What is this thing?
I work in a wholesale business that supplies retail shops, and I deal with shops around Australia. For their part, the shops would deal with a number of suppliers. I have been in this job for about 13 years, so I have gotten to know, at least by telephone, a number of staff in the various shops.
I have been dealing with one woman for about 10 years, and we joke, and –I don’t know if it’s just Australian slang– we ‘take the piss’ with each other, so to speak. I find humour and wit the best response to an arbitrary existence, even with the increasing propensity for the world to be nauseously absurd.
I am the illegitimate child of the Stoic and the Existentialist.
She had been having headaches, and went to the doctor in September. He sent her for a number of tests in October. In November the doctor told her she would be dead before Christmas, and she left work. And she did die, dying mid December: 46 years old, leaving a husband and two children. Her boss phoned me to tell me that she had died, and tho never having met me, she had a good opinion of me, and she had asked him to let me know that she had died. And I was 1 of only 2 people (suppliers) that she had asked him to do that for.
This was about 3 weeks ago.
One of the things this mad world lacks is perspective, evinced by empathy defined as a weakness. A three-year-old refugee, a Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background, washes ashore on a beach, drowned, dead.
That was five years ago. Nothing has changed. The right-wing voices, and their vicious anti-refugee words, were only momentarily silenced. One wonders what these self-professed Christians would say as they stand before their God.
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ (Matthew 25:25-36)
Perspective lost. Pig-people thinking dominates. They make the world a dark dark place. Because they cannot rid themselves of their fear, hate and selfishness. The pig-people are in power, but they condemn us all.
There are magical experiences to be had in life –of discovery and learning, of loving and losing, living in the moment but never taking possibility from those yet to come, to be quick to share and slow to anger– but the pig-people can only offer us greed, ignorance, endless obedience in manufactured consumption.
“The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.” Hannah Arendt.
At home I feed the wild birds. I like seeing them, including magpies, rainbow lorikeets, rain birds, cockatoos, galahs, blue wrens, miner birds, the double-barred finch, honeyeaters, the courageous willie wagtails (who fight off the much-larger crows), and the gentle and very pretty king parrots. Unfortunately we have crows too, who are my least favourite bird. I suspect I might be turning into Bill Oddie, but that’s ok. Animals with a brain smaller than a golf ball. Yet you soon realize, individual birds have different personalities. What is this thing??
The Arab Spring in a Dead Land.
Remember the Arab Spring: ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām (“the people want to bring down the regime”).
There is no epiphany to come for the rich and powerful –the pig-people will never willingly relinquish their privileged positions, and the apologists will never waver in their jealous support for the pig-people. Accept this, and cease endlessly expecting reform that can never happen. How many times must you look around the world, before you realize you are seeing the same view each time? Understand they will always oppose any change that threatens the status quo, and accept too that change must be demanded and forced. Anger is your ally.
The pig-people have fashioned the world so that they can maintain their privilege and power. This is the reality of the status quo. As wealth and power is increasingly concentrated, as lies become the new truth and ignorance is lauded, notions of equity and sustainability, respect and fairness, become ever distant. Societies, so-called democratic or otherwise, exist only to further the interests of the pig-people: wealth and power, wealth and power!
But remember the Arab Spring.
Lives of misery before, and except perhaps for Tunisia, for most even greater misery after. When all the protesters wanted was an improvement in economic conditions, and an increase in political freedom. Why did this fail to be achieved? Because the construct survived intact, most of the pig-people remained, and joined by other pig-people, with the status quo in danger their retribution was merciless, the punishment applied with great malice.
But our anger is not enough. We must not only confront and banish the pig-people, we must make it impossible for the pig-people to return. If we make the right decisions –for equity and sustainability– there is a future for all. But always, the return of the pig-people must be guarded against. A commitment to reason, common-sense, openness and fairness, will deny them entry.
The pig-people monopolize available possibilities, and so deny the majority a future with choice. Other people are not competitors, they are collaborators, and all are deserving of an authentic human life that the pig-people must deny them. Only when we speak with one voice will we be heard, but their strategy is always to divide. Freedom –the freedom to, and the freedom from– has been replaced by coercion and deceit in this brave new world.
