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Jia Tolentino on the steps needed to bring about more equality and justice: “[A]t a policy level: slashing the military budget and police budgets; really taxing inheritances; really taxing corporations; instituting a massive wealth tax — and then using that money to fund public schools, public colleges, public transit, universal health care, affordable housing, subsidized parental leave and care for children and the elderly; a higher minimum wage. In order to get there we need to restore voting rights — reverse court decisions on voter suppression, enfranchise incarcerated people, including felons. But on an individual level, I’ve been thinking about what it means to normalize the everyday surrendering of advantage — to put an ideology of equality in practice at a time when it’s obvious that voting once a year or whatever is not going to be enough. I think the American obsession with symbolic freedom has to be traded for a desire for actual freedom: the freedom to get sick without knowing it could bankrupt you, the freedom for your peers to live life without fearing they’ll be killed by police. The dream of collective well-being has to outweigh, day-to-day, the dream of individual success.”

Boe Spearim on his new history podcast: “Frontier War Stories is a podcast dedicated to truth telling about a side of Australian history that has been left out of the history books. In each episode I speak to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people about research, books and oral histories which document the first 140 years of conflict and resistance. These times are the frontier wars, and these are our war stories. I’ve always been interested in history, not just here in Australia but worldwide. The transmission of history is something Aboriginal people on this continent have always done through culture and storytelling. History connects us to who we are. It gives us a way to connect to the past and gives context for us to understand the world today. … Aboriginal people are murdered today, and there is no justice because our humanity was — and still is — stripped from us. If you look through history you can clearly see when we as a people didn’t matter to anyone else on this continent. Not long after the invasion commenced in 1788, our people began a war of resistance and we fought fiercely for 140 years. This history gives context to the relationship between Aboriginal people and settlers today.“ Listen to Frontier War Stories.

Last week, the government’s new Closing the Gap targets were leaked, including parity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous incarceration rates by 2093 — not so much a target as a threat. It was dropped after an outcry. Megan Davis points out that the new goals reflect a bureaucratic status quo: “A feature the government was happier claiming was that the new National Agreement on Closing the Gap was a deal between it and the Coalition of Peaks, the many organisations that make up our Aboriginal service delivery sector, who would deliver on its aims. This innovation is ostensibly ‘self-determination’. It is anything but. The peaks are a triumph and a testament to the peerless activism of pioneers in the health and services sector … [b]ut the peaks are contracted service providers. The peaks rely on government funds to run their organisations and these monies are pegged to the governments’ outcomes, not ours. Government can defund service deliverers and dismiss them with a wave of a pen or defund them when it so chooses. … True self-determination is beyond the scope and function of providers of essential services. We need structural reform that will give Indigenous Australians some power over all decisions that are made about us. The peaks treat the symptoms, but a protected Voice in the constitution is about treating the causes of illness, of incarceration, of early death, unemployment and poor education outcomes.”

Christopher Ryan asks Why Are Rich People So Mean? “When the researchers posed as pedestrians waiting to cross a street, all the drivers in cheap cars respected their right of way, while those in expensive cars drove right on by 46.2 percent of the time, even when they’d made eye contact with the pedestrians waiting to cross. [W]ealthier subjects were far more likely to claim they’d won a computer game — even though the game was rigged so that winning was impossible. Wealthy subjects were more likely to lie in negotiations and excuse unethical behavior at work, like lying to clients in order to make more money. When [researchers] left a jar of candy in the entrance to their lab with a sign saying whatever was left over would be given to kids at a nearby school, they found that wealthier people stole more candy from the babies.” But it seems that it is inequality, rather than wealth per se, that makes people mean: “Research conducted at the University of Toronto … suggest[s] … it’s the distance created by wealth differentials that seems to break the natural flow of human kindness. … Rich people were as generous as anyone else when inequality was low. The rich are less generous when inequality is extreme, a finding that challenges the idea that higher-income individuals are just more selfish. If the person who needs help doesn’t seem that different from us, we’ll probably help them out. But if they seem too far away (culturally, economically) we’re less likely to lend a hand.”

The Flemington-Kensington CLC’s Police Accountability Project: “Interventions into this pandemic, however necessary the rationale, are not neutral.  Government and public health interventions can either strengthen the health and capacities of affected communities or they can cause harm. The policing we have seen in Victoria to date and scale of the policing we have seen last night and today in Flemington & North Melbourne, has caused and continues to cause harm. … The policing of the emergency lock-down takes place in the context of long-running and well documented community concerns and extensive legal action to regard to discriminatory policing, documented racial profiling, policing operations targeting particular ethnicities and multiple incidents of severe human rights abuses over many years. … It is paternalistic that people living in these towers were not considered active partners in the need to prevent COVID transmission and instead have been made to feel like criminals in an urban detention centre. … The need for rapid and urgent measures to control the spread of coronavirus is undisputed.   But health and social workers, housing workers and community leaders need to be resourced and empowered to communicate the Chief Health Officer’s directions in partnership with residents and their associations, instead of public order police.”

Bassina Farbenblum (UNSW) and Laurie Berg (UTS) have produced a significant report for the Migrant Worker Justice Initiative, outlining the serious and ongoing exploitation of visa workers in Australia: “A half (49%) were paid below the basic statutory minimum wage. Over three quarters (77%) were paid below the minimum casual hourly wage. … Over a quarter (26%) of all respondents earned $12 or less per hour in their lowest paid job (approximately half of the minimum wage for a casual employee). … This figure has remained static despite increases in the statutory minimum wages since 2016, the introduction of legislative protections for vulnerable workers, and an increased focus on international students by the Fair Work Ombudsman.” Berg emphasised the additional vulnerability caused by their immigration status: “They suffered in silence, often because of visa concerns or fear of job loss. Our findings confirm many who complained were in fact sacked. Their visa concerns are also valid — there’s nothing to stop the labour regulator sharing information with immigration authorities if a student has worked more hours than her visa allows.” The pandemic has made visa workers even more precarious and vulnerable to exploitation — but the already useless FWO has used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to stop conducting investigations, rejecting a call for help with this justification: “In this current COVID climate, I cannot conduct site visits or interviews.”