A vicious debate and media storm over whether 340 houses were “built” or “acquired” only underscore the total inadequacy of Labor’s “social and affordable” housing policy.
Insolvencies were up 57 percent for the year to November 2024, with businesses closing at the highest rate since August 2020.
The acute housing crisis is increasingly affecting low-income workers as well as retirees living on a pension.
The proportion of Australians aged 55 to 64 who own their homes outright fell by almost half between 2000 and 2020, from 63.9 percent to 36.1 percent.
Australia’s unemployment payment, JobSeeker, amounts to just $55 per day, less than half the minimum wage and among the lowest in the OECD.
Unemployment is rising across the country, with the highest levels recorded in working-class areas.
Almost three-quarters of Australian suburbs are in “extreme rental pain” as rent soars and wages stagnate.
The purpose of Centrepay is to ensure that landlords, utilities and other businesses get the first cut of the pittance from which the unemployed, elderly, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged are forced to eke out an existence.
Studies suggesting that even a brief period of rough sleeping can have an enormous impact on health and life expectancy are of particular concern amid a rise in homelessness, including among people with paid jobs.
Four in ten people who sought assistance from a major homelessness charity in the past three years were employed but unable to meet the soaring cost of rent and other basic essentials.
Economists say Australian households and the economy have “hit the wall,” with the Australian economy “almost” coming to a “standstill in the September quarter.”
In Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, households need to earn a staggering $261,733 annually for a mortgage on an average-priced home.
Almost one-quarter of the population experienced “severe” food insecurity, meaning that a lack of money had at times forced them to reduce food intake, skip meals and even go entire days without eating.
The proposed deal, hailed as a “win” by the United Workers Union (UWU) bureaucracy, is scarcely better than the original offer: a 13.12 percent pay “rise” over three years.
This was the 15th workplace death in Western Australia since July 2022, and one of at least 110 worker fatalities recorded across the country since the start of the year.
Around 5,000 rallied outside the state parliament in Adelaide with multiple homemade banners expressing educators’ determined opposition to the government’s wage offer of a nominal wage rise of just 3 percent a year and rejection of any meaningful measures reducing excess workloads and abysmal conditions.
Levels of mortgage stress are at their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis, with broad sections of the working class struggling to make ends meet.
Workers confront economic pressure on multiple fronts—interest rates, housing costs, and surging inflation in the price of essentials, such as utilities and groceries.