The course of our other possible future is already visible now, and the signs do not bode well. But I say to the future: not all today were blind to the madness, not all today were empty and defeated.
Never forget, the pig-people would rather see this world burn than lose their privileged positions. That is what is at stake. The pig-people would rather see the world burn. Government, so-called democratic or otherwise, exists today merely to facilitate and further the interests of the pig-people. This wrong cannot be made right by reform; it is the natural and inevitable end result of the construct. Change the system.
Mistah Kurtz-he dead
But he wouldn’t go
Robodebt and the lack of accountability.
I am writing about the Online Compliance Intervention system, more commonly referred to as the ‘robodebt’ scheme.
The Department of Human Services, which looks after Centrelink, has a computer program that gathers data from other government agencies like the Australian Tax Office, and then compares it with data that people have reported to Centrelink.
The system is designed to quickly check whether the income that you reported to Centrelink — used to calculate what welfare benefits you’re entitled to — is the same as what your employer has told the tax office.
Centrelink has used data matching for a long time, and this particular algorithm was used by the previous Labor government.
What changed? The main change is what happens after the computer detects a discrepancy.
In the past a Centrelink officer would do a basic investigation before deciding whether to send out a letter. But since July 2016, the computer prints out and sends the debt recovery letter on its own.
Before the system was automated, only 20,000 interventions were made a year. But the amped up system was running at 20,000 a week.
The prime minister, the cabinet, and all ministers asked about it, fully supported the robodebt scheme, even though there were increasing reports of errors and mistakes in the automated debt claims, and hardship and distress, and even suicide, from those that received debt letters.
What happened?
A class action was launched. The Federal Court found the government had acted unlawfully, and the government agreed to repay $1 point 2 billion dollars!
As I say, I’m middle-aged now, and age does allow a perspective over time.
Over my life, I have witnessed an increasing denial of accountability and responsibility for decisions made by the political class (and, it must be said, by police too). We are in a dangerous position where the people who make the laws (and enforce the laws), deny that they should ever be accountable for their decisions, and even see as an affront any request to justify their decisions. I have seen it getting worse over my own lifetime, and I have no reason to think it won’t get worse still moving forward.
Even though a court found the government acted unlawfully, and the government must pay $1.2 billion to settle the class action –taxpayer money!– no politician has resigned, no politician has faced any kind of censure, no penalty, no fine. Those involved –the government– have even denied the request for a Royal Commission into the matter. The Westminster tradition of ministerial and prime ministerial responsibility abandoned by fair-weather friends.
You can be fined (and many are) for jaywalking in Queensland, if you cross a road when you are within 20 metres of a designated crossing (traffic lights, zebra crossing etc) –I guess we are all presumed to be carrying a tape measure. If you are 19 metres and 99 centimetres from that designated crossing you will be fined. If you take it to court, that court will find you guilty, and if you are unsuccessful in your court case, the government adds an extra financial penalty to the fine (not including your own costs). And if you don’t pay the fine, and any further penalties, you WILL go to prison. A jaywalker is deemed more deserving of punishment than a politician who lies and deceives, who willfully attempts to cover up the facts, a government who acts unlawfully, and where a court says the government must pay $1.2 billion of taxpayer money. Do you see how absurd this is?
It is a very dangerous position for the citizen, this rise of illegitimate authority, where the political class refuse to be held accountable, and can’t be forced to be accountable. That is not a real democracy.
A fourth McDonald’s to open in Australia’s ‘fattest town’.
With a population of about 60,000, there are already more than 35 fast-food outlets in Tamworth, and McDonald’s is about to open a fourth store.
Tamworth was found to have the nation’s highest obesity rate earlier this year, in statistics released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
A staggering 61.2 per cent of residents in the country New South Wales town are considered to be obese.
The Council had received public objections against a fourth McDonald’s store. One member of the public stated: “Tamworth does not need a 4th McDonald’s and another McDonald’s will further increase the rates of obesity in Tamworth.”
Council responded by saying: “Whilst noted, these concerns are not a matter for consideration in accordance with Section 4.15 of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.”
