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The debate over population has reared its head again in Australia.  New Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has put it into the headlines again.  Sustainable population is how it is being spun now but what is the right population number?  Is it more about the age of the population rather than the number of them?

 I was listening to a really interesting thing about this on the radio today.  It was on News Radio and it had to do with populations in China and India.  In fact, the whole gist of the news story was that China was in a bit of a dilemma because the government’s “one child policy” is actually starting to expose some real flaws in their system.  They don’t have enough young people anymore.

 What that really means is that they don’t have enough young people in the work force or about to join it that can cope with paying the way for the older people they have to support.

 While China is a very different country to Australia, the population debate is very much the same.  Generally, people have less children than they did in previous generations.  That is why our governments rely on immigration because they are generally younger.

 According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as of today Australia has a population of 22,366,272.  That might seem pretty small if we compare it to many other nations but don’t forget that most people in Australia live in either the cities, the coast and rural and regional towns. 

 A lot of Australia, even though it has the same land as the USA without the islands, is inhibited.   That means that the population is focused entirely on centres.

Don’t forget that it was only about six years ago that our former Treasurer, Peter Costello, was begging everyone to have a third child for the nation.

 From an environmental perspective, many would really focus on the shortage of water and other resources that may sustain a population.

 From a business perspective, most people would want a lot of people around who can buy their products.  This is significant for small business, more than any other enterprise.

 From a social standpoint though, we see a different perspective.  We continually hear about just how much of our workforce will be retiring in the coming years and therefore not paying tax. 

 This last point is the scariest one because as people live longer, more health services are need, more services for people ageing are needed and governments are worried.

 There was a really good movie in the 70s called “Logan’s Run”.  It was a fanciful and futuristic movie about the future.  Everyone lived in this idealist world until they were 30.  Then they were sent to wherever it was.  Everyone in this world went to the huge stadium to watch them being sent to their master.

 Perhaps it is all not about sustainability.  Maybe they just want everyone who is past their used by date and a burden on the government to meet their master earlier. At the very least, the ones who don’t have enough money to look after themselves are the least wanted.

 Is the population debate really about sustainability and environment or is it more about the ability for people to pay tax?  Think about it more clearly when you contemplate future population forecasts.  Is it really about the environment or is it has it got more to do with a government turning its back on the older population?

 You be the judge.

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Culture evolves and transforms all the time. One day something is taboo. The next it has become an icon.

One of the cultural phases that Australia has gone through has been this one. Whether you want to believe it or not, many Australians once shunned the idea that they were from convict stock. Yes, shocking as it may sound, most Australians, only decades ago would not buy into the idea that they may have had ancestors who were on the First Fleet.

A criminal ancestry no-one wanted to have. That changed of course when it all of a sudden became quite prestigious to be able to say one of your ancestors were on the “First Fleet”.

This turnabout in culture says something about how the changes in culture occur and develop. Why did we despise the idea only decades ago, only now to view it all as some sort of status symbol?

Australia is a really interesting country. We all know our roots. The country has prided itself on immigration and there are so many who have immigrated here and have a story to tell about it.

We are a new country. That is what sets us apart from so many others. There are immigrant stories, stories of people being shipped out from the UK and Ireland and stories of European successes.

I was talking the other day to a German backpacker who told me that everyone in Australia seems to know their history, whether it was Irish, English, European or even South American. For him, his heritage was kind of unknown. All he knew that it was German a long way back.

This statement alone gave me a lot to think about. Yes, we in Australia are young particularly compared to many European countries. We take for granted what all the immigration and the culture that has brought to us really mean.

Many people try to put the argument about the different cuisines that have been introduced into our culture. They are a welcome contribution to Australian society but I think our immigrant population has invested a lot more than good meals. They have made our country colourful, diverse and even eccentric. No country should shun that.

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Outsourcing is one of those issues that gets a lot of media coverage and it’s been particularly rampant of late. The problem is that it has a lot of repercussions for the Australian worker and the government.

The practice of contracting services out to other companies is really a feature of the free market and the idea that services could be delivered cheaper this way. Not that contracting out in some services didn’t happen way before our government embarked on free-trade as an economic model.

It is just that when they decided to do this, there was no way of knowing that technology would update to the extent that the jobs would be contracted overseas. This poses a lot of problems for government and it is not just in call-centre jobs. It has now reached into the white-collar workforce with a vengeance.

On the ABC’s 7:30 Report last night, a whole section was dedicated to the practice of small and medium sized businesses seeking workers off-shore because they cost a lot less. In fact, if just about anything can be done on the internet, an employee is available overseas at a much reduced rate than anyone would or could work for in Australia.

It has been going on for a lot longer than most people realise but the practice poses a really big problem for the workforce and the government in Australia which is really very much hidden. 

For decades now, we have encouraged people to educate themselves, go to university and skill themselves.  They have done this at enormous cost only for a lot of them to find out the jobs are not here. They are elsewhere and a lot cheaper.  How do they pay off their university fees?

If anyone keeps up with media, they would surely realise that many of the articles that fill the media pages are always talking about keeping labour costs down and it is a basic theory of business to pay as less as you can for anything.

The trouble with this is that people are having to compete with pitiful charges for services from overseas. How can anyone compete?

When the Labor Party first came into being, they were not a political party but a workers movement. That was in the late nineteenth century and they soon became a force to be reckoned with and became a political party.

Long gone though is the commitment to the Australian worker. Governments encourage them all to pay for their education with some sort of delusion that this investment will reap great rewards.

Some graduates are kindly rewarded but for many they are now competing against people overseas with skills and ability that many of our own small and middle-sized businesses find really attractive.

It also says something about Australian attitudes in general. Once we were quite happy to look after our own but now it doesn’t seem to matter. Cost is the be-all and end-all.

No longer can people rely on their hard earned degrees or their efforts in gaining skills through TAFE. We are in an internationally competitive market that takes none of this into consideration.

No-one in this whole debate seems to think that cheaper “directors” or senior personnel can be sought by the same means. In fact, the upper echelon of our corporations seem to be quarantined from the whole situation. If internet can replace local workers than how is it that it can’t replace those at the top of industry?

If anyone regularly keeps in touch with what is being said in the media, governments of all persuasions view the idea of “protectionism” as some kind of dirty word. That is really interesting, because governments are elected by the community they govern, not by those from overseas. Isn’t it about time that the government (the present one or any future one) focuses on its own population.

It is elementary that a society needs a government to watch over them.  It is also important that the basic needs of any one of their constituents should be at the top of any polititicans list. 

One of the most important things is employment – to see that people within their constituency have a job.  Everyone needs a job and a job that pays them at least enough to survive. Businesses going overseas for cheaper “labour” are a thorn in the side of the Australian community.

The reality is that in this international community of “competition policy” that most Australians will never recover, that is if they have managed to get anywhere in the first place.

So what is our government doing about this?  Possibly nothing.  It is just all too hard.

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 The current corporate crime case that has been going through the courts in Western Australia since last year and resumed last week, is the ultimate example of corporate fraud.

The case against Firepower directors is the stuff of Hollywood – investors from the big end of towns all over the world and celebrities fell for the great corporate swindle.  Even our own government kicked in quite a bit.

The problem is that there was no product. They were all investing in nothing.

This is a story about how one person can fool so many people into believing he has a product that he doesn’t actually have.  In the case of Firepower, it was a pill that would reduce the emissions of petrol.  And how so many people believed him.

The Firepower story goes to the heart of what anyone can get away with in corporate Australia, if they are bold enough. The story of the rise and fall of the company about nothing was featured in The Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend.

