‘Eviction by dereliction’: the decay of public housing

Barney Gardner is one of the last public housing tenants still living in Sydney’s Millers Point. The 72-year-old former painter and docker has lived in public housing his entire life. He has experienced firsthand the complete disregard of state and federal governments for the wellbeing of the “invisible” Australians in housing such as his.

“We can mix with wealthy people,” he says. “I have no desire for greener grass. But can they live with us? It’s disgusting the way that public housing tenants are treated.”

Gardner has watched as his community disappeared, first slowly, then rapidly. They were shunted from one dilapidated property to another, with seemingly no right to basic maintenance, let alone a modest standard of living as their heritage-listed homes were sold to private buyers.

And Gardner is one of the lucky ones, having inherited his parents’ worker’s cottage under the “succession” provision once ensured by the Maritime Services Board. Although Gardner helped to fight and win several cases allowing some of his neighbours to retain their families’ leases, the “succession” provision was eventually dispensed with.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/04/09/eviction-dereliction-the-decay-public-housing/164942640013672#hrd

 

Bitter harvest

Seen from the top of a small, extinct volcano known as the Hummock, the countryside east of Bundaberg is a fertile patchwork of green fields and freshly tilled red-brown earth. Extending inland, this is perhaps Australia’s richest food bowl, pre-eminent in avocados, macadamia nuts, passionfruit, sweet potatoes and sugar cane, says the chief executive of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers, Bree Grima. That’s the sugar cane used to make the rum that bears the town’s name.

But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bitter harvest

 

How ‘prestige, status and power’ led to Australia’s war crimes

Australian military commanders were told some of their soldiers in Afghanistan might be committing war crimes, but because the information came from Afghans they didn’t believe it.

After a four-year investigation, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) has this week confirmed what has long been reported: that between 2005 and 2014, and particularly during 2012, some Australian special forces soldiers murdered and tortured civilians while deployed in Afghanistan.

As part of the inquiry, Professor David Whetham of King’s College London found that complaints of substance were lodged by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and local Afghan elders, but were brushed off as “Taliban propaganda or motivated by a desire for compensation”.

“It is clear that there were warning signs out there,” Whetham writes. “But nothing happened.”

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2020/11/21/how-prestige-status-and-power-led-australias-war-crimes/160587720010724#mtr

 

The reward for good pandemic leadership: Lessons from Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand reelection

The recent reelection of the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour government in New Zealand offers leaders elsewhere a potent lesson about how best to respond to COVID-19. Saving lives is, not surprisingly, a real vote-winner.

Ardern’s Oct. 17 victory was a record-breaking landslide. Labour secured 49% of the party vote and an expected 64 seats in the 120-member Parliament.

Labour can therefore govern alone, if it wishes. It’s the first time any party has had this choice since New Zealand moved to a mixed-member proportional electoral system in 1993.

Pending special votes, Labour has secured more support than its competitors in 77% of local neighorhoods. The result is the most dramatic swing in more than a century of elections.

The election outcome constitutes a compelling endorsement of Ardern, whose decisive response to the first wave of the coronavirus in March was a master class in crisis leadership.

https://theconversation.com/the-reward-for-good-pandemic-leadership-lessons-from-jacinda-arderns-new-zealand-reelection-148515

 

Licensed to govern

The big question mark over Jacinda Ardern’s second term as NZ prime minister is whether she can make good on her December 2017 declaration that she would lead a “government of transformation.”

Her government’s first three-year term was more a repair shop than an innovative enterprise of deep reform. Now Labour has a majority in its own right — sixty-four seats of 120, according to Saturday’s election-night count, from an extraordinary 49.1 per cent support under New Zealand’s two-vote mixed-member proportional system.

So will we see real action on climate change? Ardern called that “my generation’s nuclear-free moment” in 2017, evoking the famed nuclear-free legislation of David Lange’s 1984–90 Labour government, which reduced the ANZUS treaty to only Australia and the United States.

