The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
Susan Ryan (Dec’d)
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Are the ‘big four’ accounting firms above the law?
In 2004, the federal parliament passed the Age Discrimination Act, making age discrimination in employment, education and the provision of goods and services unlawful. But the major accounting firms seem to think it doesn’t apply to them. (more…)
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – June/July 2020
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – May/June 2020
The latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Apr/May 2020
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
One of the key themes for this instalment is that now is an ideal time – for a range of good reasons – for government at all levels, led by the Federal Government, to facilitate a massive and much overdue investment in social housing.
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SUSAN RYAN supports Pearls and Irritations.
Anyone who wants to keep up with policy developments, both failures and successes, cannot rely on mainstream media. (more…)
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Mar/Apr 2020
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Unsurprisingly, much of the following is Covid-19 focused, as the pandemic has undoubtedly made the relevant issues more pressing than ever, and therefore provided additional impetus for urgently needed reform.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Feb/Mar 2020
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Although housing affordability and homelessness have featured less in the news over the past month, due to our almost exclusive (and understandable) focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, there is little doubt that the already difficult plight of those suffering housing stress or homelessness has been made substantially worse by the virus and the public health and economic havoc it has caused.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Jan/Feb 2020
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – late Nov 2019 to mid Jan 2020
This is part of what is normally a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Due to the just past Christmas holiday period, this particular digest covers more than the usual monthly period, and is therefore longer than usual.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Oct/Nov 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Sept/Oct 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Aug/Sept 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – July/Aug 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – June/July 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. Vale Graham Freudenberg.
Anyone who has heard of Graham Freudenberg, and most aware Australians have, think of him not so much as an individual , but in association with the great men, the massive political personalities whom he served.
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – May/June 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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SUSAN RYAN. Older Australians, winners or losers?
In this election , there was an extra 300,000 voters aged over 65 compared with the 2016 election. The parallel increase for young voters was 135,000 , less than half the older voter increase. Did older voters exercise this voting strength in the interest of their age cohort? It seems not. I see more losers than winners among older Australians. (more…)
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Apr/May 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.
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SUSAN RYAN. Older women are budget losers.
The 2019 budget contains little to improve the circumstances of the poorest older women. Increases of 10,000 previously announced home care places are provided for. An extra 13,500 residential places were provided. A new $8.4 million is allocated to mandatory reporting against quality indicators in residential aged care. Tax changes are of little use to older women living on pensions. One-off energy payments of $75 for an individual or $125 for a couple will reach pensioners and carers. An elder abuse hotline allocation of $18m is re announced. Over ten years $185m will be allocated to establish a dementia, ageing and aged care research program. The crisis in housing affordability, unaffordable rents and homelessness among older women is not addressed. (more…)
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Mar/Apr 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. (more…)
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Feb/Mar 2019
This is the second monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the source.
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Monthly housing digest – Jan/Feb 2019
This is the first of what is intended to be a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the source material. While the focus is on Australia, the Digest may occasionally include items of significant interest from overseas jurisdictions. See for example the piece about Microsoft in this Digest.
This edition is re-posted from Thursday 21 February, and in future will appear on the first Saturday of every month. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. Ladies in Red.
In the late 1970s, federal Labor, still in opposition after Whitlam, was struggling. New polling research enabled me to advise national conference that Labor would not regain office unless it increased its support among women voters. If women had voted Labor in the same proportion as men had, Labor would have won every election since World War 2 , with the possible exception of the Chifley loss in 1949.With these findings, measuring the gender gap in polling analysis was introduced, and has remained there ever since. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN .When it comes to women, all Liberals are conservatives.
It was with a sense of irony that on Saturday August 25th, a few hours after the parliamentary Liberal party concluded days of ugly self-mutilation by electing Scott Morrison as Prime Minister and Josh Frydenberg as deputy liberal leader, I attended at Old Parliament House Canberra a government sponsored launch of an exhibition to honour 75 years of women in the federal parliament. In 1943 Enid Lyons, Liberal, was elected to the House of Representatives and Dorothy Tangney, Labor, from Western Australia became the first woman senator. Despite Lyons’ earlier history as a Labor party member, and her marriage to Joseph Lyons who entered federal parliament for Labor but ratted and became a liberal prime minister, modern liberals have taken great pride in owning the first woman in the House. Last week they could have provided themselves with further cause for self-congratulation. They could have elected Julie Bishop as the first female liberal prime minister. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. The Irish teaching orders in Australia.
For over a century many children, particularly from poorer families, in cities and country areas, and indeed a good number of indigenous children, got a sound basic education in schools established throughout Australia by the Irish orders. As well, students in these schools were exposed to the principles and practice of social justice, typically through an Irish lens. I believe this inculcation of social justice values may not otherwise have happened for those students. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. Class warfare or fighting for fairness
Every time Labor in Opposition proposes to remove or reduce a publicly funded benefit from a high earning individual, or a medium to large company, anguished cries of “class war” ring out
Is it class warfare to reduce investor tax concessions at a time when in NSW alone over five years homelessness has increased by 48%? (more…)
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Update to May 2017 ‘Making Housing Affordable’ series
Pearls and Irritations continues to publish various blogs on housing affordability, recognising that the cost of and accessibility to appropriate housing remains out of reach for a significant part of the Australian population. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. The impact of the 2018 Budget on women. It is most notable for its omissions.
The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) each year prepares an analysis of the impacts of the federal budget on women. Since the Coalition government abandoned the practice of including a Women’s Budget Statement in the official Budget documents, a policy-oriented women’s NGO, the NFAW, has prepared this work. This extract gives an overview of the impacts of the budget on older women.
The clearest impact of this budget in relation to older women is this: for women home owners, there are potential benefits. For women who don’t own their home, there are few if any measures of potential assistance. (more…)
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SUSAN RYAN. Book launch. ‘Jesus the forgotten feminist’ by Chris Geraghty.
The Catholic Church here and globally faces a crisis of loss of support arising especially from its deeds and omissions in relation to appalling sexual abuse of children.
Our secular societies are experiencing a massive epidemic of allegations and charges of sexual harassment and violation of women in their workplaces, be they on film and television sets, in the training of medical specialists, on university campuses, in major corporations, within churches, just about anywhere where men dominate women’s employment prospects.
The Catholic Church’s failure to protect children, and our first world societies’ failure to protect women, are connected in ways that makes Geraghty’s book highly relevant. (more…)