Civics & Commerce

54

Stories on the political forces shaping business and community. civicsandcommerce.substack.com

  1. The politics of schooling

    15 hr ago

    The politics of schooling

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The political project of mass public education - Victoria passed an Education Act in 1872 that made schooling free, compulsory, and secular, the first of the Australian colonies to do so. New South Wales followed with the Public Instruction Act in 1880, and the other colonies legislated comparable systems through the 1870s and 1880s. - Historians of education describe mass public schooling as a deliberate political project whose purposes were contested from the start: the formation of citizens able to take part in public life, the production of a literate and disciplined workforce for an industrialising economy, and the building of a common national language and loyalty. Education for Self-Reliance - Julius Nyerere led Tanganyika, later Tanzania, to independence in 1961 and governed the country until 1985. In March 1967, following the Arusha Declaration, he published a policy paper titled Education for Self-Reliance. - The paper argued that Tanzanians had demanded more schooling for years without asking what its purpose was, and criticised the education inherited from British colonial rule for selecting a few people out of their communities into clerical and administrative work while teaching the majority to undervalue their own villages and labour. Nyerere argued for an education that served the society funding it. The folk high school movement - N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783 to 1872), a Danish pastor, poet, historian, and politician, argued from the 1830s for an education built around what he called life enlightenment rather than examinations and Latin grammar, intended to prepare ordinary rural people to take part in public life. - The first folk high school opened at Rødding in 1844, and the movement spread across Denmark and the wider Nordic region over the following decades. Grundtvig was a member of the assembly that drafted Denmark’s first democratic constitution in 1849. School councils and the resourcing of public schools in Australia - Victorian government school councils are governing bodies constituted under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 and associated Ministerial Orders. They are made up of elected parent members, school staff, the principal as executive officer, and sometimes co-opted community members, and their functions include approving the school budget and endorsing the strategic plan. Curriculum, staffing, and major funding decisions are determined centrally by the Department of Education and the Minister. - A significant share of many government schools’ discretionary funds is raised locally, through fundraising activities and voluntary parent contributions. Because the capacity of families to contribute varies widely, schools serving wealthier communities can raise substantially more than schools a short distance away. The exclusion of Aboriginal children from public schooling - Although the Australian public system was established as universal, Aboriginal children were widely excluded from it. From 1902, the New South Wales Minister for Public Instruction instructed government schools to remove Aboriginal children whenever a white parent objected to their presence, a practice known as Exclusion on Demand, alongside the earlier “clean, clad and courteous” provisions. - Excluded children were directed to mission schools or to separate Aboriginal schools with a deliberately limited curriculum, or were left without schooling. The capacity of school principals to exclude Aboriginal children was not removed from New South Wales policy until 1972. REFERENCES [1] Education and Training Reform Act 2006 (Vic); on the role and powers of Victorian government school councils, see Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, School Councils in Government Schools (Melbourne: Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, 2018), https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/school-councils-government-schools. [2] Education Act 1872 (Vic); on the colonial Education Acts that established free, compulsory, and secular schooling, see Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980). [3] Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (London: Macmillan, 1990). [4] Julius K. Nyerere, “Education for Self-Reliance” (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1967); reprinted in Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism / Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968). [5] Mark K. Smith, “Julius Nyerere, Lifelong Learning and Education,” The Encyclopedia of Pedagogy and Informal Education, https://infed.org/mobi/julius-nyerere-lifelong-learning-and-education/. [6] Steven M. Borish, The Land of the Living: The Danish Folk High Schools and Denmark’s Non-Violent Path to Modernization (Nevada City, California: Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1991). [7] “N.F.S. Grundtvig,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/N-F-S-Grundtvig. [8] Ministerial Order 1280 (Constitution of Government School Councils) 2020 (Vic); Victorian Department of Education, “School Council: Composition, Eligibility and Office Bearers,” Policy and Advisory Library, https://www2.education.vic.gov.au/pal/school-council-composition-and-office-bearers/policy. [9] Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). [10] Review of Funding for Schooling: Final Report, chaired by David Gonski (Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2011). [11] Jim Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Carlton, New South Wales: J. Fletcher, 1989); “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Schooling,” Dictionary of Educational History in Australia and New Zealand, https://dehanz.net.au/entries/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-schooling-1/. [12] National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition, The School Exclusion Project Research Report (2024); on the persistence of the exclusion policy until 1972, see also the historical overview in the Dictionary of Educational History in Australia and New Zealand entry cited above. FURTHER READING Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism / Uhuru na Ujamaa (1968). The collection containing Education for Self-Reliance and Nyerere’s wider writing on the politics of a newly independent society. Steven M. Borish, The Land of the Living: The Danish Folk High Schools and Denmark’s Non-Violent Path to Modernization (1991). A study of the folk high school movement and its place in Danish democratic development. Andy Green, Education and State Formation (1990). On why modern states built mass education systems, and what they wanted those systems to do. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977). The classic statement of how schooling can reproduce social class rather than dissolve it. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). The foundational argument that the purpose of public education is the formation of a democratic public. Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (1980). A standard history of how schooling was built across the Australian colonies and states. Nigel Parbury, Survival: A History of Aboriginal Life in New South Wales (1986). A history that includes the exclusion of Aboriginal children from public schooling and the long struggle for access to it. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). On education as a practice of freedom and the classroom as a political space. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic contexts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    10 min
  2. The politics of youth services

