Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Inequity

  • The questionable good that our public policy serves

    • Elenie Poulos
    • 02 April 2015
    4 Comments

    Humans have always pursued wealth and the power it affords, but only relatively recently has the world itself become organised around the service of that wealth. The systems and structures which define the way our world works are financial, geared to the making of profit. They are global and buoyed by governments whose domestic and foreign policies ensure their support. ‘Social good’ and the ‘common good’ are assumed to be economic neoliberalism, and what’s in the ‘public interest’ is whatever advances the neoliberal economic agenda.  

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The General of the poor and the Iron Lady of industry

    • Barry Gittins
    • 01 April 2015
    15 Comments

    Former Australian Salvation Army world leader General Eva Burrows, who died on 20 March, tried in vain to engage the former British PM in making the preferential option for the poor. ‘Margaret Thatcher was a disappointment,’ the General said. ‘I felt she didn’t have a deep, true feeling for the poor. I invited her to come out on the soup run indirectly and said it wouldn’t be a media event, we’d go incognito, but the answer was no.’

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Images that empower women

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 06 March 2015
    7 Comments

    Studies confirm that sexualised images of slim young women used in advertising and popular culture lead to body dissatisfaction, psychological impairment and eating disorders. A new initiative from the non-profit LeanIn.org is fighting this entrenched culture through a partnership with Getty Images. It has created a photo library depicting females in many sizes, cultures and styles of appearance, but all strong and determined and in-charge.  

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Medibank Private is not the government's to sell

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 November 2014
    12 Comments

    There has been a rush to purchase shares in Medibank Private since the Federal Government's sale offer opened last Tuesday. Past sales of government owned corporations such as Telstra have produced windfall profits for cashed up Australians able to invest. But what about the rights of the policy holders who were told they were members with ownership of equity in the company?

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Commbank plunder part of new world economic order

    • David James
    • 07 July 2014
    7 Comments

    As the Pope and economist Thomas Pikkety have observed in recent times, the inequity created by capitalism is a growing concern. But the problem with this argument is that 'capitalism' is too broad a term. The attack would be far better directed against the financialisation of developed economies. A new type of sovereign has emerged, and like all rulers they are cheerfully engaging in acts of plunder.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    An opportunity to invest in Australia's needy

    • Lin Hatfield Dodds
    • 02 July 2014
    9 Comments

    Australia's welfare system was designed for an era where men were the breadwinners and women worked outside the home only until marriage. Australia is a different place now, and the McClure review is an opportunity to update and simplify the system. But it must not confuse short-term cost-cutting with efficiency.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Malcolm Fraser whacks lackey Australia

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 16 May 2014
    2 Comments

    Fraser was a ruthless, conservative political animal who today is one of our most prominent human rights champions. The elder statesman is quite the angry young man in print. He delights in telegraphing his haymakers and following through with a well-placed elbow or two. Put bluntly, Fraser suggests we need to shed our lackey status. 'We need the United States for defence,' he argues, 'but we only need defence because of the United States.'

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    They call him backflipper, but Gonski's still sliding

    • Ray Cassin
    • 04 December 2013
    9 Comments

    The Education Minister Christopher Pyne has spun the latest developments on education funding reforms as having saved Gonski and achieved what Labor could not. But it is an achievement derived from surrendering oversight of how the money will be spent. If public schools continue to be the losers in the battle for funds, the reversals of the past fortnight will be remembered as the start of a slow burn for the Abbott Government.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Confessions of a fat, exploitative tourist

    • Ellena Savage
    • 25 October 2013
    5 Comments

    One person told me the story of going out to a gallery in a rural area and seeing the same man harvesting rice with a buffalo that they'd seen a few months earlier. When they asked the gallery owner if it was harvest time again, he was told that the man was not actually harvesting rice, he was just employed to look like he was. A spectacle for the tourists. Which I'm pretty sure is the most alienated labour possible.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'Naked Jihad' sacrifices feminism to racism

    • Ellena Savage
    • 12 April 2013
    9 Comments

    The phrase 'white men saving brown women from brown men' derides the use of western feminist tropes to further colonial expansion. The anti-Islamic reaction of some feminist activists to the death threats suffered by Tunisian 'naked protestor' Amina Tyler does nothing to promote global solidarity among women.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Before and after Bali's searing flash

    • Pat Walsh
    • 12 October 2012
    4 Comments

    The bombing in Bali ten years ago today did not target Balinese directly, but they took the collateral damage to tourism, their bread and butter, very personally. Drawing his finger across his throat in a slitting motion, a smiling Balinese says he is happy the bombers have been executed.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    What's the point of the Olympics?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 August 2012
    16 Comments

    The games are an escapist spectacle, where the flags of Iran, Palestine and Syria flutter without irony alongside those of the US, Israel and Turkey, and delegates from Spain and Greece wave as if their nation's economies have not fractured the Eurozone. The dissonance between the games and reality has become hard to ignore.

    READ MORE