Civics & Commerce

Show notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. Theidentifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situationsand 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 EPISODEMarriage as a political institution- The political theory of marriage in liberal modernity has been a substantive field of scholarly work for more than half a century. The Welsh-Australian political philosopher Carole Pateman, whose career has spanned positions at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Los Angeles, advanced one of the most influential contemporary statements in The Sexual Contract (1988), which argues that the marriage contract in modern liberal society is not a freely-entered agreement between equals but the historical institution through which women’s subordination was consolidated alongside the formal political contract of citizenship.- The Nigerian philosopher Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women (1997), argues that the gendered marriage contract European societies treated as natural was a particular cultural form, not a universal one. In pre-colonial Yoruba society, seniority rather than gender was the primary organising principle of social relations. Colonial administration imposed gendered marriage and the male-headed household as the legal-political form.The wedding industry as a post-war consumer creation- For most of European history, marriage was an economic institution before it was a romantic one. The notion of marrying for love became culturally dominant only in the nineteenth century.- The white-wedding consumer apparatus that Australian and other English-speaking wedding industries have built around themselves, including the engagement ring, the elaborate ceremony, the photographer, the hen’s night, and the wedding magazine and trade-show economy, was largely built up in the post-Second-World-War decades through the marketing of an aspirational middle-class ritual.Australian marriage rates and demographic shift- Australian marriage rates have been falling since the early 1970s. The crude marriage rate has fallen by roughly half over that period. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its most recent Marriages and Divorces, Australia data on 23 July 2025, reporting 120,844 marriages registered in 2024, a crude marriage rate of 5.5 per thousand people aged 16 and over, and a median age at marriage of 32.8 years for men and 31.2 years for women.- Cohabitation has risen sharply over the same period. A majority of couples who do marry have lived together first. The economic and structural drivers of marriage delay and decline include the housing crisis, longer schooling and later workforce entry, shifting gendered patterns in paid work, and the loss of marriage as the default container for partnership.- In 2024, 4,746 marriages were registered for couples of the same or non-binary gender, around 3.9 per cent of all marriages, up 4.1 per cent on 2023.Aboriginal customary marriage and the colonial Marriage Act- Aboriginal customary marriage, the system of partnership and kinship recognition developed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over tens of thousands of years, was for most of the twentieth century not recognised by Australian law.- The Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) codified a European model as the only legally-recognised form of marriage in Australia. The protection regime that took children from Aboriginal families across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now known as the Stolen Generations, operated in part on the explicit basis that Aboriginal families and marriages were not the right kind of family or marriage.- Recognition came in pieces: family law reform from the mid-1970s, partial recognition of Aboriginal customary law in some state jurisdictions including the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and a wider literature of legal and political scholarship documented in the Australian Law Reform Commission’s foundational 1986 report on the Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws.- The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 (Cth) expanded the legal definition of marriage to “the union of two people” to include same-sex couples. The amendment followed the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey conducted between September and November 2017, in which 61.6 per cent of respondents voted Yes on a participation rate of 79.5 per cent. The Act did not address the customary-marriage question.The international picture: Netherlands and Japan- The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage on the first of April 2001. The Wet openstelling huwelijk, the Act on the Opening Up of Marriage, was passed by the Dutch parliament in the second half of 2000 and signed by Queen Beatrix on 21 December 2000, taking effect on 1 April 2001. Four couples were married at midnight at Amsterdam City Hall to mark its commencement. As of 2026, around thirty countries have legalised same-sex marriage.- Japan has moved in the other direction on the broader question of marriage formation. The Japanese marriage rate has fallen sharply since the 1970s, driven by housing pressure, long working hours, women’s increased participation in paid work outside the home, and a wider questioning of what marriage costs people who enter it. Japan’s birth rate has fallen with the marriage rate, and the demographic implications of the trend are now one of the country’s central political questions.REFERENCES[1] Goran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000(London: Routledge, 2004).[2] Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1988).[3] Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (NewYork: Viking, 2005).[4] Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business ofTradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).[5] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2024,released 23 July 2025 (Canberra: ABS).[6] Commonwealth of Australia, 2023 Intergenerational Report (Canberra: TheTreasury, 2023); Australian Institute of Family Studies, Families inAustralia survey reports (Melbourne: AIFS).[7] Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense ofWestern Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).[8] Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to IndigenousAustralia (Richmond, Vic: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018); Australian Law ReformCommission, Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws, Report No 31(Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986).[9] Marriage Act 1961 (Cth); Marriage Amendment (Definition and ReligiousFreedoms) Act 2017 (Cth); Australian Bureau of Statistics, “AustralianMarriage Law Postal Survey, 2017,” catalogue 1800.0 (Canberra: ABS, 15November 2017).[10] Wet openstelling huwelijk (Act on the Opening Up of Marriage),Government of the Netherlands, effective 1 April 2001; Pew Research Center,“Key facts about same-sex marriage around the world, 25 years after theNetherlands legalized it,” published 25 March 2026.[11] Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability inPostindustrial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); NationalInstitute of Population and Social Security Research, Vital Statistics ofJapan (Tokyo: IPSS, annual).FURTHER READINGFriedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State(1884). The foundational nineteenth-century materialist account of marriageas a political institution tied to property, inheritance, and the patriarchalhousehold.Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and PrimitiveAccumulation (2004). On the family, women’s labour, and the witch hunts as amoment of primitive accumulation that disciplined women’s reproductive workinto the heterosexual household.Anne Manne, Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? (2005). AnAustralian argument about the political economy of care, the family, andwomen’s work, with attention to the policy choices that shape householdformation.Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and theFamily in America Today (2009). On the institutional destabilisation ofmarriage in the contemporary United States and its sociological causes.Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). Foundational essay on family, kinship, andgender under and after slavery in the United States.Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007). Onhow love, romance, and partnership have been shaped by the rise of consumerand emotional capitalism.Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, andthe Politics of Empowerment (1990). On Black family, motherhood, and thepolitics of kinship.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listedabove are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic orprofessional writing, direct verification against the original publication orinstitutional 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODETā moko and its colonial suppression- Tā moko, the customary Māori practice of marking the face and body, was almost extinguished in Aotearoa New Zealand across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Missionary stigmatisation through the nineteenth century stripped public legitimacy from the practice; the Native Schools Act of 1867 removed Māori children from the language and knowledge networks in which tā moko transmitted; and the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, in force until its repeal in 1962, criminalised the work of traditional specialists, including tohunga tā moko.- By the middle of the twentieth century the male facial moko had effectively ceased to be applied, and the women’s chin moko, the moko kauae, had declined sharply.- The tā moko revival from the 1980s onwards has been led by Māori practitioners and scholars, including Te Arawa scholar Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, whose Māori and Psychology Research Unit at the University of Waikato, funded by a Marsden Fund grant, produced the contemporary reference work Mau Moko (2007) with Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, Rolinda Karapu, and photographer Becky Nunes.Tikanga and the moko kauae revival- Tikanga, the body of Māori protocols rooted in customary law and relational obligation, governs the application and receiving of tā moko. The work proceeds through layered permissions: from the recipient’s iwi, from kaumātua, and within the practitioner’s own teaching lineage.- The moko kauae revival, accelerating from the late 1990s and into the 2000s and 2010s, has seen growing numbers of wāhine Māori receive the chin moko as an assertion of cultural and political authority. The revival has been documented as one of the most visible expressions of Māori women’s political agency in this period.Samoan tatau and the Pacific traditions- Samoan tatau, the full-body male tatau and the women’s malu, is one of the few Pacific tattooing traditions that survived the colonial period substantially unbroken, transmitted across generations by the masters of tatau, the tufuga tā tatau.- The English word tattoo entered the language from the Samoan tatau, picked up by Captain James Cook’s expedition to the Pacific in the 1770s. The word travelled into global English while the practice itself was suppressed across most of the colonised Pacific.- Samoan novelist and scholar Maualaivao Albert Wendt’s essay “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (Span 42-43, 1996), republished as the afterword to Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999), is one of the foundational scholarly readings of Pacific tatau as political and literary practice.Wurundjeri Country, Aboriginal sovereignty, and inter-Indigenous protocols- Naarm Melbourne sits on the Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Practices conducted in Melbourne by visiting Indigenous practitioners, including Māori tā moko artists, take place on Wurundjeri Country and customarily proceed with the engagement of Wurundjeri cultural authorities and Welcome to Country protocols.- Australian First Nations scholarship, particularly the body of work associated with Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson and the Indigenous sovereignty literature, has developed the political-philosophical argument that all relationship to land in Australia begins from the unceded sovereignty of First Nations peoples.Māori in Australia: the trans-Tasman diaspora- The 2021 Australian Census recorded 170,035 people of Māori ancestry in Australia, the largest Māori population outside Aotearoa New Zealand. Queensland holds approximately thirty-eight per cent of this population, New South Wales approximately twenty-three per cent.- The Māori diaspora in Australia is largely a post-1990 phenomenon, driven by the closure of New Zealand industries that had absorbed Māori labour in the postwar decades, the wage and housing gap between the two countries, and the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that has historically allowed relatively open movement between Australia and New Zealand.- The result is a generation of Māori, including the second-generation diaspora born and raised in Australia, who carry ancestral practice in contexts away from their whenua and within reach of trans-Tasman family networks.REFERENCES[1] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and IndigenousPeoples (London: Zed Books; Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999).[2] Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, and RolindaKarapu, Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (Auckland: Penguin, 2007).[3] Mason Durie, Whaiora: Māori Health Development, 2nd ed. (Auckland: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).[4] Hirini Moko Mead, Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values (Wellington: HuiaPublishers, 2003).[5] Naomi Simmonds, “Mana Wahine: Decolonising Politics,” Women’s StudiesJournal 25, no. 2 (2011): 11-25.[6] Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot, Tatau: A History of Samoan Tattooing(Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2018).[7] Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” Span 42-43(April-October 1996): 15-29; reprinted as “Afterword: Tatauing thePost-Colonial Body” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, andIdentity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 399-412.[8] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, andIndigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).[9] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural Diversity in Australia: Census2021 (Canberra: ABS, 2022).[10] Paul Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i te Ao Moemoeā (Wellingtonand Brisbane: Te Puni Kōkiri and Griffith University, 2007).FURTHER READINGRanginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End, revised edition(Auckland: Penguin, 2004). Foundational political history of Māori-Crownrelations.Michael King, Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century (Auckland: DavidBateman, 1972). The first major late-twentieth-century documentary study ofthe practice.Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia(Richmond, Vic: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018). On Aboriginal cultural protocols,including the engagement of visiting Indigenous peoples with First Nationscustodians.Larissa Behrendt, Indigenous Australia for Dummies, 2nd edition (Milton,Qld: Wiley, 2021). On Aboriginal political and cultural history.Damon Salesa, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific Futures (Wellington: BridgetWilliams Books, 2017). On the trans-Pacific and trans-Tasman political anddemographic patterns shaping Māori and Pacific lives across Aotearoa NewZealand and Australia.Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans,1642-1772 (Auckland: Viking, 1991). On the early Pacific encounters thatbrought the word tatau into English as tattoo.Brendan Hokowhitu, ed., Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching theDiversity of Knowledge (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010). On Indigenouspolitical and cultural authority in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listedabove are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic orprofessional writing, direct verification against the original publication orinstitutional 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEThe British anti-slavery sugar boycotts- In the 1790s, a popular British movement urged ordinary households to refuse sugar produced by enslaved labour in the British Caribbean. The campaign was largely organised by women at household and parish level, used pamphlets, shop boycotts, and lists of grocers who sold only free-grown sugar, and drew an estimated three hundred thousand households into a “free produce” practice at its peak.- Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), an English Quaker abolitionist from Leicester, published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, criticising William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson for accepting a gradualist position on the abolition of West Indian slavery. She organised a local boycott of slave-grown sugar so effective that within a year roughly a quarter of Leicester’s population had stopped buying sugar. The pamphlet spread among women’s anti-slavery societies in Britain and influenced American abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott. More than seventy women’s anti-slavery associations were active in Britain by the late 1820s.American consumer activism: leagues, labels, fair trade, anti-sweatshop - The National Consumers League, founded in New York in 1899, with Florence Kelley as long-serving general secretary, ran white-label and union-label campaigns for clothing and other goods produced under fair conditions, and campaigned for the abolition of child labour and for shorter working hours.- The fair-trade movement developed from the 1940s through the 1960s, with organisations such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV importing handicrafts on fair terms from producers in lower-income countries. Fairtrade certification was established in 1988.- The student-led anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s and 2000s, including United Students Against Sweatshops, targeted university apparel licensing and major fashion brands, and pushed for codes of conduct, factory monitoring, and the right of garment workers to organise.Black American consumer politics- The Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns of the 1930s, beginning in Harlem and spreading across Northern cities, organised boycotts of white-owned stores that refused to hire Black staff.- The Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 to December 1956, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, was sustained for more than a year by Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to use segregated buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., ran an alternative carpool network during the boycott.- Operation Breadbasket, founded in Atlanta in 1962 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later run by Jesse Jackson from a Chicago base from 1966, used selective patronage and threatened boycotts to win jobs and supplier contracts for Black workers and businesses from white-owned firms operating in Black neighbourhoods.The consumer cooperative movement- On 21 December 1844, in Toad Lane in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, twenty-eight weavers and craftsmen opened a small shop they owned together. The principles they wrote down, known as the Rochdale Principles, included democratic member control on the basis of one member one vote, open membership, distribution of surplus to members in proportion to purchases, political and religious neutrality, and the education of members. The model spread quickly across Britain and the world and became the constitutional basis of the modern consumer and worker cooperative movements.- The Mondragon Corporation was founded in 1956 in the Basque country of northern Spain by Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta and a small group of graduates from a local technical school. From a single workshop it has grown into one of the largest worker-owned cooperative networks in the world, with operations across industrial manufacturing, retail (the Eroski supermarket chain), finance (the Caja Laboral cooperative bank), and higher education (Mondragon University), employing tens of thousands of worker-owners.Australia and global garment supply chains- The Australian labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built consumer cooperatives and union-label campaigns, including the Co-operative Bookshop tradition and Rochdale-style retail cooperatives in working-class suburbs.- Australian fair-trade and ethical-consumption institutions grew from the 1970s onwards, including the Oxfam Australia fair-trade shops and the Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand certification body.- Contemporary global garment supply chains depend heavily on the labour of migrant women in countries with low wages and weak protection of labour rights. A series of catastrophic factory deaths in the global garment industry in the 2010s, including factory fires and a major building collapse, focused international attention on conditions and prompted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the wider transparency movement now visible in Australian ethical-fashion brand campaigns.REFERENCES[1] Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers,from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016).[2] Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism inAmerica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).[3] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise ofWomen’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).[4] Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender andBritish Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).[5] Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry intothe Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West IndianSlavery (London, 1824).[6] Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: BlackCommunities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).[7] Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African AmericanConsumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press,1998).[8] Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1997).[9] William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growthand Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1988).[10] Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stake-Holder Society (Sydney:Pluto Press Australia, 1999).[11] Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour MarketDecisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000).FURTHER READINGW. E. B. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans (1907). The earliest scholarly study of mutual-aid and cooperative economic life in Black American communities. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Includes the “moral economy” thread that informs how historians read the early consumer-political tradition and the relationship between custom, refusal, and the market.Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997). Essays on the 1990s anti-sweatshop campaigns and the politics of the global garment supply chain.Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986). Connects feminist political economy to the global production of consumer goods.April Linton, Fair Trade from the Ground Up: New Markets for Social Justice (2012). On the development and contradictions of the fair-trade movement from the mid-twentieth century onwards.Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave, A Global History of Co-operative Business (2018). A wide-ranging history including the Australian cooperative tradition alongside European and American developments.Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997). Glickman’s earlier book, on how the living wage became central to American labour politics and how consumer identity entered working-class political thought.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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEPharmacist scope of practice in Australia- Queensland’s Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice Pilot began in 2024 and wasmade a permanent feature of the state’s health system from 1 July 2025.Trained pharmacists can assess, treat, and prescribe for a range of acutecommon conditions under the Extended Practice Authority, with roughly 16 to22 conditions covered.- Victoria’s Community Pharmacist Statewide Pilot reported a 97 per centpatient satisfaction rate and was made permanent with an $18 millioninvestment, covering 22 conditions and offered at no cost to patients.- New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania haveintroduced or expanded pharmacist prescribing. Western Australia’s EnhancedAccess Community Pharmacy Pilot is expected to begin service delivery by2027. Scope is set state by state, and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia hascalled for the rules to be harmonised nationally.- The Productivity Commission and Queensland Government report Unleashing thePotential: An Open and Equitable Health System found that using pharmacistsand other health professionals to their full scope of practice improvesaccess to care and helps address workforce shortages, particularly inregional and rural areas.- The Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College ofGeneral Practitioners have opposed elements of the expansion, citing patientsafety and fragmentation of care. Commentary has described the dispute as aturf war between the two professions.The professionalisation of medicine- Through the nineteenth century, medicine in the English-speaking worldconsolidated into a single licensed profession through registration andlicensing laws, the standardisation of medical education, and control ofhospitals. In Britain the Medical Act 1858 created a statutory medicalregister, and comparable registration regimes followed across the Australiancolonies.- As the profession closed, women, who had long done much of the work ofhealing, were pushed to its margins. Midwifery was subordinated to amale-dominated obstetrics, and women were largely excluded from medicaltraining for generations.Medicine and colonial power- Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist and headed theBlida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria from 1953 until hisresignation in 1957, during the Algerian war of independence from France.- His essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” published in A Dying Colonialism in1959, described how colonial medicine operated as an instrument ofdomination, and how colonial doctors were legally required to reportpatients’ suspicious injuries to the authorities.Non-physician clinicians and primary health care- Mozambique, left with only a few dozen doctors after independence in 1975 anda prolonged civil war, trained a cadre of non-physician clinicians, thetecnicos de cirurgia, to perform major surgery. Studies over more than twodecades found their surgical outcomes comparable to those of specialistdoctors, at a fraction of the cost, with far higher retention in ruraldistrict hospitals.- The International Conference on Primary Health Care at Alma-Ata in September1978 produced the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which set out primary health careand the goal of Health for All, giving community health workers a centralrole in delivering basic care.- In Australia, Ngangkari, traditional healers from the Anangu PitjantjatjaraYankunytjatjara Lands, have been integrated into South Australian hospitals.The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network entered a partnership with theAnangu Ngangkari Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation in 2019. The Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Health Practitioner is a nationally registeredprofession, regulated through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslanderHealth Practice Board of Australia.REFERENCES[1] Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division ofExpert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).[2] Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of AppliedKnowledge (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970).[3] Eliot Freidson, Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of MedicalCare (New York: Atherton Press, 1970); supporting source Magali SarfattiLarson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1977).[4] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: BasicBooks, 1982).[5] Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: AHistory of Women Healers (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1973);supporting source Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (London: Routledge,1992).[6] Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism,translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965); originallypublished as L’An V de la revolution algerienne (Paris: Francois Maspero,1959).[7] David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1988).[8] C. Pereira, A. Cumbi, R. Malalane, F. Vaz, C. McCord, A. Bacci, and S.Bergstrom, “Meeting the Need for Emergency Obstetric Care in Mozambique: WorkPerformance and Histories of Medical Doctors and Assistant Medical OfficersTrained for Surgery,” BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics andGynaecology 114, no. 12 (2007).[9] World Health Organization, Declaration of Alma-Ata: InternationalConference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata, 6-12 September 1978 (Geneva: WorldHealth Organization, 1978).[10] World Health Organization, Task Shifting: Rational Redistribution of Tasksamong Health Workforce Teams; Global Recommendations and Guidelines (Geneva:World Health Organization, 2008).