Australia

Usual caveat:  "affordable housing" isn't "social housing", which isn't "public housing". Public housing is what's needed. Also what was delivered as mandatory trickle-down housing in Sydney and presented here as a success story is not going to make a measurable difference to the situation.

New analysis from the Community Housing Industry Association Victoria (CHIA Vic) has revealed that since 2016, when the Central City Planning Provisions were amended to include a “public benefit uplift” incentive, developers have secured approval for almost 31,000 new homes. Not one of those has been delivered as affordable housing.

Instead, the voluntary scheme has overwhelmingly favoured commercial office space as the “public benefit” of choice. As reported by this masthead in early 2018, within just a year of its introduction more than 54,000 square metres of office floorspace had been awarded to applicants under the FAU mechanism, while no uplift had been granted for social housing, libraries, kindergartens or other community facilities that were also originally contemplated.

The result, according to CHIA Vic chief executive Sarah Toohey, is proof that voluntary approaches do not work.

"The voluntary developer contribution scheme for the Melbourne CBD and Southbank has not delivered a single affordable home since it was introduced nearly a decade ago," she said.

“What we’ve seen instead is developers opting for office space and other benefits that serve their own interests, while communities continue to miss out on the affordable homes they desperately need.”

The issue is back in the spotlight with the Suburban Rail Loop East planning documents now proposing a similar voluntary uplift framework around new station precincts. CHIA Vic has warned that without mandatory requirements, there is little chance of affordable housing being supplied in these high-demand areas either.

“The Suburban Rail Loop will add tens of thousands of new homes around station precincts but right now it’s not clear if any of them will be social or affordable housing,” Ms Toohey said. “We can’t leave the delivery of social housing in these precincts up to a voluntary scheme that we know from experience won’t work.”

By contrast, Sydney’s long-standing mandatory affordable housing contributions scheme has already provided more than 1500 homes since 1996, with a further 1950 projected by 2036.

In 1987, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled Gender-disordered children: does inpatient treatment help? by Robert Kosky, then director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Services in Western Australia.

It described eight children, all under 12, who were hospitalised at Stubbs Terrace between 1975 and 1980 for what the paper called "gender identity disorder".

The children were separated from their families and treated for months at a time. The paper argued their "cross-gender behaviours" were the result of inappropriate family dynamics — and suggested the hospital program corrected them.

When Anja Ravine, a trans youth health researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, came across it decades later, she was alarmed.

"It's implicit that they were expecting gender identity to return to what was expected. So that is really within the definition of conversion therapy."

Efforts to suppress or change a person's gender identity or sexuality, often referred to as "conversion therapy", are now illegal in most parts of Australia.

"We know now that people who've been exposed to this actually carry long-term psychological scars. It's very harmful," Dr Ravine said.

Despite being nearly 40 years old, the Kosky paper is regularly cited by opponents of gender-affirming care in submissions to lawmakers, courts and medical regulators around the world.

Even in Australia, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, has written a clinical guide on how doctors should care for gender diverse youth that also cites the paper.

Dr Ravine said that the study being used is "deeply troubling".

There are investors like the Wilsons all over Australia, who have built or bought disability homes where they are not needed, often under the guidance of property or investment advisers.

Property investment adviser Goro Gupta said part of the problem was that the NDIA — the agency that administers the policy — has not released clear data about where eligible people with a disability want to live.

That has meant many SDA houses have been constructed on the outskirts of capital and regional cities where the land is cheap.

"That's why, of course, the average investor wants to invest," Mr Gupta said.

At one estate in outer-western Melbourne, he was incredulous that so many houses for people with profound disabilities had been built.

"In these areas, there's a lack of amenities," he said.

"It's not close to shops, it's not close to the allied health services that people with disabilities need on a day-to-day basis.

"I mean, have a look at this area. It's paddocks."

For some investors who have overextended to build the homes, renting them out as a normal property is not an option because the returns are nowhere near enough to cover their mortgage repayments.

That means the homes are sitting empty in the hope that an eligible disability client will move in.

Some state governments were suspicious of the Commonwealth's desire to involve itself in housing supply, but the government still managed to secure their support to introduce a national scheme for subsidised rental housing.

The policy was less ambitious than housing reformers wanted, but it was better than nothing.

During the second reading debate on the legislation, a Labor MP from Tasmania, John Frank Gaha, told his parliamentary colleagues that he supported the CSHA "in its entirety". 

However, he said, he regretted the fact that constitutional limitations prevented the Commonwealth and states from taking a "wider view" of the role that housing played in the structure of the economy itself.

He said it made a huge difference to people's lives when they owned their own homes, especially in retirement.

He said it would be great if the government could devise a scheme to keep rents at a low level nationally, so some of the money that low-income families would otherwise spend on rent could be used to help them pay off a family home.

"In this way, we would make the average worker a capitalist; and that is our only solution to communism in this country," Dr Gaha said.

Anti-immigration rallies that have drawn out tens of thousands of Australians in capital cities are being secretly controlled by neo-Nazis – part of a co-ordinated “fraud on the public” experts say could become even more violent when they march again next month.

An investigation by this masthead can reveal how neo-Nazi leadership is using far-right influencers to sell the March for Australia rallies as a “spontaneous” groundswell of “everyday Australians”, while they stack crowds with plain clothes Nazis and send key members interstate to headline rallies. Some neo-Nazis have even donned yellow vests to act as official safety marshals in order to bring marches under the group’s control.

Leaked chatlogs, recordings and insider accounts tell the full story of how the March for Australia rallies grew out of a mysterious TikTok video in early August and descended into a day of chaos and violence across the country on August 31.

And they lay bare the strategy of Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, as they move to radicalise the right to their dangerous fascist ideology under the cloak of the Australian flag.

While the National Socialist Network might be “deluded in thinking they can get a Nazi elected”, researchers at the White Rose Society say “you just have to look at the way [some] mainstream conservatives” have latched onto the Shrine booing stunt, to question Welcome to Country ceremonies, “to get a preview of how a Nazi political campaign will be used to push the Overton window”, referring to efforts to bring extreme views into the mainstream.

Far from deflating their party launch, researcher Dr Kaz Ross expects the publicity from the stunt will boost it. “They’re eating One Nation’s lunch,” she said. “And they’re growing.”

First, by inking this deal, Coles frames itself as future-forward and logistically driven. Groceries and grocery-store labour become more data, just like the hedge funds, healthcare, or immigrants that other Palantir clients coordinate.

Supermarkets have been under fire over the past year for increasing profit margins through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, and accused of underpaying workers.

The Palantir deal continues this extractive trajectory. Rather than paying workers more or passing savings onto customers, Coles has chosen to invest millions in technology that will “address workforce-related spend” as part of a larger effort to cut costs by a billion dollars over the next four years. Food (and the labour needed to grow, pack and ship it) is transformed from a human need to an optimisation problem. 

Second, dependence. As my own research found, Palantir clients tend to enjoy the all-encompassing data and new features but also become dependent on them. Data mounts up; new servers are needed; licensing fees are high but must be paid.

Much like Apple or Amazon, Palantir’s services excel at creating “vendor lock-in”, a perfect walled garden which clients find hard to leave. This pattern suggests that, over the next three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to understand and manage its own business. A company that sells a quarter of Australia’s groceries may become operationally reliant on a US tech titan.

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.

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.

[…]

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”.

[…]

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.”