So residents of the ‘fattest’ town in Australia are not able to say to their elected representatives ‘We do not need another fast-food outlet in town’, and have the Council act on that. Even if an overwhelming majority of the residents were opposed to another fast-food outlet in the town, it is of no consequence.
Why?
Successfully obtaining funding/finance largely determines whether a project eventuates –that determines the worthwhileness of it– and certainly NOT the wishes of residents (and other considerations). And of course McDonald’s donates to the main political parties.
Fat and getting fatter.
Would you like fries with your diabetes and heart attack!?
There is a persistent unaccountability within police forces. And it is getting worse.
Monday: Northern Territory Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker defended police who were seen on CCTV footage assaulting an indigenous youth in a watch-house. Commissioner Chalker said the police “were provoked”, and that no disciplinary action against the officers would be taken.
Let us look at Chalker’s defence of provocation. I’ve actually heard that defence many times from wife-beaters, perpetrators of domestic violence: ‘yeah I knocked the bitch out, but she provoked me!’ And often the male would give an explanation of the provocation as something like his meal wasn’t warm enough!
I am certain teachers are often provoked by unruly or abusive students. In such a situation, is the school teacher justified in slamming the head of the student into a desktop? Well, no, the teacher would likely be charged with assault. So why is it not ok for the teacher, but ok for the police??
And where is the line drawn: is it ok for the police, because they “were provoked”, to slam the head of the indigenous youth into a desktop, and it is justified, say, six times, but seven times it isn’t justified?? Why so that number, when is the response to the so-called provocation justified, and when not, and determined by whom?
The reality is the police believe they deserve to be unaccountable, to law, to reason, and to standards of proper conduct.
Tuesday: The final report of a two-year inquiry by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) into NSW Police strip-searches was released.
It found there was a “recurrent issue” with officers conducting unlawful strip searches and a “failure” to provide reasons to warrant the invasive procedure.
Greens MP David Shoebridge said Tuesday’s report “has uncovered routine and criminal lawbreaking by the police in how and when they undertake strip-searches and who they search.”
In regards to strip-searches by NSW police, Commissioner Mick Fuller said “they {the public} need to have respect and a little bit of fear for law enforcement.” (!)
The reality is the police believe they deserve to be unaccountable, to law, to reason, and to standards of proper conduct.
Wednesday: Four South Australian police officers involved in the assault of a handcuffed man that ended with him being knocked unconscious, and with permanent brain damage, at the Victor Harbor Police Station in 2017, will not be prosecuted, a court has heard.
Magistrate O’Connor said Senior Constable Higgins “was not candid” in his statement about the incident, and another two police officers had made “misleading” statements “that place Higgins in the best possible light, and blame Mr Cross for what happened to him”.
The reality is the police believe they deserve to be unaccountable, to law, to reason, and to standards of proper conduct.
Putting thugs and bullies, and liars and cheats, in uniform, arming them and calling them police, and ignoring the deindividuation inherent in such organizations, not holding them accountable for their actions, not insisting on a proper standard of conduct, is to the detriment of society –everywhere, whether China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, Australia, or America, we have an out-of-control and criminal police.
And they are your enemy.
But remember, the political class have allowed this to happen. And ask yourself, why would they desire it to happen?
How the right-wing skews Australian politics.
Senator Pauline Hanson, leader of the right-wing One Nation (or rather, White Nation) Party, said in the Senate this week that welfare recipients don’t have any rights (!).
She was speaking specifically in regards to people on the unemployment benefit (the dole), about which she has previously said that the payment is too high, the payment should not be increased, the payment should be denied to some Australians, and that the payment should be time limited.
The official unemployment rate in Australia is about 7%, bearing in mind that a part-time or casual employee who works 1 hour in a week is considered ’employed’ that week. When underemployment (part-time or casual employees wanting more work hours) is factored in, and the participation rate (the number of people who have given up actively looking for employment) is factored in, the actual situation is much worse.
If there are 100 job vacancies and 20 unemployed, one might reasonably ask why you can’t find employment. If there are 20 job vacancies and 100 unemployed, the answer is obvious. Re-training etc might assist a particular person, but if most/all undertake re-training, the individual advantage is gone.
Hanson, as the right-wing and conservatives are want to do, have views that are so ideologically corrupted, they refuse to accept the reality of the situation. They blame the unemployed for being unemployed, when the reality is that the jobs are not there.
