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Keywords: Wealth

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Among the gods of the Melbourne Cup

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 November 2017
    9 Comments

    More recently, Mammon has dominated the Melbourne Cup. It has been targeted by wealthy international owners and stables who buy up the most likely stayers in order to buy the result. It has also been used by corporations to fuel their engines of misery that suck money and life out of many Australian families.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    An interplanetary future favours the wealthy

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 19 September 2017
    11 Comments

    In a ball of fire, Cassini's 20-year journey across the solar system came to an abrupt finale last week. The spacecraft's odyssey soon revealed not 12 but 62 moons orbiting the gas giant. The most significant of these is Titan, which harbours large quantities of liquid water, considered to be essential to the existence of life. Meanwhile back on Earth ...

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  • RELIGION

    Bishops call for an economy that serves all

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 September 2017
    11 Comments

    The general argument of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Statement on the economy is that Australia is a wealthy economy in which too many people are marginalised. In response to the litany of neglect and abuse that it details, the statement calls for a new view of the economy as the servant of people, and not vice versa.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Grenfell Tower laying inequalities bare

    • Saman Shad
    • 28 June 2017
    4 Comments

    The Lancaster West Estate, which contains Grenfell Tower, is among the top ten per cent of the most deprived areas in England, but is located within the wealthiest local authority. As a former resident of the area the disaster has validated what I knew all along: that events such as these bring out both the best and the worst in people, and that this little corner of West London is a microcosm for greater society and an increasingly unequal world where the poor suffer while the rich increasingly prosper.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    No minister is an island

    • Kate Galloway
    • 23 June 2017
    9 Comments

    Three Commonwealth ministers faced the Victorian Court of Appeal on 16 June to make submissions as to why they shouldn't be charged with contempt of court. This extraordinary occurrence arose because the ministers made public comments about a sentencing matter still under deliberation. Andrew Hamilton has in these pages looked at how the ministers' comments might offend the presumption of innocence. However, there is a further issue at stake - a question of good government.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The origins and incoherence of Australia's asylum seeker policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 20 June 2017
    7 Comments

    I am resigned to the boats from Indonesia being stopped and staying stopped. But it is high time to stop the cruel treatment of the proven refugees on Nauru and Manus Island, and provide a permanent solution for the asylum seekers waiting inordinately in the Australian community. Their treatment is separable from the stopping of future boats setting out from Indonesia. The Commonwealth's $90 million settlement of the claim brought by asylum seekers on Manus Island should be a wake-up call to us all.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Building social justice through shareholder advocacy

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 26 May 2017
    4 Comments

    Wealth inequality in Australia is flourishing. The top one per cent of household wealth in Australia is moving toward being 20 per cent of total wealth, and the country is a preferred destination for millionaires. With a government that prefers to impoverish and vilify the disadvantaged and spend big on coal mines, this does not look likely to shift. But there are always other paths to social justice, and in Australia one may be through the millionaires - or at least the companies on which their fortunes are built.

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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

    Indigenous citizenship rights 50 years after the referendum

    • Dani Larkin
    • 23 March 2017
    9 Comments

    In the face of historically low levels of Indigenous representation in our parliaments, the Indigenous caucus between Commonwealth, State and Territory Labor representatives points to some progress. It is aimed at increasing Indigenous voter engagement figures, increasing Indigenous Labor candidacy, and developing strategic plans that encourage Indigenous students to become young leaders in Parliament. Those are all necessary and noteworthy causes. But we have a long way to go.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Catholic voices against runaway capitalism

    • Michael Walker
    • 20 February 2017
    20 Comments

    The presidency of Donald Trump should bring a renewed focus on the dangers of unbridled capitalism. The Catholic Church has a rich trove of teachings on the subject that have been missing in action for the past 30 years. Now is the time for a well-articulated Christian message addressing such issues as widening wealth inequality fuelled by stagnant wage growth, the privatisation of public services, the financialisation of the economy (which fuels both of those trends), and tax justice.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Uprooting toxic inequality

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 February 2017
    19 Comments

    In itself inequality is not harmful. It is part of the diversity proper in any human society. But the inequality that is now in question is toxic because it is extreme when measured by any scale, and because it is programmed to increase. It is self-perpetuating and self-intensifying. The increase of wealth of the few entails the marginalisation and impoverishment of others. Inequality is the enduring root and not the transient blossom of the plant of social division.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Bread and circuses in modern Australia and America

    • Julie Davies
    • 24 January 2017
    11 Comments

    I can understand the Trump phenomenon. Hard-working Americans and many Australians are blaming various minorities as responsible for their decline. They are being blinded to the real culprits: our own governments and their wealthy backers. Juvenal's 'bread and circuses', designed to keep the people docile and distracted in Ancient Rome, have been updated to Maccas and manufactured news. And hatred. Are we so easily manipulated? Is the American model the future Australia wants for itself?

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