And will she make good on finance minister Grant Robertson’s “wellbeing budgets,” which he has today signalled he plans to continue? “Wellbeing budgets” are intended to bring measures of environmental, social and human capital into calculating how well the government and the country are doing. Put fully into effect, this change could be transformative, but whether Labour will do that is the big second-term question.

Licensed to govern

 

NZ stands together as the world burns

It’s hard to stop watching Belarus. The idea that a torturous bully can refuse to let go of power in 2020 is unconscionable.

Watching the people demand genuine democracy, it’s possible to simultaneously feel a swelling of pride for those who refuse to give up, and nausea at the police batons raining upon unarmed protestors.

It’s hard to comprehend a reality where two passionate and capable women can vie to become the Prime Minister in New Zealand, while female politicians in Belarus are being told to “go back to the kitchen”.

In a place that feels a little closer to home, the scene is set for an unacceptable election result. When Donald Trump overstates voter fraud and says mail-in voting is flawed, he knowingly fuels distrust in democratic systems – and his population’s faith is already shaky.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/nz-stands-together-as-the-world-burns

 

New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet

The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own style. And every leader will be judged by the results.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel embraces science. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rejects it. U.S. President Donald Trump’s daily briefings are a circuslike spectacle, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds no regular briefings at all, even as he locks down 1.3 billion people.

Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-leadership-coronavirus/610237/

 

Coronavirus fears can trigger anti-Chinese prejudice. Here’s how schools can help

Every disease outbreak brings an accompanying outbreak of fear. Already we’re seeing coverage on the spread of coronavirus fear which leads to misinformation, an effect on the economy and, perhaps the most alarming, xenophobia .

Social stigmatisation and xenophobia are, unfortunately, well known features of disease outbreaks. And there is potential for xenophobic sentiment to build in Australian schools.

http://theconversation.com/coronavirus-fears-can-trigger-anti-chinese-prejudice-heres-how-schools-can-help-130945

 

Australia’s Fires Give Us a Glimpse of What’s Coming

The environmental catastrophe playing out in Australia provides a terrifying glimpse of the “new normal” facing a warming world. Bushfires burning since September have now incinerated over 11.3 million acres, an area bigger than the Netherlands. At the latest count, eighteen people have died, and over a thousand homes have been destroyed.

Yellow smog hangs semi-permanently over major cities, a cloud so toxic that it caused an elderly woman to collapse and later die from respiratory distress after she stepped onto the tarmac of Canberra’s airport. Millions of Australians are being exposed to carcinogenic particles; simply breathing in Sydney’s air has been described as the equivalent of smoking thirty-four cigarettes a day.

Among the devastation, nearly half a billion animals have died, including a sizable proportion of New South Wales’s koalas. Almost certainly, entire species have been wiped out, as fire has swept through ecosystems never before exposed to flames.

Scenes from the affected areas have become increasingly apocalyptic. Tens of thousands of rural residents remain without power. A state of emergency prevails in New South Wales, the third declared in the past few months. In the Victorian disaster zones, people still await extraction by naval vessels.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/australia-bushfires-climate-change-new-south-wales-scott-morrison

 

Turn up the heat on climate change deniers

The new year has started with obvious signs that global warming is not an invention of scientists, as some politicians claim. Devastating bush fires in Australia, destructive floods in Jakarta and a heatwave in Norway that has people sunbathing rather than skiing are proof of climatic conditions having been shaken up.
Yet the doubters have not changed their views, putting their nations’ economies and industries ahead of international efforts to keep temperatures from rising. They need to change their ways or the disastrous consequences of their poor judgment will be ever-more evident.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, like United States President Donald Trump, is a climate change sceptic. He refuses to accept that the fires that have claimed at least two dozen lives and destroyed nearly 2,000 homes in southeastern states are the result of exceptionally hot and dry conditions brought about by global warming.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3045085/turn-heat-climate-change-deniers