[11] Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, TraditionalHealers of Central Australia: Ngangkari (Broome: Magabala Books, 2013); on theregistered profession, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health PracticeBoard of Australia, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.FURTHER READINGEliot Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (2001). Freidson’s finalaccount of professionalism as a distinct way of organising work, set againstthe market and the bureaucracy.Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis (1976). A polemic arguing thatan expanding medical monopoly erodes people’s capacity to care for themselvesand each other.Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions (1995). A survey of howsociologists have understood professions as projects of monopoly, status, andsocial closure.Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of theExperts’ Advice to Women (1978). Traces how a male-dominated medical andscientific establishment claimed authority over women’s bodies and lives.Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (1991). Onhow colonial medicine in Africa classified and governed the people it claimedto treat.Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s HospitalSystem (1987). A history of how the hospital moved from a charitable refuge tothe institutional centre of professional medicine.Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (1959). The essay “Medicine and Colonialism”sets out how medicine became part of the machinery of colonial rule.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listedabove are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic orprofessional writing, direct verification against the original publication orinstitutional record is recommended.bout the hostLiv 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEThe 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 READINGJulius 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 hostLiv 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEThe 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 READINGRuth 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 hostLiv 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEThe 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 READINGAndré 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 hostLiv 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODECivic 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 READINGCarole 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 hostLiv 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEAustraliaThe 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.AustriaFrom 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.FinlandSince 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 traditionGøsta 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 READINGEsping-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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEAustraliaThe 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.IrelandThe 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.IcelandOn 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 READINGBacchi, 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 theorists.Ross, Loretta J., Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure, eds. Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique. New York: Feminist Press, 2017. A wider collection setting out the movement’s intellectual and organising history.Langton, Marcia. Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018. Langton’s accessible survey of Indigenous Australia, useful background to her wider scholarship.Baird, Barbara. Abortion in Australia: Access, Politics and History. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023. A recent account of the political history of abortion access in Australia.Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. A historical account of reproductive healthcare politics that informs the comparative material in this episode.Australian Women’s Health Network. History of the Women’s Health Movement in Australia. A movement-produced account of the establishment and development of community women’s health services.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

Episode 13. Show notesThe 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 EPISODEAustraliaThe 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.GermanyThe 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.ScotlandThe 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, 2024), https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-annual-report (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Productivity Commission, In Need of Repair: The National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2022).[10] State of Victoria, Royal Commission into Family Violence: Report and Recommendations (Melbourne: Victorian Government, March 2016), http://rcfv.archive.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Report-Recommendations.html (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre and Justice Connect Homeless Law, joint submission to the Residential Tenancies Act review, 2016; Victorian Government, Free from Violence: Victoria’s Strategy to Prevent Family Violence and All Forms of Violence against Women, https://www.vic.gov.au/free-violence-strategy (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[11] Tenants Victoria, https://tenantsvic.org.au (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Tenancy Advice and Advocacy Service (Victoria), funded through Consumer Affairs Victoria, https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/housing/renting/advice-and-help-with-renting/get-help-with-renting/tenant-advice-and-advocacy-service (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[12] Australian Council of Social Service, Poverty in Australia 2024 (Sydney: ACOSS, 2024), https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026); Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates, Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).FURTHER READINGDavies, Margaret. Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories. Abingdon:Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. The foundational text for the analyticalframe used in this episode: property as a political relationshipbetween people mediated by the law.Davies, Margaret. Asking the Law Question. 4th edition. Sydney:Thomson Reuters, 2017. Companion text in critical legal theory,covering feminist, critical race, and post-colonial approaches tothe question of what law is and what it does.Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106,no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791. The foundational article on property asa racialised political category in the United States, with continuingrelevance for understanding settler-colonial property regimesincluding the Australian one.Behrendt, Larissa. Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights andAustralia’s Future. Sydney: Federation Press, 2003. Behrendt’saccount of Indigenous legal and political claims in Australia and thepolitical settlement they require.Behrendt, Larissa. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling.St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2016. Behrendt’s analysisof the political work that colonial storytelling does in maintainingthe Australian property regime.Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Thefoundational text in Anglophone political theory on the politicalconstruction of the property-holding individual.Pawson, Hal, Vivienne Milligan, and Judith Yates. Housing Policy inAustralia: A Case for System Reform. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan,2020. A major recent academic survey of Australianhousing policy and reform options.Maxwell, Douglas. “Contesting the Property Paradigm amid ‘Radical’Constitutional Change: Living Rent and the Private Housing(Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016.” Legal Studies (Cambridge Core).Academic analysis of how Living Rent successfully politicised tenancyreform in Scotland.Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices): Securing Our Rights, SecuringOur Future. Australian Human Rights Commission, 2020. A major recent national survey of Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander women’s experiences, including in housing and tenancy.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical eventslisted above are real and citable. For any source intended for formalacademic or professional writing, direct verification against theoriginal 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

Show notesThe 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 EPISODEAustraliaThe 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.MadagascarInvestigative 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 thepolitical tradition behind the EU regulatory ban.International theoretical traditionNaomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, published byKnopf Canada at the end of 1999, the same week as the Seattle protestsagainst the World Trade Organization meeting that put thealter-globalisation movement on international front pages. Nowtranslated into more than thirty languages and the foundationalpolitical-economic text on the brand as the carrier of consumeridentity and political affiliation in late twentieth-centurycapitalism.Sara Ahmed’s concept of non-performativity, developed across theessay “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism” in Meridians (2006) andthe book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in InstitutionalLife (Duke University Press, 2012), based on interviews with diversityofficers in universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. Theargument is that the public statement of an institutional commitmentoften does political work as a speech act in ways that substitute forthe 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 studiesfrom Nigeria, Iraq, South Africa, and elsewhere in the Global South.Foundational text in postcolonial environmental humanities ondispersed, slow-moving harms that fall outside conventional accountingframeworks.REFERENCES[1] Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto:Knopf Canada, 1999), with 10th anniversary edition (London: FourthEstate, 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 inInstitutional 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) andTerre des Hommes Netherlands, Child Labour in Madagascar’s MicaSector: Impact of the Mica Supply Chain on Children’s Rights from theMalagasy 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 MicaInitiative Releases First Annual Report,” 18 March 2019.[6] Terre des Hommes Netherlands, “Children Make up Half of AllWorkers 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 MiningMica 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 LabourDue Diligence Act), Netherlands, 2019.[7] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Harvard UniversityPress, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[8] European Parliament and Council, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 of30 November 2009 on cosmetic products, Official Journal of theEuropean 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: Universityof 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: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006);Michal J. Carrington, Detlev Zwick, and Benjamin A. Neville, “The Ideology of the Ethical Consumption Gap,” Marketing Theory 16, no. 1 (2016): 21-38, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593115595674.FURTHER READINGKlein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999. Foundational political-economic text on the brand as the carrier of consumer identity and political affiliation in late twentieth-century capitalism, and the new forms of political accountability that emerged alongside that shift.Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Continuation of Klein’s political- economic analysis into the climate question.Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. The book-length development of the non-performativity concept, drawn from interviews with diversity officers in UK and Australian universities. The key reading for understanding what distinguishes institutional commitment from performative positioning.Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Foundational text in postcolonial environmental humanities on dispersed, slow-moving harms that fall outside conventional accounting frameworks.Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Companion text on extractivism as a colonial-modern relation that converts territories and bodies into resources.O’Rourke, Dara. Shopping for Good. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. On the political economy of ethical consumption and the political and material conditions that shape what is available to consumers as a values-aligned purchase.MacGregor, Sherilyn. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. On environmental citizenship as a political-philosophical category and its relationship to gendered care work.Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. The major scholarly biography of Cruelty Free International’s founder, covering her political philosophy of cross-movement social reform across animal rights, women’s rights, and anti-vivisection campaigning in nineteenth-century Britain.Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and Terre des Hommes Netherlands. Child Labour in Madagascar’s Mica Sector. Amsterdam: SOMO, November 2019. https://www.somo.nl/child-labour-in-madagascars-mica-sector/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026). Primary source on the Malagasy mica supply chain.The Freedom Hub. Child Mica Mining. July 2021. Survey of the global political economy of mica mining, child labour, and the limits of voluntary industry response.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 hostLiv 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

