20 September 2019 Student Strike 4 Climate in the NSW Northern Rivers

On 20 September 2019 at gatherings large and small across Australia during the Global Climate Strike  in excess of an estimated 300,000 people met to protest government and industry inaction in the face of global climate change.

Approximately 268,500 of these people participated in all eight capital cities.

Incredible pictures as Australia’s gathering for the #climatestrike
This is the huge crowd building up in Sydney.
Australia is setting the standard!
Its bedtime in New York...so please share as many pictures as you can as the strikes move across Asia to Europe and Africa! pic.twitter.com/7eAPUQPq5C

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 20, 2019

Protests were reportedly also held at another 104 cities, towns and villages.

Echo NetDaily estimates close to 6,000 students and supporters participated in Byron Bay, 3,400 in Lismore and 1,580 in Pottsville.

In Grafton 200 people listened to stern words directed at prime minister and parliament.......

The Daily Examiner, 21 September 2019, p.3:

With more than 200 people marching down Prince St, it would be hard to deny something is building.

Supported by a sizeable contingent of adults, students in the School Strike 4 Climate marched through the Grafton CBD to protest inaction on climate change.

In a rousing speech in Market Square, strike leader and Year 12 student Shiann Broderick called out Prime Minister Scott Morrison and said a select few were benefiting from coal projects that were “sacrificing our future”.

Ms Broderick sent a clear message students would not be backing down after Mr Morrison and others in the community had earlier criticised the strikes. “We will not restrict our activism to out-of-school hours because this is the only way to make you listen,” she said.

“You are unhappy that we are not at school but I would be at school today if I didn’t have to teach you how to do your job.

“You say you don’t support schools being turned into parliaments but I think we should turn the parliament into a school since you so obviously need educating.”

With the crowd buzzing, Grafton High student Oskar Robertson said he was “sick and tired” of not having a say in decisions affecting his future and was “tired of old men in suits deciding on things that won’t even affect them”.

He too urged the crowd to keep up the fight against those who continued to “pass up our future for money”.

“If they don’t heed our demands and pass us off as some dumb kids trying to get off school for the day, we will shout so loud we will rock Parliament House to its foundations,” he said.

“We don’t want dirty coal and gas, we want clean energy that won’t poison our lungs and the lungs of the earth, that won’t send us hurtling towards an extinction event.”.......

Bushfire forces temporary part closure of Yuraygir National Park in the Clarence Valley

Department of Planning, Industry and Environment & NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, media release, 18 September 2019: 

Bushfire forces temporary part closure of Yuraygir National Park

Following last week's destructive bushfires part of the Yuraygir National Park, including a section of the iconic Yuraygir Coastal Walk are temporarily closed. 

A National Parks and Wildlife Services spokesperson said 6600 hectares of private property and 4000 hectares of Yuraygir National Park burned in the Shark Creek 2 fire. 

"The walking track from Mara Creek Picnic Area, just south of Angourie to Lake Arragan is closed while the site is being managed," the spokesperson said. 

"Mara Creek Picnic Area and Shelley Headland Camping Areas are also closed. 

"The rest of the Yuraygir Coastal Walk, from Lake Arragan to Red Rock remains open. 

"Angourie Bay Picnic Area and all other visitor areas within Yuraygir National Park are still accessible to the public." 

"Unfortunately, the fire damage extended to the toilets, a bridge, numerous elevated walkways, signs, picnic tables, seating, fencing, bollards, staircases and drainage structures across the park," the spokesperson said. 

"NPWS will continue to assess the damage and address safety hazards including burnt structures and trees as a priority. 

"We're urging the public to put safety first and to be patient until works to repair damage commence. 

"The damage is significant and will take some time to restore. 

"In the meantime, we're investigating temporary solutions to allow the public access to the park. 

We will keep everyone informed of these decisions once they are made."

"We'd like to acknowledge the work of the NPWS and RFS (Rural Fire Service) crews who worked tirelessly with significant support from dozers and aircraft to contain the fire."

ENDS

Are some homeless people being denied access to affordable housing in Australia also?

It would be foolish in today's political environment - and with society seemingly drifting mindlessly further to the right each decade - to reject the propostion outright that this would not be occurring somewhere in Australia today.......

The Guardian, 17 September 2019:

Homeless people are being denied access to affordable housing because social landlords are routinely excluding prospective tenants who are deemed too poor or vulnerable to pay the rent, a study has revealed.

Research by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) found that “screening out” of homeless applicants nominated for newly available lets was widespread, as housing associations and local authorities increasingly ration their shrinking stocks of social homes.

