More civilian deaths due to armed conflict were recorded in 2023 than for more than a decade, according to Action on Armed Conflict. Doctors in Gaza coined the devastating new term WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family) at the end of that year to categorise many of the victims of Israel’s genocide.
For the people of Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan and many other regions of the world, the price of war is incalculable. For the weapons industry, it’s $52 billion.
That’s how much the top fifteen defence contractors are expected to earn in 2026, according to analysis by Vertical Research Partners for the Financial Times. Like all good entrepreneurs, they know never to waste a good crisis.
Lockheed Martin—suppliers of the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets that Israel uses to drop bombs on Gaza—increased its profits to $8.5 billion in 2023. CEO James Taiclet is proud of his community spirit. In 2021 he told reporters, “There’s no better way to get a tighter bond with an ally than to sell them jet fighter aircraft”.
RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) made a profit of $12 billion in 2023, thanks in no small part to increased demand for the bombs and missiles it sells to the Israeli military. Like all good corporate minds, RTX CEO Greg Hayes is always thinking ahead. “Peace is not going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon”, he said in 2021. “I think it remains an area where we’ll continue to see solid growth.”
Solid growth in death translates to solid growth in defence industry profits. The fact that an industry as fundamentally anti-human as the weapons industry is allowed to exist, let alone thrive, tells you everything you need to know about the moral compass of capitalism.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who calculate the risk of human-caused apocalypse with the Doomsday Clock, say we’re closer to midnight than ever before. Defence industry profits are also higher than ever. 
Sixty years ago, as the Cold War nuclear arms race heated up, Bob Dylan described defence industry leaders as “masters of war”. The relevance of his lyrics, sadly, hasn’t aged:
You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
…
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

Lucas Brunning-Halsall

Defence industry profits soar as death and destruction increase

Way back in 1979, Lewis Lehr, the CEO of American corporation 3M, met with an expert on toxic chemicals. A mysterious set of chemicals produced by 3M had been found in the blood of people across the US.
The toxicologist told Lehr that, when tested on animals, exposure to the chemicals resulted in symptoms consistent with cancer. Instead of reporting this information to the authorities, 3M wiped it from the minutes of the meeting.
So began one of the most sinister and deadly corporate cover-ups in history, laid bare in the new Stan documentary Revealed: How to Poison a Planet.
Nearly 50 years after that fateful meeting, PFAS, known as forever chemicals because they do not break down naturally, are in nearly everything—and everyone. They occur in a range of household items as varied as non-stick cookware, cleaning products, make-up and rain jackets. Tap water across Australia contains unsafe levels of PFAS. The chemicals were detected in every study of umbilical cord blood in the last five years.
In 1998, the head toxicologist at 3M estimated that a safe level of PFAS in human blood is about one part per billion. The average American’s blood has not double, not triple, but 30 times that amount.
Media coverage of the health ramifications of PFAS is growing, for good reason. The list of afflictions linked to the chemicals is long and expanding.
A 2019 study commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers estimated that more than 15 million Europeans are affected by illnesses caused by PFAS exposure. It also predicted that high blood pressure caused by PFAS could be responsible for the deaths of up to 10,000 Europeans each year.
Researchers from the University of Michigan found in a 2023 study that women with high levels of exposure to certain PFAS chemicals had twice the chance of developing melanoma.
While today’s scientists are just scratching the surface, the CEOs of 3M and the other major producer DuPont knew about the dangers decades ago. But the chemicals were key to their most profitable products, so in keeping with the tradition of many a mighty corporate empire, they chose a systematic cover-up over telling the truth.
As early as 1970, researchers for DuPont found that some PFAS were “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested”. Again, the company said nothing and continued to produce the chemicals. 
In the late 1970s, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose of PFAS—less than most people consume today—administered to monkeys could kill them within weeks. This would put the chemicals in the highest of five toxicity categories recognised by the United Nations. Again, the company said nothing while ramping up production.
In fact, 90 percent of PFAS have been produced in the time since 3M and DuPont knew how dangerous the chemicals are.
Actor Mark Ruffalo raises the sharpest political question of the documentary. Putting toxic chemicals into popular products was not an accident but a conscious “decision made by people”, he notes. “You can’t help but ask—what kind of people do that?”
“Evil people”, he later concludes. He’s not wrong. 
But he’s not referring to evil people like drug dealers who get thrown in jail for distributing toxic products. He’s talking about the evil people who get multimillion-dollar salaries and an obituary in the Wall Street Journal.
The leaders of 3M poisoned the planet because it made them money. They played by the rules of the capitalist game—profit before all else—and were rewarded massively for it. 
3M has not been raided by police, nor have its leaders been thrown into jail. Instead, it is a Fortune 500 company with an estimated net worth of $58 billion. Forbes
ranked it as one of “America’s most just companies” in 2021, based on “issues relating to giving back to their communities”.
PFAS are just one of the many ways in which capitalism’s relentless drive for profits is poisoning the planet and all those who live on it. The only “just” solution to this disaster is for every complicit corporate executive to be stripped of their wealth and power.

