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Victoria is in its worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis is the direct result of respective governments neglecting housing despite being entirely aware of the sectors proliferating state of disrepair. Current housing minister Harriot Shing is not only complicit in this crisis, but actively an enabler, allowing her friends in big financial and real estate firms to profit from the suffering of the rest of the city.

Couldn't have put it better myself:

Powerful financial actors have done a great job at framing themselves as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the prevailing crisis. They have incessantly pushed the now-dominant narrative that more real estate investment is a good thing because it will increase the supply of much-needed homes. Blackstone, for example, claims to play a “positive role in addressing the chronic undersupply of housing across the continent”. But the evidence suggests that greater involvement of financial markets has not increased aggregate home ownership or housing supply, but instead inflated house prices and rents.

The thing is, institutional investors aren’t really into producing housing. It is directly against their interests to significantly increase supply. As one asset manager concedes, housing undersupply is bad for residents but “supportive for cashflows”. Blackstone’s president famously admitted that “the big warning signs in real estate are capital and cranes”. In other words, they need shortages to keep prices high.

Where corporate capital does produce new homes, they will of course be maximally profitable. Cities such as Manchester, Brussels and Warsaw have experienced a proliferation of high-margins housing products such as micro-apartments, build-to-rent and co-living. Designed with the explicit intention of optimising cashflows, these are both unaffordable and unsuitable for most households. Common Wealth, a thinktank focusing on ownership, found that the private equity-backed build-to-rent sector, which accounts for 30% of new homes in London, caters predominantly to high-earning single people. Families represent just 5% of build-to-rent tenants compared with a quarter of the private rental sector more broadly. These overpriced corporate appendages are a stark reminder of the market’s inability to deliver homes that fit the needs and incomes of most people.

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In recent decades we have been living through an ever-intensifying social experiment. Can housing, a fundamental need for all human beings, be successfully delivered under the machinations of finance capitalism? The evidence now seems overwhelming: no.

As investors have come to dominate, so the power of residents has been systematically undermined. We are left with a crisis of inconceivable proportions. While we can, and should, point the finger at corporate greed, we must remember that this is the system working precisely as it is set up to do. When profit is the prevailing force, housing provision invariably fails to align with social need – to generate the types of homes within the price ranges most desperately required. In the coming years, housing will occupy centre stage in European politics. Now is the time for fundamental structural changes that reclaim homes from the jaws of finance, re-empower residents and reinstate housing as a core priority for public provision.

Housing Lawyer and author Nick Bano came by JOE Towers to chat about his new book Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis which is out now. In this conversation we chat about Britain's housing setup, how is set up to create winners and losers and how to end the age of the landlord.

As food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, it’s time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dépanneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, a city-owned grocery store is in the works to serve an underserved neighbourhood after the last private grocer pulled out. Atlanta operates two public grocery outlets to tackle food deserts — where full grocers are distant and inaccessible for whole populations, typically due to community poverty and poor profit margins. Chicago is moving ahead with a city-run food market to help poorer residents afford groceries. These U.S. cities do not want to become supermarket empires, rather,  they are responding to a market failure causing hunger and poverty. When concentrated corporate ownership meets declining margins and socioeconomic gaps, some neighbourhoods are left with no fresh food options at all.

In New York City, 2025 Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is pushing for a public grocery store in every borough. It is a bold idea and campaign policy promise that has emerged in response to rising food insecurity among New Yorkers. The concept gained traction during Mamdani’s Democratic Mayoral Primary campaign, where food justice became one of several economic rallying cries alongside other affordability measures like rent control and free public transit. 

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So far, our food policy imagination has been largely confined to subsidies, zoning incentives, and casual price monitoring. We also tried the classic Canadian tactic of knocking on international doors and asking very, very nicely for prices to freeze or come down. Canadians can likely tell you whether they have felt the benefits of these current approaches. But what if we went further? What if we treated food access not just as a supply-chain challenge or a matter of affordability, but as infrastructure: as essential to community resilience as transit or libraries?

Fears about losing jobs to automation have become commonplace, but according to United Workers Union (UWU) research and policy officer Lauren Kelly, who researches labour and supermarket automation, rather than manual work being eliminated, it is often augmented by automation technologies. This broadens the concern from one of job loss to more wide-ranging implications for the nature of work itself. That is, she says, “rather than replace human workers with robots, many are being forced to work like robots”.

