Lockdown 6: can we please can the protests?

I just finished watching a frustrated wedding business owner from Melbourne expressing his support for the anti-lockdown protest after yesterday’s announcement that Victoria would lock down again (Lockdown #6.)

 

His complete lack of logic destroyed any scrap of sympathy I may have had for him. 

 

A year and a half into this pandemic there are still people doubting its existence and treating mitigation/suppression measures as a human rights issue rather than a public health issue.

 

FARK! I’m losing patience with the media giving air-time to every single person who wants to have a whinge about their dreadful business prospects during this global pandemic.

 

We get it. We know times are tough. We know.

 

WE KNOW!

 

In case people hadn’t noticed, we’re ALL going through it. Everybody’s family life has been disrupted. Our bank balances & mental health have been affected. Our lives have changed. Some of us, sadly, are dead. Some are in hospital on ventilators, and we all find ourselves unable to plan ahead. 

 

ALL. OF. US. 

 

Does anybody really believe that having a whinge on the telly, protesting in a city street, punching a horse or chucking ink on a policeman will change anything for the better for ANY of us?

 

Perhaps Mr COVID-19 Virus, Esq., is sitting at home in front of the TV with the missus. Perhaps he’s hearing the sob stories, seeing the frustration and anger of the people acted out in public. Perhaps he’ll have a change of his little viral heart and will turn to Mrs Virus with tears in his little viral eyes.

 

“Geez, love, I didn’t think this through, did I? I didn’t realise I was being such a thoughtless bastard. I think it’s time we packed up and left. I just wanted to make a connection, but nobody likes us. This was a bad idea.”  No?

 

Well maybe this virus really is a truly Evil Overlord. If so, it must be delighted by all this chaotic protest! It’s probably turning to the missus right now with a giant

Muwahahahahahahahaha! 

Sweet! Look at those dumbarses suffering! This is great!!! What can we do to make things worse? Outdoor transmission? Check. Short transmission time? Check. ” No, I don’t think that’s any closer to the truth either.

 

Mr and Mrs Virus aren’t saying either of those things because guess what? COVID-19 is a VIRUS. It has no brain. No feelings. It’s not alive. It’s not a plot to steal human freedoms. It doesn’t vote Labor or Liberal or anything else. It doesn’t give a shit about your business or our economy or whether we’re happy, or even whether we live or die. 

 

IT’S A VIRUS, FFS!

 

We human geniuses have become so comfortable, so complacent, so much the centre of our own universe that we demand governments fix every little thing that goes wrong – even a virus. When they DO try to fix things, we argue, we whinge, we tell them it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and hurting us and “not fair”. We want things fixed at zero cost to ourselves and we aren’t prepared to put ourselves out one iota.

 

Grow up, people.

I’ve made some lists - first, here’s a list of protests that MIGHT make a difference.

Protests against governments that cut medicare, that imprison children, that tax the poor and give the rich a free ride, that ignore climate change, that cut welfare, that love coal. Protests against government corruption and systemic discrimination.

 

And here’s a list of things that it’s just plain dumb to think you’ll solve with protests:

Bad weather, brittle fingernails, onions, a lumpy mattress, pineapple on pizzas, your cat waking you up at 4am, hangovers, the word “moist”, blisters and oily skin. 

 

And COVID-19.

Cashing in - a rant

Yesterday a book came into the library where I work. It was a children's picture book by someone from Melbourne; a self-published, rather poorly-written, extremely trite tale, as it turned out, about a summer holiday in Mallacoota that goes all wrong when a bushfire arrives and inconveniences a tourist family by burning down the narrator's holiday accommodation. I felt like throwing it across the library and jumping up and down on its glossy pages. The visceral nature of my reaction surprised me.

Mallacoota's time in the spotlight goes on. And on. And on. Hardly a day goes by without Mallacoota popping up in this or that news program or newspaper. Our real estate market has gone a bit mental and our long-term rental market is pretty much non-existent. 

Some unscrupulous landlords (local and non-local) have made an absolute killing since the bushfire. The cash-grab has been quite an eye-opener.

It's embarrassing. It's changed the way I see the place where I live. It's changed the way I see catastrophe - it's become very evident that one person's catastrophe is another person's cash-cow.

At work we've had to put up signs asking tourists not to question staff (some of whom lost everything) about the fires. Insensitive comments and questions probe like pointy sticks into deep wounds. Some tourists seem surprised when they come here and find regrowth and rebuilding - "you'd hardly know there was a fire," they say, filming new houses and lush new greenery with something akin to disappointment. What were they expecting? Bodies in the street? The real scars of the fire, while still evident in some of the scenery, are inside the residents of this town, plodding along every day, rebuilding lives and minds and homes and businesses while looking after tourists.

Those real scars, it has to be said, are also inside the residents of towns up and down the east coast of Australia; towns that haven't received anywhere near the media attention, focus or financial help that picturesque Mallacoota has. Add guilt to the list of bad tastes in my mouth.

Oh dear, it would appear I have disaster-fatigue. I wonder whether other people feel the same way?

Random Ramblings and not-quite-a-rant - Masks

                                     

I pondered this earlier today as I hauled gravel and rocks and pulled out weeds in the cat palace - garden work provides wonderful opportunities for contemplation - did learning to wear underpants cause as much complaint as being asked to wear a mask? People happily keep their sweaty bits entrapped in undies without whingeing. When we had the bushfires and could SEE the enemy (smoke) we couldn't get enough of those tight, hot and heavy masks. People wear a dust mask when weed-spraying/installing insulation. Surgeons wear them when they cut people open. Why the widespread whingeing over this precautionary measure against the spread of a deadly and invisible enemy? (And don't get me started on the politicisation of masks!)

Here’s another thought – people appear to be quite happy to follow the dictates of fashion (those heels are SO last year, dahling!) or interior design (remember Mission Brown trim?) or the way your food appears on your plate at a restaurant – who can forget the deconstructed cheesecakes of 2019, piles of ingredients served on breadboards or in slippers or some such bullshit?)  As long as a vapid, vacuous celebrity tells you to do it, it’s ok. And yet – and yet – when epidemiologists and public health experts outline measures that should be taken for your own safety and the safety of those around you – people want to whinge and bleat and sook about rights and freedom and sovereignty. Why is that? It's been something I've pondered for months now. 