    2 days ago

    The politics of youth services

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The shadow state - The American geographer Jennifer Wolch set out the concept of the shadow state in a 1990 study of the voluntary sector. She used it to describe a layer of voluntary organisations that carry out social services once delivered directly by government, funded and shaped by government through service contracts, while remaining outside the reach of ordinary democratic politics. - The arrangement Wolch described took hold across the United States, Britain, Australia, and other countries through the 1970s and 1980s, as governments moved from delivering services themselves to purchasing them from non-profit and for-profit providers under contract. The non-profit industrial complex - In 2004, the organisation INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence held a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The conference, and the 2007 book that followed, gave currency to the term non-profit industrial complex. - The critique describes how dependence on foundation and government funding can channel organisations away from advocacy and structural change toward narrower, measurable, fundable service delivery, professionalising movement work and managing dissent. Contributors drew on the United States non-profit sector, in which more than a million organisations hold tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Charities, advocacy, and political activity - In its 2012 federal budget, the Conservative government of Canada provided the Canada Revenue Agency with additional funding, later totalling around 13 million dollars, to audit the political activities of registered charities. Charity law at the time allowed charities to devote up to 10 per cent of their resources to political activities; partisan activity was, and remains, prohibited. - The first wave of audits targeted environmental charities that had criticised government energy and pipeline policy, and later widened to anti-poverty, human rights, international development, and religious charities. Researchers documented an advocacy chill across the sector. The audits were suspended in 2017, and in 2018 a court found the political-activity limits an unjustified restriction on freedom of expression, after which the relevant law was changed. Community control and the Aboriginal community-controlled sector - In July 1971, Aboriginal activists opened the Aboriginal Medical Service in a shopfront on Regent Street in Redfern, Sydney. It was the first Aboriginal community-controlled health service in Australia, founded in response to the racism and neglect Aboriginal people faced in mainstream health services at a time before universal health care. - The service was built on the principle of community control, that it should answer to the Aboriginal community through an elected board rather than to a government department. It struggled with funding in its early years, operating on bank overdrafts and community donations while government payments and decisions were delayed. The model spread, and by the 2010s around 150 Aboriginal community-controlled health services operated across Australia, represented by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. REFERENCES [1] Jennifer R. Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). [2] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007; reissued Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017). [3] Dylan Rodríguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007). [4] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007). [5] Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, editors, Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government Is Controlling Public Opinion and Stifling Debate (Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2007). [6] “Canada Revenue Agency’s Political-Activity Audits of Charities,” CBC News, 5 August 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-revenue-agency-s-political-activity-audits-of-charities-1.2728023. [7] Gareth Kirkby, “An Uncharitable Chill: A Critical Exploration of How Changes in Federal Policy and Political Discourse Are Affecting Advocacy-Oriented Charities” (MA thesis, Royal Roads University, 2014); “Revenue Minister Suspends Political Activity Audits of Charities,” CBC News, 4 May 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-revenue-agency-political-activity-diane-lebouthillier-audits-panel-report-suspension-1.4099184. [8] “Our History,” Aboriginal Medical Service Co-operative Limited, Redfern, https://amsredfern.org.au; “The Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern: Improving Access to Primary Care,” Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, https://www.racgp.org.au. [9] National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, on the principle of Aboriginal community control, https://www.naccho.org.au. [10] On the early funding history of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service and the Aboriginal community-controlled sector, see the Redfern Oral History project, http://redfernoralhistory.org, and the published histories of Australia’s Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations. [11] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s Youth (Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare), https://www.aihw.gov.au. [12] On the effects of short-term and competitive funding cycles on community-sector organisations in Australia, see the community-sector research published by the Australian Council of Social Service, https://www.acoss.org.au. FURTHER READING Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (2022). A collection on the state, organising, and the limits of the non-profit form, from one of the contributors to the non-profit industrial complex critique. John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare (1997). An account of how managerialism and contracting reshaped the way social welfare is delivered. Mark Considine, Enterprising States: The Public Management of Welfare-to-Work (2001). A study of the contracting of welfare and employment services, with close attention to the Australian case. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018). A critical account of philanthropy and the management of social change by the powerful. Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (2018). An argument about the politics of philanthropic money and a reparative alternative to it. Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020). A short, practical case for mutual aid as an alternative to the charity and non-profit model. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  3. The politics of mechanical workshops

