"No lasting change has been successful without large numbers of people acting consciously and collectively around human values of solidarity and social justice, not market values. Markets are great ways to do some things, but not to fashion communities of caring and compassion" Michael Edwards Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World.
Small Change is a wise and radical book that challenges many of the taken for granted assumptions that dominate thinking and practice in the world of not-for-profits and civil society. Edwards argues that business and market thinking has too much influence over not-for-profit organisations and civil society groups.
Edwards rejects the role of markets, business and business thinking as solutions for the social ills of society and the challenges facing the not-for-profit and civil society sector. He contends that civil society and NGO groups must turn away from the lures of the market and business and reassert the importance of independent citizen action. He is deeply skeptical about importing business and market approaches into the nonprofit and civil society sector.
In a piece in the Australian e-Journal Online Opinion Sarah Burnside discusses the linguistic and political strategies deployed by the powerful (and their courtiers) to counter and limit restrict discussion about inequality and wealth redistribution in Australia.
The Politics of Envy Sarah Burnside*
Recently, Education Minister Julia Gillard unveiled a plan for an “education overhaul” to review the funding for all Australian private and public schools. The Australian noted that Gillard's emphatic statement that “this is not about taking money from schools” represented a desire to “avoid a repeat of the divisive 2004 election campaign debate about private school funding that destroyed Mark Latham”s leadership”
Former ALP leader Mark Latham was pilloried in 2004 for inciting a “politics of envy” in calling for redistributive funding of schools. His plan to divert funding from 67 elite private schools to needy government schools was slammed as a “private schools hit list” – terminology recently revived by Coalition education spokesperson Christopher Pyne. Then-Prime Minister John Howard suggested that Latham's educational policies were “based on class and envy”. Similarly, former teacher, writer and campaigner Kevin Donnelly argued that the ALP schools policy was “guilty of the tall poppy syndrome – let”s attack those schools that achieve the best academic results and that promote values that parents want”. Journalistic wisdom, citing the 2004 election as an example, holds that the ALP is vulnerable to indulging in the “politics of envy” and must guard against such tendencies if it is to enjoy electoral success. Anthony Ashbolt, a senior lecturer in politics, has subjected this “perplexing myth” to analysis, concluding that the policy had been electorally popular and that a combination of Liberal Party spin and soundbite reporting had buried it. In particular, Ashbolt charged that the ALP had mistakenly “managed to convince itself of the mythology surrounding its electoral loss”.
The expression “the politics of envy” requires unraveling. Such language is arguably symptomatic of the way real and substantive concerns about the kind of society we live in are reframed by the right in terms of personality, character and “values”. The reframe is powerful; arguing in favour of envy would appear as difficult as opposing hope, faith or charity. The identification of ideological difference with mere character flaws not only reinforces the banality of contemporary political debate. More dangerously, such reframing draws the life out of the arguments of the social democratic left. If a desire to create a more egalitarian society boils down to mere envy, then social democrats can be nothing more than a group of jealous people with an inexplicable inability to appreciate the fine things that capitalism has to offer their fellow citizens. Rather than a commitment to see all Australia’s children receive an optimum education, the ALP is characterised as having a (seemingly irrational) dislike of private schools. Tony Abbott queried Gillard’s call for an inquiry into schools funding, warning voters: “You can’t trust these people. They don’t like private education…if they’re re-elected, as sure as night follows day, they will try to cut private-schools’ funding." Advertisement
Similarly, former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has suggested that the ALP simply disliked the well-to-do. Nelson criticised the Rudd government’s first budget in 2008, which introduced means testing for the baby bonus, tighter thresholds for family tax benefits and an increase of the threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge to $100,000 per year for singles and $150,000 for couples. For Nelson, these measures were an attempt to “appeal to the politics of envy and resentment”. Nelson charged not only that the ALP had “always been opposed to people who do well”, but used extraordinarily emotive language in concluding that the Party had a “deep-seated vendetta” against them. The debate thus shifts from ideological ground to that of personality flaws, allowing the Liberals to avoid enunciating their own position in any depth by effectively accusing their opponents of mere mean-spiritedness. The real debates that underlie these issues – differences as to conceptions of the nature and extent of the state’s role in providing education and health to citizens – remain stagnant.