The case against them started last year in the courts and resumed last week with chief swindler, Tim Johnston, now claiming victim status with stories of intimidation and threats.

Last week, Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law, Chris Bowen, announced tough changes to corporate laws that give ASIC, the corporate watchdog significantly increased powers to tap phones and much harsher penalties for insider trading.

While this may be a step in the right direction in controlling corporate fraud, would any of these harsh new laws prevented the whole scenario of Firepower?

Con artists exist at every level. The bolder they are, the more people believe them.

Here was a guy who told people he had a product that he didn’t have, conned some really top people into investing large amounts of money in his company.  Then he started shelling out sponsorships so the name “Firepower” was everywhere (with everyone else’s money I might add) and even conned the government, not only into giving the company grants but also giving leads overseas.

What was really a stroke of genius was the idea that this “product” was going to eliminate deadly emissions from the air completely. Something that could click onto a world trend didn’t seem to need any clarification.

Just about everyone has been tricked into buying shares these days,  The media can be quite patronising sometimes when some of these go belly up.  They often refer to investors as “mum and dad investors”.   

Firepower shows how big time investors can get conned too. They just don’t ask questions.

The new laws may sound really good and are a step in the right direction. The trouble is that usually a whole lot of people have lost a whole lot of money before anything can really be done. The jail terms don’t bring back the money to those who have lost it.

Maybe there should be some more investigation or research before people, including governments shell out the money.

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Social isolation, particularly among the elderly, is fast becoming a serious problem in many western societies and the problem isn’t necessarily related to geographic distance. In fact, some of the saddest examples of lonely lives and deaths have been found in some of our most built-up locations.

One of the leading stories on the ABC just the other day was one about Japan’s growing numbers of older and often poor or penniless people who are dying alone. So isolated have some of them become, that often a death can take a while to be discovered and, in many cases, workers at some of the funeral homes are often the only ones there to mourn at the funerals.

More and more often, the government has been forced to step in and pay for funerals for those without family or relatives and this is not necessarily in isolated areas either. It is happening in the major cities as well.

The story is a sad one but Japan is not alone. Similar stories have regularly emerged from other western countries in recent years including the UK and Australia.

In July last year, the BBC ran a story very similar to this one that told of the growing numbers of people dying alone and penniless in the UK where councils were often jumping in to pick up the tab.

The BBC article Funerals without any Mourners tracked an alarming trend in the UK for many people to live in complete isolation, even in some rather built up areas with some people not even being discovered for weeks, even months after they have passed away.

One man had not been discovered for fourteen months and then the discovery was only made by the landlords after they had initiated eviction procedures because his rent hadn’t been paid for more than a year.

Similar cases in Australia prompted the Australian government into action a while back. In June 2008, Australia’s Minister for Ageing announced protocols that were being proposed for several projects in community aged care and significant funding for them after several cases of undiscovered deaths had made headline news.

These included the case of a 64-year-old Sydney man being discovered a year after his death in his flat and three elderly people being dead in their homes for more than six months before they were found.

In response, $4.2 million was injected into programs to reduce isolation of older Australians and provide emergency meals and accommodation for those in need of it. Programs may be of assistance but perhaps the problems go more to the heart of modern day culture. Fast and busy lives have excused us from social responsibility.

Any social scientist will give us multiple reasons for this social isolation. An ageing population with smaller families than in previous generations is one suggested cause. Researchers in the UK recently suggested that the divorce trend over the past few decades had left a lot of men in particular isolated from their children and families.

Money, or rather, having very little of it adds a lot of salt to the wound too but there are all types of social problems that can lead someone to isolation including mental health issues, an emotional event in one’s life such as the death of a loved one or even losing a job, or it could be rejection by family or friends.

Of course some people just prefer to be disconnected. In fact, most of us at one time or other through the course of our lives has probably felt this way. Some of us have acted on it. Others have just let the urge pass.

There are others who have probably hit bad times and never recovered from them. According to the ABC article on Japan’s empty funerals, 57-year-old Hioshi Yamanochi was one of them. His body was undiscovered for weeks and his cousin Kiataka Sato could not find any numbers at all in his mobile phone.

The recession 20 years ago finished off Yamanochi’s once successful building business leaving him broke and broken. He had a total of 596 yen ($A7.00) when he died and aside from Sato there were only two other people to mourn for him at the funeral.

Urban isolation was examined back in July in 2007 when a survey was conducted by the Tokyo Min-Iren Association. It concluded that the growing isolation of the elderly was particularly rife among those of low financial status. Urban dwellers, the survey found, were far more vulnerable to social isolation than their rural counterparts who have far more social ties and community links.

Not all those suffering isolation are necessary old or elderly either. Hioshi Yamanochi was 57, hardly old by today’s standards. His case illustrates just how easily events can take away more than a livelihood. They can actually take away a life.

It is a sad indictment on societies that pride themselves on being sophisticated. We now have all the technology that can keep us connected if we choose to be. The trouble is, we need to know that people actually want us to connect to them. Yamanochi had a mobile phone. The sad thing is, he had no-one to call on it.

Sourced:
www.abc.net.au; www.reuters.com; www.guardian.co.uk; www.bbc.co.uk.

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The two news headlines that most governments fear most are a rise in the unemployment figures and a rise in interest rates. Both reflect a government’s economic management capability and no matter what the story is out in the real world, it is the story that is on the front page of the daily newspapers that really counts.

While the government this week can congratulate itself on the reported improvement in unemployment figures, it now has to brace itself for a probable interest rate rise by the Reserve Bank.

It is certainly ideal to have low unemployment figures and low interest rates. The real question is: Can we have both?

From what most finance journalists and economists are saying this week, you would have to conclude that having both low unemployment and low interest rates is just about impossible. I have never really understood this, particularly as no-one is really sure if the worst is behind us yet, so people do really need to keep spending.

From what most finance journalists and economists are saying this week though, one seems to have to balance the other. The improved jobless figures they predict will ensure an automatic rise in interest rates. What a dampener that must be for our government, particularly if their predictions become a reality.

Aside from the fact that jobless figures, just like any statistics, can be very flawed, it doesn’t take into account that many jobs that may have been created are very lowly paid.

What confuses me even more is that we have had times when unemployment has been much higher according to figures but at the same time top executives were taking home pay and bonuses that would make  Maria Sharapova’s recently announced $75 million sponsorship deal with Nike look almost ordinary.

So why don’t interest rates go up when the top end of the corporate hierarchy are doing so well, even if the bottom layer are doing it tough? 

If we’ve listened to what the economists have all been saying this week, it is hard not to conclude that most of them are not so happy about the improvement in unemployment.   In fact, the ones who are seemingly being held responsible for the predictable rise in interest rates are the people who have managed to find some work.   Shame on them.

I had very similar thoughts last year when the government was coming under a lot of criticism for generously giving out the first home loan grants. These first home buyers were squarely being blamed for the rise in property prices. 

Further up the scale, investment properties were being vastly accumulated by those who did not need a grant to purchase a property.  These purchases didn’t seem to be even partly to blame for the escalation in property prices.

Where am I going with this you might ask?  Well, it seems to me - and I will admit I am completely uneducated in the area of economics - that in a market-driven economy, a good economy depends on having a poor or at least a fair amount of people who are either below the poverty line or not too much above it.

That way we can keep housing prices low, interest rates down and, thanks to our previous government’s tweaking of the definition of an “unemployed person”, we can keep many off the official unemployment figures when they really should be included on them.

