When you think about your local community what springs to mind? Perhaps it's taking your kids to the local library or playground; swimming laps at your local pool; playing at your local sporting club; taking your dog to the dog park or enjoying local food festivals and street parties? These services are made possible by your local council - and they are now under threat. The State Liberal Government wants to implement rate capping; an arbitrary one-size- fits-all limit on council rates that restricts the ability of councils to provide essential community services. If rate capping gets up, we will see a reduction in services, reduced investment in infrastructure and backlogs in crucial maintenance. It means the services that contribute to building strong and vibrant communities are either reduced or discontinued entirely. Rate capping also means communities pay more for the things that they love. In the most extreme cases overseas, important services like libraries have been handed over to untrained volunteers to run- or worse, privatised. Imagine having to pay a fee to access your local library? We don't want to see people forced to pay more for essential government services. That's why we're calling on Members of Parliament to vote against rate capping.

Aged care residents receive one and a half hours less care than they should, every day. Yet there are no rules to ensure the $2.17 Billion in government subsidies given to for-profit aged care companies is spent directly on their care. Proof of government funding being directly spent on care for residents needs to be mandated as a pre-requisite to receiving a taxpayer funding. It’s time to make aged care operators accountable for how they spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The Victorian Pride Lobby has been fighting for LGBTIQA+ rights for decades. We believe that no worker should face the sack for coming out at work. But under current laws there over 200,000 jobs in Australia - including at least 38,564 jobs in Victoria alone - that a worker can be fired from if they come out. These include teachers, school staff, doctors and health workers. May*, a lesbian woman, was employed by a Christian welfare agency for two years when she was asked to resign after they found out about her relationship with her partner. She told the Lobby: “I resigned and fell apart after having served that community for years. The fall out also meant I had to leave my church community. All of this resulted in mental health challenges, isolation, loss of faith, friends, purpose... I can’t express the devastating impact being asked to resign due to my sexuality had on my life. I lost everything - my vocation, faith, community - and had to rebuild myself from a very broken place.” Workers like May deserve job security and fair rights at work. Our political leaders must commit to amending the Fair Work Act to protect workers like May from workplace discrimination. * Name changed in order to protect privacy

Hospo workers are too often exploited. We work without breaks, we're not treated with respect and our wages are stolen. I stood up to my employer and was fired for exercising my rights! Businesses like BARRY get away with this kind of behaviour too often. I'm calling on the Fair Work Ombudsman to conduct a full audit of BARRY and order repayment of wages to past and present staff. Send a clear message that it's time to take wage theft off the menu.

As an outreach of the Queensland Baptists, Carinity claims to “provide communities of care, compassion and respect” to those in need, yet is failing to provide any of these things to its staff – Carinity doesn’t seem to care. Carinity’s cuts to the working conditions of teachers and school support staff will put them behind their counterparts in other Queensland schools and create second-tier teachers in the state but Carinity doesn’t seem to care. Carinity’s cuts would reduce superannuation provisions for its largely female workforce putting their financial futures at risk but Carinity doesn’t seem to care. Carinity’s cuts would deny its staff access to community standard leave provisions including paid Domestic Violence Leave – an area that Carinity works in and claims to care about yet when it comes to its own workers facing such devastating circumstances, Carinity doesn’t seem to care. Carinity’s cuts would mean its students’ teachers are worse off despite Carinity publicly emphasising the extra support their students, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, are given by school staff but Carinity doesn’t seem to care.

• The number of Indigenous children taken from their families has doubled in the decade since the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations. Less than 35 per cent of these children are placed with their Aboriginal family. • Funding continues to be directed to removing children. There is no serious investment in early intervention that help keep families together, or to meet the unmet needs for housing, employment and other basic services, the root cause of the “neglect” that leads many children to be removed. • Once kids are removed families struggle to get them back, with little support provided and a system biased against return. Current reforms are placing children in foster care until they are 18 years old almost immediately and there is a further push to ease restrictions on adoption.

The Victorian government is gutting the community mental health sector. It argues that it can pull this funding out of the sector because the NDIS is a better system for people with mental health needs. But here is what is really happening: • 91% of Victorian with severe mental health needs are not even eligible for the NDIS – leaving a massive 135,000 people without any support services. • Mental health admissions at ED’s have jumped over 19% in the past 4 years, putting an incredible strain on an already over-burdened system. • Victoria spends less per capita on mental health support than any other state or territory – $197 per capita to the rest of Australia’s average of $227. Along with these shocking facts, more than a thousand well-trained and dedicated Community Mental Health workers are being forced out of their jobs. This is devastating to them, their families and the people they support. Community Mental Health workers work in services that support Victorians with a wide range of mental health challenges. Their support helps people to live better lives and contribute to their communities. Community Mental Health is the frontline of mental health services that takes pressure off the hospitals and other acute services, the police and the courts. We’ve been warning of a crisis in mental health support – that crisis is now here. Vulnerable people with complex needs are falling through an ever widening gap. The Andrews government must recognise this looming disaster and act quickly to save Victoria’s recovery-focused community-based mental health support services.