Episode 11, The Childcare CentreShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- The 2026-27 federal budget handed down by Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Tuesday 12 May 2026, including the Three Day Guarantee replacing the activity test on subsidised early childhood education hours from 5 January 2026 with a universal entitlement of 72 hours per fortnight, or 100 hours where additional eligibility applies, not dependent on parental work activity; the Worker Retention Payment, a A$3.6 billion two-year wage subsidy for ECEC educators delivering a 10 per cent increase from 2 December 2024 and a further 5 per cent from 1 December 2025, supporting over 200,000 educators with around A$160 per week increase on relevant award rates; the Building Early Education Fund, a A$1 billion capital fund for new centres in underserved outer-suburban and regional areas; the A$17.6 million National Worker Register; the A$54.8 million Inclusion Support Program; the A$139.7 million Thriving Kids early intervention program; the A$0.7 million Little Scientists program; and consultation flagged with states and territories on the establishment of a national early childhood education and care Commission.- The Productivity Commission's inquiry into early childhood education and care, commissioned in February 2023 and co-led by Professor Emerita Deborah Brennan AM of the UNSW Social Policy Research Centre, with the final report A path to universal early childhood education and care released on 18 September 2024, making 56 recommendations and proposing a phased move toward universal access by 2036, with the central political-philosophical argument that ECEC should be reframed as foundational social infrastructure comparable to schools and Medicare.- The Fair Work Commission's Priority Awards Review of gender-based undervaluation, with the Children's Services Award 2010 as one of the priority awards under review, addressing the historical structural wage discount carried by female-dominated care sectors.- The decades-long Australian feminist scholarly conversation on universal early childhood education and care, running from the 1970s and gathered into its major historical reference point in Deborah Brennan's The Politics of Australian Child Care: Philanthropy to Feminism and Beyond, published in revised form by Cambridge University Press in 1998.- Anne Manne's Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children?, published by Allen & Unwin in 2005 and named a finalist for the 2006 Walkley Award for Book of the Year, with the foundational Australian argument that orthodox economic accounting fails to register the political-economic foundation of care.International theoretical tradition- Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, the founding pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), and the launch of the international Wages for Housework movement at the same time, arguing that the political invisibility of women's unpaid labour was a structural condition of capital accumulation.- Marilyn Waring, New Zealand feminist economist and former parliamentarian, with If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (1988), demonstrating that the United Nations System of National Accounts excluded women's unpaid care work from gross domestic product calculations and shaping subsequent revisions to the SNA.- Joan Tronto, American political theorist, with Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993) and Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (2013), with the argument that the political category of citizenship has been constructed in opposition to relational care.- Tithi Bhattacharya, Indian-American Marxist feminist historian and Professor of South Asian History at Purdue University, editor of Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017), the major contemporary gathering of the social reproduction tradition.Sweden- The publication in 1934 of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal's Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question), setting out the foundational social-democratic argument that universal public early childhood education and care would be both a social right of children and a structural foundation of women's economic equality. Alva Myrdal later received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her disarmament work; Gunnar Myrdal received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974.- The Swedish Förskolelagen (Preschool Act) of 1975, formally establishing the framework for publicly funded universal early childhood education, and the Preschool for All bill of 1984 extending the framework. Attendance among Swedish children aged one to five rose from approximately 17 per cent in 1975 to 90 per cent by 2005, with the policy framework treating early childhood education as public infrastructure on the same political-philosophical footing as schools and hospitals.Cuba- The founding of the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Federation of Cuban Women), or FMC, by Cuban revolutionary and chemical engineer Vilma Espín on 23 August 1960, as the principal organising body for the political incorporation of women into the new Cuban state.- The opening on 10 April 1961, one week before the Bay of Pigs invasion, of the first three círculos infantiles (children's circles) in working-class neighbourhoods of Havana, named Camilo Cienfuegos, Ciro Frías, and Fulgencio Oroz, establishing publicly funded early childhood education and care as a foundational element of socialist citizenship and as the structural mechanism for women's full participation in the post-revolutionary workforce.REFERENCES[1] Anne Manne, Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005), https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Anne-Manne-Motherhood-9781741145090; Walkley Foundation, "2006 Walkley Award shortlist for Book of the Year," https://www.walkleys.com/; "Anne Manne," The Monthly, contributor page, https://www.themonthly.com.au/author/anne-manne.[2] Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017), https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399881/social-reproduction-theory/; Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University faculty page, https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/history/directory/index.aspx?p=Tithi_Bhattacharya; Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2019).[3] Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972); Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-1977 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018).[4] Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Marilyn Waring, Still Counting: Wellbeing, Women's Work and Policy-Making (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2018), https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/still-counting/.[5] Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), https://www.routledge.com/9780415906425; Joan Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2013), https://nyupress.org/9780814782781/caring-democracy/; Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring," in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives, ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).[6] Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal, Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1934); Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind, trans. Linda Schenck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Nobel Foundation, "Alva Myrdal, Nobel Peace Prize 1982," https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1982/myrdal-a/facts/; Nobel Foundation, "Gunnar Myrdal, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 1974," https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/myrdal/facts/.[7] Förskolelagen 1975:1132 (Sweden), Riksdag legislative record; Government of Sweden, Förskola för alla barn, Government Bill 1984/85:209; Skolverket (Swedish National Agency for Education), Förskola i förändring (Stockholm: Skolverket, 2008), https://www.skolverket.se/; OECD, Starting Strong V: Transitions from Early Childhood Education and Care to Primary Education (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2017), Sweden country profile, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264276253-en.[8] Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, official institutional history, https://www.mujeres.cu/; Karen Wald, "Vilma Espín," obituary, The Guardian, 21 June 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jun/21/guardianobituaries.cuba; Catherine Murphy (dir.), Maestra (2012), documentary on women's literacy work in the early Cuban Revolution; Yolanda Ferrer Gómez, La Federación de Mujeres Cubanas: una organización con historia (Havana: Editorial de la Mujer, 2010); Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now: Interviews with Cuban Women (Toronto: Women's Press, 1974).[9] Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care: Philanthropy to Feminism and Beyond, revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), https://www.cambridge.org/9780521629454; Deborah Brennan, UNSW Social Policy Research Centre profile, https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/deborah-brennan; Deborah Brennan and Marian Sawer, "Childcare and the Welfare State in Australia," Social Politics 14, no. 1 (2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxm002.[10] Productivity Commission, A path to universal early childhood education and care, Inquiry Report No. 106 (Canberra: Australian Government, 18 September 2024), https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/childhood/report; Productivity Commission, A path to universal early childhood education and care: Overview (Canberra: Australian Government, 2024), https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/childhood/report/childhood-overview.pdf.[11] Fair Work Commission, Gender-based undervaluation Priority Awards Review, Statement and Decision, Matter Nos. AM2024/4-9, https://www.fwc.gov.au/hearings-decisions/major-cases/gender-based-undervaluation; Fair Work Commission, Children's Services Award 2010 (MA000120), https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/documents/modern_awards/award/ma000120/default.htm.[12] Australian Government, Budget 2026-27, Budget Paper No. 2: Expense Measures, https://budget.gov.au/; Department of Education, Cheaper Child Care, including Three Day Guarantee from 5 January 2026, https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/early-childhood-education-and-care/cheaper-child-care; Department of Education, Worker Retention Payment, https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/worker-retention-payment; Department of Education, Building Early Education Fund, https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/building-early-education-fund.FURTHER READINGAnne Manne, Motherhood (2005). The foundational Australian work on the political philosophy of care, written from a position in Australian political theory.Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory (2017). The major contemporary gathering of the social reproduction tradition, with chapters from Susan Ferguson, David McNally, Nancy Fraser, Salar Mohandesi, Emma Teitelman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Cinzia Arruzza, and others.Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted (1988). The foundational text in feminist economics on the political consequences of national accounting frameworks that exclude women's unpaid care work.Joan Tronto, Caring Democracy (2013). On the structural place of care in democratic theory and the political construction of citizenship in opposition to caring labour.Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). On the historical political economy of women's reproductive labour and the witch hunts as a moment in the constitution of capitalist labour relations.Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (2001). On the political economy of care work and its structural undervaluation.Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care (1998). The historical reference text for the Australian conversation on early childhood education and care across the late twentieth century.Productivity Commission, A path to universal early childhood education and care (2024). The major contemporary Australian policy text on the case for universal early childhood education and care as foundational social infrastructure.Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (2008). Major scholarly biography of Alva Myrdal, covering the political philosophy behind the Swedish welfare state model of early childhood education.Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now (1974). Early documentary record of the political incorporation of Cuban women through the FMC and the círculos infantiles in the first decade after the Revolution.Selma James, Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning (2012). Collected writings of Selma James across four decades of the Wages for Housework movement.Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (1993). Cambridge University Press historical study of how the politics of family policy shaped the formation of European welfare states.Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (1999). On the political philosophy of dependency work and its place in theories of equality and justice.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 hostLiv 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

Episode 10 — The CafeShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- The launch of Hospo Voice on 21 May 2018 in Melbourne by United Voice (now United Workers Union) as Australia's first digital union, organising hospitality workers around wage theft, sexual harassment, and working conditions.- The wave of high-profile Melbourne hospitality wage theft cases exposed through 2018 and 2019, including the A$7.83 million underpayment admitted by George Calombaris's Made Establishment in July 2019, the approximately A$4.5 million in unpaid wages exposed at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner by Heston in 2018, the A$1.6 million underpayment settled by Neil Perry's Rockpool Dining Group, and smaller-venue cases at Barry Cafe, Chin Chin, and other Melbourne venues organised through Hospo Voice campaigns.- The Victorian Wage Theft Act 2020, passed 16 June 2020 and in force from 1 July 2021, the first Australian state legislation to make deliberate underpayment of wages, superannuation, or other entitlements a criminal offence. Penalties include fines of up to A$198,264 for individuals, A$991,320 for companies, and imprisonment of up to 10 years.- The Closing Loopholes (No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth), with federal wage theft criminal provisions in force from 1 January 2025.- The 2019 Global Climate Strikes in Australian capital cities, drawing an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 participants on 20 September 2019, the largest climate mobilisation in Australian history at that time.- The Australian specialty coffee direct trade movement through the 2000s and 2010s, with operators including Market Lane Coffee, Padre Coffee, Single Origin Roasters, Coffee Supreme, Seven Seeds, and Pablo & Rusty's building direct producer relationships and progressively publishing pricing paid to producer partners.El Salvador- The arrival of British migrant James Hill in El Salvador in 1889 and his establishment over the following half century of one of the world's great coffee plantation dynasties, documented in Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland (2020).- The transformation of El Salvador into the most intensive coffee monoculture in modern history, with coffee accounting for over 90 per cent of the country's exports by the mid-twentieth century, built on land enclosures that displaced Indigenous Pipil communities and on a plantation labour model that withheld food to compel longer working hours.