Economics – it never makes any real sense to me.

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Wasting food may not be good for the environment and throwing away perfectly good food can raise a lot of concern among those who really care about the millions of people starving all across the world, but our economies have really become dependent on over-consumption and that is where much of the problem lies.

Food waste is a topic that generates a lot of discussion. Reports are published in newspapers all over the globe from universities, think-tanks and environmental researchers who regularly give us pretty damning statistics on what we throw away at all levels of the food chain including what goes into our very own garbage bins. They may spark a lot of heated discussion but do these reports actually change anything?

Only yesterday, Melbourne’s The Age newspaper plucked figures from the Australia Institute’s What a Waste research report from late last year that estimated food waste in Australia to be 3 million tonnes and worth $5.2 billion a year. The article also quoted recent estimates by IBIS World that of the $7.6 billion spent on food in Australia in December alone, 20 per cent of it – or roughly $1.52 billion worth – was wasted.

The What a Waste report went a lot further than assessing only food waste. It weighed the environmental and moral attitudes of those surveyed against the amount of food they actually trashed and found that those who had serious convictions about environment preservation and worldwide starvation were generally the ones who threw out most of it. The least waste, the report concluded, came from those who did not have enough money to over-spend. So it is actually the ones who can’t afford a lot who are living more environmentally sustainable lives rather than the more affluent, environmentally conscious ones.

This “conflict of interests” could possibly be excused because most of these modern day environmentalists are actually unaware of the hidden impacts of wasted food on the environment, but our whole new world seems to be a continual collision of interests. Our over-indulgent lifestyles may be keeping our own economy buoyant but they are hardly going to help address the global environmental crisis, but that is exactly the problem.

Economists regard retail spending as the best economic indicator and food accounts for the largest share of retail spending. That means that buying more than we need has become crucial for a good economy, despite the long term environmental challenges this culture is generating. As far as economic management is concerned, this surplus buying is good for governments too.

This report suggests, as many others have before it, reducing this waste to curb the climate crisis. Concluding that this would be a more cost effective solution for reducing our carbon footprint than the current proposed emissions trading scheme, the report omits a very important factor in the whole thing: less spending means less profits and can only slow down the economy rather than maintain or boost it.

We aren’t the only country that wastes enormous amounts of food either. Regularly reports are published from all around the globe with similar statistics. Only days ago Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper reported that one billion euros worth of food was wasted there annually and this report only took into account the waste at large supermarket outlets.

Our wasteful culture isn’t restricted to food either. Our whole lifestyles in this modern day are in deep conflict with popular attitudes, particularly when it comes to the environment. We buy petrol guzzling cars and drive them everywhere; we drink water out of plastic bottles and discard them; we buy products that have been shipped all around the globe to get here; we update our mobile phones and our television screens before our last ones have even been broken in properly and cheap imported clothes some of which we will never get around to wearing fill up and even flow out of our wardrobes.

For many, this limitless indulgent lifestyle should be a major concern – that is, if current reported attitudes to the environment are real – but indications of any changes in our lifestyle choices have been minimal while concerns for the environment are deepening.

Of all the waste, it is food that generally seems to get the most attention. It can often trigger feelings of guilt or shame but not really enough to force us to kick our wasteful habits it seems. There is one thing we can however congratulate ourselves for. This surplus buying has probably saved a lot of jobs, for now anyway, and we can hardly argue that our economy isn’t any better for it. In the end, the demand whether real or over-indulged is what keeps the entire supply chain going.

Just look at what is happening to our local wine industry at the moment. Through many years of high international demand and exports of wine seemed were almost like a bottomless pit, sales have really hit a slump over the last year or two. Today’s Sydney Morning Herald quoted a recent industry report that estimated production of Australian wine to be 20 million to 40 million cases more than it was selling and a recent report revealed that the current crisis in the wine industry had forced retail prices of some wines to well below cost.

While industry spokespeople suggest that there should be far fewer players and a lot less vineyards in the overall market largely because the industry expanded so much during the really good years, there doesn’t appear to be anyone too keen to back out.

This too could happen to the food industry if demand started to slow down. It is all very well to tell us all to “only buy what you really need” but that culture would certainly have some detrimental effects on the whole food chain that has long been accustomed to an over-spending culture. These merchants just want us all to buy. Is waste really a concern for them? Well, I cannot really imagine any of them being all that interested in what we do with their products after we have actually bought them.

Sourced: www.smh.com.au; www.theage.com.au; www.corriere.it;

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 When 26 year old Katherine Hibbert from the UK, a journalist, lost a job and found her rent was going up she headed for a life on the streets.  It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, particularly in the beginning but after she learned the ropes, her life free (or just about) of cash has really turned out pretty well.

Hibbert found that networks were just as important in a nomad city life as they were in a corporate job and gradually she learned all about squatting, abandoned buildings and where to find the best disgards. In fact, Hibbert eventually found the lifestyle quite an attractive one.

Hibbert has penned her experience in Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society that is due for release on 14 January and her story has had a lot of media attention internationally recently.

It sounds like an interesting read.  Most of the people I have usually read about that live like this, by choice anyway, are doing it for ecological or environmental reasons and actively protesting the ways of modern society.

In July, I wrote a post on the wasting of food and discussed another Brit, Tristram Stuart, who lived the life of a freegan – subsisting on the disgarded food of others. 

Initially his life as a freegan began due to his poor uni student status but later evolved into one of ecological and environmental reasons.  His unusual life led to another book “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal”.

Stuart’s story is interesting too but his choice is one of ideology rather than lifestyle.  What makes Hibbert’s tale more intriguing is that she didn’t turn to this life because of any real passion to save the environment, even if the knowledge that modern day living was harmful may have niggled at the back of her mind.    

In fact, Hibbert was not really any more down and out than most of us have been at one time or another and from what I can gather, there were family around who could have well helped her through a tough situation.

In Australia, squatting is not legal everywhere.  In NSW, it became an offence to trespass back in the 70s so this would not be as easy to camp out in an abadoned building as it is in the UK.  People do get rid of a lot of stuff that is still quite useful here too though and, as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 

So aside from the squatting in abandoned building (although I really don’t know how much this is policed here in NSW), there is probably a lot of things people could accumulate to help them live comfortably.  That is, if they don’t have to cart it all around with them all day, every day.

I know I could live that way if I really had to but there is probably no way I would do it by choice.  I like the basic comforts and I like the security of a “home” rather than just a place to sleep.  That is probably why I find Hibbert’s story so interesting.  It is a choice she really didn’t have to make.

Although Hibbert would not be the only one who has turned to this life by choice, her story is an unusual one.  One of the things that I found really fascinating is one of the most attractive features of this lifestyle to Hibbert.  The commaraderie and friendship among everyone living in the same circumstances, she says, help her to feel protected and secure.

Sourced:   ; www.guardian.co.uk

Image credit:  www.guardian.co.uk

Hibbert with all her free stuff

Could you give away job, money and the creature comforts that come with living the normal life?  Believe it or not, there are many who have chosen a life away from the shackles of modern society and have found the shift in lifestyle a lot more attractive than they had expected.

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Fair pay should be something all Australians embrace. It is something that should be embedded in our culture. It was a thing that was embedded in a culture a century ago but over time and in the name of competition, it has all been forgotten.

Last year, the Rudd Government put the wheels in motion for a revamp of the national employment legislation.  Predominantly, this was all about ditching the former government’s individual contracts under its Work Choices legislation.

