Category: housing

Housing Relief

Had the six-monthly rental inspection this morning. Spent the week cleaning since I found out about it, and it must have been fine because I got an email offering us another 2 years lease (this was just 12 months to start with) with a $10 increase. So, yes, totally taking that offer up lol it was a one year but still taking it and feeling relieved and going to collapse into a corner with the doggo who hung out with me all morning.


My stephdaughter is signing their first lease today on a place up in Tamworth with their bub, and my sister is exchanging contracts on a house in the suburb we grew up with in just under a month, so lots is going to settle for a bit… stepson’s girlfriend is pregnant and so that’ll be the next challenge, they’re also looking for a place together and saving up for what’s ahead.

So I get that mental settling for another could of years. They can increase the rent annually still but that’s not an concern til late next year anyway. I’m thinking of things I can do now to the place now I know I have another couple of years and in terms of settling into the neighbourhood…
In other news, the People Against Poverty Summit in November has been launched. Tickets are tiered. Facebook event here. I’ll have to organise getting up there etc, but it’ll be nice doing that knowing I won’t have a lease ending the next week! See you there?

Mourning Winter

Records breaking again and again, apparently 39 degrees in Winter is possible in Central Australia, and they got it this week in Oodnadatta. On the east coast, we’re getting high 20s, not entirely unusual for August, but that it’s continuing so many days in a row seems to be. Looking across the road to the RFS, I hope those burns through winter were enough because we’re in for a long hot summer.

We were in the shower this morning and my  partner turned it up to warm his legs, I said to him to enjoy it because I don’t think we’re gonna need the heater again this year and that that air con will probably be on at lunch a few times this week, if the boys come home for lunch, so they can cool down and not feel like dying in the heat. We’ve started summer prep – making sure there’s zinc and sunscreen, a couple new pairs of cheap sunnies, and hats and shirts and shade and the shade sails. Water bottled in the fridge and freezer, eskies and ice packs. People are wanting to get their boats and caravans all dolled up for Spring already, so it’s on.

It’s four months til Christmas, but, along with my annual will I get a lease extension myself to stay here for Festivus, my sister will have to find a new rental in the next few months, having being given notice, and there’s places, but whether they’re suitable for 4 kids, or close enough to schools and therapies and Dads to not cause too much upheaval, all the things. I hate the housing situation in this country. I truly do.

Finally dragged myself to the GP and scored some drugs – prednisone steroids to strengthen my weak lungs. And that’s kicking in, which I’m grateful for. So I should be able to at least hold a sentence in a week at that panel, and perhaps enlighten people on how us ground level advocates can help change the world. I hope I also get more of my works back, because I’ve had more word-finding difficulties since the last Covid bout, and while I’m a master of circumlocution, not so helpful when time limited. Also keeping an eye on my swallowing and saliva control, I think I just need to be more mindful of it, they always said in uni that swallowing function starts declining after 40, so for me to be coughing and gagging more after these latest illnesses isn’t a shock. I also need to chew my dry food like chips or popcorn. I hate having to pay attention in order to do basic life things.

SO, I’m fuzzy but getting there. Repurpled my hair, even shaved my legs. Spring IS here. Vale, Winter.

Earnest and Overwhelmed – Teasing out the personal from the professionals this Homelessness Week

There’s a week for everything. Cancers, lupus, boys, thongs. This week is National Homelessness Week here in ‘straya, the lucky country, where there are no affordable homes to rent in most cities, let alone buy on the minimum wage, where we settled for mold-ridden shacks and ever-increasing rents rather than joining the ever-increasing homeless population. Sleeping in cars, in tents, on couches or garages, swags in the park until their moved on, but a nice little CEO sleepout each year will bring money and awareness to the charity sectors coffers.

My little granbaby turned one yesterday, having moved house three times already in her life, looking at another one soon. A young family needs to be able to establish roots, find some community and stability. You can’t grow let alone heal when you’re continuously uprooted, waiting for that email that says you’re on the move again.

NSW is supposedly strengthening their tenant’s rights, but they need to be enforced, and not have ben enforced by the little guy, the tenant who’s fighting to have a roof over their head. Landlords need to have consequences for being dicks about it all, and they need to know that it will cost them if they do lie about the reason for eviction or refuse to fix dangerous properties.

I’m tired and overwhelmed from yesterday. My car needs repairs. Well both our cars need repairs. I got some new kitties, bub got some too. I just wanted to take bub and her mum home and make them safe and warm and looked after but it doesn’t work like that, and it hurts.

I’ve been sick and now have passed it onto the boys.

I nearly had some paid work but that fell through, but I now have a working with children check completed and paid for so I can use that if something comes up. But that would involve me going for things. And I’m a bit of a spooked groundhog at the moment.

Groundhog Day, the Importance of Being Earnest. Movies we see over and over, comforting and just there. I’m told I’m Earnest, and I am there’s so much of the layers of the world that are needlessly there in my eyes. Why do we need to have all these layers? Whether it’s the extra layers of charities, meaning money is wasted at every step, or posturing and needing to seem to be doing good and being polite hen our actions are causing pain and suffering. So long as we’re nice about it. As long as the status quo and social cohesion is maintained, people’s rights can be eroded, their families sent away, the planet slowly destroyed.

