Australia: Escalating need for food handouts
More than 50 percent of those receiving Foodbank services have a job, reflecting the rise of casual and part-time work, as well as declining real wages.
More than 50 percent of those receiving Foodbank services have a job, reflecting the rise of casual and part-time work, as well as declining real wages.
Refugees cannot be genuinely protected and settled in PNG, given the extraordinary levels of poverty that beset most of the country’s people.
Australia’s skewed and unstable economic growth is dependent on continuing high global demand, especially from China, for its minerals.
Under the guise of helping the disabled, the NDIS involves a massive rationalisation of existing services designed to drive many off pensions and into work.
Far from the “increased funding” promoted by the media, the changes will reduce the government’s contribution to the funding of home care from 84 percent to 76 percent.
Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten was briefed in advance, indicating that the cuts will be implemented with the Labor government’s support.
A Reserve Bank decision not to cut interest rates has intensified the pressure on employers to shut down operations, lower their labour costs and squeeze more from smaller workforces.
Backed by the Gillard government, the corporate elite is using the economic crisis to carry through wholesale cost-cutting to match the austerity measures being imposed on workers internationally.
The 2011 contraction was the first since the recession of the early 1990s, when official unemployment rose to 9 percent.
The warnings underscore the acute exposure of Australian capitalism to the worldwide impact of the worsening global financial crisis.
The statistics indicate that the wealthy have been able to exploit the global financial crisis to profit at the expense of ordinary people.
Outside of mining, which only covers 1.7 percent of employees, the economy is stagnating or in sharp decline, exposing the Labor government’s claims of immunity from the international financial turmoil.
The proposed changes, which have drawn outrage from pensioner groups, are designed to meet the aged care industry’s demand for higher profits.
Labor’s measures have one goal: to force welfare recipients to compete for poorly-paid jobs and create a cheap labour pool to drive down wages.
On the eve of its federal budget, the Australian government confronts an economic landscape that is contradictory and highly unstable.
Qantas chief Alan Joyce denounced the resistance of pilots, engineers, and ground crew to his airline’s plans to undermine wages and conditions as “nothing short of a Kamikaze campaign.”
Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbin has warned that the Australian economy faces a sharp crisis.
For months, the Gillard Labor government suppressed these statistics, fearing renewed public opposition to its anti-refugee measures.
The economic cost of the Queensland flood disaster is impacting on coal, wheat, sugar, and cotton prices internationally.
The Gillard government is preparing plans to overcome a unanimous ruling by Australia’s highest court, which declared that detained asylum seekers have the right to legally challenge refusals to grant them protection visas.