The recent legislation by our Federal Government does goes some way to righting the wrongs of past administrations and not all of past misdemeanours was due to Work Choices. Globalisation and Australia’s absolute embracement of it, shredded away what was really something that was held dear in Australia.

The previous government’s Work Choices just went one step too far and shredded completely workers’ rights and, eventually, tossed the Liberal Party out of government altogether.

There is something else about this that really should be looked at by employers and employees alike. The Fair Work Legislation will be a good thing for both employers and workers, even if employers can’t see it right now.

Since the announcement of the really big revamp to employment policy and legislation, there have been so many employer groups coming out to criticize the new legislation. What they don’t see are the positives – they are only viewing the legislation as doing them harm.

Think about this. While most employers may think that the new legislation is only going to suffer them yet another blow, they ignore the fact that over the last few decades they have been subjected to “competition policy” that basically has no bounds.

This policy forced even the most ethical of businesses to drop their standards to match those that had no ethics at all – including paying people whatever wages they could get away with.  Now these businesses will have to work within the law too.

To look on the bright side, many employers should now be thankful that their competitors will also now have to pay award wages and conditions. They will not be undercut by unscrupulous business people because “fair work” policy and legislation will take care of that.

“Fair Work” does not go as far as it should in looking after the worker and certainly doesn’t revert to standards of two decades ago. It does however address some of the pitiful arrangements the past administration cast on the Australian worker.

I have read with utter disgust some of the comments that have criticized the new policy for workers. Some of the comments included “it will cost people more to go out for dinner” or “it will put a big burden on the small businesses in the hospitality industry”.

This has been through the era where executives have been given lottery-type payouts – and to be sure they have been condemned. The criticism of these payouts really resulted in anything but hot air. So why the criticism of lower paid workers and new rights?

Whatever happened to a “decent day’s wage”? Get real, Australia. Everyone should be able to earn a wage that they can live on. We have really forgotten all that our forefathers fought for.

Think about that.

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Does religion play a part in current world politics?  Whether or not we are particularly religious at all, we would have to concede that it does.  I was certainly convinced after watching Compass on the ABC last night.

Compass often covers some fascinating topics and last night’s episode didn’t disappoint.  There was a forum with some of the world’s religious leaders forming a panel discussion and hosted and facilitated by veteran Geraldine Doogue. The forum was filmed in front of a live audience at the conclusion of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions which was held in Melbourne earlier this month.

I am not a deeply religious person but I was really impressed with all those who spoke on the panel and would have to agree with a comment made by our own Tim Costello.  Australia may be a secular nation, he said, but most of the rest of the world are very religious and that makes religion very important in international affairs. Costello is currently CEO of World Vision Australia and has worked tirelessly on programs addressing homelessless, poverty, reconciliation and other social justice issues throughout his life.

The first Parliament of the World’s Religions was in 1893 but it was not until 1993 that this became a five-yearly event, being hosted in Chicago, Cape Town, Barcelona and this year in Melbourne.  The Parliament brings together the world’s diverse religions, leaders and delegates from major world religions such as Baha’I, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism and many others and focusses on building harmony.

The forum was a very interesting one where leaders from these diverse religions talked about their views of the world and what the world’s leaders should be doing in areas of social justice, most of all poverty.  All had very similar views and concerns about the social inequities of the world, addressing climate change, education and addressing world poverty even though some of them were bolder than others.

Another interesting statement was made by Tim Costello, a social justice advocate, who thought the governments of the world should be as generous about addressing the climate change issue as they had been with worldwide financial organisations.  Of course, this comment received a lot of applause.

While all the participants were quite articulate in what the world should be – and I was pretty impressed with their unanimous views about poverty, I sometimes wonder why the world still has these problems after decades of so-called “prosperity”.

These are not problems totally attributable to the current global economic crisis.  For decades now we have seen poverty increase around the world, except in some pockets and there seems no real reason for it.  There have been some pretty major natural disasters, of course, but even in the good times, the wealth never seems to spread to some of the world’s poorest areas.  Even in Australia, a really prosperous nation compared to a lot of others, we have seen a real rise in the amount of people who call the streets home.

Of course it has been escalated by the global financial crisis but we only have to look back a bit to see just how much history repeats itself.

In the early 80s, Bob Geldof brought to us “Live Aid” a rock concert to bring in relief to the starving in Ethiopia.  Can any of us who were around at the time forget the theme song “Do they know it’s Christmas?”   Of course, the whole extravaganza was fraught with egos and no-shows but raised quite a bit regardless.  It may also have raised a lot of money to throw at the poor of the world but has anything really changed?

Since then we have had the big recession that began in the US in 1987 after all the excess of the 80s, hit Australia a while later and ran into the early 90s. Then we had a decade and a half when everyone who could went mad buying shares and using up any credit that anyone would give them (excess again) and then another recession/depression which we have had or are having – no-one seems to be quite sure whether it’s past or present.

Do a lot of the people in the world really know it is Christmas now?  Probably not.  Day to day survival is all many can know and think about.  If you really stop and think about it, that is if you have time, world poverty has increased rather than decreased.  

It is really good that religious leaders and political leaders voice their concerns about the real inequities in the world but I would have to add that the problem needs a little more than concerned thoughts.   

Nor should the world’s leaders be turning a blind eye to the problem.  Only last year, Slumdog Millionaire, a movie about a couple from the slums of India, made it to the Academy Awards.  We could dismiss this as “just a movie” but the images of real slums highlighted the plight of those who live in poverty among an otherwise rich universe.  The ending may have been too good to be true but the gulf between rich and poor was never more apparent than in this.

In Australia most of us are quite happy to keep Church and State quite separate but we now live in an international society where religion plays a big part in the lives of millions around the globe.  This must give many of these religious leaders enormous influence in world affairs, something that can’t be too bad a thing provided the influence is used to better the lives of the most vulnerable among us. 

Our world leaders are currently in negotiations for action on climate change.  Regardless of all the skeptics who don’t believe that pollution is exacerbating the problem, inaction on this issue promises to hit the poorest of the world the hardest.   

Our international religious leaders should muster all their influence to pressure our world leaders to make the right decisions.  If governments cannot look after the ones who need them the most, then there doesn’t seem to be any point in having governments at all.

Image credit:  iskcon.com

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Can 192 countries come to any agreement on strategies to combat climate change? Even the countries involved in the Group of 20 are having a lot of difficulty coming to some sort of consensus.

Since December 7, Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, has been hosting the long-awaited UN conference on climate change and the city has probably never seen the activity that is abuzz in the streets right now.

It has been reported as the largest conference in UN history where politicians and officials from 192 nations have gathered to resolve the international pollution problem. Can they do it?

As expected, the city has drawn a real share of protestors, among them are environmentalists, human rights activists and representatives from smaller nations that are most likely to suffer if there is an international stalemate.  High profile personalities and celebrities have also been drawn to this usually quiet city.

Depending on which report we are inclined to believe, the numbers marching in protest are either 30,000 as reported by the local police or 100,000 reported by the organisers. It is probably some number in between but the international meeting has certainly attracted a large crowd and the conference has sparked a lot of emotion all round.

I find it very hard to believe that our world leaders have not already put on the table what their governments intend to do, if anything.

Some including Australia and Europe are pushing for a stronger international commitment than what has been produced so far, although green groups are far from happy with the stronger strategies to address the crisis.

On the other side of the coin, China, is pushing to continue with the Kyoto Protocol that forces the richer nations to have a much earlier start to controlling emissions so as its own economy and other developing countries can at least catch up with many of those in the west.