They do this in large measure to justify their failure, and the failure of a system.
It is mere co-incidence I am sure that an unemployment rate, of more unemployed than jobs available, puts downward pressure on wages, and benefits the corporations and companies that donate to the political parties.
I believe employment at the level of a living wage is an individual right. If the system cannot provide that, change the system. Hanson says people on the unemployment benefit should have no rights. I work full-time in a private company, and I am definitely accountable for any and all of my mistakes, and for my job performance. Politicians are not, and the political systems, whether so-called democratic or not, cannot provide the solutions to the problems we are confronted with. Blaming the unemployed for being unemployed, when jobs aren’t available, defies reason and common-sense. It is one of the many lies of the pig-people, and not one rational word can be heard above the clamour of their ignorance and ideology.
Conservatives in Australia use the right-wing extremists to skew the political debate. For example, One Nation might call for zero muslim immigration (muslim or non-white, her two favourite prejudices). Conservatives will then, say, prioritize christian immigration, but with no specific muslim immigrant ban. Yet the intent of both is the same. The conservatives will disingenuously claim there is no muslim ban, and also deceptively claim, in the name of a more widespread political appeal: ‘look, we’ve not gone as far as some have called for –we’re moderates!’.
Expect the conservative Australian government to remove rights from welfare recipients, but to say: ‘look, we’ve not gone as far as some have called for –we’re moderates!’ It will happen.
I always chuckle, but yes, increasingly more difficult these days, when conservatives insist they believe in free markets. You would have heard it many times, they recite it as if in prayer: ‘I believe in free markets!’.
But I don’t. I believe in a free people, in open and critical thinking, in not exploiting fellow free people in the name of greed or personal power, I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.
When Hanson said welfare recipients should have no rights, perhaps she meant wealthfare, not welfare.
“In fact, these tax concessions (to the richest Australians) are costing the budget about six times as much as Newstart [the unemployment benefit], a payment even business groups say is too low for job seekers to live on,” said an Anglicare report.
“For forty years I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics—and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an authority that would wish to govern by despotic means, and over the masses who claim the right to make a minority subservient to a majority.” –French thinker Benjamin Constant.
And today in Australia, in this so-called democracy, there are in power many Hansons, and many Hansons in the electorate who bully to cast their vicious votes.
Alleged pedophile’s house seized by AFP in Australian first.
Less than a hundred years ago, and for a millennia before that, a child born out of wedlock was a ‘bastard’, legally unrecognized and socially shunned. Of course reason always dictated the child was not in any way, shape, or form, blameworthy.
Yesterday, the Australian Federal Police have seized the home of an alleged pedophile in an Australian first.
The AFP alleges the man was ordering and instructing child sexual abuse happening in South-East Asia, and watched it online from the Adelaide property.
It is the first time the AFP has seized the home of an alleged child sex offender.
It has done so under laws used to restrain and then confiscate the homes, goods and cash of outlaw motorcycle gangs, serious organised crime syndicates and drug dealers.
The man is not accused of profiting from his crimes.
In a statement, AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said the action was part of a “more aggressive strategy to fight the insidious crime of child sexual abuse and exploitation”.
But this is just the kind of banal bombast, the empty headline, that police and politicians use to justify their past failures.
From the AFP website, as of today:
“The AFP-led CACT {Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce} is a Commonwealth initiative dedicated to taking the profit out of crime by targeting criminals and their assets derived from criminal activity.” https://www.afp.gov.au/what-we-do/crime-types/proceeds-crime
Once again, the person made no profit from their alleged criminal activities.
The right-wing commentators say: ‘but he’s a paedophile, so who’s going to have a problem with that?”
I say:
1. Child sexual abuse is not acceptable by any person, under any circumstance, at any time.
2. The person has been charged. He has not yet even entered a plea, and there has of course been no trial yet, but the legislation allows the police to confiscate property merely if a person is charged.
Has the judiciary in Australia become so subservient to executive power, that they cannot insist on natural justice, deny the extra-judicial punishment, and say to the government: there will be no power to confiscate unless and until there is a determination of guilt by a court? Apparently so.