In many cases nominees were refused a home because of the likelihood they would accrue major rent arrears after moving on to universal credit, because of the probability they would be hit by the bedroom tax or because the benefit cap had made them a financial risk.

Others were rejected after social landlords identified they had unmet mental health or addiction problems, often because of cuts to local NHS and housing support services. Individuals with unmet support needs were regarded as “too high a risk to tenancy sustainment”, the CIH said.

Homeless people were at risk of being caught in a “catch-22 scenario”, the CIH said, with some landlords’ letting practices creating a “perverse situation where the reasons why people may need access to social homes the most can often become barriers to accessing them”.

Some housing associations demanded that prospective tenants who would be moving on to universal credit pay a month’s rent up front, an impossible requirement for many homeless people. Landlords have been badly hit by rent arrears caused by tenants’ five-week wait for a first universal credit payment.

Faye Greaves, the CIH policy and practice officer, who wrote the report, said: “For decades, we have failed to build enough homes, and our welfare safety net is no longer fit for purpose. More and more people are turning to local authorities and housing associations for help to access social housing.

“But that leaves housing providers having to find a balance between people in acute need, local priorities and their need to develop sustainable tenancies. What we found is that relying solely on processes can end up having the opposite effect to that intended.”

It called on ministers to launch a major social housing building programme and scrap right to buy. There has been a net loss of 165,000 social homes in England since 2012, the CIH estimates. It adds that 90,000 of the 340,000 new homes needed every year should be set at social rent. In 2017-18 only 6,434 homes were built for social rent.

The findings will concern critics who believe some housing associations are becoming increasingly estranged from their charitable mission to house homeless people. Many were set up in the late 1960s on a wave of public outrage over growing homelessness typified by the famous BBC drama Cathy Come Home.

Jon Sparkes, the chief executive of Crisis, called for proper scrutiny of social landlords’ letting practices: “Having a safe and stable home is a human need, and this report paints a sorry picture of the difficulties that people who are homeless, or who are at risk of becoming homeless, face in accessing this basic right.”

Pre-tenancy screening is causing tension between housing associations, which want to minimise the damage to their balance sheet of taking on tenants at risk of rent arrears, and councils, which want to exercise their right to nominate social tenancies to reduce growing numbers of homeless people on their books.

The research did not ask what happens to homeless people who are refused social tenancies but the assumption is that most will continue to be housed in high-cost and often unsuitable temporary accommodation in the private sector. Local authorities in England spend nearly £1bn a year on temporary accommodation.

In recent years cuts to government grant funding have meant housing associations have adopted more commercial, profit-orientated approaches, resulting in some being accused of concentrating on building homes for private sale and “affordable rent” at the expense of the people they were set up to help.

The National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations, said its members were committed to providing homes for those most in need and on the lowest incomes but action was needed to reverse the “dire shortage of social rented housing caused by decades of underinvestment”.

David Bogle of Homes for Cathy, a group of housing associations dedicated to restoring the sector’s commitment to ending homelessness, welcomed the report. “Housing associations and local authorities need to be given additional support to develop new social homes and to allocate those homes to those who are homeless and in greatest need.”......

Report: CIH: put people before process when allocating social housing, 17/09/2019

Thought of the Week

If you combine photos of Australian political players Joyce, Abbott, Dutton and McCormack in a soup pan you have the makings of a simple borscht - beetroot, onion, potato and dill. [Anon]

Quote of the Week

"NSW is experiencing one of the most severe droughts on record, with the Central West, Far West and North West regions the worst affected to date. There have been extreme low inflows (the amount of water entering the river and its storages) – the past six months have seen the lowest recorded inflows in history. ..... Without imminent inflows, the lack of water will continue to impact water quality and the riverine environment, while curtailing agricultural production."  [WaterNSW, Regional Drought Information, August 2019]

At last, a class action to be mounted against Morrison Government's error-prone 'robodebt'

If any of the following applies to you and you are considering joining this class action challenge on behalf of Centrelink clients who were served with a debt notice, the following are first contact details for the law firm which may act for you if you are eligible:

Gordon Legal
Ph: 1300 55 50 16

Informaton at https://gordonlegal.com.au/robodebt-class-action/ Online contact form at https://gordonlegal.com.au/contact

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Guardian, 17 September 2019:

Gordon Legal has put out its official statement on the class action: 

"The law firm will challenge, on behalf of affected persons, the government’s use of a flawed calculation system by Centrelink to unlawfully take back tens of millions of dollars from many thousands of Centrelink recipients, including pensioners. 

