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The main purpose of government is to promote the welfare of its people. And yet over the last few decades, through numerous inquiries, it’s become clear that the Australian government has failed to provide services for the Australian population as well as might be expected.
As Australian students receive their year-end academic results, a stark educational divide comes into focus, with high-fee-paying private and selective government schools leading the ranks. This trend highlights significant socio-economic disparities across the country, raising urgent questions about the accessibility and true cost of academic excellence in a nation grappling with inequality.
Australian school funding is full of common misconceptions, and creating a rational, just, and effective school funding model requires cutting through media-driven inaccuracies to understand the real needs of Australian students and schools.
Beneath the facade of Australian prosperity lies a hidden country where over three million citizens, including a staggering 761,000 children, grapple daily with the hard choices that come with poverty. With an urgent need for reform, what policy shifts could bring about the transformation this nation needs?
Two months into a 10-month prison sentence, I was placed in solitary confinement after having a nervous breakdown. I’d originally made a fruitless attempt to keep my breakdown to myself, because I’d been told what would happen if Corrective Services found out I was having mental health issues. One of the first friends I made in prison, like many of the inmates, was suicidal. ‘The best advice I can give you if you’re struggling with your mental health’, he told me, ‘is to do everything you can to keep it from the officers.’
Despite last week’s decision by the Fair Work Commission to push up the national minimum wage by 5.2 percent, millions of Australians, in all parts of the country, will continue to live in poverty and on survival wages. The facts are that the Commission’s decision takes the minimum wage from $772 a week to $812, an increase of $5.70 a day, not a fortune but better than nothing.
Gambling is now a core national industry providing significant employment, profit for private providers and revenue for governments. All good but, as with every form of industry, there are ‘externalities’. In the case of the gambling industry, it is the personal and social costs of ‘problem’ or ‘addicted’ gamblers that must be taken into account.
We are in the midst of what is being called the ‘the Great Resignation’, with millions of workers rethinking the place of work in their lives, and WFH is a huge part of this. According to a report by Microsoft, ‘over 40 per cent of the global workforce [is] considering leaving their employer this year’ and hybrid work — a combination of home and office work — is here to stay.
It is one of the ironies of Australian political history that a policy that has profoundly benefited this country’s version of capitalism came, not from the right, but from the Labor party and unions. The mandating of superannuation payments in 1992 under the Keating government has profoundly changed Australia’s financial system.
Right now, there is a fight on for the future of the NDIS. On one side is the Federal Government, determined to have total control over the Scheme, and to change its very fundamentals. On the other side are disabled people across Australia, disability advocacy organisations, allied health workers and disability service providers, urgently telling them to stop.
After two years of often harrowing evidence from 450 witnesses and 10,000 submissions, the Royal Commission’s multi-page report has fallen short on a clear path to lasting and meaningful reform.
My personal experience during the first 18 months of involvement with the NDIS, was frustrating and particularly deflating for someone who had written submissions and emailed politicians and understood the potential of the scheme. My only contact seemed to be with an immovable, impossible-to-navigate bureaucracy determined to stand in the way of me receiving any support I was promised.
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