The Poverty of Riches: An Ecological View

Introduction -

    I want to begin with three stories - one about some students, one about me and one about million of Australians.

   The students' stories

    Some years ago, I put a question to a class of final year undergraduate students.  I asked each of them to recall the most pleasurable experience of the past year. We....

    My story

     As I write, I'm sitting in a caravan in the middle of five acres of gently sloping land at Samsonvale.  My home.  I have no running water, so carrying water from a tank to my van in a container.  My....

    A story of millions of Australians

    Over twenty years ago, there was a massive campaign titled 'Do the right Thing'.  Australians were encouraged to stop littering the landscape, and instead to use bins. I....

Whatever Happened to Equality?

Introduction -

    Two vignettes:

    1.  In the lead-up to the 1996 election, the Liberal candidate for Oxley sends a letter to the editor headed 'Equal Justice for All', decrying special 'money, facilities and opportunities' for Aborigines and demanding 'equality'.  Therefore, she, the political she forms after her disendorsement, ...

    2.  In 2000, I move to New Zealand.  My new head of school invites me to a meeting.  I find a complex of offices, research and reception area.  The Head of School's office had one entire wall of plate-glass, dividing it from - but, even more, bringing it into - the rest of the complex.  By her door, just inside the plate-glass, ....

Poverty-Free Futures

Introduction -

    Approximately 10 years ago, I was standing with my mother at a food store in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia.  We needed to buy yoghurt required by a recipe to finish a dish.  It didn't cross our minds that between a her, who worked as a senior manager, and myself, employed as an associate lecturer at the university, we wouldn't have enough money to make such a purchase.  At that time it was only the cash economy that worked, as personal cheques and credit card were no longer accepted.  The price of all goods regularly skyrocketed over night as inflation reached the highest ever recorded in history.  People ....

Should 21st Century Techno-kids Care About Inequality?

Introduction -

   In the bright new century bent on releasing markets from the shackles that have hitherto prevented them from delivering bright new centuries, school are set to become traders in Information Communications Technology (ICT) skills, dealers in multiple intelligences, retailers of social mobility, vendors of social and economic advantage and, at no extra cost, designers of personal marketability.  Schools are set to be banded and branded as good or bad producers of techno-wise citizens.

'Some Call It Culture': Aboriginal Identity And The Imaginary Moral Centre

Introduction -

    When evaluated as an argument from an imaginary moral centre, racism ceases to be only about the marginalisation of some 'other', based on pseudo-scientific grounds or quasi-academic notions of the incompatibility of groups because of difference.  Racism in this context is about concealing the past and its consequences in the present to preserve the imagined morality of the dominant group.  As such, the racism by proxy is founded on a denial of history.  This purgatorial self-absolution is a neo-colonialist act because it relegates Indigenous others to mere tokens of an imagined moral origin.  This racism belongs to a community that is so intent on maintaining its imagined morality that it ignores the fate of its own people.

Globalisation As Mystique: Inequality And Poverty In The 'One World Order'

Introduction -

    The word 'globalisation' was virtually non-existent in public until the mid-1980s.  During the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist and other scholars prefered to talk about existence of 'monopoly capital' (Baran and Sweezy 1968), 'world capitalism' (Wallerstein 1979), and/or an actual or impending 'crisis' of capitalism that was about to engulf the entire western world.  with the emergence of economic liberalism in Britain and the United States during the early 1980s, and the rise of capitalist formations based on new cyber technologies, rationalised forms production and capital investment, the world appeared to take on a new configuration.

What About The Global Poor?  Globalisation From Above And Below

Introduction -

    The process of globalisation is complex.  It involves trade, the media, the state, technology, finances ideas and it significantly impacts on the community and the individual.  A number of authors have explored how globalisation operates to bring some understanding of its processes.  For example, Wallerstein discusses the notion of a 'World System' in which everything must insert and assert itself within a single division of labour.  Wallerstein maintains that there is a centre and a perophery where those at the centre hold a relationship of exploitation to those in the periphery (Wallerstein 1990).  'Glocalisation' refers to the coming together of local cultures whose content has to be redefined when local cultures encounter the forces of globalisation.  It is the process of a world-wide restratification, in the course of which a new socio-cultural hierarchy, on a world-wide scale is put together (Beck 2000, Bauman 1998a).  Finally, Appadurai's theorization of different 'scapes', sheds much light on the way we can reconceptualize globalisation as operating through landscape of people, ideas, finance, technology and the media (Appadurai 1990).

Genocide With Good Intentions, The Stolen Generation And My Place

Introduction -

    Over the last decade Aboriginal issues have been highlighted by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC, 1991), the Bringing Them Home Report (1997), the rise of One Nation in the second half of the nineties, and the obduracy of the present PM John Howard's refusal to apologise for the nation to the stolen generations.  In particular for the RCIADIC pointed to the effects of Aboriginal dispossession from county and kin, while the Binging Them Home Report has recounted the dire effects of removing Aboriginal children from their families.  At the same time Aborigines have spearheaded their own cultural renaissance.  In the light of these developments the critical appraisal of My Place has undergone new and deeper analysis.  This analysis has focused on the effects of separating children from their families intimating a policy of genocide.  This is a contribution to that re-evaluation.

Public Choice Theory And The De-funding Of Community Welfare Groups

Introduction -

   Abstract - This paper contains the impact of public choice theory on government funding of peak welfare bodies and community advocacy groups, using the Australian Council of Social Services as a case example.

    The de-funding of community groups and the associated marketisation of human service provision is identified as a means of marginalizing disadvantaged groups, and is contrasted with the increasingly privileged access of corporate lobby groups.  The conclusion drawn is that community groups will have to turn more and more to independent sources of funding in order to retain their public voice and influence.