In The Guardian

To Fitzroy locals, carrot man – who calls the inner-city Melbourne neighbourhood home – is simply known as Nathan.

VKM first photographed him during Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns and over walks in Carlton Gardens a friendship was formed.

“I know him now just as Nathan,” VKM says. “When we were walking, I’m not thinking about the man with a carrot. But then you see people’s faces and people’s reaction and it’s like, ‘oh that’s right, I’m with the guy who’s got the carrot’.”

For such a public persona, VKM points out Nathan is “humble and shy”.

Guardian Australia approached Nathan for an interview via a friend, but was informed he was happy for the carrot to speak for him.

Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.

In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.

The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.

People leaving share houses during the pandemic lockdowns in search of more space are touted as one key reason behind the rise in low vacancy rates and high rents.

But community manager at Flatmates.com.au, Claudia Conley, said the trend is reversing.

“The volume of traffic we’ve seen in October we don’t usually see until December, indicating that demand for share accommodation is heating up well ahead of our peak season,” Conley said.

As the housing crisis continues to push people into homelessness, Everybody’s Home is calling for an ambitious plan of making one in 10 dwellings social housing over the next decade.

Photographer Andrew Chapman was 20 years old and at photographic college in 1974 when he started an assignment documenting the housing commission flats around Melbourne.

‘Back in those days you could just walk into a block of flats, take the lift up to the top floor and take photographs. It’s hard to believe it was that easy, but they were different times’

Those who refuse to have their bags checked can be fired, according to the Coles policy which was updated last year but only recently routinely enforced, according to worker representatives. It replaces a previous practice whereby staff bag inspections were only used after a genuine suspicion of theft.

“The reason they’re bag checking is because they know that their own workers are forced to think about stealing because they can’t afford food,” the secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (Raffwu), Josh Cullinan, said.

“We have these ridiculous situations where workers may have their sanitary items and prescription medication, and they have to show it to their manager.”

A Coles spokesperson said bag check policies were standard across the retail industry.

“While the policy was paused for a short time, it has been at Coles for many years,” the spokesperson said.

Coles and rival Woolworths have enjoyed a period of bumper returns after raising grocery prices at a faster pace than inflation, leading to increased profit margins during a period of financial strain for many households.

The course has long been in the crosshairs of the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, and also the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who argued it occupied prime land in the city centre that could be used by a wider range of people.

A discussion paper will be released year early next as part of a consultation process about the future of the course, but the government’s preferred option is for the new park to be established on the western boundary and part of the section north of Dacey Avenue, which it says will maximise access for residents of Green Square, Zetland and Waterloo.

The government said the Green Square urban renewal area had 33,000 residents and was expected to become one of the most densely populated areas in Australia, with 80,000 people living within 2km of Moore Park by 2040.

A letter signed by a cross-party group of local authority leaders in England indicates that some town halls in effect face bankruptcy and describes mounting temporary housing bills for homeless households as a “critical risk to the financial sustainability of many local authorities”.

It calls for an immediate cash injection of £100m for councils to provide emergency rent support for families at risk of homelessness, together with an end to the four-year freeze on housing allowance rates and long-term investment in social housing.

“Without urgent intervention, the existence of our safety net is under threat,” says the letter to Hunt, the chancellor. “The danger is that we have no option but to start withdrawing services which currently help so many families to avoid hitting crisis point.”

One senior Labour party member described the resignation of Labour councillors in response to the party’s position on Gaza as “shaking off the fleas”. This approach has broadly characterised Labour’s approach to the dissenting views it has attributed en masse to a cranky left, but it seems increasingly risky when a high-octane political event galvanises people across a demographic profile that is too large to be so easily dismissed. Sulekha, another voter lost to Labour in the past two weeks, tells me of an atmosphere in her local area in Hackney where people are identifying with the Palestine issue through “different intersections” as it draws in “greens, feminists and a broader liberal coalition”. Meanwhile, polling reveals a political establishment dramatically at odds with the country as a whole, in which 76% are in support of a ceasefire. That’s a lot of fleas.

[…]

There are signs that Labour, practised now in the art of figuring out who it can shake off without hurting its re-election chances, is beginning to catch on. In addition to Starmer’s attempt to reverse his position, there have been meetings with Labour MPs and council leaders. But it won’t be enough. Winning over those that have checked out is about more than Gaza. It’s about addressing the growing impression of Labour as a party increasingly out of touch with, and contemptuous of, its grassroots, both in policy offering and tone.

The worst-hit councils are now spending millions of pounds a year – in some cases between a fifth and half of their total available financial resources – to try to cope with an unprecedented and rapid explosion in homelessness caused by rising rents and a shrinking supply of affordable properties.

The scale of the crisis means smaller councils, often in affluent shire counties, are struggling to supply enough emergency homes to meet their legal duty to support homeless families. Homelessness rates in some districts have more than doubled year on year.

I have lived, my whole adult life, through the project known as the property-owning democracy. It was based on the idea that property would make you a better, happier and richer person and responded to the simple, reasonable and powerful desire of very many people to own their home. The property-owning democracy would set you free. For Margaret Thatcher, for whom it was a defining and prodigiously successful concept, it was a “crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation”.

So she sold off council houses to their tenants and deregulated and liberalised mortgage markets. From 1980 to 1990 rates of home ownership rose from 55% to 67% of households. At the same time prices rose, almost trebling during her 11-year term. In general Thatcher’s government prided itself on fighting inflation, inflicting heavy costs on employment in an attempt to bring the annual rate down. But with property it was different. Inflation, when it came to homes, was to be celebrated. It was seen as a sign of economic virility, and it made those who had bought feel good. Succeeding governments followed her lead in encouraging both ownership and rising prices. Values more than trebled in the Blair era.

Eventually the inflationary part of the project defeated the ideal of widening enfranchisement. Newcomers to the market just couldn’t afford it, and from the mid-00s rates of ownership started to fall. At the same time the stock of council housing declined. The symptoms of what is now called the “housing crisis” became plainer and plainer – fewer and fewer young people buying, more living with their parents or in rented homes whose prices continue to rise. Private rents are now at their highest level ever, up 20% in some regions over the previous 12 months.