3. The legislation was originally specified to apply to bikie gangs, then extended to drug dealers, then to organized crime, and now apparently child-sex abusers. If and when, will it apply to murderers? To terrorists? To rapists? To tax evaders? To climate change protestors? To animal rights protestors? To jaywalkers? Why so or why not? Open-ended legislation like this has to be rejected. Have the police ever said they didn’t want more power? No. We have already seen the legislation has moved on from the original intention, merely by a unilateral interpretation and extension of scope.
4. Property can be confiscated even if the person charged is not the sole owner, eg he co-owns the house with his wife. In this case, he is not accused of financial profiting from his criminal activity (so he’s not living a lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous on the unemployment benefit), and let’s assume he has a wife and his wife had no idea of what he was doing (which is often the case in these situations, as perpetrators operate in secrecy), you are punishing the wife who is entirely innocent. Further, let’s assume he has children as well. They and their mother are now homeless, NOT due to any crime they committed, NOR due to anything they could reasonably have been expected to know or to have done.
A two month old baby could be made homeless because of the sins of a parent. And so we have a new kind of bastard child. But the mother and child are, and always will be in these circumstances, entirely blameless and not deserving of such treatment.
What is next?
Punishment for a “thought crime”?
Extending a perpetrator’s terms of punishment to the next generation? And the next?
Something deep down is very wrong in Australia.
It is the Rule of the Pig-people and their anti-reason. They take the right and proper abhorrence of something, in this case child-sex abuse, as justifying anything they do in relation to that, however simplistic or ineffectual. And perplexingly –seemingly without rhyme or reason– they will cherry pick where they act, so with two reasonably similar and abhorrent situations, they will act in one case, and not the other.
And not just in Australia:
Pig-people thinking in Australian politics again.
The conservative Australian Federal government has announced an expansion of its trial ‘cashless welfare card’, the latest attempt at a solution-that-solves-nothing, the latest example of the anti-reason pig-people thinking.
The card was introduced with the government saying a small minority of recipients were using welfare payments for non-approved spending, eg illegal drugs, alcohol, gambling, and was a recommendation from the billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest’s Enquiry into Employment and Welfare.
Yet ALL independent reports, and even the government’s own report, says the ‘cashless welfare card’ does not work. To persist with it, now against the available evidence, indicates it was only ever an ideologically-driven decision.
See https://www.vinnies.org.au/icms_docs/301475_CashlessDebitCard_Briefing_Feb2019.pdf
One of the recommendations in the Brereton Report into Unlawful killings by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, was to strip a group citation for the Special Forces in Afghanistan. It was hardly the most significant recommendation of the report; a unit citation is not a war medal and stripping it is hardly akin to what might be in store for those who committed war crimes.
But immediately, controversy erupted, fanned by right-wing politicians and public figures, saying it is unfair to remove a meritorious group citation when only a small minority were involved in the unlawful killings.
(Incidentally, considering the closeness of the troops in the Special Forces group, and the persistent culture inside the group, I find it highly improbable that other soldiers in the group, although not directly involved in the killings, were unaware that the killings were occurring. If so, they are not blameless, they are accessories before and after the fact.)
General Angus Campbell, who as Chief of Army commissioned the inquiry four years ago, and now as Defence Chief, he is dealing with the findings and recommendations. I find him an honourable man doing a difficult job, but Australian Prime Minister SmugMo, ‘Scotty from Marketing’, has seen the controversy and cannot run away from Campbell quick enough! SmugMo is a marketing man, unprincipled, dishonourable, and driven by expediency, and like the war itself, the peace is a politically-corrupted lie.
But anyway, my point is this:
a small minority are said to use welfare payments on illegal drugs or gambling, BUT ALL get a ‘cashless card’ (leaving aside independent reviews that say the card doesn’t achieve its goal, leaving aside the independent advice that says increased drug and gambling counselling and services are needed to address drug and gambling problems),
and a small minority of soldiers are said to have committed murders of civilians, BUT ALL get to keep a meritorious group citation.
Do you see the inconsistency?
Do you see the hypocrisy?
Do you see the underlying ideological agenda: one group are deemed deserving, the other group undeserving?
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