to say one day out from Australia’s historic referendum on the Voice other than this instance of a nation examining its soul has been a wee bit fucked. There has been love and courage and truth and hope, yes, but the air is thick with bile and bullshit, and it will linger. …
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RonniSalt
What is happening to ‘our’ ABC?
At some time between 10 and 11 am on September 3rd last month, a man called Nick Fletcher passed a comment on a UK radio program called The Women’s Hour, a sort of celebrity audio version of women in a coffee shop, except they’re getting paid for it and they can’t bitch about the shitty…
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Dave Milner
Fuck Rupert Murdoch
Most of us have only a limited capacity to ruin the lives of the people in our immediate orbits. We can inflict stress, trauma, hatred, violence and lies upon those that come into direct contact with us. We are all capable of malice and destruction; it is an innate part of being human. But on…
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Thomas Mayo
What if the referendum was about you?
Imagine if the question we will all be asked at the referendum on 14 October was being asked just about you: Would you want to be consulted before decisions were made about your future?
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RonniSalt
Voiceless
It may or may not be a well-known fact that the Uluru Statement From The Heart has a beautifully subtle, double meaning. The first and most obvious one is that this one-page statement is an invitation to Australians, an invitation to listen and understand Aboriginal Australians in a way that comes from their heart. Rich…
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Dave Milner
The ‘No’ campaign’s argument isn’t based on fear – it IS fear
Preambles being all the rage, before we begin I’d like to acknowledge how painfully Australian it is that the Prime Minister announced the date of the referendum – ostensibly about whether we should listen to Indigenous people – almost immediately after photo-oping in a personalised Rio Tinto shirt, a mining company that was recently urged…
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RonniSalt
Bullshit and spin
During his rise to power in 1930’s Germany, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle had a major problem – their leader was an unpalatable weirdo. A peculiar, solitary figure who lived alone, had manic temper outbursts and scowled at cameras, Hitler was quite the spin doctor’s challenge.His inner circle formulated a plan to only have Hitler shown…
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Joel Jenkins
‘War is peace’: What does AUKUS get us into, and why?
The Labor national conference has a deep historic legacy, having shaped some of our young nation’s most consequential policy decisions. Despite diligent efforts to quell the detractors and instil a sense of unity, the conference couldn’t avoid public rancour bubbling up over the half-a-trillion dollar target that is AUKUS: Australia’s largest military spend since the…
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Dave Milner
I willingly watched Channel 7 and didn’t even regret it
Deep down, on some fundamental – even spiritual – level, most of us are aware that watching Channel Seven is an unfortunate thing to do. This is a universe of infinite wonder and only finite moments with which to absorb it, so none of us should ever watch Channel Seven lightly. It is a mind…
