Pay Dispute

One hundred and fifty social and community services (SACS) workers yelled and cheered. Some seemed close to tears as they sat in an auditorium at Technology Park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern last Thursday morning.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard was standing before them to announce that the federal government would support pay increases demanded in the ASU’s Pay Up campaign.

The emotion of the crowd was not surprising. They have been waiting for this result for a very long time. They have campaigned hard, and with the knowledge that the case will benefit not just them but their families and the communities they work for.

Continue reading "Win for community workers is a win for communities" »

In 2006, I was driving out of Beirut airport in the backseat of a taxi when I had a horrible thought. Around me, cars were driving in and out of lanes, zipping past one another in dangerous manoeuvres and in disturbing excess of the speed limit, over packed with passengers sticking their arms, legs and even their heads out of windows.

Some were even joy riding on the roof of the vehicles in question, though this had more to do with a bizarre system of car pooling than anything else.

But my horrible thought did not in fact revolve around this chaos, but in the fact that in the midst of this was a lone police officer, driving along in relative calm as if blissfully unaware of the throngs of madness around him, but doing so because the scene I just painted was simply a part of the everyday and he no longer had a role in it. Would life in Australia ever be the same?

Continue reading "Why we should give our police a proper payrise" »