Certainly some of the key governments have already expressed a strong reluctance to participate in an agreement that will have a lot of impact on the growth of their economies.

Australian Climage Change Minister, Penny Wong, European negotiators and international green groups have condemned the first official draft proposal released this week as being too weak and did not legally bind the big polluting nations including the U.S., China, India and Brazil to curb greenhouse emissions.

Our own Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is not due to arrive in Copenhagen until this week and US President, Barack Obama, Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will not be arriving in Copenhagen until the final day on Friday.

So far there hasn’t been too much enthusiasm over the draft agreement but the Copenhagen conference has certainly invited a lot of colour to the city. Eighteen giant ships ablaze with climate messages sailed into Copenhagen harbour starting the large protest march to the Conference being held at the Bella Centre.

Reports have also emerged that the local police have been over zealous on their watch.  According to the national director of Australia’s online political movement group Get Up, Simon Sheikh, police in full riot gear, moved in on the marchers pushing some into shopfronts and others on to the ground.

According to other reports up to 400 marchers were arrested as what can only be called pre-emptive strikes, having their hands bound and separating them from the march.

As the conference enters its second and final week, protests are bound to become even more colourful. According to recent research, domestically in Australia and in the US at least, the citizens have generally become a little fearful of aggressive action, fearing the costs of an aggressive scheme will be the loss of many jobs and much a higher cost of living.

Perhaps if China holds out and continues to hold firm on removing China and other developing nations from any international agreement, it may just let the US and Australia off the hook.
 

Sourced: www.smh.com.au; www.guardian.co.uk.  Image credit:  AP on www.smh.com.au

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Australia and many countries around the world have been moving in a more environmentally friendly direction for the past few decades.  The rise and rise of the Greens as a political party is testament to the growing public interest in protecting the environment. 

It could even be said that one of the policies that helped Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party win government back in 2007 was a commitment to environment protection and preservation. 

Now public opinion has started shifting as the costs of committing to an international Emissions Trading Scheme are starting to emerge and other more pressing problems such as employment and surviving the recession are now a much bigger priority.  

What makes it difficult to rationalize it all, for most of us anyway, is that the arguments surrounding the issue are scientific ones, and most of us aren’t scientists. 

As for the Emissions Trading Scheme do most of us actually even know what that means, except maybe that business will pay some type of fine or tax if they emit a lot of junk into the air?  The Scheme itself (now commonly referred to as the ETS) is vague enough for most of us but I will deal with that later.

This is how I see either side of the argument:

PRO – Emissions Trading Scheme

Advocates of the Emissions Trading Scheme would argue that man has been destroying the earth for centuries and industrialization has contributed directly and immensely to the evaporation of the ozone layer. 

Heavy polluters, they believe, should be forced in some way to clean up their act and imposing fines or taxes according to the pollution they are causing is a fair way to force them into other ways of producing their products. 

The belief of advocates is that both Climate Change and the erosion of the earth’s surface has been predominantly man driven rather than natural and so therefore it is up to man to recognize this, make amends and rectify the situation, no matter what the cost.

It is all about taxing industry on however much they are contributing to pollution. How this is calculated is beyond my area of knowledge but advocates believe that this pollution is not only the main cause of rising temperatures around the globe and extreme weather conditions, but directly contributing to erosion of the earth.

The belief of advocates is that both Climate Change and the erosion of the earth’s surface has been predominantly man driven rather than natural and so therefore it is up to man to recognize this, make amends and rectify the situation, no matter what the cost.  If we don’t they say, future generations will have to bear the cost with lost natural resources such as water and rising temperatures.

CONS – Emission Trading Scheme

Those who condemn the Emissions Trading Scheme believe advocates are sensationalizing the issue, that Australia is but a bit contributor to world wide pollution and that the costs to us would be far greater than any benefits to us in the short or long term.

First of all, detractors of the Scheme believe that the advocates of emissions trading are scaremongering about the pace of climate change.  Many in this category believe Australia’s commitment would make little change and would come at a huge cost to Australian industry, most of all to the mining sector which is Australia’s largest exporting industry. 

Most detractors also believe the much higher populated and developing countries such as China and even some of the bigger populated countries such as the United States should be the countries to take on most of the responsibility for rectifying the situation.

Challenging this is that China believes they should have much more of an extension because they have been polluting at this level for much shorter than most countries in the West.  China also believes they should be allowed to catch up to the rest of the world before being expected to participate in the Scheme.

Agriculture too will come under the category of “high polluters” but in revised legislation now going before The Senate in Australia, the agriculture sector has been excluded from the scheme after extensive negotiation between the parties.

Electricity is another contentious issue.  The Scheme will ultimately increase the price of electricity which will be a cost that all households as well as industry will have to bear. This will have a flow-on effect to products across the board and therefore all groceries and many necessary services are destined to become more expensive. 

Detractors will say that in the current economic climate we are racing in too fast and this will leave Australians with much higher living costs and no real short term benefits. These disbelievers are also skeptical of the predictions of future temperatures and believe there is no concrete proof that the weather is changing that much at all, let alone that it is pollution that is the cause of it.

Confusing Most of Us 

These two groups have polarized views on pollution and who should take responsibility for itand whether or not it is the cause of any global warming at all. 

Since the economic crisis, according to recent polling, there has been a considerable shift in the priority most Australians are giving environmental issues.  Generally the population still cares about the environment and believes industry should take some responsibility for it.

Where most of us start faltering on whether we really want to commit to an international scheme is the idea that many jobs will be lost in the process, costs of basic goods and services will escalate and generally Australians will be worse off.  To add insult to injury, many are starting to doubt the benefits of racing forward with the Scheme.

The current economic climate and confusion over the issue is turning the community away from the issue.  Coupled with that, the continuous battle in Parliament over whether or not Australia should sign up to an Emissions Trading Scheme in Copenhagen next month has made us all just a little bit tired of the issue, even if we were really interested in it in the first place.

It also leaves a lot of questions about who is in it for what because many of the arguments do tend to have a smell of self-interest about them.

Questions also arise about the pace of global warming. Are even the most cautious predictions of changes in the climate patterns to be believed or are they at their best mostly exaggerated?

If the media is to be our most influential source of information in this whole debate, then all those reporters and commentators should be investigating the interests behind the reports that are coming through.

They also need to talk to all of us as people rather than scientists and do away with all the scientific jargon and the presumption that all of us know what they are talking about.  Most people don’t understand what an Emissions Trading Scheme is even if the information is presented to us as if we all do. 

Making matters worse is the recent inclination to cut this down to ETS.  And they wonder why we all just want to tune out.

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Anyone with the slightest religious beliefs, despite what religion it is, or an affinity for the importance of morals and values in society must wonder at least sometimes how we incorporate morals, values and a social conscience into modern society.

You could hardly expect your child to watch the news and not be just a little confused about what morals and values actually are. It is not only the uncertainty that surrounds the current refugee debate in Australia that still has the Oceanic Viking in limbo at sea while dignitaries play out their respective politics.

A lot of it too goes down to what has happened in the business world over the past few decades. Recently the fallout from the global financial crisis has seen former captains of industry decline in absolute disgrace. Will that matter in the long run? Probably not. It happened before. Remember the 80s? Companies folded. Illegal transactions became public fodder for a while there but did things change?

It is not that long ago for most of us who were already up and running in the workforce but when everyone told us everything was good again, old habits came into play – and this time it was stronger.