    4 days ago

    The politics of mechanical workshops

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The car as a political object - André Gorz (1923 to 2007), the Austrian-born French philosopher and journalist who helped found the tradition of political ecology, set out an early and influential argument that the motor car was a political technology rather than a neutral one in his 1973 essay The Social Ideology of the Motorcar, published in the French magazine Le Sauvage. - Gorz’s wider work argued that an ecological transition is a political contest over who controls and benefits from change, a theme running through his book Ecology as Politics. Just transition - The concept of a just transition originated in the North American labour movement. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the trade unionist Tony Mazzocchi, a leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, proposed a fund to support and retrain workers displaced by environmental regulation, an idea first called a Superfund for Workers and later renamed just transition. - The principle holds that the costs of moving away from harmful industries should be shared across society rather than concentrated on affected workers and communities. The International Labour Organization adopted formal guidelines on just transition in 2015, and the preamble to the 2015 Paris Agreement refers to a just transition of the workforce. Norway and the electric vehicle transition - In 2025, battery-electric vehicles made up 95.9 per cent of new passenger car sales in Norway, according to the Norwegian Road Federation, up from roughly a third a decade earlier. In 2017 Norway set a target of ending sales of new fossil-fuel cars by 2025. - The transition was driven by two decades of sustained government policy and tax incentives. Norway is also one of the world’s significant exporters of oil and gas, and manages its petroleum revenue through a large sovereign wealth fund. Cobalt, the Congo, and extractivism - Cobalt is a key component of most lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces well over two-thirds of the world’s cobalt, and between roughly 15 and 30 per cent of Congolese cobalt is produced through artisanal and small-scale mining, much of it in hazardous conditions, with documented child labour. - The Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta, a former president of Ecuador’s Constituent Assembly, has written extensively on extractivism, the economic model in which regions are organised around exporting raw materials. Acosta and others argue that an energy transition reliant on large-scale mineral extraction can reproduce the same pattern. The right to repair - For around two decades, independent repairers and consumer advocates internationally have campaigned for a right to repair, the principle that owners and independent trades should have access to the information, parts, and software needed to fix the products they own. The European Union introduced vehicle repair information access rules in 2007, and the US state of Massachusetts passed an automotive right-to-repair law in 2012. - In Australia, the Productivity Commission examined the question in its 2021 Right to Repair inquiry. The Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme, legislated in 2021 and in effect from 1 July 2022, requires manufacturers to share service and repair information with independent repairers. Data transmitted wirelessly from newer connected vehicles to their manufacturers sits largely outside the scheme. REFERENCES [1] André Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” Le Sauvage, September-October 1973; English translation by Patsy Vigderman in André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980). [2] André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980); first published in French as Écologie et politique (Paris: Galilée, 1975). [3] Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). [4] International Labour Organization, Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2015). [5] United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Paris Agreement (2015), preamble; International Trade Union Confederation, Just Transition Centre materials, https://www.ituc-csi.org. [6] “Norway new car sales hit 96% electric in 2025 as Tesla dominates,” CNBC, 2 January 2026, reporting figures from the Norwegian Road Federation, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/evs-norway-new-car-sales-hit-96percent-electric-in-2025-as-tesla-dominates.html. [7] Norwegian Petroleum (official petroleum information service of the Norwegian government), https://www.norskpetroleum.no. [8] “DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt: how control by local elites can shape the global battery industry,” The Conversation, 19 September 2025, https://theconversation.com/drc-is-the-worlds-largest-producer-of-cobalt-how-control-by-local-elites-can-shape-the-global-battery-industry-236205; “Why Cobalt Mining in the DRC Needs Urgent Attention,” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/articles/why-cobalt-mining-drc-needs-urgent-attention. [9] Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” in Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America, edited by Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Quito: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013). [10] “Driving on Destruction: How EVs Are Exploiting Congo’s Mines,” UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, July 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/news/2025/jul/blog-driving-destruction-how-evs-are-exploiting-congos-mines. [11] Australian Productivity Commission, Right to Repair: Inquiry Report (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2021). [12] Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme, Australian Government, in effect from 1 July 2022; Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association, materials on the scheme and on access to vehicle telematics data, https://www.aaaa.com.au. FURTHER READING André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (1994). Gorz’s later argument on the politics of work, ecology, and the conditions for a transition that serves people rather than industries. Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (2007). A biography of the union leader who built the labour-environmental alliance and gave just transition its name. Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani, editors, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America (2013). A Latin American collection on post-development and post-extractivism, including Alberto Acosta’s essay on extractivism. Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020). A study of resource politics and post-extractivist movements, directly relevant to the minerals the energy transition depends on. Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023). A reporting-based account of artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Aaron Perzanowski, The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own (2022). The leading book-length treatment of the right to repair movement and its legal and political stakes. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009). An argument for the worth of skilled manual and repair work, and a useful companion to the question of who gets to fix things. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). A wide account of why the politics of transition, and not only the technology, decides who carries its costs. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  4. The politics of a community group

