The Cape York Welfare Reform Trial – Continuing Acts of Paternalism

<em>The Queensland Government has managed Aboriginal peoples’ property since at least 1897. Today, in four predominantly Aboriginal communities in Cape York and Doomadgee in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Family Responsibilities Commission can direct Centrelink to manage up to 90 per cent of a person’s social security payment if they fail to meet one of four ‘social responsibilities’. If social security payments could be found to be property, as occurs in European countries, income management of Aboriginal people’s social security payments arguably breaches the </em>Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth)<em> and the </em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Queensland Discriminatory Laws) Act 1975 (Cth) <em>which require equality for Aboriginal peoples in exercising their right to own and manage property. If social security cannot be found to be property, a court is likely to find income management to be a special measure for the benefit of Aboriginal people.</em>

Fraternity and Equality

Is there a connection between the values of fraternity and outcome equality? Is inequality at odds with fraternity? There are reasons to doubt that it is. First, fraternity requires us to want our ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to fare well even when they are already better off than we are and their doing better will increase inequality. Second, fraternity seems not to require equality as a matter of fairness. Fairness requires (a certain) equality, but fraternity does not require fairness.In examining what fraternity requires I discuss Rawls' suggestion that the difference principle corresponds to a natural meaning of fraternity, arguing that fraternity may be even more tolerant of inequality than the difference principle. Nevertheless, I defend the claim that fraternity and equality are linked, albeit not in such a way as to make inequality inconsistent with fraternity. Fraternity is related to equality since equalizing expresses the connectedness at the core of fraternity; but inequality is consistent with fraternity since there are other ways of expressing that connectedness.

Strongs-Sequences and Variations on Martin's Axiom

As part of their study of βω — ω and βω1 — ω1, A. Szymanski and H. X. Zhou [3] were able to exploit the following difference between ω, and ω: ω1, contains uncountably many disjoint sets whereas any uncountable family of subsets of ω is, at best, almost disjoint. To translate this distinction between ω1, and ω to a possible distinction between βω1 — ω1, and βω — ω they used the fact that if a pairwise disjoint family of sets and a subset of each member of is chosen then it is trivial to find a single set whose intersection with each member is the chosen set. However, they noticed, it is not clear that the same is true if is only a pairwise almost disjoint family even if we only require equality except on a finite set. But any homeomorphism from βω1 — ω1 to βω — ω would have to carry a disjoint family of subsets of ω1, to an almost disjoint family of subsets of ω with this property. This observation should motivate the following definition.