The money for pensioners, carers, widows, students, farmers and unemployed people was taken from them due to a one-size-fits-all online compliance system. 

The robodebt scheme has been in place since mid-2016, its legality was first raised with us by the new shadow minister for government services, Bill Shorten. 

The basis for the challenge is that that the federal government financially benefited when it wrongfully took and banked money that legitimately belonged to recipients. 

Gordon Legal Senior Partner Peter Gordon says ‘investigations reveal between two to three hundred million dollars have been wrongly taken from people, and making it even worse was many were hit with penalties of 10% on those amounts.’ 

‘These people are the least able groups to afford the heavy-handed actions which are based on a system that used ATO averages that didn’t take into account individual circumstances.’ 

‘The unfair and incorrect assumptions had a devastating financial impact on people’s lives. The emotional distress for people who have done nothing wrong has been high.’ 

‘The robodebt system put debt collectors onto innocent people to chase unlawful debts.’ 

‘They have been unfairly financially disadvantaged and must be repaid with interest, penalties dropped and damages paid.’ 

‘The amounts owed will vary from case to case but the average repayments could be a few thousand dollars which is vital from a financial and wellbeing perspective for these people who are least able to afford it.’

Peter Gordon says ‘The people in this class action were not gaming the system. They had honest claims to payments and allowances that Robodebt wrongly assessed, penalised and pursued with harsh consequences.’ 

‘If you have been unfairly affected by Robodebt, you should register your details on the Gordon Legal website and we will be in touch.’ 

Gordon Legal considers a class action is likely to be the best way to deliver redress for people unfairly impacted by Robodebt." [my yellow highlighting]

Peter Gordon: 

"The class action element of the claim is reasonably straightforward. What is innovative about this is to bring a claim against the government for damages for unjust enrichment that will require the high court to recognise legal principles, which I hardly recognised in other common law countries, particularly the United Kingdom. It may break new ground. We think there … is a strong legal basis for it. 

In order for a class action to proceed, either in a state court or the federal jurisdiction, you need to demonstrate that there appear to be several more people who have claims with similar or the same common issues in the fact of law, and there are clearly a large number of people who have similar issues of fact and of law. 

So the question of its status as a class action is not particularly controversial. Under class-action law, not every case needs to be exactly the same. They only have to be roughly similar. Not every case needs to be bound to succeed. You simply need to demonstrate that there are cases that have similar issues that the court can resolve for the benefit of everybody. 

Everyone who believes they are aggrieved is entitled to bring their own actions, whether they are in the ART or as appropriately advised. We are working with the legal aid agencies, but it doesn’t take, I think, a lot of consideration of what has happened to understand that if a template approach has been applied across 800,000 people, and there are admittedly, on the part of the government, 150,000 errors that have been made, that’s a very large number of mistakes which have been made. If they’ve been made, there is a limit to the ability of any court system and indeed bureaucracy to take them off one by one. 

We think it’s appropriate that if there are common issues that have been got wrong by the Commonwealth, that they be addressed in a way that gives everyone release, not just those who are able to access lawyers and legal aid or have the wherewithal all the records to be able to do it themselves."

Bill Shorten: 

" Let’s be clear, we’ve asked the government to fix this, but they’ve got it wrong. If the government through parliament won’t fix the problem, I think giving justice to victims through class action is a legitimate political approach to take. 

Question: Should the program then in your view be suspended while this class action is even being looked at? 

That would be smart for them to suspend it. The question you have to ask is why is the government looking at a blanket scheme looking at annual wages data against people getting fortnightly payments? 

They are hoping they can shake down people into paying up. This is a government building their government position based on this faulty, immoral and quite possibly illegal scheme, but they should suspend it and rule out extending it to anyone else, and in fact they should revisit their own files and perhaps sit down and work out why this is wrong and stop it. 

The government keeps reaching for blaming Labor pre-2013. Robodebt, this online compliance system, was introduced by the current government. 

The current government announced compliance campaigns in 2015, 2016, and they started introducing robodebt, their use of an algorithm to data match. 

It was born under this government and the pathology of robodebt is sick, it has caused countless harm. I give a shoutout to the media, you’ve all covered the problems of robodebt, but at what point in Australia do you say once you’ve seen individual case after individual case it is called a pattern, and the pattern shows robodebt is immoral itself. 

What we and Gordon Legal is going to do is testing the legal foundations of robodebt, because my own research in the last couple of months has led me to believe it is almost certainly illegal and I just have to do research through the stories you’ve covered to say there is a sickness at the heart of robodebt which needs to be cured."