    5 days ago

    The politics of a community group

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Civic participation: theory and traditions - Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 article A Ladder of Citizen Participation, which set out eight rungs of participation grouped into three bands: nonparticipation (manipulation and therapy), degrees of tokenism (informing, consultation, and placation), and degrees of citizen power (partnership, delegated power, and citizen control). It became one of the most cited works in planning theory. - Ella Baker (1903 to 1986), the African-American organiser who worked across the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and whose model of group-centred leadership shaped the participatory-democracy strand of the civil rights movement. - Paulo Freire (1921 to 1997), the Brazilian educator whose 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed introduced conscientization, the development of critical consciousness, into popular education and community organising worldwide. Australia - The green bans, beginning in June 1971 when the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation, asked by a group of women in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill, refused to supply labour for a housing development on Kelly’s Bush, the last bushland remnant in the area. - The conduct of the green bans between 1971 and 1974, with the union placing more than forty bans, each imposed only at the request of a resident group and only after a public meeting demonstrating community support. - The proliferation of resident action groups across Sydney from 1971, numbering around one hundred by 1974, and the formation of the Coalition of Resident Action Groups in 1972 to coordinate their efforts. - The exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the franchise. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 effectively barred most Aboriginal people from the federal vote. The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962, which received assent on 21 May 1962, extended the federal vote to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Queensland in 1965 was the last state to grant the state franchise, and compulsory enrolment followed in 1984. - Research on community consultation in Australian local government documenting the consistent under-representation of renters, younger residents, shift workers, and recent arrivals in council engagement processes. Switzerland - The Swiss system of direct democracy, in which citizens vote several times a year at communal, cantonal, and federal level on concrete questions through referendums and popular initiatives. - The Landsgemeinde, an open-air cantonal assembly with medieval origins in which citizens vote by a show of hands, still practised in the cantons of Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden. - The late extension of the franchise to Swiss women. A referendum on 7 February 1971 granted women the federal vote. Appenzell Innerrhoden was the last canton to admit women to cantonal voting, doing so only after the Swiss Federal Court ruled in November 1990 that the exclusion breached the federal constitution. Kenya - Harambee, a Swahili word meaning all pull together, a tradition of community self-help in which residents pool funds and labour to build shared facilities such as schools, clinics, and roads. - The adoption of harambee as a development strategy and as the national motto by Jomo Kenyatta after independence in 1963, and its part in building a large share of the country’s post-independence schools. - The later entanglement of harambee with political patronage, as wealthy figures seeking political office used large donations to harambee fundraising drives to build legitimacy and support. REFERENCES [1] Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216 to 224, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225. [2] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [3] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), first published as Pedagogia do Oprimido (1968). [4] Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998); National Museum of Australia, “First Green Bans,” https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/first-green-bans. [5] Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998); James Colman, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2016). [6] “Green Bans Movement,” Dictionary of Sydney, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/green_bans_movement. [7] “The Way to Modern Direct Democracy in Switzerland,” About Switzerland, Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/the-way-to-modern-direct-democracy-in-switzerland. [8] “50 Years of Women’s Suffrage in Switzerland,” In Custodia Legis, Law Library of Congress, 28 April 2021, https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/04/50-years-of-womens-suffrage-in-switzerland/. [9] “Harambee, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://www.oed.com/dictionary/harambee_n; Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson, Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977). [10] Joel D. Barkan and Frank Holmquist, “Peasant-State Relations and the Social Base of Self-Help in Kenya,” World Politics 41 (1989); Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson, Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977). [11] Nicole Brackertz and Denise Meredyth, Community Consultation and the “Hard to Reach”: Concepts and Practice in Victorian Local Government (Hawthorn, Victoria: Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, 2005). [12] National Museum of Australia, “Indigenous Australians’ Right to Vote,” https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/indigenous-australians-right-to-vote; Australian Electoral Commission, “Electoral Milestones for Indigenous Australians” (2019). FURTHER READING Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (1970). The foundational modern argument that democratic citizenship is learned by taking part in the institutions of everyday life, not only at the ballot box. Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (2004). A close study of how devolved decision-making over schooling and policing can work when ordinary residents are given a share of the power. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003). The definitive biography of Baker and the clearest account of the group-centred organising tradition she built. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). The founding text of critical pedagogy and a continuing reference point for popular education and community organising. Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union (1998). The standard history of the New South Wales green bans and the resident action movement that worked alongside them. James Colman, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero (2016). A biography of the union leader most closely associated with the green bans. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971). A practical and much-argued-over handbook of community organising from the American tradition. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (2000). A political-philosophical case for why democratic processes have to actively include the perspectives of marginalised groups to count as legitimate. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    10 min
  5. The politics of community housing

