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AUSTRALIA

Vinnies' sad heart over Welfare to Work legislation

  • 10 July 2006
1. Australia at the dawn of the 21st century: More like the 19th? More divided than diverse? • How many feel oppressed and blamed for their oppression? • How many ask: What does it profit the country that we be pushed and shoved like this? Will anyone profit from us, pushed off income security and into low-paid jobs? • In 1848 Ozanam, wrote of the burning need to take the side of “the people who have too many needs and not enough rights.” • Australia 2006: unprecedented changes to our social security and industrial relations frameworks. Combined, these changes will supply cheap labour, driven by legislative sticks into the lowest and most insecure end of the labour market. • How many of us would love the chance to connect? But this is not connection. How many of us will suffer and how many of our children will suffer? Not connection; catastrophe.

2. The prophets cry blue murder: “Woe betide those who enact unjust laws and draft oppressive legislation, depriving the poor of justice, robbing the weakest of my people of their rights, plundering the widow and despoiling the fatherless.” (Isaiah 10:1-3) • Paul VI wrote of the mutilating effects of ‘oppressive social structures, whether due to abuses of ownership or to the abuses of power, to the exploitation of workers or to unjust transactions.”

3. Remember the story that Nathan told to David? (Samuel 12:1-7) The one about the poor man’s lamb that the rich man took possession of and slaughtered even though he had many flocks and herds of his own? • Bewildered, we watch the little we have, we who survive on the margins, being taken away. • We’re told that this is good for us; that it’s good for us to take care of ourselves even if this means being poorer and more crushed. • Some of us live in cars or on the streets. • Some of us are homeless - one in every three is a child. • Two out of three children who seek assistance from a homelessness service are turned away each day… • This is not good for us. This is not good for our children.

4. We feel like we’re pushed with sticks. • As if this is all we understand. • Our incomes have been lowered. What does this teach us? How are we to give our children breakfast, let alone birthday cakes?
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