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Keywords: Poverty

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ending poverty is a human challenge, not a technical one

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 October 2017
    7 Comments

    The difficulty inherent in the metaphor of eradication is that it sees poverty as a discrete object that exists independently of the people whom it affects, and that can be dealt with by devising technical solutions. It ignores the complex sets of relationships that constitute poverty as a human reality.

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  • RELIGION

    Notes from India's margins

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 October 2017
    9 Comments

    A Jesuit priest who has worked for over 30 years in India with the poorest villagers, Tony Herbert grapples with three questions: what to make of poverty, what happens when you commit yourself to people who are indigent, and how, in living, the three aspects of poverty - religious poverty, material poverty and its injustices, and personal emptiness - come together. He builds his reflections around encounters with villagers on his own journey.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Of murderers, bastards and inequality: neo-liberalism's failure

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 August 2017
    18 Comments

    Cometh the hour, cometh the third murderer. So now inequality is in the spotlight and is being booed off the stage. It is blamed for the rise of populist politics, and more fundamentally for economic stagnation. The economic neo-liberal orthodoxy, that so implausibly claimed that economic competition unfettered by government regulation would benefit all of the citizens, has produced the gross inequality that hinders economic growth. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Tackling wealth inequality through justice reinvestment

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 31 March 2017
    10 Comments

    Australia was rated as the top destination for millionaire migrants in 2016 for the second year in a row. Meanwhile the latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reveal high correlations between prison entrance and indicators of entrenched poverty and discrimination. If we want our system for justice to amount to something more than a mirror of our inability to distribute wealth and opportunity evenly, we need to address the undeniable role wealth inequality has in putting people in prison.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The power of persuasion in confronting fascism

    • Daniel Nicholson
    • 24 February 2017
    9 Comments

    In the footage of one violence protest, I was shocked to see a handful of my homeless clients, draped in Australian flags, engaged in street battles with anti-racists. These young men had experienced alienation, exploitation and poverty - all the things the Left is supposed to fight against. Long, uncomfortable conversations don't make for good social media content, yet if Australia is to stare down the threat of a rising alt-right it won't be done by yelling at right wing fringe groups across a police barricade.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No vacancy at the inn (or anywhere else in Australia)

    • Marlene Marburg
    • 05 December 2016
    5 Comments

    Please god of the fit and strong, forbid we should become 'the un-lucky country'. Help us to conjure the nerve to say, There is no room for you here in Australia. No vacancies. All full up. You will be turned away while you are trying to give your family respite from poverty or war. We have no room for you. We are using our space for shops. And Christmas trees.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    How to relieve poverty in India without endangering the planet

    • Frank Brennan
    • 02 December 2016
    9 Comments

    Neither India nor Australia can go it alone when confronting a global issue such as climate change. India cannot disregard the effects on other nations when it adopts laws and policies for alleviating the poverty of the poorest of the poor. Australia cannot disregard the effects on other nations when it considers restricting the availability of resources for export such as coal which might help provide electricity for the world's poorest citizens.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    There's room at the table for the poor if we make it

    • Julie Edwards
    • 17 October 2016
    17 Comments

    One of the most misused passages of Christian scripture tells us we shall always have the poor with us. It is often repeated by those who are not poor in order to dismiss any project that involves public expenditure or private generosity to people who are poor. When we do not focus on the good or bad conscience of the observer but on the lives of the people who are poor, we can see that the statement is not a justification for a modern society that allows people to live in poverty. It is an indictment.

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  • MEDIA

    Unmasking Elena Ferrante diminishes her radiant magic

    • Ellena Savage
    • 06 October 2016
    1 Comment

    Happily, I do not know who the 'real' Elena Ferrante is. Happily, I have blocked my eyes and ears to the unfolding, the unmasking of the Italian author whose anonymity allowed her the freedom from scrutiny to give us seven novels that document the slow burn indignities of poverty and sexism and ambition. How can we accept this gift, a woman writing about the most abject of female pleasures, the darkest impulses, and then demand that she answer inane questions at a writers' festivals?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dickensian England lives on in Australia

    • Kate Galloway
    • 26 August 2016
    15 Comments

    Oliver Twist is still used to aid understanding of the trauma arising from poverty, and the suffering of children at the hands of individuals and within institutional settings. In broader Australian society we assume Dickensian attitudes to children have evolved. Aligned with the sentiments behind child protection, society's image of children and childhood is idyllic. Yet beneath this veneer lies a substratum of deeply ambivalent, even malevolent, attitudes towards children with a distinctly Dickensian flavour.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Jailing fine defaulters punishes poverty

    • Kate Galloway
    • 30 March 2016
    6 Comments

    Around half of Indigenous prisoners in Roebourne Regional Prison are there on driving offences. Many Indigenous Australians do not have birth certificates and therefore cannot get a drivers licence. Yet those who live in remote areas often have no means of transport other than by car. When they are caught driving unlicensed, they receive a fine, and since many are unable to pay, they are consequently are jailed. And as we all know, jail is a particularly risky place for Indigenous Australians.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless truths from an agent against poverty

    • Brian Doyle
    • 09 March 2016
    8 Comments

    The tall man had worked for the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence for years, and long ago had lost any illusions about the overarching nobility of people who were hammered and lost and helpless against addictions, diseases, crisis and tragedy. I asked him about the most wonderful people he'd met, and he told me some amazing stories, and then I asked him about the worst, and he told me some horrifying stories, and then his face twisted and he told me about the worst of the worst.

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