    6 days ago

    The politics of community housing

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Australia The Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement of 1945 committed the federal and state governments to funding public housing construction at scale. For roughly three decades, public housing in Australia was built for a broad section of working households. From the 1980s, governments reduced public housing construction, narrowed eligibility to those in greatest need, and allowed much of the existing stock to age, a process housing scholars describe as the residualisation of public housing. The community housing sector, made up of not-for-profit housing providers, grew substantially through this period. Stock transfers, in which the management or ownership of public housing dwellings is transferred from state housing authorities to community housing providers, became one of the main mechanisms of sector growth. Community housing providers in Australia are regulated under the National Regulatory System for Community Housing. The Housing Australia Future Fund was established on 1 November 2023 by the Housing Australia Future Fund Act 2023, credited with ten billion dollars as a dedicated investment vehicle. Returns on the fund support the delivery of social and affordable housing, with a five-year target of 20,000 social and 20,000 affordable homes from 2024, delivered largely in partnership with community housing providers rather than through direct public construction. The fund operates alongside the National Housing Accord and the National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are heavily over-represented among social housing tenants and among people experiencing homelessness. Severe overcrowding across many remote communities is a longstanding and acute housing failure, attributed by researchers to decades of underinvestment and to housing programs designed and delivered without the control of the communities they were intended to serve. Austria From 1919, the municipal government of Vienna, in the period known as Red Vienna, used the city’s taxing power to fund public housing construction on an exceptional scale. Most of the municipal housing, known as Gemeindebau, was built between 1922 and 1980. The City of Vienna today owns approximately 220,000 dwellings, making it the largest municipal landlord in Europe. Together with the limited-profit housing cooperatives that have built most of Vienna’s social housing since the 1980s, social housing in Vienna is accessible to around eighty per cent of the city’s residents, making it a mainstream form of tenure rather than a residual service. Finland Since 2008, Finland has built its national homelessness strategy on the Housing First principle, which provides a person experiencing homelessness with permanent housing immediately and without preconditions, in place of the earlier “staircase” model that required people to progress through stages of temporary accommodation. Finland is the only country in the European Union where homelessness has fallen consistently. Long-term homelessness fell by around two-thirds between 2008 and 2022. The Finnish Constitution recognises a right to housing, and the strategy is delivered substantially through non-government housing organisations, the largest of which is the Y-Foundation. International theoretical tradition Gøsta Esping-Andersen, a Danish sociologist, set out the concept of decommodification in his 1990 study The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Decommodification refers to the degree to which a welfare state allows people to maintain a livelihood without dependence on the market. Esping-Andersen argued that welfare states cluster into distinct types according to how far they decommodify the major welfare goods. Housing is widely regarded as the least decommodified of the major welfare goods in most English-speaking countries. Raquel Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and professor at the University of São Paulo, served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing from 2008 to 2014. Her work documents the financialisation of housing, the process by which housing has been transformed from a place of residence into an asset class and a vehicle for capital, driven in part by governments withdrawing from direct housing provision and channelling subsidy through markets. REFERENCES [1] Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), https://www.wiley.com/en-auThe+Three+Worlds+of+Welfare+Capitalism-p-9780745666754 (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [2] Raquel Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance, trans. Felipe Hirschhorn (London: Verso, 2019), https://www.versobooks.com/products/559-urban-warfare (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [3] United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as a Component of the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living, Raquel Rolnik (Geneva: United Nations, 2009-2014), https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [4] Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999); City of Vienna, Wiener Wohnen, “Vienna’s Municipal Housing,” https://www.wienerwohnen.at (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [5] Wolfgang Förster and William Menking, eds., The Vienna Model: Housing for the Twenty-First-Century City (Berlin: Jovis, 2016); International Building Exhibition (IBA) Vienna, Social Housing in Vienna, https://www.iba-wien.at (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [6] Y-Foundation, A Home of Your Own: Housing First and Ending Homelessness in Finland (Keuruu: Y-Foundation, 2017), https://ysaatio.fi/en/housing-first-finland/a-home-of-your-own (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Housing First Europe Hub, “Finland,” https://housingfirsteurope.eu/country/finland/ (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [7] Patrick Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing (Annandale, New South Wales: Federation Press, 2012). [8] Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates, Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0780-9; Lucy Groenhart, Terry Burke, and Liss Ralston, Thirty Years of Public Housing Supply and Consumption: 1981-2011, AHURI Final Report No. 231 (Melbourne: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, 2014). [9] Housing Australia Future Fund Act 2023 (Cth), No. 37 of 2023, https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2023A00037/latest (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Department of the Treasury, Social and Affordable Housing, https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/housing/social-affordable-housing (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [10] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Housing Assistance in Australia (Canberra: AIHW), https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/housing-assistance/housing-assistance-in-australia (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2024: Housing and Homelessness (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2025). [11] Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Indigenous Housing Need and the Role of Community-Controlled Housing, https://www.ahuri.edu.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and Housing, https://www.aihw.gov.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [12] Community Housing Industry Association, Stock Transfer and the Growth of Community Housing, https://www.communityhousing.com.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); National Regulatory System for Community Housing, https://www.nrsch.gov.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026). FURTHER READING Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. The foundational statement of the decommodification concept used in this episode. Rolnik, Raquel. Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance. Translated by Felipe Hirschhorn. London: Verso, 2019. The major studyof the global financialisation of housing. Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999. A history of the Vienna municipal housing program and the politics behind it. Pawson, Hal, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates. Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. The most extensive recent survey of Australian housing policy and reform options. Troy, Patrick. Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing. Annandale, New South Wales: Federation Press, 2012. A history of federal involvement in Australian housing from the 1945 Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement onward. Madden, David, and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. London: Verso, 2016. A critical account of housing politics and the case for treating housing as a public good. Y-Foundation. A Home of Your Own: Housing First and Ending Homelessness in Finland. Keuruu: Y-Foundation, 2017. A movement-produced account of the Finnish Housing First model. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  6. The politics of women's health organisations