This awful pandemic has exposed a lot of ugliness and inconsistency in the people we share the world with. I haven't forgotten the callous calls, early in the pandemic, to lock down oldies because "only oldies die from this" (and then the irony, in the Victorian experience, at least, of those oldies in aged care being sitting ducks because of the casual workers who unwittingly took Covid to several workplaces where those vulnerable oldies were living.)  I wonder whether the mask-refusers are the same “lock down the oldies” people, or whether they’re a whole different group of selfish jerks?

It’d be nice to be able to rely on people to do the sensible thing – but we apparently all have different definitions of “sensible”. Unfortunately, this means the government has had to make a bunch of rules to try and stop the spread of Covid, and to keep us as safe as possible – and it’s using the “one size fits all rule”.

Is there anything wrong with that, when you’re talking about a public health emergency? I don’t think so. Here in this far-flung outpost of regional Victoria, we are expected to observe the mask rule, despite having had zero cases of Covid since the pandemic began. Fair enough. Making exceptions for every self-interested group is fiddly – and also leaves the government open to charges of unfairness.

Think about this: one rule for all means people don't (or shouldn't, at least!) moan about being left out or singled out. Yay, we’re all equal! Rich, poor, young, old blah blah blah blah. Isn’t that a good thing?

I'm having a lovely time, as I weed the garden, thinking about "what-ifs"... What if the government had said that everyone over (insert arbitrary age here) must wear a mask and everyone under that age had to take their chances? What if only those in "essential occupations" were allowed to wear masks? (Remember the early shortage of PPE, when the general public was advised that health care workers needed the masks more than we did? Bit of ill-feeling erupted over that.) What if only the employed were issued masks? What if only casual workers were allowed them, because they couldn't afford to take time off work? I'm still thinking of the loophole-seeking by some of those so-called journalists at Dan Andrews press conferences. (Everybody's special. Everybody has a compelling reason to argue and be non-compliant. Oh. please!)

If people were denied masks, I suspect they would suddenly all insist on having them! Perhaps a bit of reverse psychology could’ve been employed, tee hee - humans are such contrarians. We want what we can't have. We want what other people have (in fact, we want MORE – and we’re prepared to fight people in the toilet paper aisle to ensure we get it!) When we're told we must all have masks, we don't want them because we won't be told what to do. Our first response to so many problems in society is "The government should ___" but on this very important matter of public health and the common good, we want to ignore the government and make our own rules, because theirs make us uncomfortable. Boo hoo. (Personally, I’d rather wear a mask than a ventilator, but anyway…)

As we in this part of the world talk about opening up, easing restrictions and so on, those in other countries are starting to mask up, lock down – and far too many are dying.

Humans. Endlessly fascinating and so so frustrating, don't you reckon?

No such thing as a dumb question?

  

Actually, there is. Tune into Daniel Andrews’ daily press conference and you’ll hear plenty of them, usually from Rachel Baxendale – an obnoxious “journalist” for The Australian who sits starry-eyed at the knee of Peta Credlin to deliver breathless revelations on SkyNews about the Eviltude of Dictator Dan in the fight against the Victorian Covid-19 outbreak.

I was a high school teacher for about 2 decades. When I say that the behaviour of some of the “journalists” at Daniel Andrews’ press conferences gives me flashbacks to some of my worst Year 9 classes, believe it. Year 9s can be really obnoxious.

The particular breed of obnoxious Year 9 student that morphs into a Baxendale-style “journalist” at an Andrews presser  knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are smarter than the teacher. They know that every smart-arsed comment is a mark of their genius. Their main aim in the classroom is to impress their peers by scoring points against the teacher in pointless petty argument, and to waste as much of a lesson as possible.

No teacher has ever heard the sort of excuses or clever questions they can come up with and no teacher can fail to be impressed by their cleverness and ultimately cowed into submission by it.

Like a dripping tap, such students are relentless in the quest to wear down the teacher, badgering and haranguing until they achieve their goal,  the bell goes, or the teacher snaps. AND – they think they’re the only one ever to do it.

Is it any wonder teachers become jaded? I am flabbergasted to see Daniel Andrews show up day after day after day to answer the increasingly ridiculous questions respectfully and with seemingly infinite patience. I’d have sent the little shits to the Principal’s office by now, or slapped an after-school detention on them.

This morning in a Twitter thread about the repetitive, ignorant and time-wasting questions posed by Rachel Baxendale, somebody responded to one of my tweets with “It’s always ok to question things”.

So I questioned her – “Have you always been so disingenuous?”

She got a bit annoyed – “It’s a fair question. I was raised to be polite, think for myself, and ask questions where i needed clarification. It’s perfectly ok to do that. You don’t need to blindly accept everything and anything. That’s dogmatic. I was polite to you, leave it now.”

Sigh.

Here’s the thing, If you’re still asking the same questions over and over, many months into a pandemic – questions that have been answered several times already – you haven’t been paying attention. You don’t really want an answer. Your intention is to disrupt and distract and be a general pain in the arse.

Off to the Principal’s office with you.

 

WTF is happening to the human race? A rant

I haven't had a good rant for a while. Today's the day.

WTF is happening to the human race? Where did the love go? Why, all of a sudden, is an "I'm all right Jack" attitude pervading every aspect of life, from shopping to travelling to working and touching?

During the recent bushfire catastrophe there was such an outpouring of love from those who hadn't burned, to those who had. What happened to that?

Millions upon millions of dollars were donated by people around the world. People cared. Food, clothing, bedding, all sorts of goodies poured into fire-affected towns, burying us in mountains of love and "Licorice Bullets" (it's true - those chocolate treats turned up in Mallacoota by the pallet load) ... We saw the birth of the Empty Esky movement and the roads reopened and people who hadn't burned visited towns that had, to spend money there and help boost the devastated economies of fire-ravaged towns.

Ah - my furiously-turning cogs are seeing the common denominator. I think I get it now.

During the catastrophic fires there were 2 very distinct groups of humans: those who hadn't burned and those who had. A Helper group and a Helpee group. An "Us" and "Them" (this is something we humans do a lot). Or, pardon my cynicism, a group that could feel virtuous about their "altruism", and a group that should be grateful to be the beneficiaries of that "altruism". (Here's a hint, people - that's not real altruism.)

With the advent of COVID-19 that division has disappeared, my friends, and that is what has changed:

All of a sudden we've all been dropped into this toilet together and some people believe they have more right to the toilet paper than everybody else.

News footage of Aussies returning home last night - the final flights before the closing of our borders - showed people arriving from overseas destinations and being hugged and kissed by those meeting them at the airport. I'm hoping their next destination was wherever the traveller had to go for their 14 days of self-isolation - and I hope their happy huggy greeters went with them to isolate themselves as well, rather than dropping them off and heading out to the shops to pick up extra supplies.

