Moving Australia Forward? Why young people are disengaged with politics
Young people feel increasingly disengaged with politics. There was a real push to get them to enrol to vote in time for this election. And with this election coverage being swamped in spin and about nothing of substance, it is not surprising that young people aren’t engaged. But why?
The general thrust of this election campaign so far has been boredom. The election has been about nothing much at all. Both Gillard and Abbott seem to be talking in terms of spin, without any real debates or conflict. The real debates and alternatives seem to be happening outside of the two major parties so it’s not surprising that not even just young people are disengaged from the election at the moment.
Those debates are ones predominantly of concern to the younger demographic.
The issue of same-sex marriage is a prime example. With poll after poll showing that the majority of the population support same-sex marriage, it is polls amongst young people that show a greater majority and the rallies around the country in the past year are made up mostly of young angry high school students.
By Kables
These people show that the issue is not just about marriage, but about homophobia. They’re not getting married anytime soon but are concerned with rampant homophobia as studies show that school is one of the most unsafe places for gay and lesbian youth. To them, the issue is one of equal choice so that their relationships can be seen as just as legitimate as relationships amongst straight peers.
And yet, the issue has been largely absent from debate between the two major parties because both are in agreement that the ban is going to stay. And Penny Wong’s defence as it being a religious, cultural and historical shows that the Labor party are not interested in moving forward but holding things back.
And then we look at other issues. Education is under attack, underfunded and being turned into just a means to get people into the workforce rather than enriching young people’s minds. We’ve all seen the empty promises of promising more schools and we all know neither Labor and Liberal will actually deliver any noticeable change on this front.
Exploitation in the workplace is much more harsh on young people who have little knowledge of their rights at work, are desperate for employment so are forced to accept worse conditions. No one is talking about this in any real way. Fair Work Australia is barely distinguishable from WorkChoices.
And the debate about climate change is cloaked in mumbo-jumbo about carbon taxes and the market.
The message seems to be that older people are the experts and young people should just leave it to people like Gillard and Abbott to fix.
This is on top of a society that disempowers and controls young people. My own experience of politics and that of friends when we were young was that older family members patronised and belittled our ideas, with things like “When you’re older, you’ll learn.”
Young people aren’t encouraged to think for themselves. What a dangerous idea!
I’m not much interested in discussions about the generational divide as older working class people don’t benefit from this either, but the push toward making younger people disengaged with politics is about holding back change.
This election is full of empty promises to ‘move Australia forward’ but I can’t see it anywhere and neither can young Australians. But if there were movements and alternatives outside of the realms of electoral politics, then young people might feel that they can actually make a difference when they feel like their 3 minutes at the ballot box isn’t much to look forward to.
Penny Wong, same-sex marriage and why you can’t change things within the Labor party
I haven’t said much about politics since the election campaign until now, mainly because it’s been sterile and boring, the debate being the pinnacle of politicians waffling on without actually saying anything of substance. But the defence of Penny Wong’s position on same-sex marriage really needs to be countered.
Penny Wong has enraged advocates of same-sex marriage, including myself, for defending Labor’s position that maintains the ban on same-sex marriage because it’s a cultural, historical and religions norm (just like women being unable to vote, Blacks having no rights and gay sex being a crime.)
It all came to a head on Monday night on ABC’s Q&A when someone from the audience asked her to justify her position. Penny talked about how she’d suffered discrimination and how much the laws Labor introduced made things better for LGBTI people in Australia. She didn’t answer the question, whether or not she really does support same-sex marriage. And she defended not having a conscience vote on the issue.
This all made me pretty sick to my stomach. It’s clear Wong puts her own political career ahead of the rights of all LGBTI people. You can’t be a little bit equal so it is a lie to say there’s equality when we don’t have full marriage rights.
And then the worst thing was when Graham Richardson claimed that progress in Australia came from people like Penny Wong fighting within the Labor party for change.
