There are approximately 60,000 public and community housing tenants in NSW and about 85% of them are receiving welfare benefits.
Several non-government organisations (NGOs) such as Mission Australia are now providing clothing, food, job training and housing to welfare recipients.
As more and more public housing gets transferred into the hands of NGOs as part of a push for privatisation, many of the organisations who were traditionally advocating for the poor have now become their landlords. These organisations receive a large part of their clients’ income through their rent assistance.
Economy
The statement below was released by the national executive of the Australian Socialist Alliance on August 16.
* * *
Socialist Alliance condemns the massacre of protesters by the Egyptian army during the dispersal on August 14 of sit-ins at Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda Square by supporters of former president Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.
United States: Seven-year-old banned from mentioning 'fracking' ― ever
“When a property owner reaches a settlement with an oil or gas driller, it's not unusual for the company to demand that the plaintiffs in the case agree to a gag order that bars them from talking about the agreement. But a recent case in Pennsylvania is unusual.
“That's because the gag order prohibited the 7- and 10-year-old children of a couple that sued several gas companies not only from talking about their specific settlement, but from mentioning fracking at all. Ever …
Back in 1989 a schoolmate of mine showed me some copies of Tribune, the newspaper of New Zealand’s Socialist Unity Party.
The SUP had for decades been convinced of the infallibility of the leadership of the Soviet Union, and the pages of Tribune were full of recycled press releases from the Kremlin and large airbrushed photographs of crumbling Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov.
For a good part of his 33 years in power, Robert Mugabe has presided over a ruthless dictatorship. From the thousands killed in the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres and misery for millions under structural adjustment plans, Operation Murambatsvina and hyper-inflation of 2008.
Yet in the July 31 general election, endorsed by Southern African Development Community and the African Union, the 89-year-old ruler annihilated the hitherto iconic working-class leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), who beat him in March 2008.
Love & Struggle, My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground & Beyond
By David Gilbert, PM Press, 2012
336 pp, $22.00
From the earliest anti-capitalist revolutions, starting almost as soon as capitalism cemented its political mastery of Europe in the late 1700s, there has been dispute between those whose moral outrage at oppression led them to conspiratorial methods and those saying that open political struggle is superior.
Originally this debate was between the Blanquists and Marxists and later between Bakuninite anarchists and (again) Marxists.
Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the “PNG solution” — where refugees who arrive in Australia by boat will be denied resettlement and sent to Papua New Guinea — has sparked the largest refugee rights rallies in Australia since John Howard was in power, as well as opposition from within PNG itself.
On August 2, 2000 students at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) held a protest against the proposed plan.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cost United States workers 700,000 jobs. But another effect was to drive Mexican small farmers out of business.
In the brave new world of free trade, Costco makes tortilla chips and salsa in the US and trucks them to its stores in Mexico.
US Congress will soon debate whether to “fast-track” a trade deal that would make job-killers like NAFTA look puny. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being negotiated by Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam.
As more people start to share scientists' long-expressed concerns over climate change, revelations of big bank energy market manipulations highlight Wall Street's entrenched stake in the fossil fuel economy that is heating up the planet.
Tony Abbott has promised a 1.5% cut in the company tax rate if the Liberal-National Coalition wins the September 7 election. It will cost about $2.5 billion a year and it is exactly the opposite of what Australian society needs.
Big business needs to pay more, not less, tax.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden finally left Moscow's airport, where he had been stuck for weeks evading capture by the United States government, on August 1 after being granted political asylum for one year in Russia. Snowden had sought to apply for asylum in places such as Ecuador and Venezuela.
If Bangladesh represents the worst of exploitation in clothing factories, India is home to the most rapacious conditions for auto workers.
Auto workers and union supporters in Manesar, India, launched an indefinite dharna (sit-in and hunger strike) on July 18. They demanded the release of jailed co-workers.
A staggering 147 workers have spent a year in jail on trumped-up criminal charges after a company-provoked altercation led to the death of a human resources manager who supported the union. Hundreds have pledged to take part in the dharna.
- Previous page
- Page 254
- Next page