Moreton Bay City Council, just north of Brisbane, is attacking its homeless residents. Last week, the council overwhelmingly voted to repeal a measure that allowed camping in public spaces. From next week, camping on public land will be illegal. Council workers, with the assistance of Queensland Police, are being dispatched to evict anybody still camping—two encampments have already been cleared. 
The move is the latest in a string of attacks on Moreton Bay’s homeless. In December, the council banned sleeping in vehicles, already a last resort option for many who can’t find housing. For this supposed “crime”, you can face fines of up to $8,000. Patrick Weir, 76 years old and a Vietnam War veteran, is one resident now threatened by the repeal. 
“They’re saying we can’t stay here overnight. I mean, that’s just bullshit. When you’re homeless, where else are you going to go?”, he told the Guardian. Equally as cruel, the council has banned homeless people from owning pets, which, for many, provide companionship in lonely and difficult circumstances. 
The council has cited “public health and safety” to justify the measures. But this surely doesn’t refer to the health and safety of the homeless themselves, who are now effectively banned from living in the town at all. The attacks seem to be more about protecting Moreton’s wealthiest from having to view people living in poverty. 
It’s “sad and shocking that these people feel compelled to live like this”, according to Councillor Jodie Shipway. Councillor Adam Hain laments that the council “just became the soft touch” and that it’s not all bad because “a lot of these people have got smartphones”. 
Moreton Bay has Queensland’s longest social housing waiting list—4,421 people are registered. Homelessness has increased by 90 percent in the last decade. In the last five years, house prices have risen by 80 percent; statewide rental vacancies remain at 1 percent, on average. In Redcliffe, within the Moreton Bay area, the vacancy rate is 0.6 percent. 
The media and politicians focus on housing supply as the primary cause, but there is another factor. “An average of 34 percent of homes were unoccupied in [Brisbane’s] top 20 suburbs with the highest percentage of empty dwellings on Census night [2021]”, journalist Viva Hyde reported in the Courier Mail last year. “The figure soared to 60 per cent for the top 20 areas across Queensland.”
Many of the vacancies were due to short-stay holiday accommodation such as Airbnb, holiday investment properties and land-banking by property developers.

Edward Cahill

In Moreton Bay, homelessness is a crime

In every country and culture, capitalism depends on an ideological mirage of equal opportunity and reward for effort, to conceal, as much as possible, the reality of brutal exploitation and inequality. In the US it’s the “American dream”—the idea that every person has the “equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination and initiative”, as defined in the Oxford Dictionary. 
Here in Australia, we are more familiar with the “fair go”—a term beloved by Labor and Liberal politicians alike. It fits neatly with the myth of Australia as the “lucky country”: a land of promise and opportunity where, with the right work ethic and a bit of gumption, anyone can get ahead. 
Last week Forbes magazine unveiled <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">its rankings</a> of the richest billionaires on the planet. An annual sycophantic tradition, this year the billionaires’ club ballooned to a record 2,781 members, collectively owning US$12.7 trillion—seven times the annual product of the entire Australian economy. 
Beneath the headline figures was concealed a particularly galling fact. Of the fifteen billionaires who made up the “under 30” cohort, none amassed their fortunes through anything resembling actual work, investments or so-called entrepreneurialism. All of them received their vast wealth through inheritance from their families.
This phenomenon is just the latest consequence of a decades-long global neoliberal assault, involving privatisations, deregulations and attacks on workers’ wages and rights. What we’ve seen in this time is a massive transfer of wealth to the super-rich, to the point where today—according to the UBS <a href="https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/global-wealth-report-2023.html">Global Wealth Report 2023</a>— the richest 1 percent of the population own 45 percent of the world’s total wealth. 
The trend is clear here in Australia. According to <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.au/2024/01/inequality-inc/">data released by Oxfam</a> in January, “the wealth of the three richest Australians, Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Harry Triguboff, has more than doubled since 2020 at a staggering rate of $1.5 million per hour”. And a <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Inequality-on-Steroids-Who-Benefits-From-Economic-Growth-in-Australia-WEB511-copy.pdf">2023 report</a> by the Australia Institute, Inequality on Steroids: The Distribution of Economic Growth in Australia, found that in the decade from 2009 to 2019, 93 percent of new wealth created through economic growth flowed to the richest 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent got just 7 percent.
Amid the windfall being enjoyed by the billionaire class and their ultra-privileged and pampered spawn, it seems the “self-made” types—those like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who can lay claim (in capitalist terms at least) to having built their fortunes for themselves—are not being replenished. Where are the new, young faces of innovation and entrepreneurship? You won’t find them among the under 30s in Forbes’ billionaires list.
We are now witnessing the beginnings of what has been described as the “great wealth transfer”. Over the next two decades, 1,000 or so ageing capitalists are set to pass on more than US$5.2 trillion to their heirs. Among them is 75-year-old Bernard Arnault, the world’s richest person, who has more than $233 billion, and 88-year-old Charles Koch, one half of the infamous Koch brothers, with $58 billion. 
The children of these ageing tycoons will, in the coming years, be joining the billionaires’ club at an increasing rate. As with the film industry, so is it with the super-rich: instead of any new ground being broken, all we’re getting, increasingly, are sequels and remakes of existing franchises. 
Who makes up the rogues’ gallery of beneficiaries? There’s Remi Dassault, who has $2.5 billion—grandchild of Marcel Dassault, the founder of Dassault Aviation. Remi’s wealth fell into his lap in 2021, when his father Olivier died in a helicopter crash. The Dassaults amassed their wealth, among other things, by manufacturing warplanes for the French military. Dassault Aviation also maintains cosy relations with the brutal el-Sisi regime in Egypt, its biggest international client. 
Then there are the Mistry brothers, Zahan and Firoz, who each possess $4.9 billion thanks to having been born into a family with a significant stake in one of India’s largest conglomerates, Tata Sons. The company, which got its start wreaking devastation through the opium trade under British occupation, now spans 29 subsidiaries ranging from engineering to automotives, energy and hotels. 
Or take the youngest member of the billionaires’ club, Livia Voigt. She’s only 19 years old and is studying at university. That hasn’t stopped her amassing a fortune of $1.1 billion, which might seem impressive until you learn that it was through being given that much in shares in the Brazilian electrical equipment giant WEG, which her grandfather was a co-founder of.
If you’re a 19-year-old in Australia starting university and hoping that—in accordance with the myth of the “fair go”—hard work and gumption will get you to the top, the chances that you’ll ever see your name among the members of Forbes’ billionaires list are approaching zero. More likely your hard work and gumption will, like the vast majority of other students, leave you with a gigantic HECS debt and lifetime of struggle just to attain the basics like a secure roof over your head. 
To the extent that the myth of the “fair go” was ever a reality, it has long since died. If you’re a young aspiring billionaire, you’d better hope you’ve got a billionaire family to give you a leg-up. In today’s economy, that’s the only real path to success.

