The preferred housing model. Suburbia… endless.

There’s nothing more boring than writing about interest rates, and housing affordability. It’s a problem that’s tearing at the very fabric of our society. We all know now. The statistics are out.  Housing in the major capitals is affordable only if you’ve got wealthy parents. Or parents who just happen to be recently DEAD. If you haven’t got wealthy parents you’ll never be ale to afford the twelve billion trillion dollars you need, and that’s just for the deposit. Then there’s the prospect of buying a house where you’d actually want to live. Forget it. Inner city housing is way way too expensive so you’ll have to settle for somewhere out on the fringe. The state government in their wisdom has “solved the housing affordability crisis’ by opening up another trillion hectares of land for development, to provide more housing. To relieve the ‘housing bubble’.

Olden days suburbia. Children were encouraged to play outside.

We all know the state government has taken the easy track and caved into the developers, They’ve been land banking for years. And they know that with their donations to either party, sooner or later their horse will come in, and they’ll make squillions. And do it under the mask of altruism. Another opportunity for them to cash in on our incapacity to plan anything beyond a chook raffle. The suburbs keep spreading and youll be living a trillion miles for where you work, and the kiddies will just have to get used to being driven anywhere. That’s what you get when you succumb to the best planning advice on offer from the lobbyists. And the lobbyists are the numero uno, the Property Council .

Modern Day outsiders. For those who can’t afford a home. There’s winners and Losers. 

The Property Council owns Australia, they love negative gearing and they own the politicians. We do get the best politicians the lobbyists pay for, and in the recent federal election all roads led to the property developers. They’re the princelings of our modern nuanced democracy, and they’re there to ensure that the bubble don’t pop. It’ll just get bigger and bigger, and with a bit of luck, when it finally does pop, the developers and the property council will have made enough money to ensure that only the last in this merry go round of musical chairs will get burnt. And they will be burnt. But “they” will be those on the bottom of the ladder, the mums and dad investors who bought property thinking it would be as ‘safe as houses’.

Not sure if we want to be winners, when the losers are DEAD.

And why is the Property Council so powerful? Since Joe Hockey got rid of manufacturing and research, we only have the two industries, property and mining. That’s a two-speed economy. And there’s been such a push on from mainland China to sock cash into a safe secure investment hideaway, the inner suburbs have just been priced to oblivion. They’re all going, Sino-Georgian. The outer suburbs is where all the “other’ migrants will go. That’s why we have a population policy that is third world-ish. Because we don’t manufacture anything, we have an economy that relies on consumers buying shit they don’t need, which is invariably made in China. If you’ve got an economy that eschews inventiveness, ideas, the spark of imagination, that’s what you get. A rusk, controlled by a few, and with no vision for the future. Except shopping and negative gearing.

Tim Flannery called them the ‘future eaters’, we’d just call em the ‘here and now-ists’, They’re here, they control the now, and they don’t care about the future. And they see governance of any persuasion a hindrance. For them, the deal is the all ensuring principle of society. The downside? Three dead in a factory fire in Footscray. Murdered.

But we know society post Thatcher doesn’t exist anyway.

Being Sunday and all that, and seeing that religion seems to be getting quite a bit of press we thought this from Adrian Mitchell pertinent. 

Many Many Many Mansions
(An ode on the occasion of the completion of an interdenominational Chaplaincy Centre t the University of Lancaster)

This hues was built for God.
It looks good.

‘You can sit on the toilet and cook your dinner, and you don’t have to stretch out at all,’ a pregnant woman told us.

Another house for God,
In case he visits Lancaster University.

He had come home from work to find his flat flooded with sewerage overflowing from upstairs.

Every new house for God
Is a joke by the rich against the poor

‘If my baby lives, the welfare may give me a place with two bedrooms.  If it dies, I’ll have to stay here.’

Every new house for God
Is blasphemy against humanity,

Christians and others, when you need to pray,
Go to the kitchens of the slums,
Kneel to the mothers of the slums,
Pray to the children of the slums,
The people of the slums will answer your prayers.

from the apeman cometh by Adrian Mitchell 1975

BUT WAIT – there is more

Two Paintings by Manuel Mendive

1
The road is a snake guarded by vultures
A man on white crutches
hauls a wagonload of corpses.
He is crying blood

2
God sits creating a bright halo of birds.
He sits on a mountain of dark people
who are impaled by everyday nails.

from the apeman cometh by Adrian Mitchell 1975

This Dispatch is titled “Chutzpah” and was written February 18 2017

האַלאָ מיין קאַמראַדז

The little boy who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy from the Court because he is an orphan, defines the Yiddish word טשוטזפּאַה Chutzpah.

