Past Programs
Community and Society - 2005
Living Alone
10/12/2005
We are living alone more, 25% of Australian households are occupied by single people, and this is rising fast. More and more people spend some part of their lives living alone, and it is far less stigmatised. Some people are there by choice, because they enjoy the solitude, others because of divorce or bereavement. Hugh Mackay presents his quarterly report - Living Alone.
Islam and Community
19/11/2005
Australia woke yesterday to the news of a video from Indonesia that specifically warned us to expect a terrorist attack on our soil. This is after a week that saw the arrests of 15 men in Sydney and Melbourne, some of whom might have been planning such an attack, and the publishing of controversial new anti-terrorism legislation that risks turning Australia into a very different sort of place.
One of the most surprising things about the young men who are willing to train and die as terrorists is the variety of backgrounds they come from. They come from all classes and countries, and the only thing that seems to unite them is their attachment to an extreme form of Islam. There is clearly a global aspect to Muslim identity that for some young men transcends their nationality, and that has very complex roots.
Product Placement on TV
19/11/2005
The delicate line between art and commerce is crossed every time you turn on the TV these days, when it seems as if we're being sold the latest product from some snappy advertiser...and it's not in the ads, we're talking actual TV programs.
It's the art of product integration – characters in TV shows drinking brand name drinks, using big brand computers, and TV closeups of the logos at all times.
It's big money for advertisers – but groups like Commercial Alert in the US say that increasingly TV shows are becoming glorified infomericals...
Even the Screenwriters Guild in the US have called for a new code of conduct when it comes to product integration. They claim advertisers are out of control...So are we to be alarmed or just alert?
Riots in France
12/11/2005
The riots that have rocked France for more than a fortnight are showing signs of abating after emergency measures were imposed on the worst-hit areas of the country.
On Tuesday Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin published a decree invoking a 50-year-old law that gave senior government officials the power to impose curfews. These have come into force in more than 30 French towns and cities.
With almost two weeks of rioting and over 1,500 arrests, France hasn't seen this kind of violence since the student uprising of 1968.
Out of all the chaos, one thing is certain, the reasons for such widespread violence across France is much more politically complex that the news headlines suggest.
Disaster Management
05/11/2005
The Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf has complained that the West has not responded to the earthquake there, in the way they did to the victims of the tsunami and hurricane Katrina.
Is it, as he says, because no Westerners were involved, or is it that this year has seen so many natural, and man-made, disasters – that we have become numb?
It seems clear that, thanks to global warming, and terrorism, catastrophes will become more common – and the worst case scenario is a matter of when, rather than if. Given the chance, most people will respond well in a disaster, with compassion and concern. The problems come when the authorities try to restrict the flow of information, and prevent people acting on their own initiative.
Murder of Olof Palme
20/08/2005
These days it's hard to imagine the prime minister of a country taking an evening stroll without a bodyguard. Twenty years ago it was a different story. In 1986, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was walking home from the cinema with his wife when he was gunned down by an unknown killer.
As Palme lay bleeding on the pavement, the killer disappeared into the night. The case was to become Sweden's great political murder mystery of the 20th century. Despite a plethora of theories as to what happened on that cold night, we still don't know the truth.
Freakonomics
06/08/2005
The essential philosophy of Freakonomics is that Morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, economics represents how it actually does work. In other words people lie, numbers don't! Levitt places his faith in the gods of data. He believes there's a serious lack of interesting questions being asked in the world of economics. He's come up with several questions that have aroused his own curiosity and used economic tools to answer them. For example, if drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade?
Essentially he's boiled down what some call a dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want, or need.
Jeffrey Sachs on Africa
09/07/2005
Jeffrey Sachs is a celebrated economist and special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General. His book The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime came out earlier this year to wide acclaim.
He insists that most of us don't ask the right questions about Africa, that the burden of disease there is a greater problem than corruption or bad leaders, and he reminds us that as late as the 1930s, many people believed extreme poverty in the West couldn't be solved.
Earlier this week he suggested debt relief for Africa should be enacted straight away.
Contemporary Church Architecture
26/03/2005
Close your eyes for a moment and try to visualise the outside of a church... What do you see? A cross crowning a steeply-pitched roof? A steeple? Stained glass windows, perhaps.
Together these architectural elements form the stereotypical image that we've come to associate with the Christian church. But the reality of contemporary church architecture paints a very different picture. Indeed, you can easily walk by a modern church without realising it's a church at all.
So on this Easter weekend we look at contemporary church architecture and how it reflects the changing nature of Christianity in Australia.