Some parallels can be drawn between the accusations of “envy”, “resentment” and “dislike” leveled at aspiring educational and tax reformers and the now-ubiquitous charge of “elitism” favoured by commentators such as Janet Albrechtsen. Thomas Frank, a journalist and editor of The Baffler, has written perceptively of the success of the Republican Party and its allies in linking liberals (in the American sense) inextricably with snobbery and elitism in the public mind. In his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Frank notes that a repackaging of social class was effected in America using the notion of a “liberal elite”. Such a notion, he argues, is “not intellectually robust”, has “never been enunciated with anything approaching scholarly rigor” and falls apart “under any sort of systematic scrutiny”. However, the trope of the elite liberal remains a powerful tool to sidestep ideological difference in favour of illusory generalizations as to personality. Frank cites a particularly instructive passage by the right-wing American writer Ann Coulter, who simplifies liberals as follows: “They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs”.
Parties of the right, on the other hand, have learned how to portray themselves as down-to-earth, abandoning or downplaying the patrician outlook of traditional upper-class Tories. John Howard’s self-assessment as “an average Australian bloke” appealed to a longstanding egalitarian instinct that has resonated throughout Australia’s history. That the kind of egalitarianism offered by Howard was one of character and personality rather than of economic equality sits comfortably within a Liberal Party tradition that eschewed class divisions. Professor of Politics Judith Brett noted in her 2005 Quarterly Essay Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia, Howard’s promise to govern “for all of us” echoed Robert Menzies’ commitment to the “forgotten people” of the middle classes and his conviction that: “We don’t have classes here as in England”.
In addition to sniping from the Liberals, Gillard has recently been criticised by Latham himself for wasting time on “stunts and trivia”, most notably the MySchool website, and for “putting politics ahead of policy”. In particular, Latham charged that Gillard had fallen prey to a “special kind of cynicism” in delaying an announcement of $11 million in funding for disadvantaged schools for 18 months, then releasing it “when she faced a PR battle over MySchool”. The MySchool website has been problematic for the left; the Australian Education Union has slammed national NAPLAN testing and its members have refused to administer them. The Union is supportive of the funding review announced last week, however, with federal president Angelo Gavrielatos calling for a new funding system to “ensure that the Federal Government meets its primary obligation to adequately and appropriately fund public schools”.
If the ALP accepts that redistributive policies on public education will inevitably constitute electoral poison, it will grant control of the debate to those who would deny the inherent value of substantive equality. Gillard would do well to refuse the reframe and respond vigorously in rebutting knee-jerk responses about “the politics of envy”.
*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.
Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute argued that neo- liberalism is well and truly alive in Australia. His view is that at the level of macro-economic policy there has been a small departure away from neoliberalism, exemplified by the Rudd Government's stimulus package and its willingness to intervene in the economy to respond to the global economic crises. However, Denniss argues that at the level of micro-economic policy the hold of neoliberalism over the Rudd Government is a strong as ever, if not stronger than before the global crises.
" Despite the government having replaced the predations of apartheid with one of the most inclusive and progressive constitutions on earth, neoliberal capitalism has stalled the rights of ordinary people in South Africa" Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing, p 135
Gavin Mooney is currently teaching in South Africa. This piece follows an earlier piece on the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre written by Colin Penter that can be found on his blog.
Neo liberalism in post apartheid South AfricaBy Gavin Mooney
The 50th anniversary last week of the Sharpeville massacre left a bitter taste in the mouth. For my generation- I was 17 at the time- it was a truly horrendous barbaric event and it was seen as such by many across the globe. Sixty nine people killed, mown down in cold blood standing up for their rights. Horrific- and 50 years on I can still vividly remember how tangible was the outrage.
Here in South Africa at present for a few weeks, what does the memory of Sharpeville convey? Perhaps more than anything a great sadness arising not so much from the massacre itself but from events in the years since.
