Yet, the latest "Closing the Gap" report actually shows a lot of positives coming out of the Intervention so far - Lots of health checks and breakfast programs improving kids health and behaviour, initiatives helping to protect kids and families that have experienced violence... Improved policing, stores reporting an increase in the amount of healthy food purchased due to the Income Management system.

What do you think of the Northern Territory Intervention ?

* Are tough measures like this needed?

* If it is racist and discriminatory to single out one group of people, should it apply across the board?

* Should all people who are on welfare payments, be restricted as to what they can spend their money on?

* Do you agree that it's humiliating for one group of people have to produce a card at the shops while others don't have to?

Also in the news this week we heard of a leaked document that showed the federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott wants to see a nation-wide ban on takeaway alcohol in all Aboriginal communities. 

• Many are saying the plan is racist. What do you think?
 

Does God have a general will for our lives, based on broad Biblical principles? Or does he have specific plans, about what we are to do for a job or ministry, where to live, who to marry?

Tell us your thoughts!

CHANNEL:  Network TEN
TIME-SLOT:  Sundays, 8.30 pm
RATING:   M

Australians are taking a shine to a new American television series that suggests the ideal wife is one who knows how to keep her distance from her husband's mistakes.
The Good Wife, produced by Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions centres on the trials - literally - of Alicia Florrick, the spouse of a disgraced politician who has returned to the law courts to provide for her family. Alicia is thrust into a world of public acrimony and personal rejection when her husband and district attorney Peter is forced to publicly admit to numerous affairs with prostitutes, and jailed for the abuse of public funds. Returning late to the work force, she now works charity cases for a high-profile legal firm. Each episode she finds herself in court with women and children who struggle in what is clearly a man's world. And when she isn't beating back younger attorneys and her husbands political enemies, this defender of modern-day 'widows and orphans' struggles to help her children adjust to their dramatic fall from grace.

Alicia is played by ER mainstay Julianna Marguilles. On the surface this is yet another in a long line of legal dramas. Yet it clearly has something to say to Australian viewers. In its first week The Good Wife earned Network TEN an admirable 1.4 million viewers nationally, rating the fifth highest viewed program in a schedule that included the Winter Olympics. More importantly, though, it scored second place with 18-49 year old adults delivering 715,000 viewers behind Cougar Town's 817,000 - another series about struggling older women. Marguilles appears ready to join TV's power-women set.
The Good Wife indirectly contrasts two archetypes of public life: the devoted, silently supportive spouse and the worldly wise woman. Barbara Bush vs. Hillary Clinton, if you like. The series challenges the honesty of that media-manicured 'faithful wife' who has played a background role in so many American scandals. In fact Alicia is encouraged by a female legal eagle to take the all-conquering US Secretary of State as something of a role model. So far the series seems to suggest that a really good wife won't be reduced to a mere appendage of her husband. Alicia's feelings for Peter persist but her hard-won wisdom must rule her heart.

The Good Wife is a program that could leave Christians conflicted. On the one hand it is very hard to argue against Alicia's newfound reticence where her husband is concerned. Peter has acted deceitfully, broken their vows and continues to behave in a manipulative fashion. Yet at the same time the series suggests that any marriage that buries a wife's outrage in the face of her husband's failures is a charade at best, soul-destroying at worst. Alicia's right to be and remain angry cannot be challenged. Divorce would be reasonable, even expected. The children are now her primary concern and her husband will have to do much to regain the right to be part of their lives.

There is no doubt that the situation described by The Good Wife is worthy of our compassion. Yet it pains me to point out that it still falls sadly short the Bible's ideal. Readers of the Gospels will know that Jesus allowed for divorce to take place in the event of marital unfaithfulness like Peter's, but he noted "... it was not this way from the beginning." Divorce happens, Jesus told its first century supporters, when one or both hearts are too hard to take the harder road of forgiveness. Marriage is supposed to be a relationship where the individual partners achieve their greatest potential, but they do so by learning to submit to the other's needs. Even, and especially so, in the face of failure and suffering.

DISCUSSION POINTS

• How do you deal with movie choices for your kids? Do you abide by the rules of the movie classifications? Or do you use the classification as more of a guide?
 
•  "MA15+" means recommended for 15 and over, and any under 15s must be accompanied in the cinema by a parent or guardian... Have you allowed your under-15s to watch an MA15+ movie, and if so, what kind?

• Do you go to the cinema with them and send them out in inappropriate scenes?

• If its on a DVD do you stick around to watch it with them, and take charge of the skip button? Or do you feel they're mature enough to watch it on their own?

