2007 Challenge

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The Earthsharing Challenge Camp Take 2

An action packed weekend learning the current issues from people who live with them daily. Record these stories on camera and let’s make it into our very own documentary!

Participants Attending the Camp:
• Approximately 20 students will be chosen.
• Students from years 8 to year 11 can apply.
• All students will undergo a free film training day in the Melbourne CBD before attending the camp.

What Will Happen on the Camp?
The weekend will involve a tour of Anglesea’s environmentally significant sites and people. The issues will include forestry, water and waste.

The Modern Juggernaut

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Taken from The Beacon, Nov 1st, 1893 (Melbourne)

Juggernaut was a god of India, a monsterous idol, whose huge nostrils loved the scent of the blood of human sacrifice.

When his great chariot was rolled through the streets, men and women in adoration flung themselves beneath its wheels and were gloriously crushed to death.

While the victims thought to gain thereby eternal joys and a paradise of indolent repose, their shrieks and groans sounded sweet in the great god’s ears, or, rather, in those of the fat priests who tended him, and who leered horribly at one another, knowing that such mad self-immolation assured them in their bloody offices. For it was the priests that fostered the worship of the beastial image, since to them fell the stripping of the slain and the toil-won offerings of superstitious devotees.

Make Poverty History

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We will never make poverty history until we rip up the tax system

Mark Braund, Saturday December 3, 2005 The Guardian

Despite the prime minister’s resolve, the year in which Britain was to lead the world in making poverty history has achieved little. This month there is one last opportunity as the World Trade Organisation gathers in Hong Kong. But even if this meeting throws up some surprises, we will end the year little closer to ending poverty. Increased aid, debt cancellation and fairer trade would certainly have some impact, but they would not address the underlying causes of poverty.

IR Reform: Unmentionable Barriers to Job Creation

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IR Reform: Unmentionable Barriers to Job Creation

The Howard government’s industrial relations agenda is supposedly about job-creation, as if the cost of labour — including wages and salaries, penalty rates and other perks, and the difficulty of reversing bad hiring decisions — were the last remaining barrier to full employment.

Sorry that we have to state the bleeding obvious, but:

* Jobs cannot be created unless the employer can pay the rent or mortgage on the business premises out of the proceeds of the business; and

* Jobs cannot be created unless the workers can pay the rent or mortgage on housing within commuting distance of those jobs, out of wages that the employer can pay out of the proceeds of the business.

Please Explain, Mr Brumby

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By Lev Lafayette.

Derived from the presentation at the Hume Global Learning Centre, June 28, 2006

Introduction

Tonight I am representing Prosper Australia, an organisation which has, in various guises, been a part of Victoria for over one hundred years. One key objective of the organisation is the reduction, as much as possible of taxes on labour and capital, and for public finances to be derived instead from site rental. Because when it comes down to it, there are only two sources for public revenue; the goods and services which are produced or the resources that are used.

The idea of public financing through site rental was extremely popular in the early days of Australia, supported by both the Liberal Party of Alfred Deakin and his Labor opponent Andrew Fisher. Indeed Alfred Deakin illustrated the case quite succinctly when he said;