Linkage

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.

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.

The 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot surveyed rental listings across Australia and found that affordability has crashed to record lows. The Snapshot surveyed 51,238 rental listings across Australia and found that:

   352 rentals (0.7%) were affordable for a person earning a full-time minimum wage
   165 rentals (0.3%) were affordable for a person on the Age Pension
   28 rentals (0.1%) were affordable for a person on the Disability Support Pension
   3 rentals (0%), all rooms in sharehouses, were affordable for a person on JobSeeker
   No rentals were affordable for a person on Youth Allowance.

In response to the findings, Anglicare Australia is calling on the Government to return to directly funding and providing housing itself, instead of leaving housing to the private sector. Anglicare Australia is also calling on the Government to wind back landlord tax concessions.

This project built on previous Australian and recent international research to develop a set of budget standards for low-paid and unemployed Australians and their families.  

The family types included are:

• a single person (male and female) 
• couples without children
• couples with one and two children 
• a sole parent with one child.

The approach incorporated existing community norms, expert judgments and relevant evidence from social surveys. It emphasised the views expressed by low-paid and unemployed individuals in focus groups to ensure that the standards are grounded in everyday experience and reflect actual needs.  

The results were also used to inform debate and guide decisions about the adequacy of minimum wages and income support payments for the unemployed required to support healthy living consistent with individual needs, family needs and prevailing community standards.

Ooh. This is really nice.

The annual rental affordability index (RAI) report is an easy-to-understand indicator of rental affordability relative to household incomes. Since its establishment in 2015, it has become a crucial tool for policymakers. It helps track rental affordability trends and informs evidence-based policy decisions – highlighting nuances between places and the experiences of disadvantaged households. To produce the Index each year, we work closely with our partners: National Shelter and Beyond Bank.