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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
While the ban is unique in its severity, it is not divorced from a broader tendencies as to how citizenship has been appraised during pandemic times. Public health and safety have been prioritised over the standard liberties associated with citizenship.
In a recent speech to business leaders, Prime Minister Morrison made the remarkable claim that ‘we are going to meet our [climate change] ambitions with the smartest minds, the best technology and the animal spirits of capitalism.’ This is straight from the neoliberal playbook, the doxa that the role of government is to get out of the way to make room for those animal spirits so as to pander to the fantasies of the wealthy few.
The debate about the future of work, and therefore UBI, was hijacked by a reductive media narrative around ‘the robot question’ and this has made it hard to recognise the complex nature of the changes underway.
But although the Coalition will never admit it, it looks suspiciously like there has been some bipartisan institutional learning about how to manage financial crises. If you want to stimulate an economy in times of crisis put the money directly into the economy, either into people’s pockets or to businesses who then pass it on to workers.
Behind the slick advertising and high-tech veneer of on demand apps and services lies a bleak, hazardous and often dangerous reality: tens of thousands of people are working at the fringe of the labour market as delivery riders and personal chauffeurs. When you remove all the tech, the sizzle and pop, it’s little more than modern day iteration of old-school precarious piece work arrangements.
The parallels with our own times of the events of Black Friday in 1921, with its movement from a time of heavy social spending and the flowering of social capital to a time of recovery, and the fateful choices that are made at such times, are evident. We await the results of the economic choices being made by government and their effects on community and solidarity.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government reassured Australia ‘We’re all in this together’ but the truth is that the end of JobKeeper and the Coronavirus supplement payments will leave more than 2.6 million people in poverty.
We don’t want to admit the truth of who we are as a nation: there are Australians who are violent toward the people they say they love the most. Living among us are those who take what they want, out of entitlement, privilege and the naked use of power.
Right now, there is a fight on for the future of the NDIS. On one side is the Federal Government, determined to have total control over the Scheme, and to change its very fundamentals. On the other side are disabled people across Australia, disability advocacy organisations, allied health workers and disability service providers, urgently telling them to stop.
There is not sufficient focus on the underlying drivers of sexual assault, harassment and other types of violence. Instead of people reverting to phrases like ‘boys will be boys’ to explain or excuse a hurtful comment or action, as a society we must do more to understand where these behaviours originate and work to prevent them.
The recently released report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care does not hold back in describing a situation that should be abhorrent to us all. As the report notes, ‘substandard care and abuse pervades the Australian aged care system’.
'It's the value of the work, not the worker.' So said a government backbencher to me last week while I was speaking to him about the omnibus industrial relations (IR) Bill that has just passed the House of Representatives.
109-120 out of 200 results.