In November 2020, the Victorian government announced plans for ‘the biggest single spend on social housing in the state’s history’, with $5.3 billion going towards building over 12,000 new homes over four years.

This all sounds great to the casual observer, but the key term here is social housing. There will be no new public housing built under the scheme; there will be nothing publicly owned and managed by and for the people, only privately run community housing. On top of this, many public housing estates will be (and already have been) demolished and replaced with ‘not for profit’ run community housing and private units.

As unrelenting storms lash our coast, from south-eastern Queensland all the way down to southern New South Wales, it is worth reflecting on what this means for the future. We are no strangers to flooding and fires in Australia, but the undeniable evidence is that these events are now getting more dangerous and more frequent, and will only continue to do so.

A statement issued by Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a Walpiri elder from Yuendumu, called for accountability and a disarming process to be introduced for police in the Northern Territory. He also noted the hypocrisy in how a murderer is allowed to be out on bail for two years without repercussions, while Indigenous people across Australia are held in jail for issues as minute as not paying fines.

On February 14th, Anthony Albanese stood over his despatch box to deliver an unsurprising and obligatory solidarity statement against what was at the time a potential invasion of Ukraine. Leaving aside the rank hypocrisy of Australian officials shedding crocodile tears for Ukrainians after conducting decades of imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside NATO “interventions” in Yugoslavia and Libya, what was unusual was Albanese’s mention of a particular Ukrainian Australian – Stefan Romaniw.