Australian Social Issues & Inequality
Sri Lankan correspondent explains why refugees are fleeing to Australia
By Mike Head, 12 April 2013
Hundreds of refugees are leaving because of severe economic hardship and repression by the Sri Lankan government and the military.
Social crisis to intensify after Western Australian election
By Dragan Slavkov and Celeste Lopez, 9 March 2013
The escalating assault on jobs, living standards and basic services will widen the already glaring levels of inequality.
Australian hospital funding cuts cause bed closures
By Will Morrow, 24 January 2013
While being presented as accounting corrections, these cutbacks are entirely in line with the federal Labor government’s so-called health care reform program.
Australian government cuts welfare payments to single parents
By Mark Church, 5 January 2013
As well as suffering a drastic drop in income, sole parents will be forced to actively search for work.
Australian dole recipients struggle to survive
By our correspondents, 5 January 2013
The WSWS interviewed unemployed workers in Sydney and Melbourne about the Labor government’s latest welfare cut.
Australian government rejects refugee protest letter
By Mike Head, 31 December 2012
At least 155 people, including about 30 children, are now detained on Manus Island, with many housed in tents and shipping containers.
Australia: Christmas period highlights mounting social crisis
By Mark Church, 24 December 2012
The sharp economic downturn, compounded by federal and state government cuts, is driving new layers of the working class into poverty.
Report details widespread poverty in Australia
By Patrick O’Connor, 16 October 2012
The findings are a devastating indictment of the Labor government and its pro-business restructuring agenda.
Australian police Taser attack kills Brazilian student
By Zac Hambides, 21 March 2012
All the evidence indicates that police used potentially lethal force against an innocent young man, Roberto Laudisio Curti.
Official report confirms growing inequality in Australia
By Alex Messenger, 26 October 2011
The statistics indicate that the wealthy have been able to exploit the global financial crisis to profit at the expense of ordinary people.
Mortgage stress rising in Australia
By Eduardo Ballesteros, 21 October 2011
The Moody’s report provides a glimpse of the mounting financial distress being experienced by working class households, even before the current barrage of manufacturing job losses.
Workers struggle in “boom” state of Western Australia
By Joe Lopez and James Cogan, 29 July 2011
Official figures disguise the immense contradictions and regressive social impact of the mining boom.
Australia: Labor’s “welfare quarantining” trials target unemployed
By Will Morrow, 1 July 2011
The WSWS spoke to unemployed people in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown, one of the working class areas selected by the Gillard government for welfare-cutting trials.
Australian government to stop welfare payments to teenage mothers
By Tania Baptist, 29 June 2011
The scheme is part of various measures aimed at forcing the disabled, the long-term unemployed, and single mothers off welfare and into the workforce, where they will become a new source of cheap labour.
“Putting mothers and babies under grossly unfair pressure”
By Tania Baptist, 29 June 2011
The WSWS interviewed advocates for single mothers and welfare recipients about the implications of the Gillard government’s trials, which will suspend welfare payments for teenage parents.
Australian tribunal allows greater exploitation of student labour
By Mike Head, 27 June 2011
The ruling is part of a concerted government-backed drive to slash wages and conditions of low-paid retail workers amid falling sales, a wave of store closures and signs of deepening slump.
Mining boom boosts Australia’s ultra-wealthy
By Peter Byrne, 15 June 2011
Four out of the top five on the Rich 200 List made their fortunes in the mining sector, pointing to the growing weight of the major miners within the ruling elite.
Corporate executive pay hits “stratospheric new heights” in Australia
By Terry Cook, 1 December 2010
Two reports on executive remuneration reveal that Australia’s corporate and financial elite are taking home millions of dollars while workers and their families suffer increasing levels of financial and social stress.
Australia: Labor government accelerates rundown and privatisation of public housing
By Will Marshall, 24 November 2010
Successive Labor and Liberal governments in Victoria have starved public housing of funds. The most disadvantaged people in the state currently languish on waiting lists for almost three times as long as they did when the Labor government was first elected in 1999.
