Category: politics

I just can’t, Jim. I can’t with your surplus.

You are the federal treasurer you can pull the lever at any time to reduce homelessness and poverty. however it means you won't be able to do a press conference boasting about a budget surplus. What do you do?

You’re repeating yourself, grinning over the same shit, so I’m going to repeat myself. I hate the surplus. I hate it when it’s 9 billion or nineteen. I hate it because it leaves my friends suffering with welfare payments below the poverty line. It leaves public school massively underfunded. It leaves public housing being sold off rather than being bought or built. It leaves you and your colleagues grinning at foodbanks, grinning because you’ve funded more charity, grinning while dental isn’t funded for adults. You’re grinning while women are rejected for domestic violence payments, when you could raise welfare above the poverty line and remove partner income tests. You’re grinning a year after the Disability Royal Commission handed down it’s findings while you’re holding your cards close to the chest on what will be allowed in NDIS packages after Wednesday. Grinning about Urgent Care Clinics while GP’s continue to walk away from bulk billing.

Grinning. Grinning. Grinning.

ned kelly hezbollah flag
Nedzbollah

As your local Eternally Online Elder Millennial, I volunteer to be Social Media Envoy to the Albanese Government

I started a new Sims save today – after reinstalling windows last month I needed to get all the updates and update OBS and all the other things to make streaming possible again. And I got there. It’s cleaner because so much got purged, I’m sure I’ll add to the clutter on the screen, in my life – both Sims and IRL.

I first got online in 2000, aged 17/18. So an older teen, but still a teen. I got onto playing Neopets, chatting through ICQ and Yahoo Groups, and we started online journals and blogging. I made friends around the world. I don’t see banning teens and tweens even from social media as viable, let alone a good thing. Kids already just get their parents and older siblings to make accounts for them or watch hours of appropriate and less-appropriate content. A ban would see kids less able to speak up when things are a bit shady online, less able to know who to turn to if there’s a problem if they’re having to hide that part of their lives and learning to navigate it with less guidance than how many are now – locked down Instagram accounts with a select audience, Minecraft servers with strangers and friends, Youtube channels and Twitter bringing us the headlines more reliably than the national broadcaster.

The country doesn’t know when to actually let kids be kids, and when to criminalise them to to imposed outdated views on what kids should be doing. Access to information when growing up is important, and these days that information and social experimentation happens a lot online. People are worried that kids are being sexualised too young if they’re learning about queerness when really they’re just learning the terminology for what they’re feeling inside themselves that kids in the 90s and earlier couldn’t find out unless they were avid readers borrowing every book in the local library, or were in a very progressive pocket of town. Kids know they’re “not straight” but doesn’t have the words for it, just as trans kids exist and need families who just let them explore themselves – through playing with gender roles, names, types of clothing and more. Kids get to see that Straight, Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgender, Intersex, Asexual and other categories of people are able to grow up into happy and healthy adults and can see that positive possibility for themselves.

I’m loving that future for the kids. Let’s not take it from them.

Appreciate this post? Support me.

Odds are, Bill, the sun WILL come out tomorrow, but the vulnerable will be worse off, and I don’t see Labor changing that any time soon

So Bill thinks we’re all getting a little hysterical when we say that people will die because of the NDIS legislation they’ve pushed through with Pauline’s help. He tells us not to be anxious and that the sun’ll come out tomorrow. I know it will Bill, it’ll be above average temperatures all week on the East Coast and all. But people will be worse off, and have their care needs neglected because of your legislation. They will also be more vulnerable to taking their own lives because of losing supports that keep them safe and healthy, and because of punitive Robo whatever actions you’re overseeing with the lovely staff leftover from Robodebt that have found new lives in the NDIA compliance teams.

I’m not going to put in links to reference this post, I’m sick, and have a GP appointment at 12.15. One that I get to pay $80 upfront for because your government has not helped Medicare bulk billing, and nowhere around here routinely bulk bills concession card holders anymore.

Jimmy’s also promised that he won’t do anything on the welfare end either in the lead up to the election. So, we don’t have to worry about being hopeful or disappointed and we can move straight into getting the Greens and Independents to promise real action on welfare. We have all the evidence that lifting welfare to the poverty line won’t affect Jim’s Inflation, but Labor won’t help us, so it’s time to go around them. Jimmy said this morning there’ll be a March budget ahead of the May election. So that’s his last chance to disappoint us and tell us he thinks we deserve poverty to make his bottom line look nicer.