- The 1932 La Matanza massacre in western El Salvador, in which government forces of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez killed an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 people, predominantly Indigenous Pipil farmers and rural workers, in the coffee-growing departments of Ahuachapán, Sonsonate, and La Libertad, following a peasant uprising led in part by Communist Party organiser Agustín Farabundo Martí. The massacre remains the political watershed of El Salvadoran coffee political economy and the political reference point of the FMLN movement that fought the 1980-1992 Salvadoran Civil War.Latin America (broader frame)- Eduardo Galeano's documentation in Open Veins of Latin America (1971) of five centuries of European and later United States extraction from Latin America, organised around the commodity flows (the "veins") of gold, silver, sugar, rubber, coffee, fruit, copper, tin, petroleum, and others, all running northward through political and economic structures of dependency.- The banning of Open Veins of Latin America by the military governments of Chile (after the 11 September 1973 coup), Argentina (after the 24 March 1976 coup), and Uruguay (under the 27 June 1973 civic-military dictatorship), and the imprisonment and exile of Galeano, first to Argentina in 1973, then to Spain in 1976, returning to Uruguay after the 1985 democratic transition.Ethiopia- The Ethiopian highlands as the genetic origin of Coffea arabica, with coffee grown today across the Sidama, Yirgacheffe, Limu, Jimma, Sidamo, and Harrar regions. Approximately 90 per cent of Ethiopian coffee producers are smallholders, with coffee farming supporting the livelihoods of approximately 15 million people across the country. Ethiopia is the fifth largest coffee producer globally and Africa's largest.- The founding of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU) in 1999, now comprising 405 cooperatives representing over 370,000 farming households across Oromia Regional State, which accounts for 65 per cent of Ethiopia's total coffee-growing land.- The founding of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU) in 2002, comprising 23 member cooperatives representing over 300,000 farming families across 62,004 hectares of coffee land in the Gedeo zone.- Peer-reviewed climate science projections that approximately 39 to 59 per cent of Ethiopian coffee-growing area could become unsuitable for production by 2080 under current emissions scenarios, with the expanding range of the coffee berry borer beetle adding further pressure, and with similar patterns documented across Central American coffee regions, Brazil, and East African producing countries.REFERENCES[1] Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316748/coffeeland-by-augustine-sedgewick/; Kathryn Hughes, review of Coffeeland, The Guardian (2020); Lizabeth Cohen, review of Coffeeland, New York Times Book Review (2020).[2] Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971); Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching and Rafael Lara-Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).[3] Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1971); Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), https://monthlyreview.org/9780853459910/; Isabel Allende, foreword to the 25th anniversary edition (1997).[4] Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire Trilogy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982-1986); Tania Pellegrini, "Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015): An Obituary," Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 5 (2015): 7-10; Isabella Cosse, "Cultural and Political Resistance in 1970s Latin America," Latin American Research Review 49, no. 2 (2014).[5] Green Left Weekly, "Hospo Voice gives voice to hospitality workers" (May 2018), https://www.greenleft.org.au/2018/1183/news/hospo-voice-gives-voice-hospitality-workers; Junkee, "Australia's First Digital Union Is Here To Help Hospitality Workers Fight Wage Theft And Abuse," 22 May 2018, https://junkee.com/hospo-voice-hospitality-union/159371; Anthony Forsyth, The Future of the Trade Union Movement in Australia (Sydney: Federation Press, 2022).[6] Fair Work Ombudsman, public enforcement actions against MAdE Establishment, Rockpool Dining Group, and Dinner by Heston, 2018-2020, https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media-releases; ABC News, "Calombaris reaches a $200,000 contrition payment after $7.83m wage theft," 18 July 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-18/george-calombaris-restaurant-wage-theft/11320540; United Workers Union, "Fine dining disaster: Dinner by Heston worker exploitation revealed," https://unitedworkers.org.au/archive/fine-dining-disaster-dinner-by-heston-worker-exploitation-revealed/; Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, Wage Theft in Australia: Findings of the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey (Sydney: UNSW and UTS, 2017).[7] Wage Theft Act 2020 (Vic), in force 1 July 2021, https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force/acts/wage-theft-act-2020; Wage Inspectorate Victoria, https://www.wageinspectorate.vic.gov.au/; Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth), wage theft criminal provisions in force 1 January 2025, https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00022/latest/text; Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, criminalisation of intentional wage underpayments, https://www.dewr.gov.au/closing-loopholes.[8] School Strike 4 Climate Australia, https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/; ABC News, "Climate strike rallies attract hundreds of thousands in cities across Australia," 20 September 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/climate-strike-protests-rallies-australia/11530456; Somini Sengupta and Jamie Tarabay, "Protesting Climate Change, Young People Take to Streets in a Global Strike," The New York Times, 20 September 2019.[9] "Coffee production in Ethiopia," Wikipedia general reference, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Ethiopia; International Coffee Organization (ICO), Ethiopia country profile, https://www.ico.org/; F. Anthony, M. C. Combes et al., "The origin of cultivated Coffea arabica L. varieties revealed by AFLP and SSR markers," Theoretical and Applied Genetics 104 (2002): 894-900.[10] Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU), https://www.oromiacoffeeunion.org/; Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), https://www.ycfcu.com/; Fairtrade International, "Cooperatives help to balance the imbalance in trade," 14 May 2025, https://www.fairtrade.net/en/get-involved/news/co-operatives-help-to-balance-the-imbalance-in-trade-.html.[11] Justin Moat, Jenny Williams, Susana Baena et al., "Resilience potential of the Ethiopian coffee sector under climate change," Nature Plants 3 (2017): 17081, https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2017.81; Aaron P. Davis, Tadesse Woldemariam Gole, Susana Baena and Justin Moat, "The impact of climate change on indigenous Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica): predicting future trends and identifying priorities," PLOS ONE 7, no. 11 (2012): e47981, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047981; Christian Bunn, Peter Läderach, Oriana Ovalle Rivera and Dieter Kirschke, "A bitter cup: climate change profile of global production of Arabica and Robusta coffee," Climatic Change 129 (2015): 89-101; International Growth Centre, "The economic and environmental future of Ethiopian coffee," 9 September 2024, https://www.theigc.org/blogs/climate-priorities-developing-countries/economic-and-environmental-future-ethiopian-coffee.[12] Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), https://sca.coffee/; Market Lane Coffee, producer partner pricing, https://marketlane.com.au/; Padre Coffee, direct trade documentation, https://www.padrecoffee.com.au/; Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (London: Zed Books, 2005); Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).FURTHER READINGAugustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland (2020). Definitive recent history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the political and labour economy of El Salvador and the formation of the modern coffee consumer market.Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (1971). Foundational text in the political economy of Latin America, tracing five centuries of European and US extraction through the commodity flows of the continent.Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985). Foundational work on commodity politics; the methodological reference point for the kind of political economy of taste, labour, and consumption that Coffeeland builds on.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009). On the political consciousness of the generations that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s, and the cultural difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism.Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even (2020). On burnout, precarity, and the political affect of millennial workers in the contemporary economy.Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger (2017). On the global political affect of the early twenty-first century and the broken promises of modernity.Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2014). On climate, capitalism, and political possibility.Anthony Forsyth, The Future of the Trade Union Movement in Australia (2022). Includes Hospo Voice as a case study in digital union innovation.Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, Wage Theft in Australia (2017). The major Australian survey-based study on wage theft, particularly among temporary migrant workers.Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox (2005). On the structure of global coffee markets and the gap between producer and consumer economies.Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice (2014). On Fair Trade coffee, certification politics, and the political economy of ethical consumption.Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine (2006). Multi-author historical study of Latin American commodity chains, including coffee.Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds (revised 2010). Detailed history of coffee from its origins in Ethiopia through the modern global industry.Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (2003). Cambridge University Press study of the Salvadoran civil war and its political ground in the coffee oligarchy and the 1932 massacre.Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa" (2012). Foundational Indigenous Latin American political thought on the practices and discourses of decolonisation.All works, organisations, scholars, court rulings, 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 hostLiv 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

Episode 9 — The Waste Management BusinessShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- The Australian recycling crisis that arrived in early 2018 following China's National Sword policy, with council kerbside recycling cost increases of several hundred per cent and multiple public reports of collected kerbside material being sent to landfill while still being marketed as recycling.- The collapse of SKM Recycling in Victoria. The company stopped receiving recyclables from 33 Victorian councils in July 2019 and was placed in receivership in August 2019, owing approximately A$100 million. Cleanaway acquired five of the SKM sites in October 2019 for A$66 million, reopening material recovery facilities at Coolaroo, Hallam, Geelong, Laverton North (Victoria) and Derwent Park (Tasmania) through late 2019.- The South Australian Container Deposit Scheme, commenced under the Beverage Container Act 1975 (SA) and in full effect from 1977, making South Australia the first jurisdiction in the world to operate a comprehensive container deposit scheme.- State landfill levies progressively introduced and increased across Australian states from the late 1990s onward, shifting the economics of waste management toward diversion.- The Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 (Cth) and the COAG National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019, beginning the phase-out of unprocessed waste exports: glass from 1 January 2021, mixed plastics from 1 July 2021, whole used tyres from 1 December 2021, single resin plastics from 1 July 2022, and mixed paper and cardboard from 1 July 2024.- The ABC's War on Waste documentary series, first broadcast May 2017, which immediately preceded the National Sword crisis and shifted Australian public conversation on waste.China- China's National Sword policy, with a WTO notification of 18 July 2017 announcing the import ban on 24 categories of solid waste effective 1 January 2018, and a 0.5% contamination threshold for non-banned recyclables effective 1 March 2018.- China had been the destination for approximately 45-50% of the world's exported recyclable plastic and paper waste from the early 1990s through to the National Sword policy.Ghana- The Agbogbloshie scrapyard in central Accra, occupying approximately 20 acres at the mouth of the Odaw River, draining into Korle Lagoon. Estimates of workers on-site before the 2021 demolition range from approximately 6,000 to 10,000, predominantly migrants from northern Ghana, with electronic waste accumulating at the site from the late 1990s onward from the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and other wealthy economies.- The demolition of Agbogbloshie on 1 July 2021 by the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council, with armed police and military backing, under the "Let's Make Accra Work" initiative led by then-Greater Accra Regional Minister Henry Quartey.- The Greater Accra Scrap Dealers Association, which organised after the demolition and pooled resources to purchase land at Teacher Mante, approximately 60-75 km north of Accra, in an effort to relocate informal e-waste activities to a sanctioned site.- The scholarly critique of the international "world's largest e-waste dump" framing of Agbogbloshie, led by Ghanaian and diaspora researchers including Grace Akese, Muntaka Chasant, and Uli Beisel, arguing that the framing was empirically overstated and politically used to legitimise state violence against informal waste workers.International- The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (1989, in force 1992), the Basel Ban Amendment (in force 5 December 2019) prohibiting hazardous waste exports from OECD to non-OECD countries, and the 2019 plastic waste amendments (in force 1 January 2021) bringing most contaminated and mixed plastic waste under prior informed consent procedures.- The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, founded 2008, coordinating organisations across Latin America, Asia, and Africa.