These overwhelmingly younger people so easily and thoughtlessly abandoned current social-distancing principles - making an exception for people returning from overseas, FFS. Oh, that's right - there's this belief that young people will only get a mild dose of COVID-19, if they get it, so they're not afraid of catching it. Has it not occurred to them that they are very capable of SPREADING it to those who may not be as young or healthy as they are? Evidently not.

Don't get me started (oops, too late!) on those alleged busloads of city-folk who have been raiding the supermarkets of small country towns - because evidently, once they have stripped everything from their own city shelves, they have some sense that they are entitled to strip ours as well. Not only are they leaving remote places without supplies - they risk bringing whatever germs they may have to remote places.

Especially insidious are those who are trying to justify their selfishness by clothing it in Empty Esky virtuousness and self-congratulation. "I just spent $426 at your supermarket. Yeah, I'm helping you recover from the bushfires by buying up all your supplies - aren't I great?"

As for those who have hooked up their caravans and headed en masse to places like Lakes Entrance and Mallacoota - because we have had, as yet, no cases of COVID-19 in East Gippsland - their stupidity and selfishness know no bounds. A single case of COVID-19 in the holiday park here will spread like the fire we had at New Year. I shudder to think of the shared amenities blocks and the soup of pestilence that could be cultivated in them - or the way our already stretched health services will collapse under the increased burden of a COVID-19 outbreak here. Or the way that our high number of vulnerable, elderly or immune-suppressed local people will be affected.

Nationally, of course, teachers, once again, are losers - from comments made by our sloganising PM that suggest they are still viewed largely as babysitters, they are being expected to keep the streets safe from allegedly COVID-carrying children. Fuck what happens to teachers in the classrooms or playgrounds of the nation - as long as the rest of the country doesn't have to be responsible for keeping the young occupied and at bay for 6 or so hours a day. As an ex-teacher, I'm disgusted. Once again, the government fails to support teachers. (On the plus side, I have seen comments from parents who are sensibly schooling their kids from home, that "teachers should be paid a billion dollars! This is harder than I thought." Imagine doing that with thirty of the little darlings all day every day, love, not just your own tiny tribe...)

Last weekend I developed a foul headache, and by Monday afternoon I had a scratchy sore throat and a cough. I imagine it's something I caught from local children, who've had some kind of unidentified lurgy go through the kinder and school like a dose of Epsom Salts. As far as I'm concerned, just now, any bug is suspect - and a large number of our library patrons are elderly - so I put myself into isolation. Since then I've realised, after observinging the behaviour of so many human beings in the media & social media that we are clearly approaching this pandemic from very different places.

What a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that we are ALL in this together. Every single one of us has a responsibility to OUR COMMUNITY as well as ourselves. It's really what we should be thinking at any time we get a communicable illness, not just at a time where so many lives are at risk from something virulent that we have no immunity to and no cure or vaccine for.

In these COVID-19 times:
Don't think to yourself "I'm young, so it won't affect me. It doesn't matter. Business as usual."
Don't think to yourself "by running to a remote town I can outrun the virus and keep myself safe"
Don't think to yourself "the government will save us".

Don't behave only as if you don't want to catch COVID-19 - behave as if you don't want to spread it.

Repeat after me:

 It's not all about me. 

I am a part of the universe, not the centre of it. 

Oh - and keep your distance. Stay well, friends.

2020: the year of catastrophe

What a shit-storm 2020 is turning out to be!

We saw in the New Year in smoke and ashes, flames having licked away the landscape. Catastrophic fires, the likes of which Australia has never seen, gobbled and howled their way down the east coast of Australia, spitting out broken houses and towns as they went, turning livelihoods and economies to charcoal, incinerating wildlife in unimaginable numbers.

For week after week after choking week, major Australian cities were cloaked in thick smoke that stung the eyes, seared the lungs and set off smoke alarms inside office blocks. The pall circumnavigated the globe. It turned NZ glaciers a dirty brown and the blood-red ball that was the sun, rising and setting over a black and grey landscape, drove some people to the brink.

And then, hard on its heels, flooding rain that washed ash into the waterways, poisoning and choking life that had survived the fires, and storms that took off roofs, and hail the size of tennis balls that smashed windscreens.

And then – simmering away in the background while we dealt with all the shit that Nature could dish out – from a country far away came The Pandemic - COVID 19. At first it crept in, on planes and cruise ships, while governments prevaricated, pointed fingers, sat on their hands, told everyone to calm down, nothing to see here. Then they screened, isolated and quarantined, and finally legislated, and one by one the lights went out.

Lockdown in Italy. European borders closed. Extreme measures. Sadly, too late to halt the exponential spread of the sickness in places where the health of the economy was deemed to be more important than the health of citizens. One anonymous PM, whom I shall call the Evil Overlord, decided on Friday that mass gatherings of more than 500 people would be banned from Monday – when his happy clappy Hillsong conference (3000 attendees in Sydney, Australia) would be over. On Friday he had vowed to go “to the footy” on the weekend, to show there was no need to worry about the virus. The Friday afternoon diagnosis of COVID 19 in one of his close cabinet colleagues dashed his footy plans, but the Evil Overlord did not put himself into quarantine, the way he required the contacts of other COVID 19 victims to do. Another example, in glorious living hypocritical colour, of the two sets of rules he has - one for us and one for himself and his ilk…

Image source: Twitter

For several years now, scientists have been warning that the world is ripe for a pandemic. Just more science for governments to under-react to.  Sure, they’ve developed Pandemic Response plans – but they’ve waited rather a long time, during this pandemic, to enact anything that seems like a serious response.

Our particular evil overlord, who ignores Science (and common sense, many would agree), is one of the villains of the disaster movie that is 2020. There are others like him in some other powerful  nations – those who will always choose the interests of the rich over the rationality and common sense of science and the evidence of their own eyes. 

There’s a photo that’s been doing the rounds of the internet for quite some time – a young woman is holding up a placard that says “at the start of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored”.

That’s the disaster movie we’re living in the middle of right now – there’s no end in sight, and no sign of Bruce Willis. Fuck.

After the Fire 5 – Stickybeaks, Show-ponies and Others

As always, this is personal opinion, and my way of trying to respond to and make sense of recent and current events - I make no claim to be representing the opinions of others in my community at this difficult time.