How a giant corporate cover-up poisoned the planet—and everyone on it

From nuclear submarines and high-profile defence pacts to politicians fawning over “our best friends”, the Australian government’s support for US empire is far from secret. But the single most important contribution Australia makes to the alliance is much more opaque.
The Pine Gap defence facility is located eighteen kilometres south-west of Alice Springs. Launched by a US-Australia treaty in 1966, it is home to more than 30 radio domes and antenna systems. The facility is primarily managed by American intelligence organisations the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), and it has around 800 employees, half of whom are Australian.
That’s about as much as either government has ever publicly disclosed about Pine Gap. 
Approaching the facility will get you arrested, fined and potentially jailed. Only twice have people been charged under the Defence Special Undertaking Act 1952, a draconian piece of Cold War legislation that carries a jail sentence of up to seven years and requires the approval of the attorney-general to be invoked. Both times were against activists protesting at Pine Gap.
Almost everything we know about Pine Gap comes from whistleblowers and military experts. 
The basics of its operations are as follows. Satellites operated out of Pine Gap are positioned across the Eastern Hemisphere, particularly within range of China, Russia and the Middle East. They intercept a vast range of signals: phone calls, radio waves, heat generated by missile launches and more. Pine Gap decodes the signals and turns them into intelligence, allowing the US and Australia to spy on their current and potential enemies and plan military operations.
For more than 50 years, Pine Gap has been an indispensable cog in the Western military machine, “perhaps the most important United States intelligence facility outside that country”, according to expert Richard Tanter. 
Pine Gap was key to US nuclear war planning during the Cold War. Intelligence from the base was used for the carpet bombing of Cambodia, which killed hundreds of thousands of people during the Vietnam War. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed Pine Gap was at the heart of America’s drone strike campaigns in Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa. 
The base has also been an important source of information for Israel. In 1973, Pine Gap intelligence helped Israel make key military breakthroughs in its war with a coalition of Arab states. David Rosenberg, a former high-ranking employee of the NSA who worked at Pine Gap for eighteen years, told Declassified Australia in November, “Pine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel”.
We will never know how many Palestinians, Cambodians, Pakistanis and others had their death warrants written in the Northern Territory desert.
While it has already contributed much to American military dominance, Pine Gap could play an even greater role in a future war with China. The site is central to Western surveillance of China, according to Richard Dearlove, a former British spy chief. Its location and technical capabilities make it an unparalleled asset for any Western assault in East Asia.
Some critics of Pine Gap see it as an example of Australia being duped by the US—there are even rooms that Australians can’t enter! 
“Do they realise how much of our sovereignty we have passed on to the US with Pine Gap?”, railed former diplomat Bruce Haigh in 2020. “What are we doing? What have we been conned into?”
But Australia’s rulers know exactly what they’re doing; Pine Gap plays an important role in strengthening Australian imperialism.
For one, the facility is undoubtedly used to aid Australia’s own foreign interests and interventions. This country is no stranger to spying. For example, in 2004, Australia bugged the offices of the East Timorese prime minister while negotiating over oil and gas deposits. It’s not hard to see how access to the best military intelligence technology in the world could be of use to the politicians and generals in Canberra.
More importantly, Pine Gap has integrated Australia into the network of US military power that dominates the Asia-Pacific. Australian leaders recognise that being intertwined with the world’s greatest superpower helps to boost their own economic, political and military weight through association. Hosting Pine Gap is probably the most significant leverage Australia has within the alliance. 
But what’s good for the Australian ruling class is life-threatening for the rest of us. Pine Gap could become a key target for China or another power at war with the US, dragging that conflict to the Northern Territory.
Politicians have long been aware of this threat. A 1980 report commissioned by the Fraser government found that in the event of a war with the USSR, “nuclear attacks on [the Pine Gap] facilities would probably occur”. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley admitted in 1996, “[W]e accepted that the joint facilities were probably targets, but we accepted the risk of that for what we saw as the benefits of global stability”.
Pine Gap is one of Australia’s leading monuments to those great Western values: secrecy, terror and war. It should be torn to the ground.