Newstart at $269 per week, is $177 per week below the poverty-line. It is less than 41 percent of the minimum wage, less than 18 percent of the average wage, and has not been raised in real terms for 23 years.
 Even the Business Council of Australia has advocated to the government that the low rate of Newstart presents a barrier to employment and risks entrenching poverty. 
 Increasing Newstart would benefit local economies, by increasing the spending power of those on low incomes, whose extra funds would circulate through local businesses. It would also reduce the strain on Council community services assisting the growing number of people experiencing hardship. Eleven local councils in South Australia and Victoria have added their voices to the chorus of business, union and welfare groups which have called for Newstart to be increased. The South Australian councils which have passed motions are Adelaide, Clare and Gilbert Valley, Copper Coast, Kangaroo Island, Mount Gambier, Onkaparinga, Playford, Port Adelaide Enfield, Salisbury, and Streaky Bay. In Victoria, the Moreland City Council has also passed a motion. The inadequacy of the Newstart payment entrenches poverty and contributes to homelessness. With the growth of gentrification and development in Melbourne's inner west the Newstart payment is no longer providing the means for Maribyrnong's working-class and migrant population to live in the area. The Maribyrnong City Council should support the motion to increase Newstart and protect the area's identity as being one of the most diverse and accessible places to live in Melbourne.

Background: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was established in March 2017. It’s funded by the $3 billion bequest of Australian businessman and top Liberal Party donor Paul Ramsay. The Ramsay Centre says it wants to “advance education by promoting studies and discussion associated with the establishment and development of Western civilisation.” Board member Kim Beazley also said the study of Western civilisation "needs a systematic voice" in Australian universities. In December last year, it was announced that ANU and the Ramsay Centre had opened negotiations about creating a degree. Overview of the Degree: The proposed undergraduate degree, titled 'Bachelor of Western Civilisation,' would offer text-based courses for yearly cohorts of sixty students. Thirty students each year would receive $25,000/year scholarships. The proposed program comprises 16 core courses, typically taken over three years, which will cover “great texts,” art and architecture from Western civilisation. The degree will be ‘elite but not elitist’; the ATAR required for entry will be 97. Negotiations are ongoing and both the Ramsay Centre and ANU have said academic independence will be respected. However, Ramsay Centre CEO Simon Haines has said they will review all course content, not hire teachers who have criticised Western civilisation and will withdraw funding if they think the course isn’t sufficiently pro-West. Our Stance: We oppose the ANU’s collaboration with the Ramsay Centre based on the Centre’s ideological bias and its stated aim to teach only the positive aspects of Western civilisation. We do not think that such uncritical teaching should have a place at our university. We oppose the reductive premises on which the Ramsay Centre is based: the idea of a ‘West’ and the assumption of its superiority.

The NSW Government are hell bent on selling off our public services, and there is no better example of this than what they have done to public transport in our great state. They’ve sold off Inner West buses, bungled the light rail, over-worked and under-staffed our train drivers and now they want to sell off the Illawarra/Eastern Suburbs Line (https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/eastern-suburbs-and-illawarra-line-to-stand-alone-in-a-decade-report-20180327-p4z6j3.html) Public transport should remain just that. We need public services that exist to serve our community to the highest standard possible, not a system that is motivated by profit and which can leave ordinary working people with a higher cost of living. Tell Andrew Constance and the NSW Liberal Government that NSW Public Sevices are NOT for sale and to keep the Illawarra/Eastern Suburbs Line in public hands.

The Easter Sunday public holiday is a chance for hard-working Victorians to enjoy a much-needed break and quality time with family and friends. Others won't be so fortunate and they will spend Easter Sunday making our coffees, caring for the ill, pouring our pints and cleaning our hotel rooms. They deserve to be fairly compensated for missing valuable time with family and friends.

The ANMF have consistently raised these concerns with THS, however with little outcome. As a result, on the 19th March members committed to commencing industrial action. This action will continue until the ANMF receive a commitment for the following outcomes as identified by members in their resolution to highlight the current bed block crisis: • Funding, staffing and opening up all beds on ward 4D at the LGH to its full capacity. • Funding, staffing and opening up all beds on 4K at the LGH to its full capacity. • Funding, staffing and opening up currently closed beds in the Intensive Critical Care Unit to be used as a High Dependency Unit. • An action plan for respiratory isolation. • Funding to staff permanent assistants in nursing (AINs) as sitters on the medical wards, to alleviate nursing staff from undertaking double shifts. • A long term commitment to fund and open additional medical and geriatric beds at the LGH. • Permanent funding for the Emergency Medical Unit within the ED. • Funding to staff after hours allied health positions within the ED. • More telemetry units purchased as often patients are waiting in the ED for a unit to become available on the wards. • Implementation of a Psychiatric Emergency Nurses seven days (and evenings) a week, to de-escalate and support all challenging presentations. That this position is funded from additional resources. ANMF members working at the LGH deserve better and so do the patients, families and wider community affected by the issue.