ROAD RULES FOR OUR COUNTRY - AUSTRALIA’S CONSTITUTION AND AUSTRALIA’S FIRST PEOPLES

There was a time when most Australian drivers would encounter a particular kind of defaced road sign in their travels. Speeding along the National Highway near the Broome turn-off in Western Australia or dodging kangaroos on the back roads of western Queensland around St George, drivers could see a sign urging them to “FORM ONE LANE” transmogrified by some local wit to read “FORM ONE pLANEt”. Graffiti on signs in a vain attempt to make them say something else can be mildly amusing but completely ineffective. However, while it is dangerous (and illegal) to interfere with road signs, sometimes tinkering with an original symbol can achieve something worthwhile, and substantial.

S.N.A.P. Today, Medicare Tomorrow

Entitlements, social safety nets, benefits and welfare are just a few of the terms used to describe benefits provided to American businesses and individuals by the federal government. For decades since the FDR laws issued post WWII, politicians have been crying reform, in a vain attempt to dismantle the social safety nets that many of the country's most vulnerable populations need to survive. This chapter provides historical and current information on America's safety net programs and provide a deeper understanding of their importance and their beneficiaries. Finally, the chapter provides clarity to the impact that social safety nets have had on poverty in the U.S. and embedded in this chapter is a personal narrative of how the entitlements helped change my life.

The Arbitration: Introduction

This chapter focuses on Menander's play titled The Arbitration, which begins with the arrival of a young man named Charisios who was then informed by his slave Onesimos that during his absence his wife Pamphile has given birth to a baby. It examines Charisios's decision to flee his home and be entertained every night by a music girl after realizing his wife's baby could not be his. It also explores Charisios' behaviour, which was described as a vain attempt to blot out the pain of his discovery and the pain from the very course of action he has taken. The chapter discusses Charisios's stage appearance, which was dominated by a reality that was difficult to gauge as it was bitten by self-recrimination in a situation far removed from normality. It mentions how Pamphile is personified as the victim of the males who surround her, which is seen as a contradiction to her name that means 'Dear to all'.

Divine Idea and ‘our Mother’: Elite and Popular Understanding in the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico

In 1648 the creole elite of Mexico City was enthralled to learn that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary had appeared to a poor Indian and had miraculously imprinted on his cape the likeness of herself, which was still venerated in the chapel at Tepeyac just outside the city limits. The moment was opportune, since in 1622 Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna had completed the construction of a new sanctuary devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe and in 1629 the image had been brought to the cathedral in a vain attempt to lower the flood waters that engulfed the capital for four years. In effect, Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe (1648) was a heartfelt response to the growth in devotion to the Mexican Virgin; and its author, Miguel Sánchez, wrote as if inspired by a particular revelation, since his only guides were oral tradition and the stimulus of other apparition narratives. A creole priest, renowned for his piety, patriotism and great learning, Sánchez appears to have modelled his account on Murillo’s history of Our Lady of Pilar and her apparition at Zaragoza to St James, which is to say, to Santiago, the patron saint of Spain.

Freedom’s Prospect

In his annual message to Congress in 1935, President Roosevelt made clear his view that excessive market freedoms lay at the root of the economic and social problems of the 1930s Depression. Americans, he said, ‘must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power’. Necessitous men are not free men. Everywhere, he argued, social justice had become a definite goal rather than a distant ideal. The primary obligation of the state and its civil society was to use its powers and allocate its resources to eradicate poverty and hunger and to assure security of livelihood, security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life, and the security of decent homes.1 Freedom from want was one of the cardinal four freedoms he later articulated as grounding his political vision for the future. These broad themes contrast with the far narrower neoliberal freedoms that President Bush places at the centre of his political rhetoric. The only way to confront our problems, Bush argues, is for the state to cease to regulate private enterprise, for the state to withdraw from social provision, and for the state to foster the universalization of market freedoms and of market ethics. This neoliberal debasement of the concept of freedom ‘into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’ can only mean, as Karl Polanyi points out, ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’. What is so astonishing about the impoverished condition of contemporary public discourse in the US, as well as elsewhere, is the lack of any serious debate as to which of several divergent concepts of freedom might be appropriate to our times. If it is indeed the case that the US public can be persuaded to support almost anything in the name of freedom, then surely the meaning of this word should be subjected to the deepest scrutiny.

Record-Keeping and Other Troublemaking: Thomas Lechford and Law Reform in Colonial Massachusetts

Historians have long discussed the different ways in which the first professional lawyer to practice in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Lechford, was at odds with colony authorities in his three-year stay there—from June 27, 1638 to August 3, 1641. Some accounts have focused on his religious views, since Lechford disagreed with the strict forms of church membership prescribed by the colony's religion, Congregationalism. When he returned to England, Lechford wrote a book called Plain Dealing in which he argued against this form of religious organization, claiming that he had received enough first-hand experience to recommend a return to the Church of England. This book has been an important source of information on religious and political arrangements in colonial Massachusetts, and so for many, the picture of Lechford as religious dissenter is familiar. Another important picture of Lechford, especially familiar to historians of the American legal profession, is Lechford the impecunious lawyer disbarred for the unethical practice of law. Lechford himself had written, “I am…forced to get my living by writing petty things, which scarce finds me bread.” He had been disbarred for “embracery,” pleading to a jury out of court, and it was assumed that this combination of circumstances forced him to return to England. James Savage wrote under his biographical entry for Lechford: “left here, aft. vain attempt to earn bread.” Other nineteenth-century scholars of colonial Massachusetts said much the same thing. William Whitmore, in an introduction to a collection of Massachusetts colonial laws, wrote that Lechford “was finally starved into returning to England.”