Enormous hope was kindled by the release of Mandela and the ensuing democratic elections of 1994. The hope continued as, in the initial years of black rule, some attempts were made to bring about elements of social justice in this country. There was an economic policy called GEAR which at least had R for redistribution in it. But then the neolibs re-established themselves and Mbeki set out to show he was just as capable of running an economy along neoliberal lines as any white man. And he did.
As a result poverty remains horrendous in this country; and inequality is now worse than in 1994. Let me repeat that. The inequality today is worse than it was in the apartheid years. South Africa now competes to be the most unequal society on the planet.
Yet the world still sees South Africa as free, as democratic, with a (genuinely) wonderful constitution. This 'wonderful' constitution in this 'liberal democracy' has failed to deliver either freedom or justice to the people.
Sad how the world could condemn the evils of apartheid- and rightly so- but passes by on the other side when the perpetrators of oppression are driven by neoliberalism and not race. Is it any more obscene? Has the world become just too bored with all the poverty and inequality to care any longer? Have individualism and materialism become so dominant globally that compassion and concern for the vulnerable and oppressed are now passe?.
To me the real sadness today is that no one would seem to care enough to listen if South Africans were to protest and bring about another Sharpeville. Why would the poor of South Africa risk provoking another massacre when they know that no one cares any longer? Then the 'enemy' was clearly identifiable as white supremacy; today when neo-liberal ideology is 'the enemy'...?
One of the issues that must become foremost in any challenging of the market is to imagine alternatives. I am doing this in economics and health policy. My starting point is that health care systems need to be seen as social institutions. Here I spell out some of my thinking. Is there I wonder, merit in running with this idea in a wider context?
There is a need to consider the broad, social role of health care systems as institutions, as part of the fabric of society. Such a focus means trying to devise ways to involve the community as a community in values to underpin these social institutions.
With respect to health care, there is a need for a dual level approach, a personal one nested within a community one. The first is at the level of individual desire for our own health. The other, community level, is concerned with setting the social principles on which health care systems are to be based. At this second community level the individual now is a citizen rather than a patient.
Two potentially important caveats here. First the citizenry will need some education so that they operate on an informed basis. Second there is a risk, that needs to be addressed, that the rights of minority groups will not be adequately recognised by the majority.
What is required to pursue the above proposal is to determine how different levels of preferences might be elicited. Three levels of preferences or interest functions are proposed.
In the context of multiple interests functions it is useful to think of Frankfurt's** first and second order preferences and to develop a third order as well. The first approximates to some notion of desire; the second to what individuals want when they have time to reflect, perhaps embracing the issue of what sorts of individuals they want to be. These may be different not only in being reflective, but also in terms of the object of the preferences. This is inter alia because reflection comes at a cost; time is needed for reflecting (There seems little point in reflecting over long on whether to buy a chocolate bar but we might want to dwell more on preferences about our chocolate dependency.)
Third order preferences are "communitarian". This philosophy recognises that individuals are not free floating atoms. Their identities are embedded in some community/ies. Being active in a community is good in itself and not just instrumental. Institutions such as health care, but also education, are valued not only for producing some narrowly defined outcomes such as health gain and educational human capital gain. They can be valued for other outcomes, in health (e.g.information) or processes (e.g.caring), or as institutions per se which contribute to the decency of a society (e.g such as a tax based universal health care system). These issues are related to what sort of society citizens want.
I have previously suggested moving Broome's concept of claims to make it more relevant to the discussion here in the following way. It is proposed that "communitarian claims" be a sub-set of claims more generally where this sub-set is the responsibility of the community to meet or address. Thus, the duty in the case of communitarian claims is a duty owed by the community.
These are labelled "communitarian claims" reflecting the fact that it is the community who have the task of deciding what constitute claims, the duty to allocate claims and to decide on the relative strengths of different claims. There is value in being part of the process of arbitrating over claims. The more embedded individuals are in a community, the stronger will be communitarian claims in that community.
The strength of a claim is not a function of an individual's ability to manage to feel harmed. Harms and the strength of these harms are for the society to judge not the individual.(In the market, income is the determinant of claims and individual satisfaction is what is to be maximised). Strictly, with respect to claims, the bad feelings arising for the person harmed are only relevant in so far as the society deems them to be relevant. They are a matter for "community conscience".