This week I went along to see Michael Moore’s latest offering that has just opened in Australia. Capitalism: A Love Story is simplistic but it is real. Whether or not you love or loathe Michael Moore, we need more of him. We need more people willing to expose those who are held in high esteem, simply because of their bank balances.

Probably the most telling quote from this movie was the one where an executive said he was in awe of the propaganda that made the people who would actually lose out of the whole new system believe they would be winners.

Yes, propaganda it was. To tell people that by reducing wages and conditions would make them better off, where executives of the same companies were making hundreds of thousands more than they had done has to be the biggest communications coup of more than a decade.

Will Hutton wrote in the UK’s Observer this weekend how much of this that correlates with some of our most watched television shows and movies. The Sopranos, The Wire and Wall Street were three of the so called fictional portrayals of the underworld that have become part of life, or at least corporate life. Hutton relates how a wire tap brought a whole world unstuck with its secret tips, kickbacks and disposable, pre-paid mobile phones.

It was a whole web of illegal trading that the FBI accidentally dropped into. The issue Hutton was referring to was that of a corporate web that eventually outed ringleader Zvi Goffer, a thirtysomething who was a major player in at least five big takeovers between March and November 2007.

There was actually nothing novel about what he or his colleagues did. They just supplied information to people who would buy shares before information was made public about companies before anyone else knew about it.

A whole web of insider trading and deceit was uncovered and many of them now face jail sentences.

Will their jail sentences make any difference is the real question. We honour people who have found success and have the trappings that go with it. We turn a blind eye to how they have actually attained their status.

It is difficult for me to think that things can go back to a day where honesty and integrity actually meant something. I also do not have kids but I sympathise with those who do. I can’t think how anyone can explain how we all cheer along those who find success by dubious means or are willing to sink boats because we don’t want people coming to our country.

How do you explain morality, honesty and social justice to your kids? How do you reconcile it all?

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Superannuation has come into the Australian government’s radar this week and Finance Minister, Chris Bowen, triggered a whole lot of discussion after he suggested that the employer contribution be lifted from its current nine per cent. Mr Bowen has not been the only one thinking this way but employers, understandably, don’t even want to discuss it.

It’s a subject that has crept into the headlines recently since the release of a few pretty damning reports. The reports by political think tanks, industry bodies and interest groups, all predict that many Australians will be unable to fund their own retirements but they offer different causes and varying solutions to what could become a huge burden on taxpayers.

Left out of discussions almost entirely are the dwindling superannuation accounts of the nation’s casual workers. This group, while being almost entirely ignored when it comes to the subject of superannuation, is far from insignificant. Even modest estimates claim casual workers represent more than a quarter of the entire workforce.

Factors that have been cited as contributing to the overall problem of declining superannuation accounts are inadequate employer contributions and the administrative fees of the funds and interest groups have called for government intervention.

While some reports say that the minimum employer contribution needs to be lifted, others call for more regulation of the superannuation funds and the fees they apply to their members.

Today, in the middle of all these reports and discussion, came the release of a report by wealth management company, Mercer, that rated Australia second in the world on superannuation, second only to The Netherlands.

Despite this, Mercer failed to give Australia an “A” rating and suggested a few remedies of its own, one being that Australia lift its compulsory contribution to relieve itself of future debt.

Superannuation has been one of the most neglected areas of policy for a long time now. It was introduced across the board a few decades ago and employer contributions were raised to nine per cent in 2002.

What most of the reports and commentary avoid discussing or even making public, however, is the superannuation accounts of the burgeoning casual workforce. This is poised to be a major problem for taxpayers in the future but it generates very little discussion.

The issue did get a little airing recently when The National Foundation for Australian Women called out for more assistance for women, claiming that many of them were relegated to part-time work because of the lack of child care services and that generally female retirement funds were lower because of the gap between men’s and women’s wages.

However, statistics are also telling us that the number of men in part-time and casual work is increasing and is closing what was a much larger gender gap in the casual workforce.

Superannuation contributions work like this. Current compulsory employer superannuation contributions are nine per cent of a worker’s earnings but there is a threshold of $450 per month. This in effect means that an employee or worker has to earn at least $450 from one employer in a month before the employer is committed to any superannuation contribution at all.

This may seem reasonable on the surface as presumably the rule was imposed to exempt employers from paying contributions for part-time student workers. However, since compulsory superannuation was introduced a few decades ago, the workforce has changed dramatically as more and more people have been forced on to either casual and contract work.

Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimate the casual workforce to be around 27 per cent of the total workforce. This is unlikely to get any smaller, and many commentators have suggested the estimated figures are probably significantly understated.

Many of these workers have been either forced to work as a single business and fund their own superannuation (and for many there is not enough left over to do so) or work for several employers who will all pay them below or not much above the threshold of $450.

Nine per cent of that amount will only just about cover the fees if there is any contribution at all and it is a loophole that is open to a lot of abuse.

It must be remembered that an employer who employs a casual worker is under no obligation to give them set hours or even a minimum of hours work in a week or a month. Therefore, it is in the employer’s own interest to employ as many casuals as possible – far more than there is work for – and have them all work minimum hours to avoid having to make superannuation contributions at all.

This has opened up a lot of work for international students and traveling backpackers but it has come at a mighty cost for many of our own workers – in terms of superannuation payments as well as work.

This is how a lot of employers, particularly those running small businesses or sole traders, get around the employer contribution payment. It also forces workers to seek casual employment from several places just to survive and it is depriving them of any contributions to their retirement.

Superannuation for this group deserves a lot more attention from government and from commentators but the difficulty for these workers is that they have no voice. There is no “industry body” that speaks out for them and no union who looks out for their welfare. This is despite their numbers growing significantly over the last decade.

We don’t have to go back far to work out how this situation has developed. It has been one of the remnants of Australia’s embracement of the market economy. One of most talked about characteristics of neo-liberalism and the market economy was the contracting out of labour.

This new way of employing people, theorists claimed, allowed companies and bureaucracies to focus on their “core” businesses. It would save them money they said because they could employ people for as little as as much as they wanted. What they didn’t say, was that this method of employment was shifting the retirement funding burden back on to the tax payer.

What grew out of this whole new style of employment was a whole industry of casual recruitment agencies in all fields including hospitality, building and construction, nursing, executive, administration and just about anything else. It is not that contracted work hadn’t existed for a long time before that but now it has become more or less an industry of its own.

Competition policy also makes a significant contribution to the livelihood of the casual worker. Multiple agencies are forced to sell off their workers at the lowest price and with minimal conditions attached to compete in what has been a booming industry.

An area where money can be saved in all this, is superannuation and employers can ensure they don’t employ the same person too often in any given month so as to avoid any commitment for superannuation contributions.

To be fair, the Rudd Government under Julia Gillard’s direction corrected some of the most appalling characteristics of the Howard Government’s Work Choices legislation. The individual workers contracts that impacted so heavily on the casual worker finally made it into the garbage bin.

Superannuation for casual workers, however, has had very little discussion and there is every reason to believe it is being largely ignored.

Some of the loopholes in current superannuation legislation need to be closed, the neglect of which has already placed a large burden on tomorrow’s taxpayer.

We can’t expect our Federal Opposition to be too keen about any cleaning up of this area either for two reasons. First, because closing the loopholes would prevent small business operators from exploiting the superannuation system and this could cost votes. Second, because they did nothing to address the retirement of this sector during its long term in government and in a time of unprecedented growth of the sector.

Age pension costs to the taxpayer in the 2009-09 year alone were $26.7 billion. If the current government has any commitment at all to the future of Australia, it would do well to not only give superannuation legislation a careful examination and revamp but urgently address the dwindling retirement funds of Australia’s casual workers.

