Young People
The Government That Cried Wolf
For as long as anyone can remember, the United States government has wallowed in fear mongering. Now there’s actually a real legitimate threat to the national health, and many people, especially the young, aren’t listening to warnings.
How do Australia’s young people want to live?
Something that Councils always ask about is what type of housing do people really want to live in, as opposed to what they are living in? There is often the suspicion that people are living in housing that is not their first choice, and that the market is not providing what households are truly looking for.
This is especially the case with young people. So I thought I’d start by having a look at how young people, those aged 18-24 years, in Australia are living. I can almost hear lots of you answering this question for yourselves – at home with mum and dad!
For this age group, that’s pretty much spot on. Across Australia, 55% of people aged 18 to 24 years are living with their parents or a guardian. This is generally due to many of them continuing into post school education and having lower incomes. However, this trend does differ between the states. In Northern Territory, 41% of young people live with their parents, compared to 60% in New South Wales.
Living arrangements of 18 to 24 year olds, Australia, 2016
Source: ABS Census of Population and Housing, 2016
How do those going it alone live?
For those who are living independently – as a couple, in a group household or lone person – the types of housing they live in may come as a bit of a surprise. Many people think that the majority of young people live in flats or apartments – however, this is not the case. Just over half of all young people living independently in Australia live in a separate dwelling, generally with 3 or 4 bedrooms. A further 30% live in apartments. Of course, there is likely to be geographic differences in this trend – in inner city areas, the proportion of young people living in apartments is likely to be much higher.
Housing consumption patterns of independent 18 to 24 year olds, Australia, 2016
Source: ABS Census of Population and Housing, 2016
It’s probably also worth noting at this point that just over two thirds of 18-24 year olds that live independently are renters. Again, this is likely due to their lower incomes, having just started in the workforce.
Is this what they truly want to be living in?
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute recently undertook the Australian Housing Aspirations survey with the goal of answering this question. The survey found that young people’s short term housing aspirations were more around location (being close to education and employment) and tenure security (not having to move after every 12 month lease), and not so much concerned about dwelling type or tenure type. Many of the quotes shared from survey respondents and follow up interviews gave the impression that young people were aware the trade-offs they were making. The survey also looked at long term housing aspirations of this age group, to which the majority of the respondents stated they would like to purchase a 3 bedroom, separate house. However, very few were actively planning for this future and were waiting to consolidate their careers and relationships.
While these sorts of insights are unfortunately not available at an LGA level, Australia wide surveys do shed some light on the types of aspirations young people living in your area may have. You can always find out more about how young people in your area are currently living. Interested? Check out the services on offer from our housing team.
Outrage as Iain Duncan Smith Given Knighthood
This is a really sick joke, and shows the absolute contempt the Tories have for the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the Tories welfare reforms, has been given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours. Smith is the pompous nonentity who was briefly the leader of the Tory party at the beginning of this century before David Cameron took over. It was a period of failure, in which the party utterly failed to challenge Blair’s Labour Party. He was, however, a close ally of his successor, and has also served Boris. He tried to stand up for Johnson when our farcical Prime Minister was denied the lectern in Luxembourg, claiming that the Luxembourgers should be grateful to us because we’d liberated them during the War. But we hadn’t. The Americans had. And under Tweezer he’d also peddled the line that there would be no legal divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
But what Smith is most notorious for is mass murder. As head of the Department of Work and Pensions, he was responsible for the welfare reforms, including the Work Capability Assessments and the system of benefit sanctions, that have seen hundreds of thousands denied the welfare payments they need and deserve. He is also responsible for Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments. UC is supposed to combine all the welfare payment into a single system. It has proven catastrophically flawed, with people waiting weeks or months for their payments, which have been significantly lower than the previous system. Mike in his article about it quotes statistics that some of those on UC are £1,000 a year worse off. But this jumped-up, odious little man boasted that Universal Credit would be as significant in lifting people out of poverty as the ending of slavery in the British Empire in 1837.
The result of IDS’ reforms is that at least 130,000 people have died. The true figures may well be higher, as the DWP has been extremely reluctant to release the true figures, as Mike and other disability campaigners have found. His attempts to get the Department to release them under the Freedom of Information Act were refused, then stonewalled. Finally Smith’s Department released some figures, but interpreted his requested so that they weren’t quite the figures Mike had requested.