CAUTION:

 SHOUTING (and a bit of BLUE language ) AHEAD

This is a hard one to write, just over seven weeks into the year and just over seven weeks post-fire (seriously, is that all it is? It feels like forever!) People are flowing into town now that the roads are open. Some of them are caring, kind-hearted people with a genuine desire to help broken town economies try to recover by spending a few dollars here and there in places like Mallacoota. I applaud their efforts. This piece is not about them.  It’s about those who are combining what I will charitably try to believe is a desire to help with an opportunity for self-promotion – and those who are just insensitive fuckwits.

Here’s a tip. People are still raw. Many remain dazed and numb. Many are trying to process the loss of everything they own as they negotiate the bureaucratic minefield that faces people after a catastrophic event: a mountain of bewildering forms, government departments, charitable organisations, insurance companies (or the lack thereof), rules and regulations. Friendships and relationships are put under stress - boundaries shift, tempers flare, tears flow at odd times – nothing is as it was as the entire community tries to find its way again.

It is not the time for out-of-towners to cruise around in their cars taking videos of devastated people picking through the remains of their lives and homes.

It is not the time for out-of-towners (no matter HOW far they drove to get here) to inflict unasked-for hugs on locals. Remember the righteous outrage all over the country when our insensitive clod of a Prime Minister forced those people in Cobargo to shake his hand as the cameras rolled? I'll leave that thought there with no further comment.

It is not the time for thousands of out-of-towners who joined a “community” Facebook page to be whingeing and moaning about their holiday bookings, or pontificating about the way the caravan park ought to be operating (do you know what's involved in running an extremely large caravan park after a major disaster, or how many abandoned but gear-filled campsites there might still be, or how many of the staff there lost their own homes, you insensitive fuckwits?) or accusing locals of being sooks because nobody has responded to an online question they posed about the fishing or the fucking entrance, or about how the town’s recovery ought to be progressing right now. Loudmouthed armchair experts, all of them the centre of their own universes.

It’s not the time for out-of-towners to get themselves on the local radio, drop names and personal details about locals – details that are nobody’s business – and comment expertly that “Mallacoota’s definitely recovering, but it’s a bit slow”. FFS, it’s been SEVEN WEEKS! Over 100 homes were burnt to the ground, you idiot. This is a community in crisis and you waltz in here from Melbourne knowing NOTHING and judging EVERYTHING. HOW DARE YOU!

I also believe it’s not the time for fledgeling reality TV “stars” – 15-minute celebrities - to turn up on our doorstep, ostensibly to “help Mallacoota rebuild” - and stage a highly-publicised media opportunity at Betka beach - the same beach where our not-quite-fledgeling hoodie chicks are trying to survive despite the odds. Our Lions Club is quietly doing a splendid job of rebuilding much-loved infrastructure - with or without media "stars" elbowing their way into the spotlight.

The remains of the stairs at Bastion Beach after the fire. Oops! The Lions Club has since built a set of temporary stairs - thank you Mallacoota Lions!

Those images of people huddling on the foreshore, terrified for their lives; of the HMAS Choules anchored offshore to send in supplies or take out evacuees; of Chinooks at our airport – made picturesque Mallacoota media hot property – but it’s still a community of traumatised people at different points on their own personal paths to recovery, whether they lost their homes or not.

I have a message for every single one of those stickybeaks, show-ponies and others: it’s not about you! IT’S. NOT. ABOUT. YOU!

Am I being over-sensitive? I don't know - but if I am, I doubt that it's "over" enough to dilute the great fucking sea of insensitivity that I feel like I'm drowning in right now. 

God, I can’t write another word. My keyboard may not survive the pounding.

After the Fire 4 – Refugee

Like many other Mallacoota residents, I was not in Mallacoota when the monster fire hit. I viewed/listened to the horror from a distance, tears rolling and heart hammering, through the filters of mass media and social media. I usually make a point of staying home over the Christmas holiday period, so it was a stroke of extreme good fortune that I wasn’t huddled in the hall or on the foreshore with the rest of the terrified summer population.

My ordeal – and it was an ordeal, make no mistake – was to become, effectively, a refugee. My life, my home, my pets, my “happy place” – all of it is in Mallacoota – and all of a sudden I was locked out of it indefinitely.

I put something on Facebook that day, along the lines of

If anything good can possibly come out of this shit, I hope it’s an acknowledgement that it’s very easy for ordinary people to become refugees - there but for the grace of God etc etc - and this country ought to rethink its stance on refugees.

The Australian government bad-mouths, mis-labels and tortures asylum seekers. It lets them rot and die in offshore detention centres rather than giving them proper medical care. It calls them “illegals” when there’s nothing illegal about seeking asylum (and sheep-like, too many Australians adopt that “othering” attitude and language.) There’s a feeling that “these people” are trying to take something from us; jump an imaginary queue; take jobs from Australians (at the same time that they’re taking benefits from Australians(!)); a feeling that there must be something inherently wrong with these people, and it’s their fault they’re in the situation they’re in. They are somehow inferior, lesser, less worthy, less human than we are – and therefore the inhumane treatment meted out to them is ok. It’s no more than they deserve.

It’s a shameful indictment of Australia: the smug superiority, the government spin, the gullibility and easy inhumanity of far too many ordinary Australians who refuse to share their great good fortune with vulnerable, frightened, displaced people who just happen to not be Australians like them.

While the 2019/20 summer fires devoured their way through millions of hectares of eastern Australia, terrified people huddled terrified on beaches and in showgrounds and evacuation centres; numb people returned to the twisted ruins of their homes. They needed, expected, hoped for – and were shown – kindness and compassion. (Well, apart from those poor Cobargo people whose hands were forcibly shaken by the Prime Minister before, photo opportunity over, he turned his back on them and walked away).

I spent my refugee time with dear friends in Michelago (one of whom, ironically, is an ex-Port Hedland/Baxter detainee) and family in Yass. I felt cared for and welcomed – but even so, I was desperately sad, and keen to return to Mallacoota as soon as possible. I cried all over anybody who would give me a hug (thank you, lady at Yass Visitor Information Centre! Thank you random strangers who went out of their way to be kind and helpful.)

After a couple of very long and frustrating weeks I was able to return on one of the police-escorted convoys from Eden, and found my home town and my community completely changed. BUT – I was able to return home – and I had a home to return to. I am very very fortunate.

There’s a shitload of lessons we need to learn from this bushfire experience, and this is just one:

All it takes for an ordinary person to become a refugee is for their home to become so unsafe that staying there is life-threatening.

--Rising sea-levels, raging bushfires, falling bombs, overwhelming oppression/discrimination/violence sanctioned and systematised by governments.-- These things are not the exclusive province of "others" - brown or black or foreign people...