Pine Gap: Australia’s secret and deadly weapon

In a hotel near Potsdam, two dozen far-right politicians, fascist activists and wealthy supporters met to discuss a “masterplan” for mass “remigration”. In their scheme, millions of asylum seekers, migrants and “non-assimilated” German citizens would be forced out of the country, some relocated to a proposed new territory in North Africa. This is not an anecdote from the rise of fascism in the 1930s, but the revelations of an investigative report by German newsroom Correctiv.
Central to the secret meeting were leading figures from Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). Formed in 2013, AfD has become the most successful far-right party in Germany since the Nazis. Stoking anti-migrant and anti-Muslim racism has been key to its success. In response to Correctiv’s report, a leading AfD politician declared: “Remigration is not a secret plan—it’s a promise”. 
While AfD formally rejects Nazism, party activists have well-documented ties with fascist groups. For example, a former AfD parliamentarian was arrested in 2022 for aiding a planned coup attempt by a far-right movement.
In the last year, AfD has become the second most popular party in Germany. It polls ahead of every party in the current coalition government, comprised of the Social Democrats, Greens and centre-right Free Democrats. In the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, which each hold elections later this year, AfD is on track to become the biggest party. 
The current government has ruled over a historic decline in living standards. Rent is so unaffordable that a camping site in Munich recently offered concession rates for homeless students. Prime Minister Olaf Scholz has delivered little meaningful cost-of-living relief and he told mortgage holders late last year that they shouldn’t complain about rising interest rates.
But when corporate profits are suffering, the government has plenty of empathy. Scholz spent more than €50 billion bailing out energy giants Uniper and Siemens. The government has also pumped cash into reviving German military power.
Unsurprisingly, all this has made the coalition deeply unpopular and allowed AfD to position itself as the “anti-elite” choice. In echoes of President Joe Biden’s America, the political establishment, unable to offer an attractive alternative to the far right, has resorted to calling on the courts to ban the AfD. This is unlikely to be successful, but the strategy risks boosting the AfD’s anti-establishment credibility. It could also set a dangerous political precedent in a country that is already repressive against left-wing activism.
Yet there is an alternative. Since mid-January, hundreds of thousands of Germans have joined weekly mass demonstrations in a powerful show of opposition to AfD. It has become the biggest German protest movement since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While it’s too early to say whether it can push back the far right, there are some encouraging signs. AfD suffered a surprising defeat in a local election in eastern Germany, while the party has dipped below 20 percent in opinion polling for the first time in months. 
Germany is not alone in its rise of the far-right. This is the new normal across Europe.
“The Netherlands will be returned to the Dutch—the asylum tsunami and migration will be curbed.” So promised Geert Wilders, long-time figure of the European far right and now leader of the biggest party in the Dutch parliament, after last November’s elections.
For two and a half decades, Wilders has built his brand as a rabid anti-Islam campaigner. Despite naming the parliamentary group he started in 2006 the Party for Freedom (PVV), Wilders calls for shutting down mosques and banning the Koran. He says that migration from Muslim-majority countries should be stopped, all asylum seeker claims should be rejected and Muslim immigrants should be paid to leave the country. He was convicted for discrimination in 2016 after leading a chant demanding “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands.
Due to the peculiarities of the Dutch electoral system, Wilders is still negotiating with other parties to form a coalition government. The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)—the conservative party leading the outgoing government—has suggested it might support a Wilders-led administration.
Like AfD, Wilders’ PVV benefitted from the cost-of-living crisis and the unpopularity of the mainstream parties.
