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Section: Australia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Being sick in Australia is harder than ever

    • El Gibbs
    • 29 May 2018
    2 Comments

    I first got sick when I was 19. I am now in my 40s and still sick. I have tried myriad medications and treatments, and live with a now permanent disability. The public systems I have engaged with over this time have become increasingly adversarial. The gaps between systems are getting wider, and the expenses higher.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Close the camps now and stop the posturing

    • Frank Brennan
    • 25 May 2018
    25 Comments

    For the good of the refugees who have languished for five years on Nauru and Manus Island, and for the good of the Australian body politic, it's time to put an end to this inhumane chapter in Australian history. Keep the boats stopped. Bring New Zealand into the mix now. Empty the camps. And fight your elections on matters of substance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Robots are not the real threat to work

    • Osmond Chiu
    • 25 May 2018
    1 Comment

    While the threat from automation is often overstated, there are big technological shifts occurring which are undermining job security. But the experience is that work is created as well as displaced by new technology. Change in social relationships, not technology, explains what is happening in labour markets today.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Must we remain so exceptionally cruel?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 24 May 2018
    3 Comments

    These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Treaty is more than a white feelgood moment

    • Sarah Maddison
    • 24 May 2018
    6 Comments

    Progressive Australians want a process that restores a sense of moral legitimacy to the nation. But far from concern about settler Australia's moral legitimacy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples seek treaty as recognition of their political difference. Treaties on these terms are unlikely to be acceptable to the settler state.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Stigmatising those in need is a grubby game

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 May 2018
    8 Comments

    These initiatives are sideshows, grubby and voyeuristic. They mask the simple truth: that governments have the duty to respect people as human beings and not ciphers, to provide benefits that help people to live with self-respect, to take responsibility for the disadvantage of Indigenous Australians and to involve them in its healing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The profit motive in Vic. public housing sell-off

    • Madeline Gourlay
    • 18 May 2018
    8 Comments

    Widespread community concern about the state government's proposed plans to sell the majority of public land on existing public housing estates for private development has meant a public inquiry into the matter will be delayed. This sell-off may be more concerned with profit than with rebuilding and improving public housing estates.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget slights domestic violence services

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 15 May 2018
    6 Comments

    Every year around the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, politicians with white ribbons pinned to their suits deliver passionate speeches about protecting women from domestic violence. But when it comes to implementing life saving measures, their lack of action speaks louder than words.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Whose health matters?

    • El Gibbs
    • 15 May 2018
    6 Comments

    Health spending takes up a significant amount of federal and state government spending. But is this to keep Australians healthy, or to treat us when we get sick? The budget was a missed opportunity to invest in preventative health measures, and to fix health inequalities through policies informed by the social determinants of health.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gods, emperors and the ritual of federal budgets

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 May 2018
    2 Comments

    On the surface budgets are exercises in financial accountability. At a deeper level they are best understood as a yearly ritual; one of the ways in which rulers acknowledge and try to manipulate truths about state power. We should evaluate these less on their stated intentions but with what the show of competence and generosity reveals.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget fails Australia’s most vulnerable

    • Julie Edwards
    • 10 May 2018
    6 Comments

    The budget includes a range of tax cuts for many Australian workers and some funding for education and early childhood services but fails to address the ever-growing inequality across the country. Simply put, it is those in the greatest need of support who have yet again been left behind.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget's arts flagship is, well, a flagship

    • Esther Anatolitis
    • 09 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The flagship cultural measure in the budget is, strangely, a flagship: the Endeavour. The government announced '$48.7 million over four years to commemorate the 250th anniversary of James Cook's first voyage to Australia and the Pacific'. A permanent presence on the first site of local trauma is not a vision for a nation.

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