We cannot afford to be smug. We cannot afford to look the other way. What goes around, comes around. Rediscover your humanity, Australia - because the next wave of refugees and asylum seekers could be us.

2019: so far, so crap - and loving my community.

Well, I had every intention of making 2019 a good year, but 4 months in, I have to say it's a bit shite.

Most days for the last 2 months it's been a struggle to get out of bed. No, not the Black Dog, although the click click of its nasty little claws patter about in the recesses of my mind now and then as I haul myself up, gingerly place my feet on the floor and wonder how much will it hurt today?

Most days, the answer is - a lot.

So..... this is what Ross River Virus feels like. Its other name is Epidemic Polyarthritis. Ouch.

The mozzies this year have been dreadful - clouds of them, nasty bitey little monsters who attack in squadrons and leave victims flapping helplessly (and futilely) at two or three simultaneous bite-zones. Bastards. And it only takes one of them to bring you down. I hope I managed to splat whichever one it was that got me.

I used up all my sick leave in the first 2 weeks, way back in late February, so now I hobble in to work, thankful that my shifts are short. Sometimes holding a pen is difficult. Bending down to reshelve books on the bottom shelf is - unpleasant - and keeping the smile on my face when all I want to do is cry, or go home to have a little lie-down, is getting harder every day. Nerve pain in my right arm and hand - the joint swelling appears to have exacerbated my not-too-bad carpal tunnel problem - wakes me up in the night, most nights.

It's cruel. There were two consecutive days last week when, for the first time in 2 months, I had NO PAINS in my feet! I was so sure I'd "turned a corner". Perhaps I had, but there was another brick wall waiting there for me and I splattered headlong into it. Fuck.

The pains and swellings in my extremities are one thing, but the blow to my energy is perhaps the most cruel. My calendar painting is very behind schedule. My house and garden are a mess. I get hungry but have zero energy or motivation to cook. I eat a lot of biscuits. I've gained three kilograms. I miss my walks.

I've painted a fairly bleak picture, haven't I? Come on, shines, where's the silver lining? 

This is the bit where I tell you how wonderful it is to be part of this small community. Wonderful friends have leapt to my aid, mowing the lawn, pruning, providing meals, firewood and a hot water bottle; offers of errands and shopping have abounded, and I've never had so many hugs. I love you all, my lovely, kind-hearted friends.

Abundant birdlife, visible from the kitchen and lounge-room windows, has been extremely entertaining. This is the time of year that the bowerbirds descend, stealing the chook pellets, splashing in the birdbaths and doing all sorts of interesting things. And I've read a LOT of great books.

Another thing that makes it bearable, believe it or not, is dispassionately observing the path of this stupid ailment as though I'm somebody else - an outsider watching with a sort of weird fascination as a rash appears and disappears, as random fingers swell and subside, as knuckles or ankles disappear and reappear. [Side note: this may not a good thing to tell a GP, especially if you are a middle-aged woman. It could go either way, really - you might be thanked for your accurate observations because they've been helpful in the eventual diagnosis of your debilitating, rapid-onset mystery illness, but you could just as easily be accused of neuroticism or somatisation.]

One more good thing - Ross River Virus, while incurable, is self-limiting. This too, will pass. I still have high hopes of 2019. Pass the aspirin, please!

Littering over Summer

LITTER: A PERENNIAL PROBLEM IN A TOURIST TOWN

In the midst of tourist season I’ve a most compelling reason

To put forth a proposition to the people of this town

To avoid the awful bummer that confronts us every summer

We could bring in prohibition just to keep the litter down

Almost every can and bottle scattered freely through the wattle

And the Mallacoota beaches and the Mallacoota streets

Was once full of beer or bourbon and it’s messing up our urban

Grassy verges and the reaches of the natural world so sweet.

Tourists spend a lot of money but it isn’t very funny

When the trade-off is a heap of litter halfway to the sun

It seems the summer drinkers are the dirty rotten stinkers

Groups of bottle-dropping creeps with no respect for anyone

Every year when they’ve departed, groups of locals, broken-hearted

Get together to clean up the filthy mess that’s left behind

It’s our home, we want to share it - but we have to then repair it

After boozy litter-droppers of the grubby thoughtless kind

This harsh message I should soften, for the folks that visit often

Love this place for all its wild and pristine loveliness, it’s true

It’s the litter-chucking scum who should feel free not to come

Back to places they’ve defiled – and take your litter back with you!

© Sue Hines 2018

 

Air Mail - the new snail mail: A Rant

Apparently Australia Post has done well enough to pay its CEO squillions, while reducing the efficiency of services and increasing the cost of those increasingly inefficient services. What a business model - it says so much about the times in which we are living.

That CEO, Ahmed Fahour, has quit AP now - check out this fat golden handshake as you bemoan the increase in the price of a fucking stamp: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-25/ahmed-fahour-walks-away-from-australia-post-with-$10.8-million/8841226

One of the cost-saving measures touted as a possibility by Australia Post a few years ago was not, as you might expect, reducing the astronomical six figure salary of the CEO, but reducing the number of postal deliveries from one per weekday to 3 per week. Poor Australia Post was losing money hand over fist. Nobody writes letters any more (although everyone sends parcels, it seems, and I'm quite certain that is a very very lucrative part of Australia Post's business.)

The three-deliveries-a-week thing, thankfully, did not happen here, and now that Mr Fahour has taken his money and ridden off into the sunset, the new Australia Post CEO, Christine Holgate, will take home a considerably smaller six-figure salary, saving Australia Post several million dollars per year. That is a Good Thing.

BUT (there's always a 'BUT', isn't there?)

Across the ditch, our Kiwi cousins have not been so lucky. NZ Post delivers thrice weekly. What that means, for anybody who posts anything from Oz, is that delivery times have slowed. A lot. I'm not altogether sure of the finer details, because really, you'd think it'd only mean a one-day delay, wouldn't you? (No delivery on Tuesday? No problem - deliver on Wednesday instead.) Instead, it appears to have added more than a week to the delivery time. Yes, I'm serious.

Once upon a time, posting something via Airmail - which used to be the speedy option - took just a few days to get from Canberra to Christchurch - add a day, perhaps even two if you're posting from Mallacoota, because Mallacoota mail takes a day or so to get to Melbourne before it can fly to NZ.

This year, my Dad's birthday card arrived late. I made sure I posted his Fathers Day card earlier than usual - it still arrived late. I posted another card  MORE THAN TWO WEEKS before a special event AND IT WAS FUCKING LATE!