    26 May

    The politics of women's health organisations

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Australia The Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into universal access to reproductive healthcare was referred on 28 September 2022, initiated by Greens Senator Larissa Waters. The committee reported in May 2023 with thirty-six recommendations, the first inquiry of its kind in Australia. The recommendations covered the cost and accessibility of contraception and abortion, workforce development including scope of practice for nurses and midwives, Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme coverage, birthing services in non-metropolitan public hospitals, and birthing-on-country initiatives. The inquiry was framed in relation to the priorities of the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030. The Australian women’s health centre movement established community-controlled women’s health services from the mid-1970s. The Liverpool Women’s Health Centre and the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, both in Sydney, opened in 1974, among the first of their kind in the country. The centres were founded by women radicalised through second-wave feminist organising and built services addressing the structural barriers women faced in the mainstream health system. A federation of community-based women’s health centres developed across Australia in the decade that followed and continues to operate today. The Lowitja Institute, Australia’s national institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research, and the Aboriginal community- controlled health sector represented nationally through the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) hold the institutional knowledge base on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s health, including maternal health, cervical screening, and culturally safe reproductive healthcare. Ireland The Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland met across 2016 and 2017, a randomly-selected panel of ninety-nine members of the public and an independent chair, established to consider a number of constitutional questions including the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland. The Eighth Amendment, inserted in 1983, gave constitutional recognition to the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn, with the effect of prohibiting abortion in almost all circumstances. The Assembly deliberated across five weekends and recommended substantial change. A referendum held on 25 May 2018 returned a 66.4 per cent vote in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment. The Together for Yes campaign, a civil-society coalition, organised the repeal campaign drawing on decades of Irish feminist movement work. The repeal led to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. The Irish process is internationally studied as a model of deliberative-democratic reform on a politically contested healthcare question. Iceland On 24 October 1975 an estimated ninety per cent of Icelandic women withdrew from all paid and unpaid work for the day, in an action known as the Women’s Day Off, or Kvennafrídagurinn. Tens of thousands gathered in central Reykjavik, and the withdrawal of women’s labour effectively closed schools, shops, banks, and many other services across the country. The strike is widely credited with accelerating the political conditions for the 1980 election of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as President of Iceland, the world’s first democratically elected woman head of state, and for the longer-running Icelandic policy framework on reproductive healthcare, parental leave, and gender equality. International theoretical tradition Carol Bacchi, an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Adelaide, developed the What’s the Problem Represented to Be approach to policy analysis, known as WPR, across her scholarship from the early 1990s onward. The approach holds that every policy proposal contains within it an implicit representation of what the problem is, and that the political work of policy lies in that problem representation rather than in the technical recommendations attached to it. The reproductive justice framework was coined in June 1994 by a group of twelve Black women in Chicago, who called themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. The framework was built into a national organisation, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, founded in 1997. The Black feminist scholar and organiser Loretta Ross is widely credited as the framework’s leading articulator across the past three decades. Reproductive justice is defined as the human right to have children, to not have children, and to parent the children one has in safe and sustainable communities, a broader frame than the reproductive rights tradition that preceded it. Marcia Langton, a Yiman woman and Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, has argued across four decades of scholarship that the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women cannot be analysed apart from sovereignty, the history of child removal, incarceration, and the structural racism of the mainstream health system. REFERENCES [1] Carol Bacchi, Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (Frenchs Forest, New South Wales: Pearson Education, 2009); Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52546-8. [2] Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520288201/reproductive-justice; SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, “Reproductive Justice,” https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [3] Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018); Marcia Langton and others, eds., Indigenous Australians and the Law (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009). On Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s health specifically, see Lowitja Institute, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Health (Melbourne: Lowitja Institute), https://www.lowitja.org.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [4] The Citizens’ Assembly (Ireland), First Report and Recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly: The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (Dublin: The Citizens’ Assembly, 2017), https://citizensassembly.ie/previous-assemblies/2016-2018-citizens-assembly/the-eighth-amendment-of-the-constitution/ (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [5] Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (Ireland), No. 31 of 2018, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2018/act/31/enacted/en/html (Accessed: 16 May 2026); on the referendum result and campaign, see Kevin Rafter and others, eds., The Abortion Referendum of 2018 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2024). [6] Kirstie Brewer, “The Day Iceland’s Women Went on Strike,” BBC News, 23 October 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34602822 (Accessed: 16 May 2026); on the strike’s place in the Icelandic political settlement, see Auður Styrkársdóttir, Women’s Lists in Iceland: A Response to Political Lethargy (Umeå: Umeå University, 1998). [7] Gwendolyn Gray, “The Politics of Women’s Health in Australia,” in Australian Health Policy, and on the women’s health centre movement, Australian Women’s Health Network, History of the Women’s Health Movement in Australia, https://awhn.org.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Marie Coleman and others, accounts of the establishment of the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre, 1974. [8] Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Universal Access to Reproductive Healthcare (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, May 2023), https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/ReproductiveHealthcare (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [9] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (Canberra: AIHW), https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au (Accessed: 16 May 2026); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Mothers and Babies (Canberra: AIHW), https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports-data/population-groups/mothers-babies/overview (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [10] Carol Bacchi, “Why Study Problematizations? Making Politics Visible,” Open Journal of Political Science 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-8, https://doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2012.21001. [11] Australian Women’s Health Network and the federation of community women’s health services, sector submissions to the Senate inquiry into universal access to reproductive healthcare, 2022, https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/ReproductiveHealthcare/Submissions (Accessed: 16 May 2026). [12] Commonwealth of Australia, National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030 (Canberra: Department of Health, 2018), https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/national-womens-health-strategy-2020-2030 (Accessed: 16 May 2026). FURTHER READING Bacchi, Carol. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? Frenchs Forest, New South Wales: Pearson Education, 2009. The foundational statement of the WPR approach used in this episode. Bacchi, Carol, and Susan Goodwin. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. A practical companion applying the WPR approach across policy fields. Ross, Loretta J., and Rickie Solinger. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. The standard introduction to the reproductive justice framework by one of its founding theor

