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Keywords: Wage Gap

  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's dysfunctional housing quagmire

    • Peter Mares
    • 12 April 2024
    1 Comment

    The ABC’s recent Q+A housing special left many questions unasked and unanswered. Labor, Coalition and Green MPs all say they want more people to be able to buy their own homes. The most obvious way to achieve that would be to reduce the price of housing. Yet no politician will make that an explicit policy aim.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Older women caught in homelessness crisis

    • Jennifer McVeigh
    • 25 May 2023
    4 Comments

    A rapidly growing cohort of homeless women over 55 has become the new casualties of Australia's housing market. With skyrocketing rents, an entrenched gender pay gap and inadequate pension funds, older women are slipping through the cracks owing to a tangle of systemic failures.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ride horses no more

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 March 2023
    4 Comments

    The decision by Australia to buy nuclear submarines from the United States and Great Britain inevitably prioritize security over justice, equality, and fraternity. As the world faces the threat of catastrophic global warming, it is time to ask whether submarines are the answer, or whether they distract us from the far greater challenge posed by nature itself.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Australian housing crisis: A Roundtable

    • David Halliday, Peter Mares, John Falzon, Nicola Nemaric, Rae Dufty-Jones
    • 18 November 2022
    1 Comment

    Despite rising interest rates and the recent dip in property values, Australia’s housing situation places it among the least affordable property market in the world. With a rise in homelessness and younger Australians locked out of an inflated housing market, what is the way forward for Australia? 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Charity is no substitute for justice

    • John Falzon
    • 22 March 2019
    13 Comments

    The work of charities, including the generous work of volunteers, should not be a means of letting governments off the hook. People do not want to have to rely on charity; they want to be able to count on justice. And charity is never a substitute for justice. But it becomes so when governments abrogate their responsibilities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Family first' rhetoric neglects single mothers

    • Kate Galloway
    • 01 March 2019
    7 Comments

    There is one type of family that consistently is omitted from pro-family government rhetoric: that of the single mother. Instead of making life easier for single-mother families, the government has imposed additional requirements as a pre-condition to their receiving the payments they need to support themselves and their children.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Women's economic security plan is no safety net

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 22 November 2018
    1 Comment

    The government finally released its women's economic security statement. The package is built around three pillars — workforce participation, earning potential, and economic independence — totalling $109 million dollars over four years. It is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to address the crisis of gender violence and substantial inequality.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Australia's deadly game of mates

    • David James
    • 14 August 2018
    6 Comments

    Murray and Frijters detail what they call Australia's 'grey corruption': the grubby nexus between 'James' (corrupt business people) and governments or regulators. The Jameses thrive at the expense of the 'Bruces': ordinary working people. The games of the corrupt elite now cost the 'Bruces' about half their wages.

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  • RELIGION

    Developing an inclusive and sustainable economy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 11 September 2017
    2 Comments

    The real call of Everyone's Business is to move beyond them and us to admitting that there is only us. If we are truly to build an inclusive and sustainable economy, it can't be just those in full time paid employment who are part of that economy. We take seriously the principles of neo-liberalism, letting the market decide. But we set limits on the market for the common good.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Health gap widens as wage growth falls

    • Amy Coopes
    • 26 June 2017
    7 Comments

    Universal health care is an ostensibly bipartisan prerogative, but what it actually means and how it's achieved is a somewhat moveable feast. Spending, we are told, is unsustainable as the population ages and we move toward ever-more personalised and technologically-advanced treatment paradigms. The objective of this rhetoric is to rationalise the privatisation of our health system by stealth. The latest wages figures are something of an inconvenient truth in this 'unsustainable spending' fiction.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Bread and circuses in modern Australia and America

    • Julie Davies
    • 24 January 2017
    11 Comments

    I can understand the Trump phenomenon. Hard-working Americans and many Australians are blaming various minorities as responsible for their decline. They are being blinded to the real culprits: our own governments and their wealthy backers. Juvenal's 'bread and circuses', designed to keep the people docile and distracted in Ancient Rome, have been updated to Maccas and manufactured news. And hatred. Are we so easily manipulated? Is the American model the future Australia wants for itself?

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  • ECONOMICS

    Hollowed out labour market stymies equal opportunity

    • Veronica Sheen
    • 13 December 2016
    5 Comments

    Over the last two decades we have seen a process of job polarisation. There has been growth in high end jobs, but mostly in low end jobs, the outcome of which has been the hollowing out of middle level jobs. This hollowing out of the middle also relates to greater wealth polarisation, as French economist Thomas Piketty has brought to light. The labour market is under a lot of pressure from many angles, so what does this mean for the project of women's equal opportunity in employment?

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