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Keywords: Soup Van

  • AUSTRALIA

    Bricks n' Oughta

    • John Falzon
    • 18 July 2023
    5 Comments

    Amid Australia's unprecedented housing crisis, there's an urgent need for  increases in social housing. However, political wrangling hampers the progress of crucial legislation. With 640,000+ Australians facing housing stress, advocates stress the need for immediate action as a starting point towards comprehensive reform that treats housing as a basic human right.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The changing face of Australian homelessness

    • Danusia Kaska
    • 08 March 2023
    3 Comments

    Women over 55 are the fastest growing homeless group in Australia. With over 400,000 women at risk of homelessness, it's Indigenous women, women with disabilities, women from migrant or refugee backgrounds, and women with mental illness who are disproportionately vulnerable.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 September 2021
    7 Comments

    In the Catholic calendar the Feast of St Francis of Assisi falls on next Tuesday. Although he gave up on wealth, power and influence Francis probably had a bigger effect on his world than any of his contemporaries. He continues to attract people to challenge the values of our society and to spark renewal in Christian institutions at the risk of going stale.

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  • RELIGION

    Soup van's history of holy risk-taking

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 July 2018
    11 Comments

    The Fitzroy Soup Van is in good hands because its people recognise the tension between the need for compliance with security and safety regulations and the call to draw close to people whose lives are lived beyond those boundaries.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Homelessness has many faces

    • Danusia Kaska
    • 20 June 2017
    9 Comments

    The first thing I noticed was his Mercedes. Then I saw he was also wearing an expensive-looking suit. We don't see the likes of guys like 'John' coming to our soup vans every day. When you've been serving food to many of the city's hungry, lonely and dispossessed for a couple of decades you do get used to seeing the same old faces. But John reminded me of an important lesson. That homelessness hasn't got a 'look', and 'homeless' never describes the person, only their circumstance.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Emergency relief fall guys for a heartless government

    • Mike Bowden
    • 30 June 2014
    37 Comments

    A week ago I get a phone call from the CEO of Northern Territory Vinnies, for whom I am council secretary. Could I come in and sign a letter about emergency relief before the next council meeting? 'Of course.' The letter is produced and, being conscientious, I actually read it. The Federal Government is offering Darwin Vinnies additional ER funds for the rest of the year. And I stop. I am not comfortable.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A plague of killer robots

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 April 2014
    6 Comments

    Killer robots — drones in an advanced stage of development — are now a daytime reality. They will be autonomous in their operation, able to identify targets, track them down, work out the best way to destroy them, and learn from their failures, all without the need for human direction. These qualities raise serious ethical questions. Obama's use of just war theory to defend such drones was misguided at best, pernicious at worst.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Alternatives to trash reality TV

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 20 December 2013
    4 Comments

    In Pimp my Soup Van, contestants are asked to deck out a van with items that could be used to help people on the streets. In Please Marry My Boys, they sit down with the mothers of people in gay relationships and hear about their experiences. The Refugee Factor asks contestants to listen to asylum seekers' stories, and press a red button at the point where they feel that they, too, would have fled their homeland.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Pilgrims in the landscape of lament

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 19 April 2013
    7 Comments

    He was the same age as me and had the same name. But he looked old. He'd left Nigeria and walked to Macedonia; four years of walking. His feet were covered in callouses, dried and thickened. In the course of these wanderings he had been kidnapped, beaten and starved. The irregular migrants in Macedonia have come to the end of the road.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Communities still need the stimulus

    • Julie Edwards
    • 10 May 2010

    There are widespread calls for the stimulus measures to be wound back as the Australian economy emerges from the global economic crisis. It might be better in this year's and subsequent budgets to continue the economic stimulus, but focused on our most disadvantaged communities.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The crash of the can market

    • Julian Butler
    • 18 February 2009
    6 Comments

    Some of the soup van's clients collect cans to sell to a scrap dealer. The work supplements their welfare income and provides a sense of fulfillment. Since the global market crash business has been slow: 'China doesn't want aluminium now.'

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