The Australian Bite

Unfair pay, remote food & dressing up statues

21 October 2010

Listen and download: MP3

This week on the Australian Bite, we’ll hear about the challenges involved in getting good healthy food into remote communities. We’ll take a look at why women working in Australia’s financial industry are generally paid way less than men. And we meet two women who have been dressing up some of Sydney’s public statues in colourful costumes – and telling their stories through art.

Unequal pay a fact of life in the finance sector

Australia is meant to be the land of equal opportunity. So it may surprise you to learn that men are paid more than 18 per cent more than women in Australia – and that’s for work of equal value. But the gap is even bigger for those working in the financial sector, where the difference in pay is more than twenty-eight percent. So why is the gap so big? Kaitlyn Sawrey, from the ABC’s youth network Triple J reports.

More on this story – including longer audio & talkback callers – on the Triple J Hack website

Healthy food and remote communities

How do you get good healthy food out to remote communities? That’s a question that Outback Stores - a Federal Government owned company that manages remote stores on behalf of Indigenous communities- is constantly working to find answer to. They advise communities on how to make the stores financially viable and how to incorporate healthy food into the communities’ diet.

Professor Kerin O’Dea has just been appointed to the board of Outback Stores. She is the former Director of the Menzies School of Health Research and is now Director of the Sansom Institute of Health Research at the University of South Australia. She has more than 30 years experience in Aboriginal health, and she speaks with Stacey Milner.

Dressing up statues

This month, many of Sydney’s statues are looking startlingly different. A new initiative known as the Sydney Statues Project, has decided to wake these statues up. They’ve dressed them in outrageous costumes, each one specially designed to bring out its unique history. Richard Aedy found out more about the Sydney Statues Project when he spoke with Creative Director Michelle McCosker & producer Imogen Semmler.

More on the story at Radio National’s Life Matters program

Music (not in podcast)

Sydney MC Dialectix was born in the Blue Mountains and began his MCing at the age of 14. This track is from his second album, Audio Projectile.

Artist: Dialectrix

Track: Pieces of a Puzzle

Album: Audio Projectile (2010)

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