Are you a unionist? How are you feeling about the Labor- Union relationship with the CFMEU? You don’t have to think that the CFMEU are good or bad to agree that it seems a bit of overreach and a real threat to the union movement to have worked with the LNP to impose 3 years administration….

So, I want a magic answer from the GP, I need to this cough gone. It’s getting in the way of me actually getting out and doing the things I’m otherwise ready to do mentally. I need to be able to talk. And yell. And scream. And rage against this fucking machine.

Middle fingers up til the reaper shows up.

Who CAN we trust with our stories?

After the disheartening response to the Disability Royal Commission finally came out last month, advocates and many others were left in literal tears, wondering what the point of a 4 -year commission that heard the many stories of violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect of disabled Australians was. Again this week, those who gave evidence to the gambling harms enquiry are wondering the same. Why should vulnerable people who have already suffered subject themselves to rehashing their stories for the amusement of government panels who have already seemed to have decided what actions they’ll take no matter how harrowing it gets?

Of course, it’s just everyone else’s turn to learn this after the continued deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, seemingly not even slowing since the 1987 Royal Commission. The Closing the Gap figures last week were going backwards in essential areas, with the stirred up racism and disappointment of “The Voice” brushed aside by our dear leader, who can’t commit to Makarrata, to Treaty, or even to Truth Telling, which is sorely needed. We need to face the fact that we’re continuing the horrors of the Stolen Generations with child protection policies and locking up Blak kids and that more of the same isn’t getting us anywhere.

And our Governments support for Genocidal Israel is not instilling confidence in their willingness to not continue the Genocide here.

Each day I get emailed surveys to do, to share my story with another Not For Profit, or the Greens (who I’m still deciding whether I’ll renew my membership of, got another reminder text today) or news of another Senate inquiry. I don’t know what to do with these. I fill some responses out myself, when I have the spoons, but I’m reluctant to pass them on anymore. Reluctant to ask that emotional labor of people who are already battling to get through their day-to-day life when I can’t seem to offer them examples of how it will change things for them or the people they care about.

A lot of my people are burning out at the moment, running themselves thin, with family deaths and health issues themselves, wanting to ramp up to see if we can force Labor’s hand ahead of the upcoming election, but also needing to focus on self-care, on mutual aid, on trying to do some positive things too to brighten their lives in the immediate sense.

I’m down a car this week, so out of routine. Bruce’ll fix in on the weekend. But I went across the road for some sun with the dog just now and that was nice, gave me some healing warmth. I’ll catch the train into town tomorrow for group and might make some time to wander along the streets and browse the shops. There’s a few op-shops there I haven’t been to in ages I might pick up something from.

Love yas x

Blue Koala at the rest stop in Port Macquarie

I, for one, Welcome the New Minister for Homelessness Industries

Hey if it’s good enough to acknowledge that Defense and the Industries that make the money off it need two portfolios, why not come out and admit that’s what you and the minister for Charities are really about, with his stated aims to double donations to charities by 2030, ensuring that government has less to do with supporting people than supporting the well-meaning white women that do.

Meanwhile, Tony Burke has given up on ignoring Workforce Australia and is reminiscing about the glory days of introducing the policy that ensure refugees that arrived by boat wouldn’t settle in this country, leading the many years of deaths and torture on nearby dentition islands. Murray Watt has picked up Employment, and is soon to learn that it’s like herding cats rather than sheep and you should just give in to the evidence based demands of livable welfare payments and scrap punitive policies like Work for the Dole and the Cashless Welfare cards in all their forms.

Shorten has reinforced his true white-supremacist/Eugenicist leaning by becoming a founding member of Labor Friends of Israel,  whatever the fuck that is, and Peter Kahill wants to maintain social cohesion and the veneer of niceness with the special envoy role while no-one wants to touch the Islamophobia special envoy and Albo’s hoping that, like the prospect of a Republic will be quickly forgotten.

It’s the run-up to the election for sure, whether they call it early or we get to hold out til May, but it’s where we’re at.

Did you miss me while I was Twitter banned? I’m back baby!

First Dog tells it like it is