Melbourne’s high rise public housing towers are icons of the city’s skyline. Indelibly associated with the inner-city suburbs, they are the product of hard-fought battles between social reformers, residents’ associations and the sprawling bureaucracy of the Housing Commission of Victoria. Throughout their history, they have been both hated and loved, generating protests against their construction and then, once established, to defend them from demolition.
The cost of food is soaring and so are the profits of Australia’s major supermarkets.
Earlier this year, the Australian Energy Regulator released its final determination on energy prices for the 2023-24 financial year, increasing prices by 20-25 percent across the country.
Australia has some of the most miserable unemployment benefits of any developed country, and the Albanese government is refusing to increase them across the board.
Last week’s conclusion of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme has once again brought national attention to the program that, from 2015 to 2019, saw nearly half a million welfare recipients hounded over unlawful fake debts concocted using faulty calculations.
In the late 1960s, cryptic notes began to appear on poles and noticeboards around Chicago, directing women who were pregnant and in trouble to “call Jane”. The number provided connected them to the Jane Collective (officially the Abortion Counselling Service of Women’s Liberation), an underground network of activists providing illegal abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This collective is the subject of The Janes, a new HBO documentary directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.