Or quickly.

I probably should work towards getting that Autism and ADHD assessment, just to sort through it all more, know where I am. Or maybe I should just continue on my little way and slowly make this world my own.

Happy EOFYS! (Don’t let the tax cuts overwhelm you on the way out)

You can’t have missed it. EVERY AUSTRALIAN TAXPAYER IS GETTING A TAX CUT. Well, anyone earning above the tax free threshold is. Anyone paying GST or excise other other taxes that disproportionally impact the poorer peeps only isn’t.

Apparently, recipients of the age pension, a disability support pension and carer payments will be able to earn more before their payments are reduced. Singles can now earn $212 a fortnight (previously $204) and couples can earn $372 (previously $360). Let’s ignore the face that those people are currently on sub-poverty level payments because they’re supposed to be caring for themselves or others full time and really shouldn’t have to go out to work for that elusive block of cheese. Aspirational cheese.

I’m still slightly bitter that the energy rebate is less, even though it was just stupid to begin with. Also jelly of those states going to elections getting extra from their state labor where GST splits have allowed it. My bill is only going up, and here I am hoping my stepson’s JobSeeker application gets approved before the next bill so we can use his backpay to pay that. Waiting time for Jobseeker is still about 12 weeks I hear, so it lines up.

I’ll be relieved when tomorrow comes and the mailing lists I’m signed up for for various organisations with charitable status will stop asking for end-of financial year contributions. Though I have shared this one for Southlakes, the local community support organisaion near me that’s run on the smell of an oily rag, feeding families each week after Centrelink refers them their way rather then government deigning it time to Raise the Rate above the poverty line.

$12 bag of expired food items from a foodbank

I’ve starting attending rental inspections for the step-kid and bub to mover back to Newcastle, there’s so little out there and so many families at each inspection. At least we all have housing, it’s not ideal but it’s shelter.

There is no “right way” to protest or otherwise advocate for change

Be polite they say, don’t graffiti they say, don’t smash a window to break un unjust law. Don’t block the road, don’t camp there. Fill out this complaint form, submit to this enquiry, accept the status quo.

I’ve always been a “good girl”, not rocking the boat, trying to make peace in a house, in a group. Trying to keep things calm at the expense of what I believed was just. So I’m new to all this. New to rocking the boat. Hell  I’ve not yet don’t a port blockade because my father works the tugs and my mother doesn’t approve. But I’m learning what boundaries I’m happy to push, while maintaining the fluffy pink outer shell and making others comfortable.

The federal Health Minister has visited the Hunter, announcing a new urgent care clinic for either Newcastle, or Lake Macquarie.While it’s good news for patients, some say more needs to be done to improve access to bulk-billing.
Recently on the local news, complaining that no-one bulk bills anymore – video is here

Protest can’t be effective if it doesn’t inconvenience SOMEONE. I find extreme weather cause by climate change pretty inconvenient, the people being killed by it the ecosystems being destroyed, so I don’t see it as an overreaction to block a coal train to disrupt supply or shut down peak hour traffic to bring attention to the cause. You’ll never make everyone happy.

This week was winter solstice, and Vinnies’ biggest fundraising gig of the year – the CEO sleepout. This is where bosses and other bigwigs pretend to be homeless for a night by sleeping in brand new Kathmandu sleeping bags with Visy branded cardboard to protect them from any elements that may appear in the football field or parliament underground carpark that night. They get to network and go to sleep with a full belly, able to sleep through the night undisturbed by the weather, nightmares from trauma, police moving them on, critters at their toes or dickheads walking home from the pub trying to provoke them

How lovely and clean is the parliament house underground carpark? There’s toilet onsite, and guards to keep away those pesky actual homeless people who might see it as better than sleeping under the Lake Burley Griffin bridges. People have been pointing out the flaws in the event for years.

Mel aka Artist Affame is a good friend and recently too on the convener role at the Antipoverty Centre. She uses her wealth of “lived experience” to advocate for change, using her art to bring more eyes in, and has learned amazingly well how to express herself through her art and writing, and through the “proper channels” of meeting with politicians and attending consultation events and being generally awesome.

That didn’t stop her state’s premier’s media teams from blocking her on Twitter this week for questioning why he’d do the CEO sleepout when he has the power to actually change things for poor and homeless people in South Australia. or Vinnies themselves from also blocking her this week (they’ve previously blocked other antipoverty activists) after questioning the efficacy of the sleepout, and why they’d be doing that while still exploiting people through work for the dole. But I don’t think we have laws here where you can’t block your constituents for asking questions of you.

So, we’ll keep taking you petitions to ignore, making submission you’ll ignore and going through peer led advocacy which you’ll ignore, while you have lunch with ACOSS and still ignore their recommendations to stop keeping people poor. We held out hope that the Robodebt’s revealed horrors would be dealt with by the corruption commission, but no, people just got to remain nameless and move on. So, at some stage people are going to get more than a little frustrated that going through the right channels, being polite, being calm, that they’re not getting them anywhere.

And then we’ll see things burn.

drawing of a frog with a molitov cocktail with text be the light you want to see in the world