Sourced:

www.watoday.com.au; www.tai.org.au; www.smh.com.au; www.dailytelegraph.com.au;

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One article in The Sydney Morning Herald  yesterday caught my eye.  It was a story about Errol Langridge a 50-year old from Sydney who has been out of work since being retrenched from the NSW Police Force 10 months ago.  With all other avenues of searching for a job failing him, Langridge has taken to flogging himself outside Town Hall Station and Martin Place in the CBD.

Langridge is an experienced payroll officer, is married and is a father of two, and in ten months his life has changed dramatically.  He and his wife have sold their home in Liverpool and are now renting in Villawood, despite his applications for nearly 70 jobs.

For Langridge and many like him, yesterday’s announcement that the economy has picked up and is on the move to recovery means very little.  Nor do the unemployment figures that were released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing that unemployment has fallen 0.1 per cent since August and that full-time employment actually rose by 35,400 in the month of September.

The statistics may have caught many senior economists by surprise, many of whom had predicted total employment to decline by 10,000 in September, but it means little to those who have found themselves out on the scrap heap and into the long haul of searching for work.

The trouble is that we are all reliant on the news and the government announcements to find out what the economic situation is and the accuracy of the information is often open to question. 

These days most job advertisements and applications are on and are completed through the internet.  That really makes a job queue completely invisible.  So too, is the unemployment queue.  This is how technology has helped push so much that we should know about completely out of sight.

It takes a lot of courage to do what Langridge is doing but desperate times call for desperate measures.   Most of us are not accustomed to begging for work and really not all that comfortable about doing it but the statement he is making is a good one.  The media have taken notice of someone who is struggling with unemployment for one thing.  It is not something many of our journalists seem to take a lot of notice of, probably because most people looking for work are  completely out of sight.  They are lost in cyberspace.

(more…)

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Just as predicted by political pundits everywhere, Japan has overthrown the longstanding Liberal Democratic Party, the party that has ruled them for almost half a century.

Now another major player in world politics has turned its back on conservative rule and the new leader has come to power with ambitious promises.  The new government leader, Yukio Hatoyama, has promised to focus spending on consumers, reduce the power of the bureaucracy and cut wasteful government spending.

Japan has suffered badly in the worldwide recession but its troubles started long before.  Businesses, as in other market economies, had made a shift to casual and contract employment and many of them had lost jobs in the whole decline leaving many of them out on the street.

Many are not willing to pull out the bells and whistles yet.  Like Obama in the U.S. and Rudd in Australia, Hatoyama and his Democratic Party have not inherited government in a time that will give them too much free rein. 

Times are tough everywhere and in Japan there is a lot of repair needed to do first.  Displaced Japanese had long tired of the Liberal Democratic Party, a government they believed had long ignored their interests and welfare.

Others have voiced concerns over Hatoyama’s ambition to have Japan more independent of the U.S. and renegotiate ties with Washington fearing that he may ruffle established ties with the U.S.

Just as in other western democracies, Japan has its own domestic problems and just as other democracies have done, they have turned to the left-leaning, community oriented party to do that for them.

The shifting trend is not isolated to Japan.  It is a worldwide one.

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There is a new wave of violence and it has nothing to do with men. It is women who are now joining street gangs and choosing victims to pick on. According to an article in the “News of the World” this weekend, women are joining gangs in droves and finding victims who will be subject to just about anything from kicking, punching, splitting and calling names.

According to an article in UK’s News of the World today, young women are turning to violence to gain social standing and acceptance. One in four violent attacks now involve women and in 2008 more than half a million assaults wer either carried out by women or involved a female in a gang.

The gang culture that has been privy to the man has filtered down to the female population. Violence in its real form has brought a lot of men respect in any given gang. Now women want some of this action and the respect that goes with it.

It is all about morale, according to clinical psychologist, Dr Fune Falfour, who says that being in a gang boosts the morale of these girls who often come from broken homes. Not that she is condoning it but women are trying to find the same sense of belonging that men have by belonging to a gang and violence often gives them respect they would not find elsewhere.

What a shame. Women now have to resort to offensive behaviour and violence to find their identity. Surely there must be some other way.

It has usually been boys who have been saddled with the lable of gang members, lured into gangs because they seek identity. Dr Falfour now claims that women are being drawn into the gang culture for very similar reasons. Mindless violience gives them respect and a social standing in a gang.

This is a sad turn for society in general. If it is violence that now gives so much social standing however will we encourage women to use education to build their reputation or their standing in the community?

Sourced:  News of the World

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Australians are really into status which is usually linked with a job, profession or level of wealth. Not that we are alone.  Lawyers, doctors and business leaders are really among the top whereas trades fare a little lower on the status scale and unskilled labour is not usually work many want to boast about.

Lately, there seems a real trend for some who have done really well to boast about the menial jobs they did before they found success. Recalling a variety of jobs he did in his younger years including cleaning, flipping hamburgers, working in a supermarket and pulling beers, our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admitted on radio that cleaning loos in a sawmill was probably the hardest one.

Not so long ago, current NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, proudly recalled his life as a garbage collector as a young man. The admission has journalists regularly referring to him – endearingly of course – as the “former garbo”.

Kevin Rudd’s recent admission was a message he wanted to send generation Y. It followed a call by his Employment Participation Minister, Mark Arbib to generation Y to be a lot more flexible about the jobs they applied for, fearing this generation is far to choosy about the jobs they are prepared to do.

Maybe there are quite a few from generation Y who won’t do certain types of jobs but it is difficult for me to believe that this is across the board. Anyone only has to go into any McDonalds, KFC, Gloria Jeans, or any supermarket or café to see that it is mostly young people who work there. I am also guessing that these former occupations of Rudd and Rees were jobs they did to subsidise their studies.

If that is the case then they are not alone. I have never met many students who don’t need some sort of job to keep them while they are studying, even if they are living at home with their parents.

There is no doubt that having a variety of jobs, even part-time, can teach anyone a lot of things and can be incredibly character building. The trouble is that many of these jobs these days can be unreliable and often don’t pay enough to make a decent living.  This is another reason for many to be reluctant to apply to some jobs.  Status may be one thing but the other is money and most of us want to earn a decent living.

It is also one thing too to do jobs like these ones while completing studies or training. It is another thing all together to be forced into this sort of work for a lifetime.

There are a few things that really need saying about generation Ys and their search for work.  This generation is supposed to be the highest educated of all in general and the training and education would not have been undertaken for fun.  University and post school education and training is usually a commitment for a purpose – to find work in a chosen career.

The money many of them owe for these studies on completion is another reason.  Once a student, for example, completes university study they are probably ready to leave home and most likely also have a huge student debt.

For years now our governments have been encouraging school students to educate themselves to ensure they have really good opportunities in the workplace. This has cost a lot of people a lot of money and this investment comes with a certain expectation of a good future. The problem is that the jobs just aren’t there.

What both Rudd and Arbib fail to recognise is that a university degree or training needs to be put to work soon after completion or there will be no hope of forging a career at all. To continue in a cleaning or service job after completing a Bachelor of Business isn’t going to help a resume too much and will probably relegate anyone doing so to that sort of job for life. I would also point out that when Rudd and Rees were doing these jobs to get by they were jobs that were more reliable and much better paid due to the system that Australia once had.

Being choosy about careers and work is hardly a characteristic of generation Y alone.  Most of us in whatever generation we belong want either the status of a good job or at the very least to earn a decent living.