As well as the financial hardship there is the feelings of despair and humiliation that his reforms have also inflicted on the poor. Doctors and mental health professionals have reported a rise in depression and suicide. The Tories, naturally, have repeatedly denied that their policies have any connection to people taking their own lives, even when the person left a note explicitly stating that this was why they were.
Some sense of the despair IDS’ wretched reforms has produced in young people is given by the quotes from them in Emma Bond and Simon Hallworth’s chapter, ‘The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People’ in Vickie Cooper’s and David Whyte’s The Violence of Austerity. ‘Julie’ said
The way that it feels walking into the JobCentre is that you are there to do what you are told to do and that’s it and then you leave. They are not there to actually help you it is just like, you have to do this and if you don’t do this or you won’t get no money. (p. 79).
And ‘Bridget’ described how she felt so low at one point she contemplated suicide.
I am ashamed to admit it but I did feel suicidal at one point. I felt so down after I was made redundant that I felt that there was no point. I had worked really hard at school and I got good grades but for what? I was happy when I got my job, it wasn’t that well paid but it had prospects and a career path – or so the recruitment agency told me – I had my flat and that and I thought I was OK. But when it [the redundancy] happened I felt like I had been hit by a brick wall. I got really down especially when I went to the JobCentre and they would not help me. I felt so depressed. I could not afford my rent. I lost my flat and the few things I had saved up for. I did not know where to turn. I took drugs for the first time in my life – I felt so wretched. I wanted to die. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I had lost my job. (p. 80).
But IDS, as Zelo Street reminds us, is the man who laughed at a woman talking about her poverty in parliament. He’s also blubbed on television, describing how he met a young woman, who didn’t believe she’d ever have a job. ‘She could have been my daughter!’ he wailed. But this is just crocodile tears. He, like the rest of the Tory party, have no love whatsoever for their victims as the guffaws with Dodgy Dave Cameron in Parliament showed.
Mike in his piece about the wretched man’s ennoblement has put up a large number of Tweets by ordinary people expressing their outrage. One woman, Samanthab, states how rotten the honours system is when it rewards not just IDS, but other creeps and lowlifes, like the sex abusers Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris.
The outrage is so great that one NHS psychiatrist, Dr Mona Kamal Ahmad, has launched an online petition at Change.Org calling for the scumbag’s knighthood to be withdrawn. She describes him as responsible for some of the cruellest welfare reforms this country has ever seen and notes that Britain is the first country the United Nations has investigated for human rights abuses against the disabled. She states clearly that the suffering and impoverishment in Britain today is a direct result of Smith’s welfare reforms.
30,000 people, including myself, have already signed it. If you want to too, go to Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/28/will-you-sign-nhs-doctors-petition-to-stop-iain-duncan-smith-receiving-knighthood/ and follow the links.
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/12/arise-sir-duncan-cough.html
Yes, the Tories Are Introducing Voter ID to Stop People Voting Labour
More dirty tricks from the party that’s incapable of doing anything fair and honourably. On Monday Mike published a piece stating that Johnson, on page 48 of his wretched manifesto, has promised to introduced legislation demanding that people carry photographic ID when voting. This is, allegedly, to prevent voting fraud, despite the fact that it’s vanishingly rare. But in a pilot project earlier this year 800 genuine voters were turned away from the polling station. Mike also reported that critics had also pointed out that Johnson was ignoring genuine threats to democracy such as anonymous political ads, dubious donations and fake news. He concluded
‘It seems that, while claiming to be improving democracy, Mr Johnson is in fact trying to, badly, limit it.’
Voter ID: ‘protecting the integrity of democracy’ – or just stopping plebs from voting?
Mike is here, as usual, absolutely correct. This seems to be another wretched policy Johnson and the Tories have copied from the Republicans over the other side of the Pond. They introduced similar legislation a few years ago on the same pretext. In fact American left-wing news sites reported that it was deliberately designed to prevent the Democrats winning elections by excluding their supporters from voting. These laws typically affect the young, especially students, the poor and ethnic minorities, who form a large part of the Democrat voter base. Over here, they comprise part of the Labour party’s voting base. And one Republican politico in one of the southern states was actually honest about this gerrymandering. When asked why his party was doing this, he actually admitted that it was about stopping the Democrats. But we obviously can’t expect such honesty from the Tory party.
So Mike’s right. This is all about trying turn away Labour voters and nothing to do with stopping voting fraud.
Because so much of that comes from and benefits the Tories.
