Author: John Falzon
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ECONOMICS
- John Falzon
- 10 August 2021
13 Comments
When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
You only have a road before you. It looks as if it has no end, stark, like the country it weaves through. It is beautiful like that. It should not matter to you, whether or not it has an end.
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ECONOMICS
Our economy is 1.1 per cent larger than a year ago. Yet, as the situation in Victoria reminded us, none of us are safe unless all of us are safe. And we cannot be safe while work remains increasingly insecure, while social security payments are inadequate and while our public infrastructure is found wanting.
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ECONOMICS
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.
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AUSTRALIA
Ideology is a powerful presence in our lives. It works its way into our consciousness through the dominant discourses of government, media, institutional religion, legal frameworks, popular culture, advertising, all the means at the disposal of the powerful. Once we learn to recognise it we see it everywhere. If it feels like we were born into it, it is because we were.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- John Falzon
- 29 April 2020
4 Comments
You have to love happiness so hard it hurts and even this for you is happiness. Even when your demons, bless 'em, meet and have a drink together. Playing a little two-up with your life.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Falzon
- 10 April 2020
25 Comments
Already the ideological die-hards of neoliberalism are working out how the pandemic might be manipulated to lower wages and to snap back to the old economic normal. So now is when collectively we need to take over the framing and the forming of the future. Not to snap back but to spring forward.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Falzon
- 03 March 2020
27 Comments
The Morrison government despises the working class. There is no other explanation for its behaviour. For all the ‘lifters and leaners’ or ‘workers and shirkers’ guff that we’ve seen over the years from this and past governments, the truth is that, according to the neoliberal worldview, whether you’re in paid work or on social security, you’re despised unless you belong to its own big money elite.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Falzon
- 13 November 2019
30 Comments
It's gone too far. The minute you voice even the smallest doubt about the Current Way of Things you get hammered. If, for example, you ask why large multinationals should profit from aged care, the guardians of Economic Correctness look at you funny. Either they don't get it, or they do and they cast you as an enemy of democracy.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- John Falzon
- 07 October 2019
2 Comments
I love reading about the lives of the poets. The ones for whom nothing good ever happened. The ones who were sure that if they did not write, they would surely disappear. The ones who tried to make the invisible visible, and failed; who carried news to this world from another one, as if it were bottles of wine and loaves of bread.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Falzon
- 26 September 2019
13 Comments
We're taught to think that aspiration means what you do alone, what sets you apart. As such it is a concept that is both lauded and loaded. Aspiration, neoliberal style, is a secular version of the gospel of prosperity so loved by the prime minister. God, or the Market, smiles on those who aspire to greater things.
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AUSTRALIA
One of the greatest philosophical challenges for social justice is to articulate a 21st century vision of the role of government. Government is the chief means by which people achieve collectively what they cannot achieve alone. We have no right to indulge in despair when more and more people are being forced to bear the brunt of inequality.
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