Micah Challenge Australia Blog

 

The Micah Challenge blog is a space for discussion and debate about the issues of global poverty, faith, advocacy and justice and the Millennium Development Goals. This blog aims to provoke thought and challenge you to learn more about the issues discussed. We welcome your comments.

Micah Challenge is a global campaign of Christians speaking out against poverty and injustice. Click here to visit the Micah Challenge website.

  • Finish Well

    Posted by Micah Challenge

    9 October, 2012

    Almost a month on from Voices for Justice, Courtney Gavin, Baptist World Aid's Production and Marketing Coordinator, reflects on finishing the race to halve extreme poverty by 2015. If I could describe Voices for Justice 2012 in three words, they would be: amazing; encouraging; motivating. But perhaps I should start at the beginning. My advocacy began as a teenager. Enraged by global poverty and wanting to do something about it, I discovered Micah Challenge and quickly enlisted by signing the ‘Micah Call’. But when I realised this advocacy might actually mean having enough guts to talk to my local federal MP, I have to admit…I was kind of freaked out. So ‘X’ amount of years later, here I am at Voices for Justice for a second time (slowly overcoming my fears), this time as a lobby group leader…no pressure!! My lobby group met with one MP, one Senator and two advisors to a politician. We asked them to recommit to increasing aid to 0.5% GNI by 2016 (and a timetabled commitment of 0.7% by 2020), to ensure effective… read more

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  • Reflections on Voices for Justice

    Posted by Josh

    26 September, 2012

    Well, the Micah Challenge’s Voices for Justice conference is over for another a year, and I thought I might offer just a few reflections on what we did while we were in Canberra for the four incredible days. Though the quality of the teaching sessions, the general reality of our diversity in unity, and the important meetings with (over 100!) MPs are obviously very important to note (and great to take part in), I thought I’d take a step back and look at some of the larger themes. The conference this year centred, basically, around two main points: 1) Firstly, it was noted very clearly that we need to celebrate the progress that has already been made towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. For me, this was such an incredibly important part of the whole conference. Though it is true that we still have a long way to go in some instances (and I’ll get to that below), I believe that it’s essential to celebrate the progress that has been achieved. When dealing with issues of poverty and social justice, it’s… read more

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  • Getting one over on the taxman

    Posted by John

    28 June, 2012

    Each year at tax time we sit down at the kitchen table with our pile of papers, take a deep breath, puff out our chest, and then dive head first into an imaginary battle with the proverbial tax man. Perhaps we personify the taxman sitting across the table trying to bleed us for every dollar we’ve got. When the tax cheque arrives in the mail and it’s bigger than we thought it was going to be, we smile and indulge in a fair measure of self-congratulation at having ‘beaten the tax man’. This tax-time battle is a common experience, but many people aren’t aware that a similar battle is now also being played out on a mass scale on the global stage. The practice of tax dodging by multinational corporations and wealthy individuals is now extremely widespread across the globe and, sadly, also reasonably widely accepted. Some multinational corporations are investing significant sums of money in elaborate schemes to ‘beat the taxman’. On both the individual and the global scale, the rationale goes, ‘if I can beat the system… read more

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  • Tax havens - a conspiracy against the poor

    Posted by Gershon

    12 June, 2012

    I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist. I am yet to be convinced that the US government organised 9/11, I doubt very seriously that alien autopsies were carried out at Area 51, and despite the ‘compelling’ evidence I don’t think that Barack Obama is an Islamic fundamentalist sleeper agent charged with bringing about the upcoming 2012 global apocalypse. With that said, there has been one ‘conspiracy’ that’s started to make me more than a little worried. What would you say if I told you that there is a massive global system that props up corrupt dictators and politicians, facilitates the activity of the world’s largest criminal industries and drains billions, possibly trillions of dollars from Governments all over the world? That this system was one of the major causes of the current global financial crisis and worse than that, it contributes to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year? If you’re like me, your first thought might be, ‘That’s just too surreal to be true,’… read more

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