The idea that you can change things from within this party is ridiculous. It’s the same party maintaining the ban on same-sex marriage, kicking refugees, moving to the right on smashing unions, for bombing Afghanistan, supporting Israel down the line. This party is not a party of progress. It’s holding things back.
We have a majority of people in this country that support the simple right for people to marry, regardless of gender. The Labor party don’t want to listen to the majority. And Penny Wong refuses to publicly come out and defy this position.
How we get real change
Things change from the mass of people getting out on the streets and fighting for it. That’s how we got women the right to vote, how we got troops out of Vietnam, how LGBTI people got sodomy off the criminal code and how Blacks got basic civil rights in the United States.
It didn’t come from politicians through parliament – but the history books give them all the credit because they have to sign the things we demanded in law because their rule and their legitimacy was at stake.
That is why, if you want same-sex marriage rights, it is more important to come out on August 14 to the next same-sex marriage protest than it is to vote in the election the week after.
We make change, not them, and we need enough of us out on the streets to make that change.
Movie Review: The Trotsky
As a Trotskyist, a Marxist who follows in the tradition of Leon Trotsky in his fight against Stalinism, I had to see The Trotsky at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival.
Trotsky doesn’t get talked about often enough so when I saw the trailer, I thought it was pretty exciting from the outset. That said, the movie wasn’t without a major flaw or two.
The Trotsky is about a 17-year-old Canadian, Leon Bronstein, who thinks he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky and is destined to follow the path the Russian Revolutionary took right up to being assassinated with an icepick.
It’s through this will and determination that he fights to try lead his fellow students and unionise his local high school. Whilst his character is understandably a little strange, you have to admire him for his commitment.
That, along with some inspiring moments, meant that I didn’t think the movie was devoid of inspiring content and a message that fighting for a better world is something worth doing.
There were also plenty of Trot jokes, that those outside of the left might or might not have got. These kinds of inside jokes and references to the revolution and Trotsky made the movie fun and never to me seemed like the director was ‘red baiting.’
That said, I thought the sub plot of Leon’s love affair with Alexandra was seriously problematic. It’s not surprising though that a love story is played out in this way and seen as perfectly fine. But by Leon seeing that his destiny was to be with her, meant that he became a stalker and I was uncomfortable with the way he acted. Especially given he slept with her when she was drunk, which I would technically call rape.
Trotsky believed in fighting against women’s oppression so in this area, the director didn’t portray Trotsky correctly. Though, I don’t think this is anything beyond what other movies do so it’s not like it’s something that sets itself out as more reactionary than the current norm.
Overall, the movie was fun and not without uplifting bits, and its important not to take the film too seriously, but I can’t help but feel the love story with Alexandra soured it for me.
#SpokenSunday: Coup d’cash II
This week’s #SpokenSunday is based on part II of my unexpected serial, Coup d’cash. I did a recording of the first part last week if you want to catch up.
For more #SpokenSunday recordings, search for ‘#SpokenSunday’ on Twitter. There’s a whole group of writers sharing recordings of their writing every Sunday.
#FridayFlash: Coup d’cash II
This piece follows on from last week’s #FridayFlash, ‘Coup d’cash’
Coup d’cash II
Photo by Travel Aficionado
Hiding behind a vending machine that seems to discharge contents at every movement, I try to think of how to get the fuck out of this place. Upstairs, the city is full of coins. There is no escaping it.
Cash has always run through the CBD like blood through veins with the shops, the banks and the heads of businesses. It occurs to me that this is where it’s strongest.
I lay low on the floor of a train as it heads to the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The windows rattle from attacks and surface cracks race along the view to the outside world, threatening to break in at any second.
Out of the centre of the city, their control is less dominant. Pockets of trouble exist around small shopping streets or corner stores. But there’s more on my side now, actual people and not the irritating anarchist kind.
In the streets of Melbourne’s suburbs, groups fight to put out spot fires, swinging anything they have to keep the cash down but we’re fighting an uphill battle.
