A World Turned Upside Down: Australian News

Wanderfound · August 3, 2021, 3:00am

Inspired by the Mondragon network of co-operatives established in the Basque Country in Spain, Earthworker Manufacturing functions via a flat collectivised organisational structure. The factory currently has a small staff of five worker members, some on the factory floor, others in sales and administration. They are all paid the same wage and Dan says any future surplus profits that aren’t reinvested into growing the business will be split evenly among the members. They are currently struggling to keep up with demand for their product, and there are plans to bring more workers on to the factory floor in the near future. Given the vast open factory space, there is certainly room to grow. The dream is to run the factory at a capacity of around forty worker-members in a few years from now and to spin off elements of the production to establish another co-operative factory elsewhere.

What’s standing in the way of that growth is access to capital and investment. The worker-owned co-operative model is foreign to most industries in Australia, and Dan says convincing government bureaucrats or others to support the project has been the hardest element of the whole undertaking. ‘We set up a manufacturing business without any working capital, which is sort of impossible,’ he says. Their ambition when they started was to be a lot bigger than they are by now, he concedes, but they are heading in the right direction. Around the time of their launch, the Victorian Government announced a major project upgrading a thousand homes in the Latrobe Valley, installing solar hot water tanks among the upgrades. Dan says they expected hundreds of orders to come from the state government’s procurement, but they never arrived. ‘At first we thought government making key procurement decisions would be the catalyst for us scaling up, but that hasn’t happened,’ he says. ‘Instead it’s been community members around Gippsland, and across Victoria and across the country, wanting to support the project and buy locally made that’s supported our growth. We have been driving our own growth, but that has meant we have been moving slower than we hoped.’

https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/manufacturing-a-co‑operative-future/

Wanderfound · August 4, 2021, 12:28am

Oz just declared that all payphones (yup, we’ve still got 'em) are now free to use.

Designed to allow basic phone access to services for the homeless; also potentially useful in domestic violence situations etc.

It was probably also motivated by the point that it likely costs more to pay someone to collect the coins than it’s worth these days.

Wanderfound · August 4, 2021, 12:52am

Wanderfound · August 6, 2021, 1:03am

Two Murdoch tabloids, one reporting on a LNP-controlled state in lockdown, one reporting on an ALP-controlled state in lockdown:

Nothing new here, Murdoch has been doing this constantly in Oz for as long as he’s been around.

Wanderfound · August 10, 2021, 7:40am

Craig Kelly is a far-right loon who is also unfortunately a Member of Parliament. Prominent amongst the Oz Covid denialist community.

And now he’s found himself stuck in quarantine for a couple of weeks. So he’s doing this:

Wanderfound · August 10, 2021, 9:24am

Sydney makes the world news!

Aussie Aussie Aussie, yeah?

Wanderfound · August 10, 2021, 11:31am

Published today:

Just coincidentally, the author is the CEO of Whitehaven Coal.

Wanderfound · August 10, 2021, 9:30pm

Wanderfound · August 11, 2021, 10:01pm

And today, we have this:

Authored by the CEO of the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association.

Lucy_Gothro1 · August 11, 2021, 10:25pm

Is Looking-Glass or Wonderland logic being practiced by these folks?

Wanderfound · August 11, 2021, 10:43pm

Just straight-up malicious, omnicidal greed. They don’t need to believe their own bullshit.

Remember Chris Faulkner?

Wanderfound · August 13, 2021, 12:20am

Paywalled, but the headline gives the gist of it:

Wanderfound · August 13, 2021, 12:33am

Wanderfound · August 14, 2021, 2:09am

Reminder, once again, that Covid is not coming into Australia via poor brown people crossing the Torres Strait in boats. It’s coming in with rich Americans and Europeans on jetliners. And that the only thing worse than using cops for public health is using the military.

Wanderfound · August 14, 2021, 2:25am

The problem with Australia is not that so many of its citizens are descended from convicts…but rather that so many are descended from prison wardens.

– Clive James

Wanderfound · August 14, 2021, 8:27am

Wanderfound · August 14, 2021, 11:36am

BTW, on the topic of “well, maybe the army medical units could help then”:

Wanderfound · August 15, 2021, 1:36am

Wanderfound · August 16, 2021, 2:43am

Wanderfound · August 16, 2021, 10:02pm