These “rags to riches” type stories being peddled out by our leaders may be good for a bit of personal public relations.  They may even have us believe that they can relate to the common man, but they mask a real problem that is out in the real world. Anyone who has invested time and money in training, career education or both can hardly be condemned for expecting a real job or career out of it. That is how the universities and training colleges lured them into these studies in the first place.

Image credit:  www.bbc.co.uk

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World food markets are mostly, but not entirely, a legacy of the market economy, the globalisation of world trade.  Although the obsession to ship food products around the world is just one of the reasons behind  the alarming amount of food that is wasted globally each year, it is one that is kept pretty quiet.

That’s not to say that our individual food waste shouldn’t come under regular scrutiny as well.  We could all do a lot better when it comes to throwing so much of our food away.

In the UK’s Observer on Sunday, there was a really interesting article on the subject.  The article was about Tristram Stuart, a self-confessed “Freegan” who has just published a new book, Waste:  Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.

What is a “freegan” you might ask?  A “freegan” is someone who largely subsists on the food disgarded by others. A commitment to freeganism can often be motivated by a range of reasons.  Saving money can be a primary one for some but for others it can be a stance against the capitalist economy or it may be a concern for the environment.

Stuart is an eco activist.  His life as a freegan dates back to his uni days where he rummaged in the bins of large supermarket chains to get by.  Now at 32 his reasons are different.  No longer does he entirely survive on disgarded food – and there is certainly no financial reason to – but he maintains it is still a major component of his diet.  Food waste to Stuart is the big environmental crisis of our times that we never hear about.

In fact, Stuart attributes food waste to some of the bigger environmental problems of the moment, including deforestation and the water shortage, even going so far as to say that it is a big contributor to global warming.

This penchant for rummaging around in bins that started some years ago has certainly armed Stuart with a lot of knowledge about the kinds of food that is thrown out even before it reaches the consumer.  His passion for the issue, which some may even say is an obsession, has found him researching not just the food but the systems and regulations that are more often the root of the problem.

In Waste, Stuart’s estimated amount of the food that ends up in the trash in England alone is 5.4m tonnes per annum and is a more conservative estimate than the 2008 survey by waste organisation, Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap), which had the amount at 6.7m tonnes.  According to Stuart everyone in England throws away around a quarter of the food they buy.

What Stuart does emphasise in his book is that there is a much bigger problem further down the food chain.  From poor transport that can’t get a lot of the food to market before it perishes to the very long journey most of the other food makes in ships, planes, trucks, warehouses, processing plants and supermarket distribution centres. 

Stuart estimates the food waste in these journeys combined with individual waste would be around a third of global food supplies and in richer countries it is about half.

Stuart is not the only one who sees a much bigger problem further down the line.  In its report, Wrap estimated that three times as much food is wasted by retailers, processors and manufacturers.

Early this year and reported again in The Observer, UK’s foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House launched its report about food, “Futures:  Rethinking UK Strategy” that painted a pretty bleak future about rising food prices and regular shortages.

By 2030, the world will need to be producing fifty per cent more food than it does at the moment, according to the World Bank, because of the new affluence of countries such and India and China.  They will be importing higher quality food such as meat instead of greens, they say.

We don’t fare too much better in Australia.  According to an article in Notebook magazine last year, Australians are throwing out three million tonnes of food every year, equivalent to 145 kilograms for each of us.

The value of this waste is estimated at $6 billion annually and most of the food that is thrown is fresh food and vegetables.  Meat, fish, bread, dairy produce, rice and pasta are all pretty high on the list as well.

Most of the Australian statistics appear to base the figures on individual waste only and it is difficult to know if any of the statistics go further into the good chain.

That is not dismissing the fact that individual food waste is still a major problem.  I know my parents who lived through the Depression are still very careful about wasting food of any kind.  Whenever I see older people eat a meal out, there is rarely anything left on the plate.

So it must be the decades of affluence – or credit – that has made many of us so careless about what we throw away.  It wasn’t really all that long ago that it was quite common to re-cook left over food for a meal the following day.

We may just have to get back to that way of thinking.

Sourced:   The Observer (online) (UK);  Notebook magazine online (Aust)

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When it comes to what people really want out of their leaders, it might pay left leaning politicians everywhere to keep their eyes on what is happening in Japan.

The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) has dragged itself out of oblivion over the last 20 months by revamping its image, re-branding its ethos and using a little bit of tech savvy.  The result – the membership has now grown to 410,000.

Many of the Japanese are so disillusioned with life and so appalled by how corporate greed has ruined their lives they are flocking to the Communist Party in droves and turning their backs on capitalism.

It all boils down to this.  The new revamped Japanese Communist Party has shed the shackles that bound it for so long and now focuses primarily on welfare, jobs and education.  Rather than talk about communism or socialism the Party proclaims a commitment to “democratic change within the current framework of capitalism”.

Students, the low paid workers and the unemployed have all taken a shine to the new Party that gives them some ray of hope.  Earlier this year, the JCP organised protests in support of more rights for workers, particularly temporary ones and are seen as the only Party that is representative of them.  The Party says it has more than one thousand new members every month and it has 24,000 branches around the country.

While JCP’s membership is nowhere near that of the government and opposition parties – the governing Liberal Democrats’ membership has fallen from five million in its heyday to one million today – membership of the JCP is flourishing.  This has no doubt been helped along by the severe effects that the global financial crisis has dealt many across the nation and a party leader, Kazuo Ishii, who is seen as affable and in touch with the people.

The JCP has, however, managed to tap into a little more that the dire circumstances of the general population.  Like Obama and his Democrats in the US, it has used its tech savvy to round up supporters on the internet and has made a big impression on particularly the youth and the under 30s.  The Party says about a quarter of the 14,000 who have joined up since 2007 are under 30.

The Party’s stand on economic policy would also strike a cord with many who see a government that has failed them in favour of corporate Japan.  The promise of change in the current economic policy of “serving the interests of large corporations and business circles to one of defending the interests of the people” would have certainly won them some friends. 

It’s not only the membership figures that can vouch for this new popularity.  Circulation of the Party’s official paper, Akahata (meaning “Red Flag”) has increased to 1.6 million from around one million in the last six months and many suggest that the sudden popularity of an almost forgotten 1929 book among students last year has helped the Party cause. 

Kaniksen, about fishermen rebelling against their bosses, made its way around college campuses and sold 500,000 copies in just a few months. This gives more than a good indication of the general shift in social thinking in Japan, particularly among the young.

This new wave of communist sympathy, or rather an anti-capitalist stance, can be further highlighted by the recent publication in Japan of a new comic version of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and his dark predictions for the capitalist system.

Things are not all bright for the JCP however.  Even with the current trend towards more social policy thinking and the Party’s soaring popularity, many say there is little chance of the JCP holding the reins of power or even coming close to it.    

There are 480 seats in the lower house of the Japanese parliament and the JCP holds only nine of them.  They are also opposed to being any part of a coalition even though they say they would be willing to co-operate with the individual policies of the Liberal Democratic Party. This will make it virtually impossible to defeat the larger parties in the Japanese system, according to many observers.

That doesn’t mean that the Party is beyond influence.  If the current growth within the Party continues and its popularity among the Japanese community expands, someone will have to listen to them.  The polling for the larger parties in both government and opposition are in a steep decline.  Whatever political party that comes to power next time will have to take some real notice of the new social shift in Japan.

Sourced:   www.guardian.co.uk; Socialist Standard, UK; www.jcp.or.up/english/; news.bbc.co.uk.

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