Australia: Privatisations send electricity prices surging
By Alex Messenger, 16 November 2010
With privatisation driving an expected rise in electricity prices by 100 percent in the next five to seven years, growing numbers of working people are having difficulties paying their bills.
Global financial crisis leaves two million Australians in poverty
By Mike Head, 4 November 2010
Beneath the surface of the mining-led “recovery”, millions of ordinary people are suffering economic insecurity, acute financial difficulties and housing stress.
Australian election: The Labor government’s childcare backdown and the profit system
By Tania Baptist and Socialist Equality Party candidate for Gellibrand, 23 July 2010
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has made clear that Labor’s construction halt on new childcare centres, which was imposed at the behest of the private for-profit childcare operators, will be maintained.
Australian government targets diabetes sufferers to cut health costs
By John Mackay, 23 June 2010
Diabetes patients are to be a test case for a new health blueprint designed to ration access to medical care.
Australia: Unemployment statistics mask job crisis
By James Cogan, 12 June 2010
Hundreds of thousands of people who want and need full time jobs do not show up in the figures because they are not counted as unemployed.
“Casemix”: The model for cutting Australian hospital spending
By Margaret Rees and Mike Head, 26 April 2010
The Rudd government’s hospital plan centres on using the “casemix” funding model to slash costs and ration patients’ access to services.
Australia’s wealthiest executives “back in the money”
By Chris Johnson, 6 April 2010
Australia’s richest 200 executives saw their wealth rebound 72 percent last year, in a list dominated by mining and finance companies.
Australia: Media demands stricter health care “rationing”
By Patrick O’Connor, 2 April 2010
Encouraged and emboldened by what was said during the televised debate between Rudd and Abbott, the media is now urging the Labor government to go further.
Australia: Rudd government unveils plan to cut health spending
By Mike Head, 6 March 2010
Despite being presented as an historic “reform,” the plan has nothing to do with resolving the worsening crisis in the chronically under-funded health system.
Australia: Queensland trials scheme to punish parents of truants
By Tess Gordon, 16 February 2010
In a trial scheme in Queensland, parents in the impoverished working class suburbs of Logan are having their welfare payments stripped if their children fail to attend school.
Australia: Victorian government attempts to pre-empt findings of bushfire investigation
By Margaret Rees, 11 July 2009
In an extraordinary political manoeuvre, Victorian premier John Brumby has moved to pre-empt potentially damaging findings by the state’s royal commission into the February 7 “Black Saturday” bushfires.
Australia: Low-wage workers’ pay cut
By Mike Head, 9 July 2009
Australia’s Fair Pay Commission has inflicted a real pay cut on 1.3 million low-paid workers by freezing the minimum wage for the first time in 27 years.
Indian student protests spread to Sydney: “We came here to study, not to fight”
By Laura Tiernan, 10 June 2009
Protests by Indian students studying in Australia that erupted in Melbourne on May 31 have spread to Sydney over recent days.
Australia: James Hardie court ruling another affront to asbestosis victims
By Noel Holt, 26 May 2009
Just as a court ruled that former directors of James Hardie Industries had issued a false statement in 2001 about the company’s asbestosis compensation fund, the company revealed that its current fund might be unable to meet its commitments by 2013.
Australia: Royal Commission inquiry forced to investigate “stay or go” bushfire policy
By Margaret Rees, 16 May 2009
Criticism of the government’s “stay or go” policy has followed the devastating firestorm, now known as Black Saturday, that hit the Australian state of Victoria on February 7.
Australia: Unemployment study highlights “new face of disadvantage”
By Tess Gordon, 2 May 2009
A research report has warned that suburbs in Australia’s middle and outer suburban mortgage belts could become “hot spots of home repossessions” as unemployment strikes.
Australia: Survivors of Victorian bushfires receive minimal compensation
By Will Marshall, 28 April 2009
Labor government promises to support the victims of the “Black Saturday” bushfires have proven hollow. The small amount of compensation for those whose homes were destroyed will mean that hundreds may never rebuild again.
Australian bushfire victims speak with WSWS as evidence of government culpability grows
By a reporting team, 16 February 2009
As evidence grows of government culpability in last week’s Australian bushfires, hundreds of survivors are living in temporary accommodation across Victoria or in tents.
