'Australia can help the neighbourhood'

My housemate Andreana has an opinion piece in today's Age, about Australia's new scheme to allow 'unskilled' workers from the Pacific to come and work here:

The Government has announced this initiative after extensive lobbying by the National Farmers Federation — the scheme will tackle critical agricultural labour shortages by allowing Pacific islanders to work temporarily in Australian horticulture. Through the remittances that will be sent home to Pacific communities, this scheme also has the potential to help lift households out of poverty.

Read the full article here.

Advocacy: social justice in Deuteronomy

Last Tuesday morning, after we looked at the passage in Leviticus, we looked at the fifteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, which was Moses' last speech before he died. It covers a lot of similar stuff to the Levicticus passage.
Some other stuff I noticed in this passage though, is that Moses doesn't tell the Israelites not to make money by lending to other countries. I suppose that might've been so that other countries who wouldn't be generous in return wouldn't be able to abuse the Israelite economic system. Dunno what I think about it though.
Another thing I noticed is that their slavery system seems a lot different to how Africans were enslaved to work in North America, or how Pacific Islanders were enslaved to work in Australia. Slaves had to be freed in the Jubilee year, and they had to be paid for the time they'd spent working for their masters. (12-18)

Nauru House

I have a job now! At Sean's party my friend Jess said that her dad is always looking for more cleaners. So on Monday I called him up. He got back to me Tuesday night and asked if I could come in to Nauru House and work yesterday.

The Nauruan government build Nauru House as an investment when they realised that their superphosphate was going to run out.
The whole island of Nauru is made of superphosphate, which is baiscally fossilised bird crap, and is very good for making fertiliser. So for ages Nauru sold it's superphosphate to Australia, and was a really really rich country.
When the superphosphat started to run out they made heaps of investments in important cities, like Batmania. When Nauru House was built in the '70s it was Batmania's tallest building. And they bought 80 Collins Street and knocked it down, so they could say that Nauru House was at 80 Collins Street. It was octagonal, and there was a great big pillar of superphosphate out the front.
Nauru's economy got stuffed up in the '90s, and in recent years they're been asking Australia for a homeland, because their's will be underwater before long, due to global warming.

Anyway, yesterday I was at 80 Collins Street cleaning up one of the floors where all the interior walls had beed demolished. There's no work today, but there probably will be tomorrow. Once I start at Urban Seed I'll just be cleaning an office block in Syndal, on weekends.