It would appear that our postal non-services would like us to pay extra for "EXPRESS AIRMAIL", adding several dollars to the already high cost of airmail. It's true - your letter/parcel to NZ can now fly cattle class, just like you, or you can pay through the nose for it to fly (probably on the same flight) the equivalent of First Class. Unless its getting a bed to sleep in and complimentary in-flight champagne, they can shove that up their inefficient bums!

So - I posted a SMALL STANDARD item AIRMAIL WITH TRACKING to my Dad on 14 November.  It weighed about 320gms, went in an A3 sized tough-bag and cost me $17.76 to post. I've been tracking it - you bet I have - to see why it takes so bloody long.

So..... looks like it's been cooling its heels in Auckland since Monday morning after being cleared through Customs. And now it's Thursday.

Why, NZ Post?

I know that Thursday is not a delivery day, but does every single person involved in the postal process only work on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well? Even if that were the case, why wasn't my item happily whizzing from Auckland to Chch on Monday, which IS an NZ Post day? Or even Wednesday, which is also a delivery day? Why is it still in Auckland on Thursday?

In Chch, a private document delivery service has sprung up to fill in the gaps left by NZ Post. We Australia Post customers, however, are stuck with AusPost and NZ Post's abysmal non-service. I'm angry.

I'm thinking of getting a carrier pigeon. Or learning to swim. It'd probably be quicker.

UPDATE: Dad texted to say a courier had delivered his article around the middle of the day on 23 November. Something in the "tracking" was evidently awry, with no notifications between Auckland and Christchurch. So - 9 days to travel airmail from Mallacoota to Christchurch. This article arrived more quickly than cards I have posted - does this mean parcel post is taken more seriously/quickly? (for all values of 'quickly' equal to "not very quickly" or "pretty slowly, actually, but it's all relative"?) You're still not off the hook, Aus- and NZ Post.

Asylum Seekers,(the telemovie) and other bright ideas

From the ‘bright ideas file’ of a government gone mad:

Don’t these asylum-seekers get it yet? The rule is “form an orderly queue and wait your turn to be processed by the refugee sausage-machine. Due process. Rules.” It’s not that hard, people.

We’ve done just about everything to stop them coming here. There was that awesome graphic novel that appeared on the Immigration department website (but is no longer there). The Guardian wrote about it though:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/11/government-launches-new-graphic-campaign-to-deter-asylum-seekers

We’ve spent a fortune on glossy communications campaigns:

http://www.customs.gov.au/site/offshore-communication-campaign-people-smuggling.asp

We’ve locked up the cowardly queue-jumpers (and their children) who would prefer to throw away everything they have on people-smugglers’ promises because they think that’s a better bet than taking their chances with the Taliban or Islamic State while they wait for the refugee sausage-machine to come up with their number.

We’ve made their lives unspeakably ugly in detention – so ugly that they self-harm. Some die. Still they don’t get it – what’s wrong with them? How can we get through to these people?

I know! Let’s make a telemovie! That’s SURE to work – everyone watches TV, right? – even people living in terror over there in those war-torn countries…

Imagine the excitement at the departmental morning tea when THAT idea was touted! I bet they almost choked on their sausage rolls.

A spokesperson for the Immigration Department told the ABC’s Lateline program that "television soap operas and telemovies are proven media to reach the target audience when seeking to deliver complex messages."

And they’ve picked Trudi-Ann Tierney, from Put it Out There Pictures, to produce it, by golly they have:

Ms Tierney is an experienced TV producer who worked in Afghanistan for four years making TV soap operas as well as an anti-terrorist police show called Eagle Four which was largely funded by the US embassy in Kabul and which she described as "propaganda".She also worked on Afghan programs backed by other embassies as well as UN bodies and aid agencies.In her 2014 memoir Making Soapies in Kabul, Ms Tierney wrote that: "Ostensibly I was head of drama (for a local TV company); but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant".

Here’s the whole story:

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-09/tv-drama-to-deter-asylum-seekers/6381092

The bargain basement price tag of only $4.1m is another incentive for our government. 

I eagerly await the next bright idea from a government that is allegedly desperate to cut costs, and is willing to defund aboriginal communities and women’s refuges,  cut pensions, make the dole an impossibility for young unemployed, deregulate higher education fees while still allowing the uber-capitalists at the high end of town - the Gina Rineharts and Rupert Murdochs – to rake in the dough by avoiding their share of the ‘heavy lifting’ that our treasurer insists upon the rest of us doing.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/rupert-murdochs-us-empire-siphons-45b-from-australian-business-virtually-taxfree-20150406-1meu0l.html

So… I’ve been thinking about bright ideas, Aussie government, and I’ve come up with a few more to go on with in the wake of your fab telemovie:

• Asylum seekers - the board game. A game with all the randomness and rationality of Snakes and Ladders. 
• Asylum seekers – the phone app – race against the clock to turn back as many boats as you can. Extra points for at-sea detention or boat-scuttling.
• Build your own Manus Island detention centre’ – a construction kit made of canvas and razor wire. Extra guard-posts available at a small cost. Comes without bathroom doors. Build your own Nauru also available.
• Children-in-detention plush toys. Standard models come in male or female. Deluxe model cries real tears.
• Leering guard action figures.  Pose-able action figures complete with guns and erections.

That’ll work, for sure. And if that doesn't disgust you the way it disgusts me, then nothing will.

Musings on hypocrisy and virginity tests

I was reading a mag in the staffroom yesterday as I tucked into the lovely stuffed capsicum I'd taken for lunch, and I almost choked when I read this 'In Brief' snippet, :

 Virginity tests averted

(Jakarta, Indonesia), Feb 11 - A member of parliament on the island of Java has been scrutinised following an attempt to introduce forced virginity tests for females planning to graduate high school. Kusen Andalas, deputy head of the district, insisted that the plans will not go ahead. 'I don't think it's ethical to carry out such tests. It is against people's rights'.

Seriously, ya think?

The article made me realise, yet again, how little personal power we have - how our dignity and privacy can be stripped away by unscrupulous, unethical - dare I say in some cases twisted? - officials who truly believe they have a mandate to do whatever they bloody well like to us.

Was the official in question merely a 'dirty old man' who gets off on the thought of probing high school girls and tries to shield his depravity with a veil of religious devotion to 'purity'? The conspiracy theorist in me can't help also wondering whether it's part of a larger and far more insidious plot to deter girls from wanting to get an education - to make the prospect of even finishing high school abhorrent, a rite of passage only achievable after a shameful, irrelevant and unnecessary invasion of her most private self?