Wilders offered seemingly simple explanations and solutions for the crisis. Housing is unaffordable? There are too many migrants. You don’t get enough welfare? There are too many migrants. The healthcare system is in crisis? “The treatments of ‘Henk and Ingrid’ are being postponed because [hospital] beds are occupied by ‘Mohamed and Fatima’”, Wilders once said on social media.
The conservatives attempted to capture the anti-migrant vote by taking an increasingly hardline approach. Ex-Prime Minister Rutte split his coalition government and triggered new elections by trying to force through tougher immigration restrictions. Under new leader Dilan Yesilgoz, a Turkish-Kurdish refugee, the conservatives ran a tough-on-migration campaign, summed up by the title of their election manifesto: “Make Space, Set Boundaries”.
The strategy backfired. It escalated anti-migrant sentiment, gave confidence to racists and made the positions of the far right, once consigned to the fringe of Dutch politics, seem legitimate. Predictably, Wilders, the symbol of anti-migration politics in the Netherlands, got a massive boost. In the words of French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen: “People prefer the original over the copy”.
The “progressive” parties have offered no alternative. The Labour Party ruled in coalition with the conservatives from 2012 to 2017. Its leader recently told a popular podcast that, while he’d like to be like Bernie Sanders, he has to be like Joe Biden (a craven ally of the rich).
The day after the Dutch election, on 23 November, Ireland was rocked by major riots. After a stabbing attack outside a school, racist lies spread that the perpetrator was an Islamic terrorist. Hundreds of people took to the streets of Dublin to burn cars, loot businesses and battle police through the night. #IrelandIsFull trended on X and rioters held banners reading “Irish Lives Matter”.
The hard right of Irish politics, including the Irish Freedom Party and news outlet Gript, helped whip up the anti-migrant frenzy. British fascists Tommy Robinson and Paul Holding, leader of Britain First, circulated racist content on social media. “Ireland, we are at war”, MMA fighter Conor McGregor declared to his 10 million followers on X.
Ireland had been heralded as a success story of thwarting the far right, but anti-migrant sentiment has grown in recent years. Last May, a makeshift camp for homeless refugees in Dublin was attacked and tents set on fire during a racist demonstration. On New Year’s Eve, a disused pub in Dublin, rumoured to soon house refugees, was set alight.
Elsewhere on the continent, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who comes from the fascist wing of Italian politics that has direct historical links to Mussolini, has been welcomed into the Western political establishment since her election in 2022. According to the Washington Post, she has “proved her critics wrong”, meaning she hasn’t rocked the boat of European capitalism, as the elite feared she would. Meloni has backed the West’s military aims in Ukraine and worked with the political and economic elites of the European Union. She has found an especially close friend in British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—in October the pair co-authored an anti-migrant opinion piece in the Times.
While the ruling class can sleep easy, workers and the oppressed in Italy are under attack. Last August, about 169,000 low-income families had their social support slashed after being notified via text just weeks earlier. Same-sex couples who use a surrogate parent, even if that person is in another country, now face jail time. Meloni is leading the charge for a naval blockade of North Africa to stop boats carrying refugees from getting to Europe. 
Fascist presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen has benefited from years of polarisation in France. Unpopular President Emmanuel Macron has routinely attacked the working class and beaten the anti-migrant drum. In December, Macron introduced a vicious set of attacks on the rights of immigrants—so vicious that some proposals, like preventing migrants from accessing key parts of the welfare state for five years after arrival, were deemed unconstitutional.
French workers have resisted Macron on a scale unseen in the Western world in years—most significantly, historic strikes rocked the country for the first four months of last year. But the refusal of the trade union officials to lead an indefinite general strike assured defeat for the movement, and the long-term growth of the French far right has left Le Pen best positioned to benefit from the turmoil. Opinion polls indicate that she would win an election held today. 
The far right is making serious gains across Europe. This is a threat that should not be taken lightly.