- South-East Asian waste import restrictions through 2019-2020 following the Chinese ban, with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam returning contaminated containers to wealthy-economy points of origin including Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Hong Kong.REFERENCES[1] World Trade Organization, Notification by China to the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade, document G/TBT/N/CHN/1211, 18 July 2017. https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/G/TBTN17/CHN1211.pdf; Patrick Sangster, "From Green Fence to red alert: A China timeline," Resource Recycling, 13 February 2018, https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/green-fence-red-alert-china-timeline/; Yifan Gu et al., "Impact of China's National Sword Policy on the U.S. Landfill and Plastics Recycling Industry," Sustainability 14(4) (2022): 2456.[2] Amy L. Brooks, Shunli Wang, and Jenna R. Jambeck, "The Chinese import ban and its impact on global plastic waste trade," Science Advances 4(6) (2018): eaat0131; Katherine Earley, "Piling Up: How China's Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling," Yale Environment 360, 7 March 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling.[3] Senate Environment and Communications References Committee, Never Waste a Crisis: The Waste and Recycling Industry in Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, June 2018); ABC News, "Recycling going to landfill after China bans Australian waste," 21 April 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-21/recycling-going-to-landfill-after-china-ban-on-australian-waste/9682386; Joe Pickin et al., National Waste Report 2020, Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment; Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Recovering and Reprocessing Resources from Waste (2020); Inside Waste, "Former SKM facilities in Victoria reopened by Cleanaway," February 2020, https://www.insidewaste.com.au/former-skm-facilities-in-victoria-reopened-by-cleanaway/.[4] Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), https://www.dukeupress.edu/pollution-is-colonialism; Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi and Nerea Calvillo, "Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World," Social Studies of Science 48(3) (2018): 331-349; Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), https://civiclaboratory.nl/.[5] Grace Akese, Uli Beisel and Muntaka Chasant, "Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition," African Arguments, 22 July 2022, https://africanarguments.org/2022/07/agbogbloshie-a-year-after-the-violent-demolition/; Peter C. Little, Burning Matters: Life, Labor, and E-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Peter C. Little and Grace A. Akese, "Centering the Korle Lagoon: Exploring Blue Political Ecologies of E-Waste in Ghana," Journal of Political Ecology 26(1) (2019): 448-465.[6] Akese, Beisel and Chasant, "Agbogbloshie: A Year after the Violent Demolition" (above); Muntaka Chasant, "Agbogbloshie Demolition: The End of An Era or An Injustice?," Muntaka.com (independent investigative research and photography), https://muntaka.com/agbogbloshie-demolition/; Electrònica Justa, "Crisis in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, caused by forced dismantlement of the landfill," July 2021, https://electronicajusta.net/crisis-in-agbogbloshie-ghana-caused-by-forced-dismantlement-of-the-landfill/?lang=en.[7] Grace A. Akese, "Electronic Waste (e-waste) Science and Advocacy at Agbogbloshie: The Making and Effects of 'The World's Largest E-Waste Dump'" (PhD Dissertation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2019); Josh Lepawsky, Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Augustus Sarpong, Dorothy M. M. Owusu and Esther O. Onallia, "Academic urban legend, Agbogbloshie: Sweeping away the 'World's Largest E-Waste Dumpsite'," Geoforum 159 (2024): 104180.[8] Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Sydney: UNSW Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter and Kane Race, Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).[9] Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, https://globalrec.org/about-us/; Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), Waste Pickers Programme, https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/waste-pickers; Melanie Samson, ed., Refusing to Be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World (Cambridge, MA: WIEGO, 2009); Sonia Maria Dias, "Waste Pickers and Cities," Environment and Urbanization 28(2) (2016): 375-390.[10] Government of South Australia, Green Industries SA, Container Deposit Scheme background and history, https://www.greenindustries.sa.gov.au/container-deposit-scheme; Beverage Container Act 1975 (SA), consolidated under the Environment Protection Act 1993 (SA) Part 8 Division 2; Productivity Commission, Waste Management Inquiry Report, chapter 6 on extended producer responsibility (2006), https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/waste/report.[11] Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 (Cth), https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2020A00119/latest/text; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, "Australia's waste export ban," https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/exports/waste-export-ban; Council of Australian Governments, National Waste Policy Action Plan 2019, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/publications/national-waste-policy-action-plan; state EPA landfill levy histories across NSW EPA, EPA Victoria, Green Industries SA, WA Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, and the Queensland Department of Environment.[12] Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia, https://www.wmrr.asn.au/; Australian Council of Recycling, https://www.acor.org.au/; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Recycling Modernisation Fund, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/how-we-manage-waste/recycling-modernisation-fund.FURTHER READINGMax Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (2021). Foundational text in Indigenous-led discard studies; argues pollution is a colonial land relation rather than a symptom of capitalism, and models an anticolonial scientific practice grounded in Métis epistemology.Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste (2006). Foundational Australian work on the political ontology of waste; what counts as waste in a society is a moral and political category produced through social and political work.Josh Lepawsky, Reassembling Rubbish (2018). Critical reassessment of the global e-waste trade, including the limits of the "world's largest e-waste dump" framing of Agbogbloshie.Peter C. Little, Burning Matters: Life, Labor, and E-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana (2021). Extended ethnography of work and life at the Agbogbloshie scrapyard before the 2021 demolition.Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966). Foundational cultural anthropology of waste, dirt, and pollution, with the influential formulation that dirt is "matter out of place."Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). On salvage capitalism, supply chains, and the rough economies that emerge in disturbed and discarded landscapes.Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture (2002). Australian eco-philosophical work on instrumentalist orientations to nature, with implications for the political philosophy of the circular economy.Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk (2019). On Aboriginal Apalech and broader Indigenous relational and cyclical knowledge systems as substantive intellectual traditions for thinking about material and economic life.Walter R. Stahel, The Performance Economy (2010, with the founding concept dating to 1976). Foundational text in circular economy and product-as-service thinking.Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered (2011). On the limits of recycling as an environmental strategy and the political work needed beyond it.Discard Studies blog, https://discardstudies.com/. Edited collective publication; the international hub of critical waste scholarship.All works, organisations, scholars, court rulings, 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 hostLiv 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

Episode 8 — The Scaffolding CompanyShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- Around 30 to 45 worker deaths a year in the Australian construction industry, with the most recent annual figure 36 per cent above the five-year average. Falls from a height are the second-leading cause of all workplace fatalities, with the construction sector accounting for nearly half of all fall-from-height deaths. Around 188 traumatic worker fatalities in total in 2024, 37 of them in construction.- The model Work Health and Safety Act 2011, adopted by the Commonwealth and most states and territories, providing the framework for primary duties of care to workers.- Industrial manslaughter as a specific criminal offence: Australian Capital Territory (2003), Queensland (October 2017), Northern Territory (February 2020), Victoria (July 2020), Western Australia (March 2022), New South Wales (June 2024).- High proportion of workers most at risk in Australian construction are on visa conditions, in labour-hire arrangements, or working through multiple layers of subcontracting.South Korea- The death of Kim Yong-gyun, a 24-year-old subcontracted worker, on 11 December 2018 at the Korea Western Power thermal plant in Taean. Kim was inspecting a malfunctioning coal conveyor belt alone on a night shift after only three hours of safety training. His mother led a national campaign in the months that followed.- The "Kim Yong-gyun Act" — amendments to the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed 27 December 2018, in force 16 January 2020.- The Serious Accidents Punishment Act, enacted 26 January 2021, in force 27 January 2022, making corporate officers criminally liable when their companies fail to prevent serious workplace accidents.New Zealand- The Pike River Mine disaster on 19 November 2010, when 29 miners were killed in a methane explosion at the underground coal mine on the West Coast of the South Island.- The Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy, reporting October 2012.- The establishment of WorkSafe New Zealand as a stand-alone regulator in December 2013.- The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, which passed Parliament with cross-party support.International- The International Labour Organization's Convention on Safety and Health in Construction (Convention No. 167), adopted 20 June 1988, in force 11 January 1991.REFERENCES[1] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).[2] Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin, "A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Actions by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist China," The China Journal 64 (2010): 143-158.[3] Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2024. https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-statistics-australia/latest-release[4] Commonwealth of Australia, Work Health and Safety Act 2011, and state and territory industrial manslaughter legislation across ACT (2003), Queensland (2017), Northern Territory (2020), Victoria (2020), Western Australia (2022), and New South Wales (2024).[5] Migrant Workers' Taskforce, Report of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce (March 2019); Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, Wage Theft in Australia (UNSW Sydney and UTS, 2017).[6] Republic of Korea, Serious Accidents Punishment Act, Act No. 17907; Al Jazeera, "South Korea puts CEOs on notice with contentious work safety law" (27 January 2022).[7] Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy, Report of the Royal Commission (Wellington: New Zealand Government, October 2012); Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (New Zealand).[8] International Labour Organization, C167 — Safety and Health in Construction Convention, 1988 (No. 167). Geneva: ILO, 1988.[9] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963); Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845); Steve Tombs and David Whyte, The Corporate Criminal (London: Routledge, 2015).FURTHER READINGKarl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). Foundational text on labour as fictitious commodity and the political countermovement against treating workers purely as a market input.Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China (2016). Extended treatment of the political construction of migrant labour and the institutional weakening of supports around the migrant worker.E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Foundational labour history on the political formation of working-class consciousness through workplace politics.Steve Tombs and David Whyte, The Corporate Criminal (2015). On corporate harm and the political fight to make corporate violations of worker safety prosecutable.Joanna Howe et al., research on labour exploitation across Australian industries with significant migrant labour content.About the hostLiv 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

CIVICS AND COMMERCEEpisode 7 — The ButcherShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- The ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry 2024-25, with final report delivered 28 February 2025 and published 21 March 2025. The inquiry formally found that Woolworths and Coles together account for approximately 67 per cent of national supermarket grocery sales, and described the sector as an oligopoly.- Wholesale meat processing concentration in Australia, with major processors largely owned by transnational firms including JBS S.A. (Brazil) and Cargill (US).- Mixed-use rezoning of suburban shopping strips across Australian state capitals over the past fifteen years, contested by trader associations, resident action groups, and community-led save-our-strip campaigns.Belgium- The founding of La Via Campesina in Mons, Belgium in May 1993. The international peasant movement is now active in over 80 countries and represents an estimated 200 million small-scale farmers, peasants, agricultural workers, rural women, and Indigenous communities.Japan- The founding of the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-operative in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, in 1965 by Shizuko and Kuniyo Iwane, when 200 women organised to buy 300 bottles of milk directly from producers. Incorporated as a consumers' cooperative in 1968. Today operates as a federation of approximately 33 cooperatives across 21 Japanese prefectures, with around 307,000 to 400,000 member households. Awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1989.REFERENCES[1] Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Supermarkets Inquiry 2024-25: Final Report (Canberra: ACCC, 28 February 2025). https://www.accc.gov.au/inquiries-and-consultations/finalised-inquiries/supermarkets-inquiry-2024-25[2] Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005); Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology (2016).[3] La Via Campesina, "The International Peasants' Voice." https://viacampesina.org/en. Founded in Mons, Belgium, May 1993.[4] Carolyn Steel, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008); Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (London: Chatto and Windus, 2020).[5] Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-operative Union. https://seikatsuclub.coop/eng. Right Livelihood Foundation, "Seikatsu Club Consumers' Cooperative — Laureate 1989."[6] Australian Retailers Association, Australian Meat Industry Council, and various community-led save-our-strip campaigns across Australian state capitals.FURTHER READINGVandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest (2000). On the political enclosure of food, seed, and agriculture by corporate intermediaries.Carolyn Steel, Sitopia (2020). On how food provision shapes cities and how planning has separated the two.Annette Aurélie Desmarais, La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants (2007). On the founding and global growth of the international peasant movement.Aegean Leung, Charlene Zietsma, and Ana Maria Peredo, "Emergent Identity Work and Institutional Change: The 'Quiet' Revolution of Japanese Middle-Class Housewives," Organization Studies 35, no. 3 (March 2014). On the Seikatsu Club as a sustained countermovement to supermarket concentration.About the hostLiv 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