Book on Austerity as State Violence
The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, eds. (London: Pluto Press 2017).
Okay, I realise that this isn’t the kind of book most of us would choose to read at Christmas. We’d rather have something a bit more full of seasonal good cheer. I also realise that as it published nearly three years ago in 2017, it’s somewhat dated. But it, and books like it, are needed and still extremely topical now than 14 million people have been duped into electing Old Etonian Tory Boris Johnson.
I found the book in one of the many excellent secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. I was particularly drawn to it because of its title, and the titles of the chapters it contains. It’s a collection of papers describing the Tories’ attack on the poor, the disabled, the marginalised, the unemployed, homeless and BAME communities, and particularly women of colour, as forms of violence. This isn’t mere hyperbole. The book discusses real instances of violence by the state and its officials, as well as landlords and private corporations and individuals. Mike in his articles on the Tories’ wretched benefits sanctions has argued time and again that this is a form of state violence against the disabled, and that it constitutes genocide through the sheer scale of the deaths it has caused: 130,000 at a conservative estimate. It’s therefore extremely interesting that others attacking and campaigning against austerity share the same view. The blurb for the book runs
Austerity, the government’s response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain. Thius books brings together campaigners and writers including Danny Dorling, Mary O’Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that austerity is a form of systematic violence.
Covering notorious cases of institutional violence, including workfare, fracking and mental health scandals, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, community violence and cuts to the regulation of the social protection are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking exposes of the ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.
One of the editors, Vickie Cooper, is a lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University, while the other, David Whyte, is professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is also the editor of How Corrupt Is Britain, another scathing look at the UK under the Tories.
The book’s introduction by the editors is on the violence of austerity. After that it is divided into four sections, each on different aspects of austerity and its maltreatment of the poor.
Part 1, ‘Deadly Welfare’, contains the following chapters
- Mental Health and Suicide, by Mary O’Hara
- Austerity and Mortality, by Danny Dorling
- Welfare Reforms and the Attack on Disabled People, by John Pring
- The Violence of Workfare by Jon Burnett and David Whyte
- The Multiple Forms of Violence in the Asylum System by Victoria Canning
- The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People, by Emma Bond and Simon Hallsworth.
Part II, ‘Poverty Amplification’, has these
7. Child Maltreatment and Child Mortality, by Joanna Mack
8. Hunger and Food Poverty, by Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton
9. The Deadly Impact of Fuel Poverty, by Ruth London
10. The Violence of the Debtfare State, by David Ellis
11. Women of Colour’s Anti-Austerity Activism, by Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel
12. Dismantling the Irish Peace Process, by Daniel Holder
Part III, ‘State Regulation’, includes
13. Undoing State Protection, by Steve Tombs
14. Health and Safety at the Frontline of Austerity, by Hilda Palmer and David Whyte
15. Environmental Degradation, by Charlotte Burns and Paul Tobin
16. Fracking and State Violence, by Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore
17. Domicide, Eviction and Repossession, by Kirsteen Paton and Vickie Cooper
18. Austerity’s Impact on Rough Sleeping and Violence, by Daniel McCulloch.
Part IV, ‘State Control’, has these chapters
19. Legalising the Violence of Austerity, by Robert Knox
20. The Failure to Protect Women in the Criminal Justice System, by Maureen Mansfield and Vickie Cooper
21. Austerity, Violence and Prisons, by Joe Sim
22. Evicting Manchester’s Street Homeless, by Steven Speed
23. Policing Anti-Austerity through the ‘War on Terror’ by Rizwaan Sabir
24. Austerity and the Production of Hate, by Jon Burnett.
These are all subjects that left-wing blogs like Vox Political, Another Angry Voice, Pride’s Purge have all covered and discussed. The last chapter, ‘Austerity and the Production of Hate’, is on a subject that Mike’s discussed several times in Vox Political: the way the Tory press and media justifies the savage attacks on the poor and disabled through stirring up hatred against them. Mike has published several articles on the way Tory propaganda has resulted in vicious attacks on the poor, particularly the homeless.
This violence and campaign of hatred isn’t going to stop after Boris’ victory, and his appeal for healing after the election is just rhetoric. He doesn’t want healing, he wants compliance and complacency. He doesn’t deserve them, and should not be given any, because from now on he and his party will only step up the attacks.
Don’t be taken in by establishment lies. Keep working to get him out!