Photo
by Igor
Kyryliuk & Tetiana Kravchenko on Unsplash
(brown pasture in foreground rising to a ridge in the midground and dark clouds in the background)
(I was going to do this as an email to MPs, but have decided to post it here instead. I may add some links in coming days)
We are
waiting to see what the outcomes of the treasurer's economic roundtable
will be, and in the interim I thought I'd provide a few thoughts.
As a first point, we are dealing with the legacy of decades
of neoliberal influence - most significantly through the utterly vile
John Howard, who also incised into the Australian heart and soul
the evils of racism and landlordism.
Landlordism
is, in essence, fooling people into thinking they can get rich quickly
and easily through property investment; however, in my experience most
lack the financial discipline and skills - especially with regard to
identifying and managing risk ... - to be able to go anywhere near achieving
that, and end up stressed and worse off as a result of being duped.
Many also become tyrannical petty bureaucrats - and this all while too
often providing sub-standard accommodations - despite a safe and secure
home being a human right.
Another major evil that has been exacerbated under neoliberalism is the emphasis on family in terms of being only the patriarchal model of lines of family being property established by blood or formal adoption connection (which evolved as part of the industrial revolution),
which rules out caring, human-based connections. Africa does much
better at human-based, compassionate connections with their philosophy
of Ubuntu - which recognises that friends are a form of family that
aren't connected by blood.
That leads into the problem of people - such as myself - who have non-standard / non-conventional life cycles.
I have not had children of my own, but I have helped five sets of kids ... . Although I had a
constructive impact of almost all of these kids (three young males were problematic), and I had successes (including getting one lot to obey the law),
they all incurred significant expenses that I had not planned for.
Those financial problems were exacerbated by [other family circumstances] .
All
of those have had a major adverse impact on my finances - as did seeing
the flimsiness and lack of adequate temperature control of Australian
housing (which has been described as functionally little better than tents)
and refusing to be bedazzled by shiny sinks, glitzy fashionable light
fixtures, and pretty curtains, and thus refusing to buy a house at the
one time in my life (mid-1980s) when I could have (I was also was trying to get out of engineering, and moving interstate ... ).
Another major problem in terms of income has been refusing to buy into
the neoliberal transformation of workplaces into cults - forced
cheerfulness, use of personal social media to publicise companies,
maximising time at work at the expense of time with family (some of that family time was supposed to be part of work time!) and the often far more supportive than family friends who businesses pretend don't exist.
... the problem of workplaces becoming cults
is going to have to be addressed at some date - things like psychosocial
safety are helping to undo some of the damage, but there is some harm
that can only be addressed by naming and dealing with the problem head
on - and especially the drivers of those changes.
BTW, how
does the Treasurer feel about UBI these days? I consider UBI has a lot
of advantages, including not having to deal with Centrelink - which causes mental health damage to those citizens.
And
on Centrelink, I know people who feel physically ill at prospect of
having to interact with Centrelink, and others who will work for long
enough so they don't have to interact with Centrelink. As far as I can
determine, there have been no surveys on this - I understand there have
been surveys about satisfaction and problems with existing Centrelink
users, but that is obviously useless as the problem I referring to is
that of people who will not use or have given up on attempting to use
Centrelink - and even with those surveys, I would like to see the
questions to determine what questions were asked about problems such as
feeling ill, etc, or that allowed open responses.
In my case, I'm going back to work - despite my health problems - because of an inexplicable problem with the Centrelink/MyGov computer systems.
I
suspect the computer problem is limited thinking: I have never
interacted with Centrelink - I have no children of my own, the
arrangements mentioned above were informal... , I have worked continuously from 1985 until I left my job in
2023 ... and the system has not been set up to cater for this.
There
was no message on ANY of the times I tried to enter my data about how
to fix the problem. Eventually I found a way of contacting Centrelink,
but, given the problems with Centrelink I will not do so without a
support person and potential witness with me, and I still trying to
coordinate the multiple aspects of doing so. I have sought one expert
group's advice, and they consider this is likely a technical glitch and
not a policy problem, but that is still not cause to trust Centrelink.
The problem continues.
The
thing about this is: I am not the only person in such a situation - and
Robodebt seems to generally be accepted as having caused deaths by suicide.
The decisions Centrelink staff are making every day are not deciding
rules as an umpire does in a sports game: they are real decisions
affecting whether people are homeless or not, starving or begging for
aid from charities or strangers, able to access health care or - in
other words: life or death.
And having worked in nations where there is no social security, I do not
want Australia to wind up a place where we have more people dying on
our streets because of our lack of civilised attitudes as a result of
too many small minded, suspicious, judgemental, bad-faith people having
too much influence on what is supposed to be our social SECURITY.
I
hope whatever comes will adequately consider and address these points,
as well as how to teach the incompetents who run businesses and made
amathiac, wrong, and inflammatory comments at the roundtable what
productivity actually is.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).
#PsychicABetterWorld and may all that I do be of value and actively BPM used for and by the nonphysical BPM because #KindnessIsThePoint
Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here, and Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear
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