In addition to the monitoring tactics used upon workers, supermarkets also direct their all-seeing eye towards customers through an array of surveillance measures: cameras track individuals through stores, “smart” exit gates remain closed until payment, overhead image recognition at self-serve checkouts assess whether you’re actually weighing brown onions, and so on. Woolworths even invests in a data-driven “crime intelligence platform”, which raises significant privacy concerns, shares data with police and claims that it can predict crime before it happens – not just the plot of Minority Report but also an offshoot of the deeply problematic concept of “predictive policing”. Modern supermarkets have become a testing ground for an array of potential rights-infringing technologies.

Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.

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A spokesperson for Primary Connect, Woolworths’ supply chain arm, said its coaching framework helped “to ensure a fair approach to the standards is applied to any personal circumstances or abilities”.

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But Guardian Australia spoke to a dozen current and former workers for Woolworths and Primary Connect, who claim the standards are unfair and putting their safety at risk. All requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

As more people shop online, there’s been growing attention to the treatment and tracking of workers in warehouses run by e-commerce conglomerates like Amazon. In June, the state of California fined the company for failing to properly disclose its productivity targets to workers – a decision the company is reportedly appealing. But Australian warehouse workers have long been subject to this style of control. Engineered standards were introduced by Australian supermarket chains in the late 1980s and 1990s and were the target of industrial action.

“It’s a fantasy of total efficiency,” Christopher O’Neill, a research fellow at Deakin University who studies workplace automation, said of engineered standards. “The argument was: this was a ‘scientific’ way of rationalising work and eliminating wasted time,” he said.

“It’s basically a pseudoscientific veneer over this kind of fantasy of being able to control every second of every day.”

The Australian Christian Lobby has sent an election mail out in Victoria, spreading transphobia and trying to discredit The Greens.

Residents of the City of Yarra and Moreland City Councils contacted QNews after they received transphobic election material.

It arrived in their letterbox the day after Trans Day of Visibility.

The pamphlet from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was titled: “Male and Female Matter”.

It states that the Greens are “experimenting with biology at your expense”.

“Male and female matter, The Greens don’t agree,” the pamphlet read.

Siting that “while you wait for urgent medical care, The Greens want to use your tax dollars for free gender transition surgeries”.

The pamphlet also says that the Greens wish to put more gender clinics in hospitals while emergency departments are in crisis.

The Republican Party thought it could ride the tiger of the Christian Right: instead, that movement swallowed the party whole. There a presidential candidate’s victory could depend on their success at gaining the Christian Right leaders’ endorsement. The news released on Sunday that Coalition candidates submitted a Christian principles statement to the Australian Christian Lobby’s (ACL) voter advice site signals they are making the same dangerous gamble.

The ACL is not lobbying for the traditional Australian definition of Christian, which leans more to the “live and let live”. Rather, this is an organisation committed to coercive, American style Christianity. It has been listed as a “hate group”. Rumours in Pentecostal circles that the ACL is encouraging its leaders to undertake training from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a radical right American organisation that has argued for the “state-sanctioned sterilisation of trans people” need to be addressed. That body also works towards the (re)criminalising of homosexuality and stripping of access to reproductive healthcare. The ACL and the ADFwere both at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London in February, with the ADF’s Kristen Waggoner listed as a speaker. Many Coalition politicians are on the ARC’s advisory board and attended that conference.

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The statement concludes with a transphobic commitment to the “biological fact” that there are only two sexes. The Coalition’s statement deviates from the extreme position represented in Trump’s second government only by allowing that intersex biology exists. This grade school understanding of human biology, let alone psychology, is reductive and wrong. It also flags the continued misuse of trans people as the first targeted outsider in an ugly politics that prioritises the insider identity against a chosen mutual enemy.

Because of course it does.

Carney has seized on Trump’s tariff crisis to push through a pro-corporate agenda that attacks Indigenous peoples, workers, and the environment. Now, it’s up to social movements to respond as quickly.

Some nice infographics based largely on census data, provided as a turnkey service for local government.