The billionaire ‘nepo baby’ boom

Waste companies in Ipswich have been poisoning residents for decades, toxifying the air and making life unbearable. For people living in the suburbs surrounding the Swanbank Industrial Area in Ipswich’s south, it can be a hazard even to step outside.
The Courier-Mail recently <a href="https://www.couriermail.com.au/nocookies?a=A.flavipes">reported</a> that residents are experiencing nausea and difficulty breathing; those with asthma experience acute attacks, some requiring hospitalisation. People are sharing images of full body rashes and hives. Families are wary of letting their children play outside because of the stench. When the odours are at their worst, people are forced to stay inside their homes, plugging any gaps that could let the air in. 
Since 2018, there have been 25,000 complaints relating to the foul odour. The <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/residents-of-smelly-suburb-report-putrid-horrendous-manure-chemical-smell-causing-illness/news-story/1d618336631c4db193270d0b36e9360e#:~:text=Residents%20have%20reported%20experiencing%20serious,to%20the%20Australian%20Cancer%20Atlas.">Australian Cancer Atlas</a> reports that residents adjacent to Swanbank are diagnosed with lung cancer at rates 47 percent higher than the Australian average. Despite repeated calls from the community for a public health inquiry, the state Labor government looks the other way.
Waste management is a highly profitable business, employing few people and paying minimal fees. During the two-decade rule of Country Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, laws were passed allowing disused coal mines to be abandoned without rehabilitation, leaving what can be described as a “moonscape” of open-cut pits. 
In the 1990s, waste companies approached the local council with a “solution”; transform the area into a dumping ground. Under Campbell Newman’s LNP government (2012-15), rubbish taxes were cut, making Queensland one of the cheapest states in which to dump waste. Companies rushed to the area; now Swanbank receives waste from across the east coast of Australia, including 42 percent of Queensland’s total. 
Two companies are infamous among locals: Cleanaway and Remondis. In early 2022, rainwater flooded an exposed waste cell at Cleanaway’s New Chum facility, mixing with contaminated waste and releasing hydrogen sulphide gas. Residents <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-21/cleanway-new-chum-landfill-smell-being-treated/101085492">described</a> the effect as smelling like “rotten eggs”, worsening the already ubiquitous stench. 
In March this year, the state regulator charged Cleanaway with “wilfully causing an environmental nuisance relating to odour”, issuing $37,000 in fines. For a company that made more than $145 million in profits that year, calling this a slap on the wrist would be an overstatement. Meanwhile, the site remains completely exposed. 
Remondis operates a large site in Swanbank. In 2018, the company received government approval to construct a $400 million incinerator to burn waste at 800 degrees. Depending on what is burned, emissions can include heavy metals such as lead and mercury, toxic chemicals and particulate matter. The company has attempted to greenwash the development, arguing that burning garbage is a sustainable energy alternative. The harms, though, are obvious. 
<a href="https://www.nrdc.org/bio/daniel-rosenberg/burned-why-waste-incineration-harmful">Research</a> suggests waste incineration has an incredibly detrimental effect on public health and the environment. The pollutants linger in the atmosphere, travelling potentially hundreds of kilometres. Sustained community activism from local organisations such as Ipswich Battles Incinerator Schemes has been critical in undermining support for the incinerator and deterring Remondis for now. 
But the waste companies continue to search for ways to avoid accountability. Cleanaway <a href="https://cleanaway2stor.blob.core.windows.net/cleanaway2-blob-container/2023/10/MR-BERC-011023.pdf">recently announced</a> a $700 million incinerator to be constructed near Beaudesert, just an hour’s drive from Surfers Paradise. Emissions from the site would blanket the entire Gold Coast hinterland. 
Facilities as harmful as the ones at Swanbank shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of populated areas. But under capitalism, public health and the need for businesses to make profits are in direct conflict. Waste and other polluting industries are drawn closer to developed areas so that they can access public infrastructure and labour, hence reducing costs. But proximity to such blatantly unsafe facilities devalues property in the surrounding area, where only working-class people live. 
The scenes would be impossible to imagine in the leafy upper-class suburb of Brisbane’s Ascot. Ultimately, it will take sustained campaigning to challenge the business-as-usual capitalism that has been poisoning Ipswich residents for years. Ipswich activists are already building a strong foundation.

In Moreton Bay, homelessness is a crime

The billionaire ‘nepo baby’ boom

Ipswich is not a dump

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us