    12 min
  7. The politics of locksmith businesses

    25 May

    The politics of locksmith businesses

    Episode 13. Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Australia The Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2018 (Vic), passed by the Victorian Parliament in September 2018, introduced more than 130 reforms to the Residential Tenancies Act 1997, progressively coming into force through to 29 March 2021. The reforms include minimum standards for rental properties, restrictions on rent increases, removal of certain no-reason terminations of tenancy, the right to keep a pet with reasonable consent, the right to make modifications, and specific provisions for tenants who have experienced family violence including the right to end a tenancy without unfair compensation, install security cameras and other safety modifications, and change locks. The Make Renting Fair campaign was led by Tenants Victoria with allied organisations across the legal assistance, housing, homelessness, family violence, and social services sectors, including Justice Connect’s Homeless Law team, Council to Homeless Persons, Victorian Council of Social Service, Domestic Violence Victoria, and Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria. The campaign worked the Victorian Government’s Fairer Safer Housing review across a four-year process, with more than 4,800 submissions received from across the rental sector. The Victorian Government has since announced further rental reforms including the complete removal of no-reason evictions, tighter rules on bond claims, and a streamlined dispute resolution process, indicating ongoing political contest over the property regime in Victoria. Germany The Berlin Mietendeckel (officially the Gesetz zur Mietenbegrenzung im Wohnungswesen in Berlin, or MietenWoG Bln) was passed by the Berlin House of Representatives on 30 January 2020 and came into force on 23 February 2020. The law established a five-year rent cap, freezing rents in approximately 1.5 million Berlin apartments at their 18 June 2019 levels, in a city where around 85 per cent of residents are renters. Germany overall is the European Union member state with the highest proportion of renters in the private sector, at around 55 per cent. On 25 March 2021 the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) declared the MietenWoG Bln incompatible with the German Basic Law and void in its entirety, with the decision published on 15 April 2021. The Court ruled on the basis of legislative competence, finding that the federal government had conclusively occupied the field of rent regulation through the Mietpreisbremse (federal rent brake), enacted in 2015 under Section 556d of the German Civil Code, and that the State of Berlin therefore lacked the authority to pass the Mietendeckel. The Court explicitly declined to rule on whether rent regulation as such is constitutional. The debate over rent regulation in Germany has since moved back to the federal level, with continuing political contest over the structure and reach of the Mietpreisbremse and the proper role of rent caps in high-pressure urban housing markets. Scotland The Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 received Royal Assent on 22 April 2016 and commenced on 1 December 2017, replacing the previous “short assured tenancy” regime under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988 with a new “private residential tenancy” (PRT). The PRT is open-ended, with no fixed term and no automatic expiry. Landlords can only end a tenancy through one of 18 specified grounds set out in Schedule 3 of the Act, and the previous Section 21-style “no-fault” eviction is no longer available in Scotland. The campaign that produced the 2016 Act was led by Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union, working a four-year consultation process that included direct action, lobbying, and submissions to politicise tenancy reform as a site of democratic contest rather than a settled question of private law. Scotland’s reform has been the leading Anglophone example of structural tenancy reform of this kind, with England’s parallel attempt under the Renters (Reform) Bill 2023 postponed and watered down in passage. International theoretical tradition The Adelaide-based legal philosopher Margaret Davies has spent over thirty years developing the analytical framework of property as a political relationship between people mediated by the law, against the standard liberal account of property as a relationship between persons and things. Her major works on the subject include Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007) and Asking the Law Question (4th edition, Sydney: Thomson Reuters, 2017), both of which are foundational texts in Australian critical legal theory. Cheryl Harris’s article “Whiteness as Property,” published in the Harvard Law Review in June 1993, established the foundational analytical frame for property as a racialised political category in the United States. The argument traces how the legal architecture of American property law was constructed around the protection of white settler claims to land taken from Indigenous nations and around the legal exclusion of Black people from property holding under slavery and its aftermath, with continuing structural effects on contemporary property regimes. Larissa Behrendt, a Gomeroi and Eualeyai legal scholar and currently Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, has developed the Australian application of critical property theory across decades of scholarship, including Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future (Sydney: Federation Press, 2003) and Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016). Behrendt’s analysis traces the Australian property regime back to its constitutional foundation in the legal fiction of terra nullius, formally overturned in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) but continuing to structure Indigenous land rights, Native Title, and the contemporary tenancy regime. REFERENCES [1] Margaret Davies, Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). Routledge, https://www.routledge.com/Property-Meanings-Histories-Theories/Davies/p/book/9781904385639 (Accessed: 15 May 2026). See also Margaret Davies, Asking the Law Question, 4th edition (Sydney: Thomson Reuters, 2017). [2] Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787. [3] Larissa Behrendt, Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future (Sydney: Federation Press, 2003); Larissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016), https://www.uqp.com.au/books/finding-eliza (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [4] Gesetz zur Mietenbegrenzung im Wohnungswesen in Berlin (MietenWoG Bln), Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing, in force from 23 February 2020. See “Berlin Rent Cap: Federal Constitutional Court,” Deloitte Legal Germany, https://www2.deloitte.com/dl/en/pages/legal/articles/mietendeckel-bundesverfassungsgericht.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [5] Bundesverfassungsgericht, decision of 25 March 2021, 2 BvF 1/20, 2 BvL 4/20, 2 BvL 5/20, published 15 April 2021. Federal Constitutional Court press release No. 28/2021, https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2021/bvg21-028.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026); “Berlin Rent Cap Law Ruled Unlawful by German Constitutional Court,” Housing Rights Watch, https://www.housingrightswatch.org/news/berlin-rent-cap-law-ruled-unlawful-german-constitutional-court (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [6] Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 (asp 19), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2016/19/contents (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Scottish Government, “Private Residential Tenancy: Information for Tenants,” https://www.gov.scot/publications/private-residential-tenancies-tenants-guide/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); on the role of Living Rent in producing the reform, see Douglas Maxwell, “Contesting the Property Paradigm amid ‘Radical’ Constitutional Change: Living Rent and the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016,” Legal Studies (Cambridge Core), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-studies/article/contesting-the-property-paradigm-amid-radical-constitutional-change-living-rent-and-the-private-residential-tenancies-scotland-act-2016/BEB645ABC0BB30CE4324278278A4D134 (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [7] Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2018 (Vic), No. 45 of 2018, https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force/acts/residential-tenancies-amendment-act-2018/021 (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Commissioner for Residential Tenancies Victoria, “Changes to Renting Laws,” https://www.rentingcommissioner.vic.gov.au/the-rental-sector/changes-to-renting-laws (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [8] Tenants Victoria, “Make Renting Fair Campaign,” https://tenantsvic.org.au (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Justice Connect Homeless Law, “Better, Fairer and Safer Renting for All,” https://justiceconnect.org.au/fairmatters/better-fairer-and-safer-renting-for-all/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Victorian Government, Fairer Safer Housing Review, https://engage.vic.gov.au/fairer-safer-housing. [9] Australian Human Rights Commission, Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices): Securing Our Rights, Securing Our Future Report (Sydney: AHRC, 2020), https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/projects/wiyi-yani-u-thangani-women (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Specialist Homelessness Services Annual Report 2023-24 (Canberra: AIHW

