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Inequality is not an aberration that comes with neoliberalism. It is the foundation of neoliberalism, along with its partners in social crime: patriarchy and colonisation. As Sharan Burrow, the Australian General Secretary of the ITUC, puts it so poignantly: 'We live in a fragmented world.' The excluded form the majority across the globe.
The government finally released its women's economic security statement. The package is built around three pillars — workforce participation, earning potential, and economic independence — totalling $109 million dollars over four years. It is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to address the crisis of gender violence and substantial inequality.
If you accept the tenets of individualism, you are going to struggle to see why we should have anything but the most minimal level of taxation, and you wouldn't hold that taxation should be progressive to be fair. But the reality is that inequality is a political failure; not a personal one.
The Vatican has launched a stringent critique of abuses in global economies, abuses that are driving astonishing inequality and threatening ecological sustainability. 'Oeconomicae et pecuniariae questiones' reiterates the call for an urgent dialogue between politics and economics to advance human life and wellbeing.
This is Australia's looming inequality issue. Those who can take advantage of the energy revolution will have lower bills and more comfortable living conditions during the frequent extreme weather events we'll experience with climate change. Those who can't will be left reliant on a dirty, aging and increasingly expensive electricity grid.
The budget includes a range of tax cuts for many Australian workers and some funding for education and early childhood services but fails to address the ever-growing inequality across the country. Simply put, it is those in the greatest need of support who have yet again been left behind.
How comfortable does anyone really need to be? The amounts of money that get quoted in remuneration packages or property portfolios is incomprehensible to many Australians who manage to survive, even thrive, on so much less. Inequality seems to be driven by an incapacity to recognise what is enough and to stop.
As I drop my daughter at daycare at 6:30am, to be looked after by someone else who I then have to pay, to go to work to earn enough money to pay our rent and daycare, I am struck by how much our system is failing families. It was a failure of my own empathy that I only came to understand this after I experienced it personally.
This affair has done little to encourage Australians keen on pushing a more robustly independent line from Washington. A ceremonial subservience and deference to US power has been exhibited. Such sentiments embrace the inherent inequality of the Australian-US relationship. To be in deficit to the US is seen as a good and necessary thing.
How is it we allow investors to leave units vacant in the Docklands while young people struggle to access housing in Melbourne? We have given legislators a free pass when it comes to economic policies that discriminate against those without means. This creates systemic inequality, and it needs to be addressed urgently.
'Francis' statement is not one merely for theological or academic contemplation. It is in effect Francis' call to establish a new benchmark for our economy, one where exclusion and inequality are no longer a natural and accepted consequence of its operation.' Director of Economic Policy for Catholic Social Services Australia addresses the CSSA annual conference in Melbourne, February 2018.
37-48 out of 89 results.