When Kevin 007 defeated John Howard we were all ecstatic, little did we know we were witnesses to the beginning of yet another betrayal of Indigenous Australia.

The Apology which many of us were emotionally touched by (a nice way of saying ‘were sucked in by’) turned out to be nothing but a political stunt aimed at showing up his recalcitrant predecessor. John Howard never pretended he was other than an ethnocentric assimilationist. Kevin Rudd gave us hope that at last the ethnocidal Colonial imperative had been lifted off the shoulders of our Nation. A New Horizon, a Bran Nue Dae…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiShXMojKfY

One of the first initiatives of the Rudd Government was to set up  the ‘2020 Summit’. Nungarrayi and Jangala from Yuendumu attended. Before leaving for Canberra Nungarrayi (who sadly is no longer with us) canvassed Yuendumu organisations and collected a folder of one pagers to take to the Summit. On her return she was over the moon, she told me that she ended up sitting next to Kevin Rudd, and her husband next to Jenny Macklin. She handed the folder to Kevin Rudd who promised he’d look into it and was going to do something about the Intervention. He did nothing of the sort.

….you’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1-SsnebFk

So you can imagine how thoroughly pissed off I was when Kevin Rudd on the 8^th anniversary of his Apology had the gall (the chutzpah) to warn against a second Stolen Generation…. I was pondering how to weave my anger into a Dispatch, when I chanced on an article on the Passive Complicity by Cockburn and Poole blog site which epitomized my feelings.

Cockburn and Poole (not their real names) are two friends who visited us in Yuendumu. When they did visit they weren’t wearing blinkers. I strongly recommend you visit their site http://www.pcbycp.com/ . Their Irish poet friend Ira Maine (also not his real name) also makes some brilliant contributions.

Anyway here is their Article on Kevin Rudd’s latest contribution to Australian Society:

Kev’s worthy opinion.

Posted on February 14, 2017

Kevin Rudd closes the gap

Kev 07. Loves dressing up. Craves RECOGNITION!

You’ve gotta hand it to Kev, welched on climate change, carbon taxes, grotesque inequality and reform of any significant type and stood back as theIntervention wiped a swathe of incarceration across indigenous communities. Kev you posturing sanctimonious wanker .You are at one with Tony Abbott on this. Your ignorance is so profound. You let the incarceration, the disfunction, the entropy happen and did nothing. In actual fact by your hand alone you made it worse.

Could we please keep politicians, and ex Prime Ministers out of the indigenous equation. They always have an axe to grind, a legacy to nurture, and they never ever listen. You and Jenny Macklin made the ‘second stolen generation’ happen. It’s your baby Kev. And it’s you who must bear some major responsibility for the lives of people rotting on Manus and Nauru. You posturing wanker!!

Goodonya Kev!

Hmmm, another case of workplace bullying?

So the world pissed you off from the U.N top job where you thought you’d find a cosy sinecure. Now you’re back for whatever brief interval to sermonise on the “ second stolen generation”. Yet your policies, unchecked and rampant, did more to alienate communities than your predecessor John “intervention” Howard ever did. By your hand alone you ensured that the militarisation of the NT was complete and whilst you pranced around talking of the ‘biggest moral dilemma of our time’ you walked away. You offered an apology because it made you feel good, but you never backed it up. You allowed the mass incarceration to continue as the only function of governance and ignored all the indices of communities riven by police and do gooders (a little like your self) who all had strong opinions on what needed to be done to repair the confected crisis you inherited from your predecessor.

You’ve never once tried to understand the complexity of issues they face and your solutions come as the facile musings of someone who always has a simple solution to complex problems. And they’re usually wrong. Funny, you never listened to members of your own cabinet either. So what motivates you to posture once again upon the lives of people you are so thoroughly and profoundly removed from.

And you assume the electorate hasn’t got a memory. On that you’re probably right.

Remember how you were big on homelessness before you came to power? You actually visited the odd shelter and pronounced, a bit like the apology, that you’d do something about it. Homelessness is off the scale now, because you did nothing. Nothing on tax reform, nothing on negative gearing and nothing on the yawning abyss between haves and have nots. And the reason? You have benefitted by the divide, and had no intention of doing anything about it. As another ambitious Queenslander you balance your convictions between righteous indignation and a holier than though assumption that your views are shared by others whom you never listen to. You are the echo chamber of your own convictions. And mostly you’re wrong. Like the other ex PM who believed he knew first Australians, Tony Abbott, you have a self belief that is purely delusional.

Please Kev, go back to wherever you came from and find a sinecure in a university somewhere , where you can make pronouncements on all manner of things and pretend to be worthy. And we’ll pretend to listen.

“You are the echo chamber of your own convictions.” I can’t beat that!

