Mo' money, mo' problems

Type
Article
Category
Activism
Politics

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak to a sizable group of Melbourne activists campaigning to stop the federal government’s new Work for the Dole scheme. Various tactics are in plan to stop businesses replacing paid workers with unpaid workers, and for the not-for-profit welfare sector to resist any involvement with this latest attack on the unemployed.

The latest McClure report on welfare reform was a major topic of conversation. I asked what people thought of the proposal to increase access to cheap credit such as the No Interest Loans Scheme run by Good Shepherd Microfinance – a Catholic not-for-profit.

banks-image
roso-image
Type
Reflection
Category
Activism
Politics

Revolutionary legacy

A philosopher outside of the norm, politics, in Bensaïd, becomes something more than an affaire of immediate action. To make politics an affaire of immediate action meant to give in to the fragmentation of political action without a universal horizon of emancipation. Radical politics needs a horizon through which all thought is directly or indirectly tied.

struk-image
Type
Reflection
Category
Politics

Inspiring justice

The truth is, I am systemically disadvantaged because I was born disabled. It wasn’t acquired in a car accident. If it had been, I would be covered by the Transport Accident Commission (TAC). I require twenty-four-hour support for personal care, around half of which is provided by my mother, who is over sixty. The other half is covered by my current funding package. If I had TAC funding, all hours would be covered, making independent living a possibility.

friedmann
Type
Reflection
Category
Writing

'Real Deal', Real Degree

The study of writing is so often characterised as an indulgent activity – people seem to take the importance of tertiary fine art or musical education at face value, and you don’t often hear people deride elite sports training because a person could run just as well as their local track.

Marissa McDowell
Type
Article
Category
Writing

Emerging poets series: Marissa McDowell

Marissa McDowell, a Wiradjuri woman born in Cowra NSW, grew up in Canberra where she began writing poetry at sixteen. In her mid-twenties she shared a poem called ‘Caged’ as a father’s day gift, and started writing seriously again after joining the ‘Us Mob’ writing group in Canberra.

Black-history
Type
Polemic
Category
Culture
Politics

‘Are there Black people in Australia?’

In the dominant Australian narrative, Blacks are regarded as Aboriginal. This is a narrative with little space for non-Indigenous Black Australians. Barack Obama, who like me had an absent Kenyan father, is Black American. But, according to the main Australian narrative, I am not Black Australian.