    11 min
  8. The Politics of cosmetic consumers

    24 May

    The Politics of cosmetic consumers

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. Identifying details are changed. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Australia The Industrial Chemicals Act 2019 (Cth) commenced on 1 July 2020, replacing the previous National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS) with the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS). The Act includes a prohibition on the use of new animal test data for chemicals introduced solely for cosmetic use, with limited exceptions for environmental hazard assessment. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission published its final guidance Making Environmental Claims: A Guide for Business in December 2023, naming greenwashing as an ongoing enforcement priority. The ACCC has since taken Federal Court action against several Australian and Australian-distributed brands. In April 2024 the ACCC commenced proceedings against Clorox Australia in relation to “ocean plastic” claims on GLAD-branded kitchen and garbage bags, with the Federal Court ordering a A$8.25 million penalty in 2025. In July 2025 the ACCC commenced proceedings against Edgewell Personal Care Australia in relation to “reef friendly” claims on the Hawaiian Tropic and Banana Boat sunscreen brands. Greenwashing remains a stated enforcement priority for the ACCC and ASIC in 2025-26, with cosmetics and personal care specifically named. Madagascar Investigative reporting by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and Terre des Hommes Netherlands, published in November 2019 as the report Child Labour in Madagascar’s Mica Sector: Impact of the Mica Supply Chain on Children’s Rights from the Malagasy Mines to the International Product Line. The report documented around twenty-two thousand workers in the mica mining and sorting sector in the southern regions of Madagascar (the Anosy and Androy areas), with around half of them children, some as young as five years old, working under unregulated conditions for wages of less than five dollars per month. The report tracked the flow of Malagasy mica into global cosmetics, electronics, and automotive supply chains predominantly via Chinese intermediaries. Madagascar has overtaken other producing countries as the world’s largest exporter of sheet mica in recent years. The cosmetics-industry response took the form of the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI), founded in January 2017 by a coalition of cosmetics, automotive paints, and electronics companies in partnership with international NGOs. The original commitment to eliminate child labour from the natural mica supply chain by 2022 was not met. The initiative has revised its target to 2030 and operates Community Empowerment Programmes and supply chain traceability work in major producing regions. The Dutch Child Labour Due Diligence Act, passed by the Netherlands in May 2019, requires companies importing into the Netherlands to declare due diligence on child labour in their supply chains, providing a national-level regulatory framework alongside the transnational investigative work. Continuing investigative journalism through 2019-2025, including major reporting by NBC News, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Terre des Hommes Netherlands itself, has documented the continuing scale of child labour in Madagascar’s mica sector and the limited reach of voluntary industry response to date. France and the European Union Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 November 2009 on cosmetic products replaced the 1976 Cosmetics Directive and consolidated the testing and marketing bans on cosmetic animal testing in a single regulatory framework. The ban on testing finished cosmetic products on animals applied from 11 September 2004, the ban on testing ingredients from 11 March 2009, and the full marketing ban including the most complex human health effects from 11 March 2013, with no cosmetic product tested on animals after that date marketable in the European Union regardless of where the testing was conducted. Cruelty Free International is the contemporary continuation of an organisation founded by the Irish writer, women’s rights campaigner, suffragette, and philanthropist Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) at a public meeting in Bristol on 14 June 1898 as The British Union. The organisation was renamed the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1949 and became Cruelty Free International on 1 June 2015. Cobbe had previously founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and was instrumental in drafting the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 in the United Kingdom. CFI’s Leaping Bunny certification is the dominant cruelty-free mark in international cosmetics, and the organisation’s century-long campaign is the political tradition behind the EU regulatory ban. International theoretical tradition Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, published by Knopf Canada at the end of 1999, the same week as the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization meeting that put the alter-globalisation movement on international front pages. Now translated into more than thirty languages and the foundational political-economic text on the brand as the carrier of consumer identity and political affiliation in late twentieth-century capitalism. Sara Ahmed’s concept of non-performativity, developed across the essay “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism” in Meridians (2006) and the book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012), based on interviews with diversity officers in universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. The argument is that the public statement of an institutional commitment often does political work as a speech act in ways that substitute for the structural change the commitment would imply. Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, published by Harvard University Press in 2011, drawing case studies from Nigeria, Iraq, South Africa, and elsewhere in the Global South. Foundational text in postcolonial environmental humanities on dispersed, slow-moving harms that fall outside conventional accounting frameworks. REFERENCES [1] Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999), with 10th anniversary edition (London: Fourth Estate, 2010). Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/19089/naomi-klein (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [2] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Duke University Press, https://www.dukeupress.edu/on-being-included (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [3] Sara Ahmed, “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126. [4] Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and Terre des Hommes Netherlands, Child Labour in Madagascar’s Mica Sector: Impact of the Mica Supply Chain on Children’s Rights from the Malagasy Mines to the International Product Line (Amsterdam: SOMO, November 2019), https://www.somo.nl/child-labour-in-madagascars-mica-sector/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [5] Responsible Mica Initiative, “History,” https://responsible-mica-initiative.com/history/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Cosmetics Design Europe, “Responsible Mica Initiative Releases First Annual Report,” 18 March 2019. [6] Terre des Hommes Netherlands, “Children Make up Half of All Workers in Malagasy Mica Mines, Terre des Hommes Research Reveals,” 6 January 2020, https://www.terredeshommes.org/children-make-up-half-of-all-workers-in-malagasy-mica-mines-terre-des-hommes-research-reveals/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); NBC News, “Kids as Young as 4 are Mining Mica in a Lawless Part of Africa,” 18 November 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/army-children-toil-african-mica-mines-n1082916 (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Wet Zorgplicht Kinderarbeid (Child Labour Due Diligence Act), Netherlands, 2019. [7] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343 (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [8] European Parliament and Council, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 of 30 November 2009 on cosmetic products, Official Journal of the European Union, L 342, 22 December 2009: 59-209, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32009R1223 (Accessed: 15 May 2026); European Commission, Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, “Ban on animal testing,” https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/cosmetics/ban-animal-testing_en (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [9] Cruelty Free International, “Our Heritage,” https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/our-work/our-heritage/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004). [10] Industrial Chemicals Act 2019 (Cth), https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2019A00012/latest (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS), “Use of Animal Test Data,” https://www.industrialchemicals.gov.au/business/use-animal-test-data (Accessed: 15 May 2026). [11] Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Making Environmental Claims: A Guide for Business (Canberra: ACCC, December 2023), https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/greenwashing-guidelines.pdf (Accessed: 15 May 2026); ACCC media releases on Clorox Australia (April 2024 and 2025) and Edgewell Personal Care (July 2025); Gina Cass-Gottlieb, “ACCC’s Compliance and Enforcement Priorities 2025-26 Address,” February 2025. [12] Dara O’Rourke, Shopping for Good (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Sherilyn MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth:

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