The actual consumption of the resources however remains determined by how an individual values the options with which he or she is then faced.
Finally it is apparent that there may be problems in advancing the concept of claims and retaining the ability to measure and quantify within whatever set of principles emerges.
I am unsure if the obsession with quantification is a product of the market or not-it is certainly more prevalent in today's neo- liberal societies. On this issue Amartya Sen the Noble laureate in economics argues that measurement can be taken too far and he seeks to guard against 'over completeness'. As Sen sees it:
"Waiting for toto" may not be a cunning strategy in a practical exercise".
He suggests that:
"the nature of interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing.. as a discipline may admit incompleteness as a regular part of the ... exercise.. An approach that can rank the wellbeing of every person against that of every other in a straightforward way.. may well be at odds with the nature of these ideas"
So I don't worry too much about such problems. Maybe others will. More importantly for this blog I wonder if others can see merit in using the idea of communitarian claims in sectors outside of heath care.
* Broome, J (1991) Weighing Goods, Blackwell **Frankfurt, H (1971) Freedom of the will and the concept of a person, Journal of Philosophy, 68:5-20 *** Mooney, G (2009) Challenging Health Economics, Oxford University Press **** Sen A (1992) Inequality Re-examined, Clarendon
As the Barnett government moves to privatize more of the WA prison system, Susie Byers's piece on the Boronia pre-release centre in suburban Perth is a reminder that well resourced, State run prisons can deliver, rehabilitation, recovery and integration of prisoners into the community far better than can the market- that is privately run prisons.
Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett once said that he didn’t approve of female prisoners being taught pastry-cooking by French chefs. Not, presumably, because he has anything against the French, but because he was furious at what he claimed were the luxurious living conditions afforded women detained in the Boronia Pre-Release Centre for Women: a minimum security correctional facility in Bentley, Western Australia.
During the 2005 state election, then Opposition Leader Barnett promised to close the 70-bed facility, which had been opened just a year earlier. He lost that election, and luckily, when finally elected in September 2008 he appeared to have changed his mind: in the month after polling day, Barnett’s Attorney-General Christian Porter was proud to announce the opening of another pre-release centre in the south-west of WA, apparently similar to Boronia and housing up to 72 inmates.
I say “luckily” because Boronia has proved to be a model for modern justice and rehabilitation, drawing praise from criminal justice experts within Australia and across the world. Boronia should become a model for prisons across the country: it’s time to rethink the way criminal justice is administered.
Opened in 2004, Boronia is styled to provide women nearing release (who have attained a minimum-security rating before consideration for transferral there) with the capacity to operate successfully on the outside. Its website states its four basic principles: personal responsibility and empowerment, family responsibilities, community responsibility and respect and integrity.
Personal responsibility is engendered in part through the housing arrangements: living in shared units, women are responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, shopping (at a shop inside the facility), and budgeting. Women share self-contained units rather than cells, and although they are locked inside the units at night they are free to move about inside them. The idea is for Boronia to mirror the outside world as much as possible, so women can prepare themselves for their post-incarceration lives.
Additionally, women in Boronia are required either to work or to study, with an average day at Boronia starting at 8.30 and finishing at 3.30. During these times women (unless they are sick) must be engaged in either looking after their children if they have them, undertaking one of the courses available to them (including horticulture, hospitality and community services) or working. Some women work in the commercial catering business operated by Boronia, serving staff as well as businesses in the local community. Others leave the centre to do community work in organisations like the RSPCA or the Good Samaritans.
In a radical departure from traditional prison structures women are allowed to keep their children with them (up to their fourth birthday), and can have regular overnight visits from their children up to the age of 12(subject in all cases to the best interests of the child). If a child is approved to live in the prison, a “care plan” is formulated, and when the child arrives it is housed with its parent in “mother and child” units.