• How do you decide what you'll let them see - do you read reviews, watch clips online or talk to other parents?
 
• If you have teenagers or older kids, is there a certain age that you stopped vetoing movies and started letting your kids make their own decisions about what to watch?
 

On the 27th January, JD Salinger died. The 91-year-old only published one full-length novel... so how do we explain the enormous interest he arouses? Ironically, it was because he was recluse. Two years after the publication of his controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye he lived a life of seclusion, emerging only to fight legal battles when anyone attempted to release a movie or a book that was in any way related to him or his work.
The more he tried to shun any publicity, the more the public were intrigued, lapping up lurid details from ex-lovers, and his daughter Margaret.
In a strange way, his novel experienced the same fate. It was panned and banned for being vulgar, explicit, undermining family values and moral codes, as well as encouraging smoking and drinking and lying. Even in the last five years it features in the top-ten of books challenged when introduced as a school reading text in the US.
In 1981, 30 years after it was published it was both the most censored book, and the second-most taught book in American public schools. Every time there is a controversy the waiting lists at public libraries grow.
Even now, 60 years after it first appeared, 250,000 copies of the book are sold every year.
So what did Salinger create in this novel that has so attracted and repelled?
Firstly, the book was unique for its time in featuring a first-person stream of consciousness, using the "street talk" of the time rather than refined and edited sentences.
Secondly, it created the genre of young adult fiction. Until that point, adults had written novels for children which clearly set out the behaviour that was expected. Good people succeeded, evil was punished. In this novel, we have an unreliable narrator, a 16-year-old boy who is caught between being a child and becoming a man. It is a novel about rebellion and search for identity and an attempt to find connections. These are all themes recognisable in novels written for young adults today.
Thirdly, Salinger has presented the literary world with one of its most memorable anti-heroes, the protagonist Holden Caulfield. Sometimes his name is the first thing people remember about the book, a book most of us studied in school; but we also remember his angst and confusion.
Fourthly, it was the forerunner of the postmodern novel. Many of the events of the book are open to speculation because Holden is confused and sleep-deprived, and somewhat alcohol-affected! There is especially debate about the ending of the book. Some critics believe that Holden is destined to wander as the catcher, in the rye field on the edge of the cliff; others see it as an optimistic book, that Holden has succeeded in rescuing (catching) children from going down the path he chose.
Finally, the novel had much to say in the post-war euphoria. Salinger had experienced the atrocities of war, present at D-Day, and the Battle of the Bulge. He was among the first troops to enter Paris, and in the following year helped to liberate those remaining at Dachau Concentration Camp. He was hospitalised for stress following those experiences and told his daughter, "You never get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils entirely, no matter how long you live."
Salinger had seen the worst of humanity, and through Holden points to the shadows beneath the surface of the victors also. He is particularly critical of anything "phoney", anything inauthentic or ingenuous. That includes the superficiality of Hollywood, and girl-boy courting, and schools that try to impress parents rather than actually educate... Another example of a phoney is a Christian businessman who gave a talk at Holden's school and told them that he prayed that God would bless his business. However, he was a funeral director...
For all the positives, it is also a troubling book. Holden is not a great role model. Neither was Salinger. He was a man who experimented with spiritualities and very young partners, and left a trail of apparently quite bitter people.
However, as one commentator has said, the enduring success of this novel shows that popularity does not necessarily require authors to be available via twitter or facebook or magazines; but if the book has some truth, then the author can even vanish, and the characters live on.

KARA MARTIN is a lecturer with School of Christian Studies (www.socs.org.au), and is an avid reader and book group attendee. Kara does book reviews for Hope 103.2's Open House (www.theopenhouse.net.au).

Although You Tube already censors out hate speech and pornography, the federal government also wants them to block videos such as instructions for euthanasia and info on drug use. They say Google should be able to filter its content to Australia's wishes, since it already does so for China and Thailand. Google says the idea is unrealistic, and a violation of democracy.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

• What do you think of the government's ISP filtering plans to censor Refused Classification material such as instructions on crims like graffiti, euthanasia instructions, and details on safer drug use?

• The government plans to keep the blacklisted websites a secret, to prevent abuse of the list. Some people believe it should be made public so we can keep the government accountable on what does and doesn't get filtered. What do you think?

* Do you think we should go the way of countries like China, where the government has massive control over what goes on the internet?

• Do you fear the government might filter out political debate?

* Do you agree with Google that such filtering is a violation of democracy and free speech, or do you prefer our nation to be protected from the type of web-content that is already illegal in other forms such as print?