With recent economic uncertainty in remote Queensland communities due to both government and corporate service closures and restructuring of the farming industry, the Cloncurry Shire has had an 8% population decline over the past decade (Queensland Government, 2011c). This results in great difficulty to sustain services and business to the region (Victorian Government, 2007). Researchers suggest that limited entertainment, employment and education opportunities also result in people leaving the region (Victorian Government, 2007). With current social and economic difficulties within regional Queensland the result we see is an erosion of the sense of community in rural areas that has quite often been a source of protection against psychological distress (Rajkumar & Hoolahan, 2008). Ideally an economic study of the region might be undertaken to identify a potential new industry/s that might be created for the area for example there may be opportunity for a mining venture or an indigenous artefacts
It will be the sickest people who pay the most, no matter what you do on a user-pays basis. However, Federal Health Minister Peter Dutton continues to reaffirm that as our population ages and Australians need to pay for new technologies and new life-saving drugs, which Australia has a system that will continue to grow and strengthen into the future. There are overall effects, both positive and negative, of the $7 co-payment on the Australian economy and society. Such negative effects on the economy include the fall in share prices for healthcare companies. In the first week since budget night, Primary Health Care share prices fell 6%.
Chapter 8 Navigating Masculinities Across the Cultural Ditch: Tales from Māori Men in Australia Richard Pringle & Paul Whitinui Introduction Contemporary Australia is multiethnic yet the lucky country has not always induced good luck for its indigenous population or non-white settlers. More bluntly, Australia’s history of race relations can be regarded as shameful (MacLeod 2006). Colin Tatz (1999) reported, in relation to the United Nation’s definition of genocide, that policies adopted by both state and federal governments up until the 1970s constituted genocide against the Aboriginals. Australia’s official immigration policy prior to 1947 also aimed to keep its population white (MacLeod 2006) and, more recently,
Human rights groups stated that the United States was in violation of the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and President Bush was found to be in violation of the Refugee Act of 1980. But in spite of defining Haitians as economic relief seekers and not political refugees, the United States was allowed to maintain its deportation
Historically Institutional racism plays a major role in hindering the progress of Indigenous people. Institutional racism is addressed in the paper as a key factor in the social disadvantage and consecutive high unemployment rate amongst Indigenous Australians. Australia is privy to a history of wrongdoing against its Indigenous community. Andrew Armitage writes of the British invasion in 1788; ‘the land needed for the colony was obtained by an act of dispossession, assisted in British law by the convenient assumption that Australia was terra nullius (vacant, unoccupied land)’. The invasion was the cause of the ‘land wars’ that ensued and resulted in the massacre and decimation of the Aboriginal people (Armitage, 1995, p. 17).
It was a widely held belief that Indigenous people were an inferior race and would eventually die out. Many policies enacted on them had a greatly detrimental effect upon their cultural heritage. Policies such as the forced Indigenous people off the land and into government reserves, the assimilation policy tried to force Indigenous people to adopt a Western lifestyle by giving up their traditional lifestyle and beliefs. They were expected to live and act like ‘white Australians’ but were denied equal wages, work conditions and welfare benefits received by other Australians. Other policies attempted to ‘breed-out’ Indigenous Australians by pairing an Indiginous individual with a white partner.
In this instance it was in regards to Commonwealth Workplace Relations Amendment Act 2005 and how the states argued that it was impinging on their industrial and regulation making authorities and the exclusivity of the laws. The new act was in fact allowing the Commonwealth to exercise its corporation’s power. This was the main issue of challenge by the states which argued that the Amendment Act was industrial related whereas the corporation’s power concerned the foreign trading and financial activities of corporations. The ruling was in favour of the states whereby the High Court ruled that to validate the new act would have meant the curtailing of essential functions of the states. It would have also been in direct to the intentions of the founders of the Constitution to maintain a balance of power between the Commonwealth and the states.
ROMER v. EVANS (1996) In 1992, Colorado voters adopted Amendment 2 to their State Constitution preventing any level of government to take action designed to protect persons from discrimination based on their "homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships." In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court in 1996 concluded that the amendment violates the Equal Protection Clause because it imposes a disability on homosexuals without a legitimate state interest. The Court reasoned that the purpose of this Amendment “seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects,” thus lacking a rational relationship to legitimate state interests. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy argued that protection offered by
There are many such justifications in the literature of the day (Stone 1974, p. 46). Social inequality Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new problem appeared for white Australia; how to treat children of mixed race. From the perspective of Social Darwinism, full-blooded Aborigines were dismissed as destined for extinction and isolated to ‘stations’, but it was feared that those of mixed race ‘would breed up to become a social menace’ (Beresford & Omaji, p. 34). The Roth Royal Commission (Western Australia, 1905) also reflected this fear. If [they] are left to their own devices under the present state of the law, their future will be one of vagabondism and harlotry … and [they] will spend their lives in gaol or as prostitutes.
Plyler v. Doe is a revision to the Texas education law to withhold from local school districts state funds for educating children of illegal immigrants, together with Texas v. Certain Named and Unnamed Alien Child. The Supreme Court decided to deny this revision, their reasoning was that illegal immigrants and their children, are people "in any ordinary sense of the term" and, therefore, are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. By denying the children’s rights to education the state was being unconstitutional. Texas could not prove that the regulation was needed to serve a "compelling state interest," the Court struck down the law (Plyler v. Doe,