CIVICS AND COMMERCEEpisode 6 — The Brow and Lash StudioShow notesThe 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 EPISODECyprus- Sophia Hadjipanteli, Cypriot-British model, and the Unibrow Movement, her ongoing project foregrounding her natural unibrow as a deliberate political and aesthetic choice. Career documented from around 2017 across international fashion press.Industry / Trade History (not country-event anchors)- Threading, an ancient hair removal technique with roots across the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau, now a global beauty service.- Modern eyelash extension techniques developed in the Japanese and South Korean beauty industries in the early to mid-2000s. The "Russian volume" technique, developed in Russia, exported internationally through training programs from the early 2010s.International- The shift in dominant Western brow aesthetics from the plucked-thin look of the late 1990s and early 2000s toward the thick, fuller, more "natural" look that dominates from the mid-2010s onward.REFERENCES[1] María Lugones, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System," Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186-209.María Lugones, "Toward a Decolonial Feminism," Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 742-759.Lugones builds on Aníbal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533-580.[2] Heather Widdows, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160078/perfect-me[3] Sophia Hadjipanteli, Unibrow Movement. https://www.unibrowmovement.com[4] Threading as a hair removal technique with origins across South Asia and the Iranian plateau.[5] Modern eyelash extension industry references: International Beauty Show industry publications, 2010-2025.FURTHER READINGMaría Lugones, "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" (2010). Foundational essay arguing that gender is a colonial imposition with beauty rules embedded in it.Heather Widdows, Perfect Me (2018). On beauty as an ethical ideal that women are morally pressured to meet.Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (2001). On Western and Arab beauty standards as parallel forms of bodily constraint.Mimi Thi Nguyen, "The Biopower of Beauty" (2011), in Signs 36, no. 2: 359-383. On how beauty operates as political infrastructure in geopolitical contexts including post-2001 Afghanistan.Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (2005). On bodily practice as a site of agency, not only of subjugation.About the hostLiv 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

CIVICS AND COMMERCEEpisode 5 — The Plumbing BusinessShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- Chronic sanitation infrastructure failures in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, documented across Closing the Gap reporting and Australian National Audit Office reviews over decades.- The Australian plumbing trade workforce, including apprenticeship intake programs and ongoing political contests about vocational training funding and the role of the public training system.Pakistan- The Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), founded in Karachi in 1980 by social scientist Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan.- Community-led construction of low-cost underground sewerage by residents of one of Asia's largest informal settlements, when the municipal government would not extend services.- The OPP's component-sharing model has since been studied and replicated globally, including through World Habitat Awards recognition.United States- Catherine Coleman Flowers and her work in Lowndes County, Alabama, documenting raw sewage and tropical disease in poor, predominantly Black communities of the American South.- The 2017 peer-reviewed study finding more than one in three Lowndes County residents tested positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite long thought to have been eradicated from the United States.- Flowers's 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, her book Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret, and the federal civil rights investigation into Lowndes County concluded in 2023.International- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 64/292 of 28 July 2010, recognising water and sanitation as human rights.- The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation, producing country reports for more than a decade.REFERENCES[1] United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 64/292, "The Human Right to Water and Sanitation" (adopted 28 July 2010). https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/687002Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation." https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-water-and-sanitation[2] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Leather-Race-Gender-and-Sexuality-in-the-Colonial-Contest/McClintock/p/book/9780415908900[3] Akhtar Hameed Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996).Arif Hasan, Akhtar Hameed Khan and the Orangi Pilot Project (Karachi: City Press, 1999).Orangi Pilot Project. https://oppoct.wordpress.comWorld Habitat, "Orangi Low-cost Housing and Sanitation Programme." https://world-habitat.org/awards/winners/orangi-low-cost-housing-and-sanitation-programme/[4] Catherine Coleman Flowers, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret (New York: The New Press, 2020). https://thenewpress.com/books/wasteMegan L. McKenna et al., "Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama," American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 97, no. 5 (8 November 2017): 1623-1628. https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.17-0396Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. https://creej.org[5] Closing the Gap. Annual reports. https://www.closingthegap.gov.auRoss S. Bailie and Kayli Wayte, "Housing and Health in Indigenous Communities," Australian Journal of Rural Health 14, no. 5 (2006): 178-183.[6] National Skills Commission, Australian Government, "Plumber: Labour Market Insights." https://www.jobsandskills.gov.auMaster Plumbers Australia. https://www.masterplumbers.com.auFURTHER READINGAnne McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995). On nineteenth-century imperialism and the political coding of soap, plumbing, and sanitation as markers of civilisation.Akhtar Hameed Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections (1996). The founder's own account of one of the world's most studied community-led sanitation programs.Catherine Coleman Flowers, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret (2020). Environmental justice advocate on sanitation as a continuation of racial geography in the United States.McKenna et al., "Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama" (2017). The peer-reviewed study that re-introduced hookworm to the American sanitation conversation.Arif Hasan, Akhtar Hameed Khan and the Orangi Pilot Project (1999). Biography and analysis from one of OPP's closest collaborators.About the hostLiv 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

CIVICS AND COMMERCEEpisode 4 — The Farming FamilyShow notesThe 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 EPISODEAustralia- Federal water plan for the Murray-Darling Basin (Water Act 2007 and Murray-Darling Basin Plan 2012), administered by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.- The Millennium Drought, the long Australian drought ending around 2010.- ABC Four Corners and Fairfax water theft investigations of July 2017 and the South Australian Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan (2018-2019).- First Nations water organising through Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) and Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN).- Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder and the federal buyback program returning water from agriculture to environmental flows.- Inspector-General of Water Compliance, established as part of post-2017 reform.Bolivia- The Cochabamba water wars of 2000, a popular uprising against the privatisation of municipal water under Aguas del Tunari, a consortium led by Bechtel (United States) and Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux (France).- The role of the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, with participation of Aymara and Quechua communities and the Federación Departamental Cochabambina de Regantes (irrigators' federation).- The reversal of the privatisation contract on 10 April 2000.India- The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement), formed in the mid-1980s under the leadership of Medha Patkar and others.- The campaign against the Sardar Sarovar Dam and related projects on the Narmada River, and the displacement of Adivasi communities from the Narmada Valley.- The movement's contribution to the establishment of the World Commission on Dams (2000) and global thinking on dams, displacement, and Indigenous water rights.REFERENCES[1] National Farmers' Federation. https://nff.org.auNSW Irrigators' Council. https://www.nswic.org.au[2] Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007).Australian Conservation Foundation, "Murray-Darling Basin Reform." https://www.acf.org.au/healthy-riversWentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. https://wentworthgroup.org[3] Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN). https://www.mldrin.org.auNorthern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN). https://www.nban.org.au[4] Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2019). https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/sand-talk[5] Oscar Olivera with Tom Lewis, ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004).Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper, eds., Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/11049.ch01.pdf[6] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization," The South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012): 95-109.[7] Narmada Bachao Andolan. http://www.narmada.orgSanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (London: Flamingo, 1999).[8] Melbourne Water. https://www.melbournewater.com.auSydney Water. https://www.sydneywater.com.au[9] Water Act 2007 (Cth). https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2007A00137/latest/textMurray-Darling Basin Authority, "Basin Plan." https://www.mdba.gov.au/water-management/basin-planABC Four Corners, "Pumped: Who's Benefitting from the Billions Spent on the Murray-Darling?" (24 July 2017). https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/pumped/8727826Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission, Report (Adelaide: Government of South Australia, 31 January 2019). https://www.mdbrc.sa.gov.au[10] Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/water/cewoFURTHER READINGMaude Barlow, Blue Covenant (2007). Canadian water justice campaigner on water as a global commons and public good.Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk (2019). Apalech scholar on Indigenous knowledge systems and how country, water, and ecological relationships are understood.Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch'ixinakax utxiwa (2010, English edition 2020). Bolivian Aymara sociologist on Indigenous political continuity and decolonisation.Oscar Olivera, ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia (2004). Firsthand account from the leader of the Coordinadora.Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development (2004). Transnational struggles over dams and water across India and beyond.Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (1999). Includes the essay "The Greater Common Good" on the Narmada Bachao Andolan.About the hostLiv 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

