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Keywords: Poverty

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Why we need a special day to see the poor

    • Michael McGirr
    • 10 November 2022
    2 Comments

    There are many special days in the year and there’s no harm in celebrating umbrellas, origami or crochet. But surely the World Day of the Poor has a special place. It asks us to see the world for what it truly is and it is not always a pretty picture.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Those with the least are still expected to do the most in the face of inflation

    • John Falzon
    • 31 October 2022
    3 Comments

    In the first Chalmers budget we see a firm, albeit modest, assertion of the role of government in the long-term project of exiting the dismal and destructive era of neoliberalism and incrementally creating, in its place, a society where we have the collective resources to care for eachother, our planet and ourselves.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    National wage decision gives low-income earners breathing space but still a long way to go

    • Francis Sullivan
    • 20 June 2022
    1 Comment

    Despite last week’s decision by the Fair Work Commission to push up the national minimum wage by 5.2 percent, millions of Australians, in all parts of the country, will continue to live in poverty and on survival wages. The facts are that the Commission’s decision takes the minimum wage from $772 a week to $812, an increase of $5.70 a day, not a fortune but better than nothing.

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  • RELIGION

    I am unashamedly pro-life, but let me tell you what that means

    • Beth Doherty
    • 19 May 2022
    10 Comments

    I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    All that is solid melts into air

    • John Falzon
    • 20 January 2022
    7 Comments

    Social security payments were once seen as a means of preventing poverty, not prescribing it. A job was once seen, at least for some, as being not only the best guarantee against poverty but the path to economic security. Now it seems, however, multiple jobs are required to stave off poverty.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Best of 2021: Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • John Falzon
    • 04 January 2022
    7 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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  • AUSTRALIA

    Poor-blaming lets governments off the hook

    • Claire Victory
    • 26 October 2021
    14 Comments

    We don’t need further commentary that gives people who are well off yet another excuse to demonise people living in poverty and to blame them for their circumstances. It lets governments off the hook – governments which should be addressing the structural causes of poverty.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Our moral duty towards Afghan refugees

    • Vincent Long Van Nguyen
    • 30 August 2021
    9 Comments

    I was one of the boat people who escaped from South Vietnam. The escape happened after South Vietnam had fallen to the Vietnamese communist forces in 1975, and my world descended into total chaos with an international embargo, wars against China and Cambodia, forced collectivisation and the insidious spread of what were termed “re-education camps” - but were really communist gulags. My siblings and I grew up in a world of poverty, isolation, oppression and constant fear of what might happen to us or our loved ones.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth

    • 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.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Are we all in this together?

    • Ursula Stephens
    • 01 April 2021
    1 Comment

      At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government reassured Australia ‘We’re all in this together’ but the truth is that the end of JobKeeper and the Coronavirus supplement payments will leave more than 2.6 million people in poverty.

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  • RELIGION

    Francesco the film: ‘The path is opened by walking’

    • David Holdcroft
    • 27 October 2020
    9 Comments

    Insofar as there is hope in Francesco, it emerges gradually through an intimate viewing of the Pope’s engagement with the ‘hot button’ issues of our day, the environment and climate change, refugees and immigration, violence and conflict, disparity of wealth and poverty, women’s place in society and Church, family and sexuality, and sexual abuse within the Church.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    One-off funding not enough for the aid budget

    • Kirsty Robertson
    • 20 October 2020
    7 Comments

    This Budget is a missed opportunity. It was a chance for the government to do something radical, to make real and defined impacts. Instead, we’ve increased funding for some regions, but at the cost of some of the most marginalised populations in the world, who have experienced years of discrimination, poverty and displacement.

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