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The rivers of gold into Treasury have dried up and programs that have provided some relief to struggling families are being wound back. Whether or not large cohorts of workers and their families continue to live in poverty depends on the decisions of the Fair Work Commission in the current Annual Wage Review.
If I was a long-term unemployed person, how would I answer the question, 'What has the ALP done for me?' 'Lots, and not much.' The Gillard Government's commitment to developing workforce skills suggests it values decent work, not just jobs, but in positing productivity as the path to prosperity it seems more Reagan than Keynes.
You don't build someone up by putting them down. You don't help someone into employment by pushing them into poverty. By keeping the unemployment benefit low, successive governments have deliberately humiliated people rather than improving their chances.
The 2013 Federal Budget is framed around a national disability insurance scheme, education reform, and welfare to work focused welfare spending. The jewel in the crown has to be DisabilityCare, which will make a significant difference in the daily lives of nearly half a million Australians.
The Treasurer has emphasised his belief that Labor's values and priorities are reflected in this Budget. He is keen to help the battler. Yet there is a sharp dissonance between the Government's promotion of a 'fair go' through big reforms and its evident disinterest in so many citizens whose financial struggles are profound.
The relationship between the Catholic Church and the poor was explored most seriously in Latin America. I caught its dimensions most vividly in a dawn trip on a clapped out US school bus to a small regional town in El Salvador.
'On this day in 1939: Belgium signed a trade treaty with France, 71 people died in the Black Friday bush fire, and Orwell's chickens laid two eggs.' Orwell's domestic diaries seem trivial, but it is wrong to assume he saw his recording of vegetables, egg laying and other small-holder concerns as dwarfed by the great world.
While Tony Abbott maintains that Work Choices is dead, Senator Nick Xenophon is advocating a position that adopts one of its central features. It is immoral to hold back wage increases or drive wages down on account of economic circumstances when there are other ways to promote job protection and create employment opportunities.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is board director of St Vincent's Health Australia and professor of law and director of strategic research projects (social justice and ethics) at Australian Catholic University. Text is from his address at Leading the Way, the Catholic Health Australia Conference, Perth 21 August 2012, Governance and Mission stream.
In her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, 60-something church elder, Sigrid, doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She carries neither iPhone nor gun. But revolutionary she is, having been at the heart of a movement that toppled an oppressive regime, thawed the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall.
The Budget confirms one thing that both sides of politics agree on, and that's their belief in the existence of an undeserving poor. There's nothing wrong with bringing home the bacon for middle Australia. But the people living at the rough end of Struggle Street are trying to get by on baked beans.
The Titanic has become the symbol of the end of a swaggering era marked by great self-confidence and belief in inevitable progress. It suggests that whenever swagger begins to walk the streets it is time to head for the lifeboats. We find it hard to apply this lesson to the circumstances of our own times.
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