John Murphy

'This important and illuminating book provides a powerful and harrowing depiction of the inadequacies of the Australian welfare system. Its findings challenge the foundations and direction of the welfare reform agenda.' - Professor Peter Saunders, University of New South Wales'This major new study challenges many myths about life on welfare and in low paid work. It should be read by anyone concerned with welfare reform.' - Jane Millar, Professor of Social Policy, University of BathWhat is it really like to be unemployed and on welfare? How do you make ends meet? Does the welfare system actually help people get back into jobs? Half a Citizen draws on in-depth interviews with 150 welfare recipients to reveal people struggling to get by on a low income, the anxieties of balancing paid work with income support, and how unstable housing makes it difficult to get ahead. By investigating the lives beyond the statistics, Half a Citizen also explodes powerful myths and assumptions on which welfare policy is based. The majority of welfare recipients interviewed are very active, in paid work, caring for children or for other family members, and they see themselves as contributing and participating citizens, even if they sometimes feel they are being treated as 'half a citizen'. These stories of resilience and passion bear no resemblance to the clich d images of dependence, laziness, and social isolation which underpin social policy and media debate.

A Decent Provision is a narrative history of how and why Australia built a distinctive welfare regime in the period from the 1870s to 1949. At the beginning of this period, the Australian colonies were belligerently insisting they must not have a Poor Law, yet had reproduced many of the systems of charitable provision in Britain. By the start of the twentieth century, a combination of extended suffrage, basic wage regulation and the aged pension had led to a reputation as a 'social laboratory'. And yet half a century later, Australia was a 'welfare laggard' and the Labor Party's welfare state of the mid-1940s was a relatively modest and parsimonious construction. Models of welfare based on social insurance had been vigorously rejected, and the Australian system continued on a path of highly residual, targeted welfare payments. The book explains this curious and halting trajectory, showing how choices made in earlier decades constrained what could be done, and what could be imagined. Based on extensive new research from a variety of primary sources it makes a significant contribution to general historical debates, as well as to the field of comparative social policy.

Pearson Longman PTEG Skills Boosters, levels 2 -- 5 are a series of exam practice tests with guidance which offers complete exam preparation for Pearson Test of English General (revised exam based on old London Tests of English).

Providing a detailed overview of the law of nuisance this book addresses contentious issues such as the distinction between the rule in Rylands v Fletcher and the law of private nuisance; the law that excludes personal injuries from the remit of nuisance, and the relationship between public and private nuisance. The book also considers statutory nuisance and the extent to which it can be seen to exceed private and public nuisances as well as utility of nuisance as an environmental tort. This book provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive treatment of the law of nuisance, drilling down to distinctions between these different types of nuisance as well as examining in detail the overlaps between them.

While there is much literature on the experience of growing up in an orphanage, very few books examine life after institutional care. After the Orphanage is the first book to address how care-leavers adjust to life in the outside world. Using interviews with people who grew up in orphanages and group homes in Victoria between 1945 and 1983, the book explores how institutionalisation affected future education, employment opportunities, relationships and health, and the implications this might have for policy and practice in the out-of-home care of children.

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: "If there is a God, why would He create us? If He's perfect, all knowing, there's nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment." Not exactly a new idea, it works well as the basis of a stand-up act, but it relies on the assumption that humanity was made not only in God's physical image, but that we are all also cookie-cutter replicas of God's psychological profile. That's where Murphy thought the act needed to say a lot more about his own personal encounters with religion. The challenge was to keep the laughs going through the widening gulf that inevitably opens up between the persona of God and the acts of creation in this stock-in-trade formula for comic monologues, and that's where Murphy eventually stumbled on his alter ego: Jesus Murphy. Now a dialogue of voices performed by a single actor, the play opens up a discourse, where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; secularists confront theists; in the context of the most fundamental and naive of theological questions thrown out to a live audience of any and all faiths--in a contemporary world fractured by an increasing proliferation of fundamentalisms--including people who have never been exposed to religion. Laughter is a form of recognition, an affirmation, and when a couple of hundred people all laugh together, all say "yes, that's true" together, it's a powerful feeling--a force of nature, which is exactly what the author intended. This story of a Roman Catholic man tormented by the religious anxieties of his youth, who resolves to become Jesus Murphy, an evangelical atheist, makes us all believers--in ourselves. Cast of 1 man.

An Analysis of Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town by Harry Farrell, and the Brooke L. Hart Kidnapping, Murder and Lynching Case in San Jose, California in 1933

With its proven methodology, Headway is the course you can always trust. The strong grammar focus, clear vocabulary syllabus and integrated skills work give you lessons that really work in class. With this new edition, you have fresh new material and plenty of components, which means you've always got support where you need it.

New Headway DVD Video is six episodes of a comedy about the lives of four young adults who live together. The stories give you a natural context to consolidate and extend the language covered in the Elementary Student's Book, and it's fun for students too. Teacher's and Student's Books for the video are available separately.

How did fears of the Cold War shape Australian images of Asia? What was the nature of the Vietnamese revolution, which some 50 000 Australian troops failed to reverse in the 1960s? How did a small and marginal peace movement grow into the powerful Moratorium and did it have any impact on the course of the War? Harvest of Fear is a beautifully crafted history of Australia's experience of the Vietnam War. It draws together a picture of social and political life in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam; an incisive look at Australian Cold War politics and the diplomacy that led us to Vietnam; and a brilliant portrait of the origins and political impact of the powerful Australian anti-war movement. No previous book has pulled together these three critical strands of the Australian experience of the Vietnam War; it is indeed a broad and rich canvas. Harvest of Fear presents the clearest picture yet of how the war came about, how it was seen from Australia, what the war in Phoc Tuy Province was like for the Australian soldiers sent there, and why our involvement was the cause of such division at home. Using a range of archival sources and interviews with participants, John Murphy shows how our intervention reflected the political alignments of Australia in the Cold War, as well as deeper and more troubled anxieties about Asia. The Australian intervention in Vietnam remains Australia's longest and most contentious war. The war and its echoes are powerfully evoked in John Murphy's story. Harvest of Fear is a book to appeal to everyone interested in Australian history and politics, and in Australia's involvement with Asia, especially with the Vietnam War.