Far-right continues its march across Europe

In Wreck Bay Village, a small Aboriginal community 200 kilometres south of Sydney, illness is the norm. The area records almost the highest rate of premature death in the country, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Cancer, heart attacks and kidney disease are frighteningly common. 
Cabbage Tree Road runs through farmland north of Newcastle. It’s a very different place to Wreck Bay, but it shares the same affliction. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that between 2002 and 2017, at least 39 people who lived along a five-kilometre stretch of the road were diagnosed with cancer. 
Both communities received payouts from the federal government in recent court cases related to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. 
PFAS are a group of chemicals used in a range of products to make them resistant to water, heat and grease. They’re in everything from shampoo and shoes to pyjamas and paint. They’re in some firefighting foams, like those used at Royal Australian Air Force bases near Wreck Bay and Cabbage Tree Road. The scientific consensus now argues that PFAS are toxic for humans. 
The United States Environmental Protection Agency says exposure to PFAS is tied to an increased risk of “some cancers, developmental effects in children, reduced fertility, increased cholesterol levels and reduced ability of the body’s immune system to fight infections, including reduced vaccine response”. While higher concentrations are more dangerous, “there’s really no level of exposure that’s been identified as safe”, says expert Dr Laurel Schaider.
There is still much that we don’t know about these chemicals; research overwhelmingly focuses on three or four types of PFAS, out of around 15,000 in existence.
They are often called “forever chemicals”, although “everywhere chemicals” would also be apt. PFAS don’t break down naturally, so when products containing them are produced, used or disposed of, the chemicals get into everything they touch. 
The best way to avoid PFAS is to not live on planet Earth. 
They are in the water we drink—a study by Stockholm University found that virtually all rainwater on Earth contains above-recommended levels of PFAS, as does most American tap water. The Environmental Working Group warns that eating a single freshwater fish from the US is equivalent to drinking PFAS-contaminated water for a month.
They’re also in the air, as well as the soil. They’re in monkeys in China and polar bears in the Arctic. They’re in 98-99 percent of people’s blood.
But this is not a fable about the uncontrollable power of chemical elements. PFAS contamination has a human cause—it has been created, profited off and systemically covered up by some of the world’s biggest corporations.
Two in particular must be singled out: DuPont, which created PFAS in 1938, and 3M. Since the 1950s, the chemicals have been a key ingredient in their respective corporate empires. DuPont pioneered their use in Teflon non-stick pans, while 3M puts PFAS in some of their most well-known products, like Command picture-hanging strips.
Both companies have known about the dangers of PFAS for decades. As early as 1961, DuPont scientists found that they caused liver enlargement in rats and warned that “contact with the skin should be strictly avoided”. In the 1980s, female workers in 3M factories were moved out of roles involving contact with PFAS after multiple employees gave birth to children with eye defects.
But, straight out of the play book of the big tobacco companies, DuPont and 3M assured the world that PFAS were safe. Workers who raised concerns were told the chemicals have a “low toxicity, like table salt”, according to Time magazine, and both companies buried their internal findings until they were hit with lawsuits in the late 1990s. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that one prominent scientist who downplayed the risk of PFAS received payments to his consultancy firm from 3M for over a decade.
While the chemicals seep out, the money rolls in. 3M ranked as the 116th-biggest US company, with a market value of US$87 billion in the 2023 Fortune 500. Dupont was ranked 250th and valued at US$53 billion.
But aren’t there supposed to be safety barriers protecting consumers from raw corporate power? Maybe a government department, an oversight committee or a set of regulations? 
“There is this mythical ‘they’, that ‘they’re’ taking care of this, and it must be safe because it’s out there”, Scott Belcher from the Centre for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS told the New York Times. “That’s a common misconception about how this works.” 
In reality, chemical regulations are shockingly loose. The US Environmental Protection Agency has mandated safety testing for only a small number of the 85,000 industrial chemicals currently in use.
When “they” do exist, they can easily be brought to heel or ignored, because guidelines and reports are less powerful than the people who control industry. The World Health Organization produced a particularly weak set of guidelines on PFAS last year and was accused by more than 100 scientists of being influenced by business. In 2018, Politico leaked emails revealing that the White House had pressured the Agency for Toxic Substances into not releasing a report on PFAS out of fears of a “public relations nightmare”.
While we are just beginning to learn the scale of this decades-long corporate crime, PFAS continue to be produced and put on the market every year. We live in a toxic system; from the air we breathe to the people who are in charge.