The Centre has been applauded by former Western Australian Inspector of Custodial Services Richard Harding, who, in his 2007 report on the facility called it a “model for good practice”. Harding’s successor, Neil Morgan, termed Boronia “one of a kind” and “first rate” due to its “women-centred approach”. (See report here.) Prisoners, too, have praised the facility. On January 19, 2005, the ABC’s 7.30 Reportinterviewed inmates and former inmates who called their guards “lovely” and “more like friends” and who called the progams offered by Boronia a “really, really good thing”.
This is the moment, no doubt, at which the obvious objection will be made: surely the point of prison construction is not to win praise from inmates? Why on earth should women convicted of crimes be sent off to be taught cooking by a chef who might (or might not) be French?
Susie Byers is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia. She has previously been published in Eureka Street and The New Critic (online journal of the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies).
Most weeks Sarah Burnside*, a West Australian native title lawyer and writer, reflects on State and national issues in national online publications such as Eureka St, New Matilda and Online Opinion. A previous piece she wrote on the WA mining boom was published on this blog (and contains links to many of her writings).
In the piece published below Sarah analyzes Tony Abbott's recent statements on his plan to reform disability pension arrangements. Like Kevin Rudd before him, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is engaged in a concerted political strategy to re-brand his party's three decades long embrace of punitive neoliberal social policies under the banner of 'compassionate conservativism'. But the contradictions are always evident, as Sarah Burnside points out in this important piece.
What is also interesting is the silence of Tony Abbott, and all those who argue the urgency of welfare reform, over the bigger problem of 'corporate welfare' for corporations and business and the provision of generous 'middle class welfare' by the Howard government (of which Abbott was a key figure) and subsequent Rudd Government.
Tony Abbott's proposal to reform the Disability Support Pension by Sarah Burnside Opposition Leader Tony Abbott drew media attention recently for proposing a 'welfare crackdown' to include compulsory work-for-the-dole schemes and higher threshold for eligibility for disability pensions. With respect to the latter, Abbott proposed a review by the National Audit Office to determine more stringent eligibility rules for the disability pension and suggested that recipients with 'less serious medical conditions' be required to undergo annual medical reassessments and sit two interviews each year to 'encourage them into employment'. Currently, 700,000 Australians receive the disability pension. Abbott estimates that around one-third of these people have conditions he would class as 'less serious'.
The Centrelink website explains that eligibility for the Disability Support Pension (DSP) is determined by reference to a set of criteria and usually requires a report from a person's doctor or specialist, and a job capacity assessment. People may be eligible if they are unable to work for15 hours or more per week at or above the relevant minimum wage or be reskilled for such work for the next two years because of illness, injury or disability, or if they are permanently blinded.
Unlike previous Coalition rhetoric on welfare recipients, which tended to damn them as 'bludgers', Abbott's language is more sophisticated, being couched in terms of care. In his 2009 book Battlelines, Abbott posited that 'allowing people who could readily work to stay out of the workforce for long periods is cruelty,not compassion'. This is a classic example of 'compassionate conservatism', a trope employed by UK Tories and US Republicans to varying success in the past decade to counter perceptions of the Right's heartlessness. The implication is that progressives are ideologically wedded to the welfare state but have little empathy for those who are dependent on it; conservatives alone manifest genuine concern for those members of the community. David Penberthy of The Punch supports Abbott, writing:
Apparently it's better to maintain a welfare program that would consign people to a dispiriting life of idolence, exposing them to the mental health anguish that comes with non-participation, rather than ask them some slightly tougher questions about what they would actually do.
The arguments are persuasive- surely no one wants to condemn their fellow citizens to a life with no prospect of employment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most welfare recipients wish to find employment and that, lacking the social hub of a workplace, they feel isolated and lonely. Several issues are glossed over, though, in the invocation of compassion to justify limiting access to the disability pension.
Firstly, welfare recipients and their families would no doubt challenge the assertion that it is easy to 'qualify' for the disability pension or retain access to it. Interactions with government bureaucracy, involving vast amounts of paperwork, are often frustrating at best and mystifying a worst. Former welfare rights advocate Susie Byers discerns a 'culture of punishment within Centrelink and its parent Department's', born of a 'suspicious pessimism about the motivations and goals of those who are unemployed, raising children, or living with disabilities'. Byers suggests that the process of achieving government benefits is dehumanizing and humiliating, noting that those who claim payments 'expose themselves to invasions of privacy that would make the humblest of aged pensioner feel like a criminal'.
