Keywords: Working Families
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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AUSTRALIA
- Marcelle Mogg
- 17 December 2015
9 Comments
Children in two-parent families don't deserve government support. That's the message the government sent last month when they passed legislation to cut family payments for two-parent families, while other families still get cash payments. One of the problems with recent policies is they increasingly see families as part of the market rather than fundamental building blocks of our communities that need to be supported. Families and communities are in fact undermined by the market.
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AUSTRALIA
- Tom Keating
- 17 November 2015
2 Comments
The case studies given during the Royal Commission's dealings with Victoria's state run institutions were heartrending for anyone like myself who worked within that system in the 1960s and '70s. It must have been harder still for those who were trying desperately to reform the system at that time. By the mid-'80s Victoria came to have the most progressive and effective juvenile justice system in the country and was a leader internationally. Much has been lost in the intervening years.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 12 November 2015
1 Comment
Against the backdrop of the crash of the US housing market, we linger on the lurid details of families' removal from the brick boxes that have been their homes for decades. We can only watch as they cycle through stages of denial, bargaining, fury and grief. These are well meaning people who have innocently fallen foul of a system that deals in laws and dollars, not humanity. It is a system so corrupt it turns the exploited into exploiters; where its desperate victims embrace corruption in turn as a means of survival.
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AUSTRALIA
- Gabriela D'Souza
- 09 November 2015
10 Comments
George Megalogenis describes a protest rally in 1849 organised by residents of Sydney against arrivals of more convict boats. Workers who 'wanted to maintain their high-wage society' made 'the first of countless calls that would be made against migrants who threatened to undercut their standard of living'. It is a familiar refrain today. In a world where three-fifths of a person's income is determined by their place of birth, it defies logic that we place restrictions on people's movement to preserve our standard living.
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RELIGION
- Beth Doherty
- 29 October 2015
28 Comments
We can assume that despite the recent Synod's focus on families, most of the voters have never had any involvement in raising families, and certainly not of experiencing pregnancy and childbirth. None have directly dealt with an abusive spouse, struggled to regulate family size, questioned whether to stay in an unhappy marriage, or dealt with a child identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender. Last year, I spent time working in a parish in Paraguay, where, unlike the church more broadly, women run the show.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kerry Murphy
- 11 September 2015
2 Comments
Some refugee advocates will almost deify the refugee, and take away their humanity by making it seem that the refugee is always right. In reality refugees make bad decisions, tell lies and exaggerate, just like the rest of us. But that does not mean they're contemptible. Recognising their humanity makes it easier to feel empathy with them, and less likely we will fear them.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 07 September 2015
9 Comments
Actions taken in the Immigration Detention Centre after the 28 August aborted Border Force operation involved the use of force and intimidation on people who are being detained. Not for their misdeeds or any threat they pose, but for the convenience of the Department. And they disclose what happens when ABF officers are permitted to to use any force they think necessary without proper accountability.
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- Frank Brennan
- 26 August 2015
7 Comments
When addressing Italian doctors last November, Pope Francis quoted St. Camillus de Lellis who suggested that the most effective method in caring for the sick was simply to 'Put more heart into those hands.' Let's do something to change the market settings and political settings here in Australia to modify the behaviour of all Australians in the future, and let's attend to our own Franciscan interior ecological conversion with our care for the vulnerable.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 August 2015
9 Comments
Childhood experience of violence is associated with many other aspects of disadvantage which, as a recent study shows, interact with and intensify one another. Violence at the home is likely to be linked to irregular eating habits, poor educational achievement, mental illness, contact with the justice system, and substance abuse. The challenge of responding to family violence is even more complex than that of protecting children from sexual abuse.
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Tony Thornton, former National President of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia, was a great lover of humanity and fighter for social justice. The persistence of poverty and homelessness in prosperous Australia affected him deeply. He was never willing to accept a status quo that included the wholesale rejection of people who were made to feel the sharp edge of inequality.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 20 July 2015
14 Comments
As high level negotiators left the air foetid in Europe and Australia, South America was scented rather more freshly, with Pope Francis ahead in the stakes of providing hope for humanity. He delivered a fiery denunciation of modern capitalism, declaring modern capitalism's 'unfettered pursuit of money' the 'dung of the devil' and accusing world leaders of 'cowardice' for refusing to defend the earth from exploitation.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ellena Savage
- 17 July 2015
4 Comments
There is a suburban myth about migrant families. The first generation toil, the second become professionals, and the third artists. Like all dynasties, the Rineharts are destined to one day represent the crusty relics of former glory. That's fine. I mean, why would the beneficiaries of other people's obsessive toils and struggle work, if they didn't have to?
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