How the hell do these creeps get hold of power in the first place? What kind of morons vote them in?

When my train of thought reached that point I derailed it. After all, I live in the country that voted in a creep who has spent the last 18 months locking up children and torturing asylum seekers.

I live in the country whose government is wringing as much political mileage as it can out of pretending to be compassionate and locking horns with the Indonesian government over the impending state-sanctioned killing of two Australian drug runners who knowingly flouted Indonesian law, and whose own Federal Police actually tipped off the Indonesians in the first place, knowing the consequences of drug-running through Indonesia.* WTF???

I live in the country whose government refuses to accept any whiff of responsibility for the deaths of Reza Barati, a 23 year-old Iranian asylum seeker who was killed on Manus Island during rioting at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre as an unwilling 'guest' of the Australian government, and 24 year-old Iranian asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei, who died because of unforgivable delays securing urgent medical attention while he was also a 'guest' of the Australian government on Manus.

I live in the country that points fingers at other countries' human rights records, while ignoring its own deplorable treatment of its own indigenous people; whose self-titled Prime Minster for Indigenous Affairs supports the defunding and closure of remote aboriginal communities because they are lifestyle choices. Arrogant, ignorant, offensive creep.

*Let me make it clear that I do not support the death penalty. What I also do not support is the hypocrisy of a government that apparently values the lives of convicted criminals over the lives of innocent people who have fled torture and terror in their home countries.

For the Guardian story about this lowest of low acts, click  here

Stop the World!

Have human beings always been such arseholes?

Just recently, while listening to the radio in the mornings as I sort the mail, I’ve been shaking my head so much that I probably look like a Parkinsons patient. It’s awful. Actually, it's worse than awful.

If it’s not the Queensland government citing VLAD as a good reason to walk over the population in jackboots, and pretending it’s all because of outlaw motorcyclists, it’s men in Taiji luring and slaughtering thousands of innocent dolphins until the water of the harbour is a thick, angry red. Or some fucking council of chieftains in India ordering the GANG-RAPE (by middle-aged men) of a girl whose only ‘crime’ was to fall in love with a - gasp -  Muslim from another village.

On top of all this, our Prime Minister wants taxpayers to give Aussie newlyweds a $200 voucher for counselling services, while rich tax-cheats get an amnesty and the welfare system looks like being overhauled (because, you know, as one Queensland pollie mentioned earlier this week, people on the dole don't care about the community and are trying to screw the system.)

Oh, and meanwhile, our illustrious PM says, for the record, after a bunch of asylum seekers with burns accused the Australian Navy of mistreatment, something along the lines of “Who are you going to believe?  The Australian Navy or a bunch of lawbreaking illegal wannabe immigrants?” (yep, always believe the guys in uniforms, right?) 

Um. Well. If recent headlines about shenanigans in the defence forces are anything to go by, I’ll believe the asylum seekers, thanks.  Our defence forces, to their eternal shame, have made the headlines for hazing, bullying and sexual misconduct AGAINST THEIR OWN MEMBERS….. while asylum seekers have made the headlines for, um, seeking asylum.

And all that crap isn't even the TIP of the bloody iceberg of man's inhumanity to man (or, very often, woman). 

As for the environment - well, it's PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE. Always. Fuck the future, all that matters is profit NOW, for RICH PEOPLE here, now. Let's remove all the red tape that stops rich people getting richer, kick poor people in the guts so the bastards will work harder, fuck the environment if there's a buck to be made from it..... 

Am I angry? You bet I am. And even angrier that I am so powerless to do anything about any of it. All I have are angry words: words to send to governments via letter and email (and get back some bullshit pap of standard words copied-and-pasted by some arse-covering public servant); words on petitions that go God-knows-where; words on my blog, which sits out here in cyberspace reaching about fifty people if I'm lucky... words words words. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the sword must be fucking useless. The world is going down the toilet, and every thinking person knows it. We're destroying the planet at such a rate ....

Ah, there's the answer. We're shitting in our own nest, big-time. It can't last. Perhaps the sooner we send ourselves to oblivion, and let the planet get on without the human race, the better. Sad, innit?

I'm so so so SO sick of it! I’m sorry. I’ve had enough of this shit. Stop the world. I want to get off.

What's in a name? Everything, apparently. Why I will not call VLAD an ‘anti-bikie law’

When I was a teacher, I always stressed how important it was to understand the ways language can be used, and the power that a skilled user of language can wield. I often started with that passage about Newspeak from George Orwell's 1984. Syme tells Winston that “the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.”

The idea is that if you have no word for ‘rebellion’, it’s a bit hard to talk about it or foment it - or even to imagine it. He who controls language can therefore control thought – and behaviour. Language is powerful.

Politicians evidently understand Orwell only too well. 

Scott Morrison, Australia’s new federal Immigration Minister, clearly understands that by changing the name of something, you can change the way it is perceived. Not for him Shakespeare’s wisdom: 

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.      (Romeo & Juliet Act II sc.ii) 

Mr Morrison’s linguistic practice is more Orwellian. Staff in his department were recently instructed to change the label given to asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. They are no longer ‘asylum seekers’ – they are ‘illegal maritime arrivals’. They have been dehumanised and transmogrified. Now they sound rather nasty and criminal, deserving of contempt, not compassion. Sneaky move, Mr Morrison - but you don't fool me with your wordplay.

Warwick McFadyen, a senior writer with the Age, put it beautifully in this article:  http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-minister-for-debasing-the-language-20131025-2w794.html ‘Say a phrase often enough and it attains a patina of truth’, he says.

That is why I will not now and not ever call Campbell Newman’s VLAD ‘anti-bikie law’. The media does us no favours by consistently calling VLAD ‘anti-bikie law’. It's dishonest. It's shamelessly misrepresenting something reprehensible as something desirable, and using the general public's antipathy towards 'outlaw' bikies to get support for an oppressive law. 

‘About time somebody stood up to those scumbag bikies’.

‘I’m not a bikie so I’m ok.’

‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.’

WRONG!

The dishonest labelling and marketing of VLAD as ‘anti-bikie law’ encourages public support for a law which actually has very little to do with bikies and everything to do with a power-crazy government wielding a sledgehammer, clumsily smoke-screened by the 'anti-bikie' tag – and besides, motorcyclists are a convenient target at the moment. 

VLAD is ultimately oppressive, and a potential weapon against ANY organisation that the government doesn’t particularly like. Today, bikies; tomorrow, soccer clubs/greenies/unionists or whoever happens to be on the Hit List du jour.

