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.

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,ย  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