WEAll Australia
This is the third (read part 1 and part 2) in a series of articles exploring the history and context of the Pay the Rent idea. What is pay the rent? In essence, it is a private reparations system. The idea is that, without a
The April issue of NENA Journal included an interview with Andrew Leigh, Shadow Assistant Treasurer. Alan Greig, a Board member of Employee Ownership Australia, and Duncan Wallace, NENA Journal Editor, respond below to comments Leigh made on the risks he perceives in expanding employee ownership.
We live in a world where public opinion has “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, or at least that was what was found by a Princeton University study of American democracy. Based on the statistical evidence, they conclude that the US
This is the second (read part 1 and part 3) in a series of articles exploring the history and context of the Pay the Rent idea. The same week I attended the Uluru Statement event, the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne hosted a public discussion with
Last month I attended an event on the Uluru Statement and Indigenous Self-Determination, held at Melbourne Law School. The chair of the panel was Dr Shireen Morris, the Labor candidate for Deakin at the upcoming federal election, and one of the principal architects of the First Nations Voice proposal. The Voice is controversial. Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman and former Victorian Greens MP, said recently, “Don’t support the Statement from the Heart because it didn’t come from the heart – it came from Noel Pearson and Mark Leibler.”
Peter Kropotkin – the Russian Prince, famed scientist and anarchist thinker – wrote, in the 1890s, that a revolution will fail if it doesn’t secure its food supply: “Bread, it is bread that the Revolution needs!” Unless this happens, “the people began to grow weary. ‘So much for your vaunted Revolution! You are more wretched than ever before,’ whispered the reactionary in the ears of the worker. And little by little the rich took courage, emerged from their hiding-places, and flaunted their luxury in the face of the starving multitude. They dressed up like scented fops and said to the workers: ‘Come, enough of this foolery! What have you gained by rebellion?’”
Tony Benn, the UK Labour Party MP and a key proponent of democratic socialism within the party, once said that in politics there are signposts and weathercocks. There are those who change their positions according to the winds of opinion, and those who stick to
Why do we have sex?
Well, one reason is that it creates genetic diversity, which means, as a population, we are much less likely to be wiped out by some disease. Though asexual reproduction is much more efficient, the benefits of genetic diversity are so big that sex dominates as a strategy amongst animals, plants, insects etc.