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 EPISODEAustralia- Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) and its reporting requirements on supply chain due diligence.- Indigenous Procurement Policy under the Department of Finance and Supply Nation as the verified Indigenous business directory.- Victorian Social Procurement Framework and the broader Australian social enterprise sector advocacy through Social Traders and Social Enterprise Australia.- The Australian Indigenous political genealogy referenced in the script: the 1938 Day of Mourning, the 1965 Freedom Ride led by Charles Perkins, the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Land Rights movement, and the Reconciliation movement.- The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and Megan Davis's work in Australian and United Nations Indigenous rights forums.Qatar- The kafala employment system and its role in migrant worker exploitation in the lead-up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup.- More than 6,500 migrant worker deaths reported since Qatar won the World Cup bid in 2010, with workers drawn from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, and Kenya.- Documented labour rights abuses during and after the tournament, including wage theft, recruitment fee debt, restricted job changes, and limited remedy.Argentina- The Empresas Recuperadas (worker-recovered enterprise) movement emerging from the 2001 sovereign debt crisis.- Hundreds of factories occupied and re-opened by workers as cooperatives, with the movement continuing to grow over the two decades since.REFERENCES[1] Anti-Slavery International, "Our History." https://www.antislavery.org/about-us/history/[2] Anti-Slavery International, "World Cup 2022: The Reality for Migrant Workers in Qatar." https://www.antislavery.org/latest/world-cup-2022-the-reality-for-migrant-workers-in-qatar/Human Rights Watch, "Qatar: Six Months Post-World Cup, Migrant Workers Suffer" (16 June 2023). https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/16/qatar-six-months-post-world-cup-migrant-workers-suffer[3] Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth). https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2018A00153/latest/text[4] National Museum of Australia, "Day of Mourning." https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/day-of-mourningNational Museum of Australia, "Freedom Ride." https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/freedom-rideNational Museum of Australia, "Aboriginal Tent Embassy." https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy[5] Supply Nation, "About Us." https://supplynation.org.au/about/[6] Megan Davis and George Williams, Everything You Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018).Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples." https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/expert-mechanism/emripindex[7] Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2018).Centre for Local Economic Strategies, "Community Wealth Building." https://cles.org.uk/community-wealth-building/[8] Jodie Thorpe, Marina Cannon, and Stefano Emili, 'Empresas Recuperadas': Argentina's Recovered Factory Movement, IDS Case Summary No. 4 (Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, 2019). https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/_Empresas_Recuperadas_Argentina_s_Recovered_Factory_Movement/26429935[9] Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). https://www.dukeupress.edu/pluriversal-politicsJ. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-postcapitalist-politics[10] Social Traders. https://www.socialtraders.com.auSocial Enterprise Australia. https://socialenterpriseaustralia.org.auVictorian Government, Social Procurement Framework. https://www.buyingfor.vic.gov.au/social-procurement-framework[11] Australian Government Department of Finance, "Indigenous Procurement Policy." https://www.indigenous.gov.au/indigenous-procurement-policyCraig Furneaux and Robyn Barraket, "Purchasing Social Good(s): A Definition and Typology of Social Procurement," Public Money and Management 34, no. 4 (2014): 265-272.FURTHER READINGAnti-Slavery International. The world's oldest international human rights organisation, founded 1839. https://www.antislavery.orgMegan Davis and George Williams, Everything You Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2018). Cobble Cobble Australian constitutional lawyer on the architecture of constitutional Indigenous recognition.Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics (2020). Colombian anthropologist on the recognition of many forms of economic life alongside the dominant model.J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (2006). Foundational text on the diverse economies and community wealth already operating within capitalist countries.Jodie Thorpe, Marina Cannon, and Stefano Emili, 'Empresas Recuperadas': Argentina's Recovered Factory Movement (2019). Institute of Development Studies case summary on Argentina's worker-recovered enterprise movement.Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything (2018). On public value and the political philosophy of collective wealth.About the hostLiv 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

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 EPISODEAustralia- National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 and the Victorian Free from Violence strategy as the long-running funding architecture for prevention work.- Family violence prevention in Victorian local government, including council family violence prevention strategies built over decades of advocacy by survivors, women’s services, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s organisations.- The National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services Forum and the broader frontline sector that produced today’s policy architecture.- Australian working-class and Indigenous boxing histories across Sydney and Melbourne, with documented gyms in Newtown, Brunswick, and Footscray.- Women’s Olympic boxing first contested at London 2012.Iran- The 2022 uprising following the death of Mahsa Amini in state custody on 16 September 2022.- Iranian women athletes’ defiance of state hijab policy during and after the uprising, including climber Elnaz Rekabi (Seoul, 16 October 2022) and the broader documentation of athletes facing exile, arrest, and execution.- Earlier cases including boxer Sadaf Khadem’s exile in 2019 and taekwondo medalist Kimia Alizadeh’s defection in 2020.Mexico- Las Hijas de Violencia, founded by Karen and other Mexico City university theatre students using confetti guns and punk performance against street harassment.- The 2019 Glitter Revolution in Mexico City following the mishandling of the assault and murder of a minor.- Un Día Sin Nosotras, the national women’s strike of 9 March 2020.- The ongoing femicide crisis (around ten women killed per day according to official statistics) and the feminist organising response across Mexico.REFERENCES[1] Pamela D. Toler, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). https://www.beacon.org/Women-Warriors-P1502.aspx[2] Kath Woodward, Sex Power and the Games (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137291110Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (London: Routledge, 1994).[3] International Olympic Committee, “Women’s Boxing Debut at the Olympic Games London 2012.” https://olympics.com/ioc/news/women-s-boxing-debut-at-the-olympic-games-london-2012[4] Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). https://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/against_our_will.html[5] Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Iranian Athletes Killed, Tortured, Sentenced to Death for Supporting Protests.” https://iranhumanrights.org/2023/01/iranian-athletes-killed-tortured-sentenced-to-death-for-supporting-protests-1/[6] Amnesty International, “Mexico: Authorities Used Illegal Force and Sexual Violence to Silence Women Protesting Against Gender-Based Violence” (9 March 2021). https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/03/mexico-autoridades-usaron-violencia-sexual-para-silenciar-mujeres/Lucie Bauce, “In Mexico, Women Are Protesting a Wave of Brutal Murders with Performance,” VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/in-mexico-women-are-protesting-a-wave-of-brutal-murders-with-performance/[7] Gary Lynch and Larry Writer, Australia’s Boxing Hall of Fame (Sydney: Murray Books, 1999).Colin Tatz, Black Gold: The Aboriginal and Islander Sports Hall of Fame (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000).[8] National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum. https://nationalfvpls.orgAustralian Government Department of Social Services, National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032. https://www.dss.gov.au/ending-violenceOur Watch, “Change the Story” (2nd edition, 2021). https://www.ourwatch.org.au/change-the-story/[9] Municipal Association of Victoria, “Family Violence Prevention in Local Government.” https://www.mav.asn.au/what-we-do/policy-advocacy/social-community/family-violenceVictorian Government, Free from Violence: Victoria’s Strategy to Prevent Family Violence and All Forms of Violence Against Women. https://www.vic.gov.au/free-violence-strategy[10] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984).Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). https://www.dukeupress.edu/on-being-includedAileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-white-possessiveOyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-invention-of-women[11] Sara Ahmed, “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126.FURTHER READINGSusan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975). Foundational 1970s North American feminist text on rape and the politics of sexual violence.bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984). Black feminist scholarship on whose perspectives are centred in feminist politics.Sara Ahmed, On Being Included (2012). British-Pakistani scholar on diversity work in institutions and the gap between stated commitments and institutional practice.Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive (2015). Quandamooka scholar on Indigenous sovereignty and the institutional politics of whiteness.Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women (1997). Nigerian feminist philosopher arguing that Western gender categories are political constructions, not universal facts.Pamela D. Toler, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (2019). Global popular history of women in combat across many cultures and centuries.Centre for Human Rights in Iran. Ongoing documentation of Iranian human rights, athletes, and the 2022 uprising. https://iranhumanrights.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

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 EPISODEAustralia- Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, established 2012 under the Road Safety Remuneration Act, abolished 21 April 2016.- Closing Loopholes Act 2023 and Closing Loopholes No. 2 Act 2024, introducing "employee-like" classification for road transport workers and gig workers.- Heavy Vehicle National Law and Chain of Responsibility provisions, effective 1 October 2018.- Documented Australian truck driver and food delivery rider deaths and the campaigning by transport workers and their families that has followed.- Migrant Worker Justice Initiative findings on underpayment and ABN-classified work among migrant workers in Australian transport.- Refugee resettlement into Australian trucking through Work and Welcome and similar programs.Brazil- Breque dos Apps, the national strike by Brazilian food platform delivery workers on 1 July 2020, organised across 13 states against iFood, Loggi, Uber Eats and Rappi.- Subsequent waves of platform delivery worker organising in 2024 and 2025, including the 2025 National App Strike.South Africa- The cross-border road freight workforce in Southern Africa, including foreign-registered owner-operators and drivers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and other neighbouring countries.- Documented attacks on foreign-registered trucking businesses and the disputes between South African and foreign trucking interests over classification and access to work.REFERENCES[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/[2] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972). https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htmVerónica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything (London: Verso, 2020). https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2783-feminist-international[3] Australian Council of Trade Unions, "Our History." https://www.actu.org.au/about-the-actu/our-history[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, section "Estranged Labour." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm[5] Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism From Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). https://www.dukeupress.edu/neoliberalism-from-below[6] Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-1977 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018). https://www.ubcpress.ca/wages-for-housework[7] International Labour Organization, World Employment and Social Outlook 2021: The Role of Digital Labour Platforms in Transforming the World of Work (Geneva: ILO, 2021). https://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/2021/lang--en/index.htm[8] Road Safety Remuneration Act 2012 (Cth). https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2012A00045/latestTransport Workers' Union of Australia, "Safe Rates." https://www.twu.com.au[9] Claire Mayhew and Michael Quinlan, "Economic Pressure, Multi-tiered Subcontracting and Occupational Health and Safety in Australian Long Haul Trucking," Employee Relations 28, no. 3 (2006): 212-229.[10] National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, "Chain of Responsibility." https://www.nhvr.gov.au/safety-accreditation-compliance/chain-of-responsibility[11] Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations, 2011). https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_EN.pdf[12] Surya Deva, Regulating Corporate Human Rights Violations: Humanizing Business (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-development[13] Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, International Students and Wage Theft in Australia (Sydney: Migrant Worker Justice Initiative, UTS Law, 2020). https://www.mwji.orgTransport Workers' Union of Australia, "Landmark Report on Migrant Underpayment Shows Need to Lift Standards in Transport." https://www.twu.com.au/press/landmark-report-on-migrant-underpayment-shows-need-to-lift-standards-in-transport/[14] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972; reissued London: Verso, 2018).[15] Ricardo Antunes, O Privilégio da Servidão: O Novo Proletariado de Serviços na Era Digital (São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2018). https://www.boitempoeditorial.com.br/produto/o-privilegio-da-servidao-1141[16] Ludmila Costhek Abílio, Rafael Grohmann, and Henrique Amorim, "Breaking the Apps: The Making of the First National Strike by Food Platform Delivery Workers in Brazil," Social Movement Studies (2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742837.2025.2562886Octavia Sibanda, "Attacks on Road-Freight Transporters: A Threat to Trade Participation for Landlocked Countries in Southern Africa." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8791686/FURTHER READINGKarl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867). The foundational text on labour, value, and the political economy of work under capitalism.Verónica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verso, 2020). Argentine feminist political economy on uncounted labour and the feminist strike.Wages for Housework movement (Italy, 1972). Movement history at https://www.ubcpress.ca/wages-for-houseworkMichael Quinlan and colleagues, Counting the Costs of Industrial Death (Federation Press, 2006). Decades of Australian research on the economic structure of trucking deaths.Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Guyanese historian on the colonial political economy of extracted labour.Surya Deva, Regulating Corporate Human Rights Violations (Routledge, 2012). Global South legal scholarship on corporate accountability and supply chain human rights.Ricardo Antunes, The Meanings of Work (Brill, 2013). Brazilian sociology on the contemporary "servant class" and platform labour.About the hostLiv 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