Big corporations are contaminating the world, forever 

“A home is the foundation on which you build everything else”, Anthony Albanese proclaimed at the recent Labor National Conference. “There is nothing like a roof over your head to give you the sense that the sky is the limit.”
But for many people, their homes feel more like the walls are closing in as mortgage stress grows to record levels. After twelve interest rate hikes since May 2022, 1.5 million homeowners—29 percent—are at risk of mortgage stress, according to a new report by Roy Morgan.
The average borrower (with a mortgage of around $600,000) is forking out nearly $15,000 more per year in repayments. That’s an extra $1,250 a month. The share of disposable income going to housing costs is averaging over 25 percent, the highest rate in 39 years. 
Even if the Reserve Bank does not raise rates again, in the next eighteen months more than a million mortgage holders face the so-called “mortgage cliff”: expiring ultra-low interest loans that will convert to the new, much higher, rate.
Despite the mythology of the Great Australian Dream—that home ownership is the grand social equaliser—the effects of rising repayments are not affecting everyone equally. The RBA’s latest “Financial Stability Report” estimates that nearly half of households in the bottom quarter of mortgage-payer incomes spend more than a third of their income servicing their loan, against only 5 percent for households in the top quarter.
A new report from S&amp;P Global Ratings indicates that mortgage stress is most concentrated in outer suburban and regional areas. Broadmeadows, a working-class suburb in Melbourne’s north, has the highest proportion of households behind on mortgage payments of any postcode, at nearly 7 percent.
First home buyers are particularly feeling the crunch, with less time to have built up a savings buffer. Young families are the group most at risk of mortgage stress, according to Digital Finance Analytics. 
For some, it is impossible to keep up. Missed mortgage payments are still relatively infrequent by historical standards, but numbers are growing. The proportion of households more than a month behind on payments has increased by 60 percent in Victoria in the past year, while in Sydney 346 homes have been hit with a court repossession order in the first half of 2023—nearly as many as in all of 2022.
More people are now being forced to sell their homes. In Sydney’s south-west, for instance, one in ten property sales is “distressed”, up from one in 25 last year. 
While most people are making their payments on time, doing so comes at a hefty price. Financial comparison site Finder’s latest cost of living report revealed that three-quarters of respondents have reduced their spending: half cut back on groceries and a third spent less on petrol.
Personal savings built up during the pandemic are fast depleting, and the rate of income that households are saving has dropped from 13.5 percent in 2021 to 3.7 percent in mid-2023, the lowest rate in fifteen years.
Almost a million people are now working multiple jobs (a new record) after 89,000 people added a second job in the first three months of this year.
“We don’t have a single penny in savings, just coping with the mortgage”, said Rana, a 38-year-old bus driver and father from Marsden Park in outer Sydney, to real estate site Domain in August. “Normally I’ve never worked on weekends, but now I’m doing it every Sunday. Family time is cut—we can’t think about having a second child now.”
Out of this pain, the banks are making a killing. The Commonwealth Bank, which holds a quarter of Australian mortgages, posted a record $10.2 billion profit this year. CEO Matt Comyn was paid a bumper $10 million salary.
This generosity is not being extended to struggling customers. Banks are squeezing more out of people by quickly passing on interest rate hikes to mortgages and other debts, while rises in rates they pay on savings accounts have been “lower, slower or conditional”, found the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Meanwhile, provisions for those in hardship are minimal. The Australian Banking Association website outlines measures banks are offering, ranging from minor assistance like increasing emergency credit card limits to noncommittal policies like “deferring interest payments on a case-by-case basis”.
It is possible to provide serious relief. During the height of the pandemic, Australian mortgage holders were able to defer repayments for up to six months. Now banks are offering no reprieve, despite their mega-profits, and the Labor government isn’t forcing them to pay up.
“Pride and security and connection is what a home provides every Australian”, concluded Albanese in his musings on housing at the ALP conference. But the reality for many homeowners is added stress, uncertainty and impoverishment.

Defence industry profits soar as death and destruction increase

How a giant corporate cover-up poisoned the planet—and everyone on it

Pine Gap: Australia’s secret and deadly weapon

Far-right continues its march across Europe

Big corporations are contaminating the world, forever

Mortgage stress bites in Australia’s suburbs

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