Drishat Shalom LaMishpacha

Frank

A luta continua! The struggle goes on… ¡Venceremos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtl62-6pY_I

“Unemployed!”  The headline said “Unemployed”, as in

Unemployed Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann wins $215,000 literary prize

I was sitting in the back yard of my daughter’s home playing cricket with the kids – actually I was checking the paper when this headline caught my eye.  You would think it was the $$$$ that caught my eye, but no, it was the idea that Ali was “unemployed” that struck me as strange.

Fish Trap by Ali Cobby Eckermann

This is the woman I’ve known for quite some time, the woman who when she can’t write she paints, when she can’t paint she sculpts and when she can’t sculpt she goes back to writing.  All this whilst actively teaching, touring, speaking, performing, and caring for family and friends.

Ali was raised by a Lutheran family in South Australia’s mid north, not far from Clare, SA.  Do you really think that a Woman raised by Lutherans would be “unemployed”? She has 157 published works.  She comes to stay a few days in my home and unobtrusively finishes yet another work.  She is continually looking out for her family, from all generations.  She is often by the side of her aging adoptive mother.  To say she is unemployed is plainly wrong.

Ali Cobby Eckermann contributes more to our society than most people in the conventional workforce.  She is like most other artists, she enriches our society, helps us see ourselves for what we are, provides perspectives on our being that are normally unrecognised.

Ali, along with pcbycp’s major poets Lionel Fogarty and Ira Maine, are true national treasures.

Not content with winning the NSW Premier’s ward for poetry in 2013, Ali Cobby Eckemann went on to take out the NSW Premiers award for Book of the Year, in the same year. These were not the first awards Ali has won – look at this site to get an idea of the range of both her work and her awards.  No, not content with those she goes on to win the extraordinary Wyndham Campbell prize for poetry.

For more on Ali see this site:  http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A96913

Donald is absolutely right,

Malcolm Turnbull. The Innovation Revolution P.M. Imagination personified.

Anzacs demonstrate improved cropping to Vietnamese farmers.

Dear reader, we know there’s a wealth divide. We know, (for our regional readers who may be tuning in on their crystal sets), that there’s a dearth of opportunity in the sticks, and we know that the climate is stuffed. We know also that electricity bills will just go sky high, and even if you get off the grid, we’ll still be slugged as the rent seekers, (corporations) find other ways of making us pay. And we also know that no politician is interested in change. In fact they’re stuck in a rut of ideological fundamentalism, laziness and managerialism. Completely rooted you may say. And no one has the imagination to get us out of the rut. The managerialist system that has seen the commonwealth diminished, the public marginalised and sanctioned doesn’t possess an atom of imagination. And that, unassailable and sinecured, is how they like it.

Aussies civilising Afghanistan. This is what liberation look like.

But then Donald comes along. And Donald has the solution. The U.S have gotta win the next war. Donald says it straight. Since, the end of the last big-un, the yanks haven’t won a bloody war. And he’s dead right. That means (by implication) Australia, (who alone possess the glorious sacred, unquestionable chalice of Anzac-dom and all the nobility and purpose it sustains) is also on the losing side. That’s an admission from Donald that the sacred task of civilising Iraq and Afghanistan rates a complete zero. That’s “nought” in Shakespearian-speak. And also, (this is the telling part), it suggests that Korea, Vietnam and whatever the fuck we’re doing in Syria is on the wrong tram, and it’s all going to end in tears.

Last time we properly won a war on our own. Civilising the outback . Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries.

Now this points to a big problem with our foreign policy. The U.S, who is currently our No 1 ally, (until China offers us something better, and the promise of recycling political dissidents organs as part of medicare ) is clearly picking on the wrong people. If the U.S want to win a war for reasons of national prestige, security and flag waving and wants to have the full unquestioning support of its allies, it needs to pick on the right kind of enemies. It just wont do fighting people who are aggrieved and unwilling to share the glorious bounty of consumerism, market capitalism and long term economic, spiritual and moral impoverishment.

That’s why New Zealand is a perfect target, They’ve always been a bit uppity and superior as they’ve had the opportunity to hide behind the protective cloak of their bigger brother. They’re irreconcilably anti nuclear, and they’ve made a treaty with their native peoples way back that actually works. How dare they!! Donald should take a leaf out of John (WMD) Howard and invade them. Another intervention is what we need. But this time its one we can WIN!! And we’ll give those Kiwi’s a reason to feel marginalised and wasted. That’s a war the U.S can win on their own terms. And we, as bold, noble, pure Anzacs can share with them in the glory. And make use of those hideously expensive jets that don’t work and the submarines that don’t submerge and the tanks that we don’t need. Donald has never had a more willing ally.

Go Donald. Do it!!!