Abbott's suggestion that an audit of the eligibility rules is needed 'to ensure that only those who genuinely deserve the benefit receive it' subtly invokes the stereotype of the bludger without providing any evidence of such exploitation, Generally speaking, it seems likely that any benefit system will attract the self-interested as well as the needy. So be it: this is the price we pay for living in a civilized community that cares for its citizens. To make a whole class of people suffer for the sins of a few- even under the mantle of compassion- would be in this context as in others, profoundly unethical.
Secondly, Abbott's classification of muscular-skeletal and psychological/psychiatric disabilities as the categories within which 'less serious' conditions might be found seems opportunistic. Muscular-skeletal conditions may involve chronic pain which is inherently difficult for external parties to perceive. Similarly, psychological or psychiatric illness is not readily identifiable by bureaucrats seeking to limit entitlements. The nomination of these categories suggests a certain lack of sophistication-if someone's not in a wheelchair or holding a cane they must be capable of holding work. These are people already people vulnerable to accusations of malingering, given the increasing sceptisim about diagnoses of mental illness. It is thus important to note that one cannot qualify for the disability pension by feeling a bit blue. The criteria regarding psychiatric impairment in the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth) specify that mild but regular symptoms which tend to case subjective distress' and give rise to 'minimal interference with function in everyday situations' will not of themselves render one eligible for the pension.
Thirdly, despite the existence of such services as Job Services Australia and the Disability Employment Assistance Services it is far from clear that there is an aequate level of support available to help people with disabilities find jobs and mentor them while in employment. A HREOC National Inquiry into Employment & Disability in 2006 noted that, although 'most people with disability want to work if they have the capacity to do so.. we cannot expect high participation rates if people with disability have work-related expenses that are higher than their potential wages or they cannot access the supports they need'. A 'tightening' of the criteria for access to the disability pension would increase the existing need for serious investment in encourageemnt of flexible workplaces and programs to help people find and stay in employment.
More broadly, there are problems with the prevalent view, integral to Abbott's rhetoric, that employment necessarily imbues people with self-esteem and a sense of purpose and enables them to lead meaningful lives. Such a claim might hold true for skilled workers, including educated professionals such as politicians, or those at the other end of the Australian job market, the prospects are less alluring.
The writer Anne Manne, a trenchant critic of the 'Get to Work neo-liberal program', cited her own experiences of dismal jobs, including a stint as a jillaroo, in her 2008 Quarterly Essay ' Love and Money:The Family and the Free Market'. Manne challenged the view that paid work is inherently fulfilling, noting 'when my university teachers talked of the liberation of work, they did not mean domestic help in rural NSW', but rather-like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique- 'prestige work'. Self evidently, prestige work is not available to all. Many workplaces are not flexible enough to cater for the needs of people with disabilities, Further there will always be jobs no one wants to do; such roles are filled by the people relegated to being the leftovers of the modern economy.
In her 2005 Griffith Review Essay law Professor Rosemary Hunter traced shifts within the Australian labour market and their effects on family disputes, noting that the 1990s had seen a 'rise of precarious low-quality employment'. Hunter suggested that 'Australia's current low unemployment rate.. does not signal economic prosperity but rather the rise of the working poor, and the phenomenon of labour market churning, whereby people move constantly between unemployment and poorly-paid, casual and part time jobs, which they must accept as a condition of continued support when they are again unemployed'. The superiority of such a life over one on the disability pension is not immediately obvious.
Currently families make up the shortfall in support of people with disabilities: this kind of informal care is characterized by feminist economist Nancy Folbre as the 'invisible heart' that combines with the 'invisible hand of the market' to render our society functional. Reliance on the family, however, is not sustainable. Its time for a real debate about how people on government benefits can be supported to live meaningful lives, including assistance securing employment where appropriate. The seductive language of dignity, choice and productivity employed by Abbott is unlikely to assist such debate.
*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.