Cash-starved Australian hospitals unable to pay for vital supplies
By Terry Cook, 12 February 2009
Recent reports show that public hospitals are so under-funded that many cannot pay pharmaceutical companies, food providers, maintenance contractors and security firms for supplies and basic services.
Australia: Tragedy of child’s death sparks international response
By Susan Allan, 10 February 2009
At about 9.10 a.m. on January 29 and in the midst of an unprecedented summer heat wave, Arthur Freeman, a 35-year-old father of three, drove onto Melbourne’s busy West Gate Bridge, allegedly took his 4-year-old daughter Darcey from the car and dropped her from the bridge.
Australian government hopes recession will produce military “recruitment bonanza”
By Terry Cook, 26 January 2009
The Australian has published a front-page article expressing satisfaction that rising unemployment could produce a “recruitment bonanza” for the Australian Defence Force.
Australian government calls for wage cuts to “save jobs”
By Terry Cook, 14 January 2009
The Rudd Labor government is using the threat of job cuts to browbeat workers into accepting the burden of an economic crisis that is not of their making.
Australian university review proposes student vouchers
By Carolyn Robinson, 2 January 2009
For two decades, the higher education system has been systematically starved of funds. Now the dire state of over-stretched universities is being used to justify a radical pro-market restructuring.
WSWS interviews charity workers and recipients
Demand for emergency welfare relief “dramatically spikes” in Sydney
By Keith Morgan and Mike Head, 30 December 2008
The WSWS interviews charity workers and recipients about the social impact of the global economic breakdown in Sydney, Australia’s financial capital.
Australia: Hundreds of jobs to be axed as childcare centres close
By Alex Messenger, 22 December 2008
Hundreds of Australian childcare employees, some of the poorest paid workers in the country, will lose their jobs in the coming months with the $1.6 billion collapse of childcare provider ABC Learning and sackings at Neighbourhood Early Learning Centres.
Australian welfare agencies warn of growing social crisis
By Mike Head, 12 December 2008
Australian welfare agencies say they have reached breaking point, with demand for services like housing, counselling and emergency relief doubling. They have made an urgent appeal to the Rudd government for a funding injection of $900 million to keep services running over the next three years.
Doctors declare Australian hospital system on the brink of collapse
By Alex Messenger, 11 December 2008
Australia’s public hospitals are so understaffed and bed shortages so serious that hospitals routinely operate for long periods at “code red”, a level of overcrowding at which patients will die, according to the Australian Medical Association.
Amid Allegations of Enron-style Fraud
Major Australian child care corporation at risk of bankruptcy
By Katrina Morrison, 30 September 2008
Australia’s largest child care provider ABC Learning, also the world’s largest publicly traded child care corporation, stands on the brink of collapse.
Australia: Methane gas landfill leak forces residents to evacuate suburb
“The land should never have been sold”
By Peter Byrne, 25 September 2008
On September 11, Country Fire Authority chief officer Russell Rees advised owners of about 250 houses in the working class outer-Melbourne suburb of Cranbourne to move out after methane levels of 60 to 65 percent were found in some houses. Concentrations of 5-15 percent are considered an explosion risk.
Australia: The 2008 Victorian teachers’ dispute, Teachers Alliance and the Socialist Equality Party
By Patrick O’Connor and Will Marshall, 12 September 2008
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing an interview with Mary Merkenich, a leading member of the Teachers Alliance organisation, on the recent struggle waged by Victorian public school teachers for improved wages and conditions. A comment by Socialist Equality Party member and public school teacher Will Marshall follows.
Australia: Labor to strip welfare from parents of truant children
Punishing the poor
By Laura Tiernan, 4 September 2008
In what amounts to a declaration of war on the right to welfare, Labor’s Minister for Education Julia Gillard presented a new bill to federal parliament last week that will strip benefits from parents whose children truant from school. Payments can be cut for 13 weeks or cancelled entirely if parents fail to provide a “reasonable excuse” for their child’s non-attendance.
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