 ‘Anti-bikie law’ as a synonym for VLAD is a disgraceful and frightening example of linguistic legerdemain, and I will not have it in my vocabulary.

Queensland – beautiful one day...: a Rant

This is quite a horror story. Except it’s true.

Once upon a time, a little man called Campbell Newman became Premier of Queensland (a state with a colourful history of, erm, characters in its political sphere). The little man, with a zealot’s gleam in his eye, declared that he was going to address the ‘bikie threat’ in his state after a brawl on the Gold Coast one day.

By ‘bikies’, of course, he was referring to approximately one percent of motorcyclists. In the blink of an eye, henchman VLAD hit the front pages. Does Little Campbell have an ad-man giving legislation cool and punchy names that can be turned into cool and punchy acronyms? Vlad the Impaler, another colourful historical character, would be proud. Anyway - the Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment Bill 2013 (which makes no mention of bikies per se – remember that, coz it could attack an 'Association' near you any time it wants) is a scary bit of legislative kit that attacks basic freedoms that Aussies hold dear.

Little Campbell, in a shameless grab for the approval of the Common Voter (who we know must be a bit dim, given the fact that they voted the fascist in in the first place), declared there would be a special hell for bikies – their own uber-tough gaol and extra-special sentencing rules for bikies for the crimes they commit.

Now, I’m all for criminals being punished for their crimes. What I’m NOT for is ill-conceived legislation pushed onto an ignorant public and supported by an ignorant police force who can’t tell one bloody motorcyclist from the next.

Things have snowballed, as they tend to do.

• Queensland police have been harassing ordinary recreational motorcyclists on their group rides, and now – unbelievably – there’s talk of setting up a police hotline that ‘law-abiding’ motorcyclists can call to register their rides and thus avoid harassment for riding their perfectly legal modes of transportation, paid for and registered to ride on the roads they’ve paid taxes for.  
• A bloke wearing a Sons of Anarchy t-shirt was questioned by police, who thought the guy was an outlaw bikie, rather than a fan of a television show. (!!!???)
• Police RAIDED a meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club and a police spin-doctor (probably the cousin of the VLAD acronym guy) said that the raid was part of a strategy to BUILD RAPPORT with decent law-abiding motorcyclists.
• If interstate service stations etc could kindly provide Little Campbell’s stormtroopers with video footage of naughty Qld bikies associating interstate, aforementioned bikies could still be ‘done’ in Queensland for illegal behaviour (presumably, going for a ride together and stopping for petrol.) The long arm of VLAD could stretch forever, really.

 If this isn’t scaring you yet – it’s not a story. It’s real, it’s true, it’s happening right now. What follows, however, is pure imagination:

Little Campbell was well pleased with the effect VLAD was having. Motorcyclists were fleeing Queensland in droves. Small towns all over the place were going broke because the streams of touring motorcyclists – who tend to shun highways for quieter, more scenic, more ENJOYABLE roads and out-of-the-way locations – were no longer visiting and boosting local economies. You know, all those cafes, bakeries, pubs and motels in all those interesting little places that get-there-fast motorists can’t be bothered going to…

But it wasn’t enough. There was still crime in Queensland. Little Campbell wondered why - after all, he’d got rid of the bikies. VLAD would have to work harder. Little Campbell sent him forth, into ethnic communities, which everybody knows are seething hotbeds of terrorism, organised crime and soccer. And VLAD also went into the universities, where dissent is traditionally seeded by the wicked intelligentsia. Schools, as the breeding grounds for universities, were not impervious to the long arm of VLAD (Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast got special attention, and not just because of the hordes of drunken nubile girls who attended it every year). Oh, and workers’ unions - they came in for super-scrutiny, because they’re full of bolshie bastards. Even the churches were not immune (well, some of them, anyway, especially if they wore identifying outfits/headgear).

Meanwhile, the corporate fraudsters, crooked pollies and other real criminals were having a field day. Everybody else in Queensland had a yellow star and was under constant surveillance by VLAD’s stormtroopers (who were not averse to taking a kickback or two themselves, if history has taught us anything). And Little Campbell saw the fruits of his labours and, well, that was that really. Queensland – beautiful one day, police-state the next.

When other premiers in other states saw what fun Little Campbell was having, they decided to join in. ‘Ban the bikies!’ replaced ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and that, my dears, is how the whole beautiful country went to hell in a handbasket. A select few lived happily ever after. 

Shades of Europe, circa 1935? You bet. Be afraid. Don’t let it happen here – PLEASE!

I’ll end this rant with a poem I scribbled, because I need to lower my blood pressure now, and fiddling about with rhyme and metre always calms me down.

A southern biker contemplates the Queensland ‘anti-bikie’ law

There was trouble up in Queensland for the word had passed around

That new laws regarding bikies would be tight

So a simple threesome riding all together could be stopped

By a roadside copper looking for a fight.

‘Outlaw’ bikers started squirming, some were fired from their jobs

Many quit their outlaw gangs in abject fear

Coz a charge that gets a normal bloke banged up for eighteen months

For an outlaw bikie could be fifteen years

So they chucked away their colours and they looked like all of us

Who go riding just for pleasure on weekends

But the cops can’t tell the diff between one biker and the next

And they started hassling me and all my friends.

To those who say that innocence should mean no need to fear

I suggest you take your heads out of the sand

Coz today it’s only bikies, just the thin end of the wedge

But tomorrow YOU might cop the heavy hand

Of the lawman on a power trip, a government regime

Bent on plundering the freedoms that we treasure

And the coppers could be hassling you for being with your mates

Protest NOW before the law curtails your leisure!

For more perspective and news on this scary development, go to:

http://quolltracks.blogspot.com.au/ 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptyyd32qxLw

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-31/recreational-motorcyclists-voice-concern/5062016

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-30/queensland-police-raid-veterans-club-under-anti-bikie-laws/5059250

http://motorbikewriter.com/2013/10/28/popular-anti-bikie-laws-lead-to-harassment
and a new one:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/human-rights-lawyers-slam-queensland-bikie-laws-20131027-2w9c6.html

Explanatory notes attached to VLAD:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/qld/bill_en/vladb2013483/vladb2013483.html This is extremely interesting. I especially like this paragraph (my italics) for what it says about justification of the "jackboot-method" with which VLAD was inflicted upon Queensland.
"Consultation
Consultation has occurred within Government. Wider consultation has not been
possible because of the need to respond urgently to the significant public threat these
associations pose in Queensland."