“We had to get it at the source,” I try to tell them, but they only return a look of ‘who the fuck are you?’ I’m still wearing my Woolworth’s uniform so at least I have some credibility as I explain to them how it all started in the checkouts. They said they almost mistook me for a student and thankfully I wasn’t one of those.
We plot our plan to get to the source, wherever that is, and I’m back on the train with reinforcements, all face down to avoid ambush’s of shrapnel as we enter the city again.
And Collins Street is dense with money. I try to them all to stay with me, to not run ahead, but one guy seems to think the paper stuff isn’t much trouble. He steps out into the street, almost glowing from the Louis Vutton display in front of of him. And suddenly we can’t see him anymore. $100 bills cover his whole body and like a cashed-up mummy, he’s on the ground, writhing in it with his hands in the air.
Another runs out to save him, but I pull her back. He’s gone. And I wonder why I’ve come back here.
We burst through the doors of the stock exchange and I think I only lost one other. This place echos with the exchange of money but there’s no cash in sight.
In front of us, numbers go up and down and make our heads spin. It occurs to me, that it’s like their war room and someone is allocating the troops, stocks go up one place to fight more on that front.
And I wonder if there was a run on Woolworth’s stock as Mark from the Deli was slicing into the cold meats like a general would send the troops to the barricades to head off a revolution.
I dream of the panic of a stock market crash; red arrows point down, down and down. Stock brokers would run around and around with their arms waving high in the air and their heads would be telling them it’s all over, that they might as well jump like Tsar packed his bags in 1917 before he had to.
I dream of taking a sledge hammer to the screen messing with their troops allocation but the workers I met out in the suburbs are well ahead of what I’m just thinking. There are no hammers but they take what they’ve got, take those stock brokers by the legs and swing them like hammer throws.
The screen splinters and bursts with splotches of broken pixels. They cannot see where the cash is flowing. I’ve cut the generals from the troops but I now I wonder what it’s like outside, whether money does have a mind of their own, whether there’s still a link somewhere to someone and whether it’s all over yet.
This is all in my head of course and the workers swinging stock brokers into the stock exchange seem less concerned with the ideas, but just getting on with the job.
—
I’m not sure I can confine this story to even a few flashes now so I think I am just going to continue with it until it’s over.
For more flash fiction, search for #FridayFlash on Twitter
Hypocritical Taboos and the Banning of LA Zombie
The Age is running a story this morning around the banning of zombie film LA Zombie mostly on the basis of the ‘sexual content’ of the film. This is outrageous, but beyond just the problem of censorship it’s a clear example of how society views sex as more offensive than violence.
by ARNO ROCA
The film was banned for its sexual content and was described as ‘gay zombie porn’ because the main character walks around looking for dead bodies and gay sex, though the penises in the film are meant to be clearly fake and a lot of it happens off screen.
It seems that sex, and particularly gay sex, is seen as this absurd taboo in our deeply conservative society which reeks of hypocrisy given all of the violence that gets through (not that I’m for censoring violent films) and not to mention the violence the Australian state perpetrates overseas.
The director, Bruce LaBruce, said that “they pass so many mainstream films that have the most extreme violence, with brutal treatment towards women, and torture and dismemberment, but because they didn’t show a penis, they can be screened with impunity.”
I do wonder if the zombie was looking around for straight sex whether or not that film would’ve been banned. Sexism and the objectification of women in the media is seen as perfectly fine and I can think of many movies, with no artistic merit, that are just frat boy outlets for sexist fantasies.
So the taboo around sex doesn’t extend to these frat boy movies, just movies that might talk about the reality of people’s sex lives and contradict norms, such as homosexual sex and teenage sex.
LaBruce points out that LA Zombie is a metaphor for healing with the zombies coming back to life. This film sounds like it has a strong message far deeper than the media will admit so it’s a real travesty that this film is being censored.
On Leave
Without going into too much detail, as of today, I’m on two weeks stress leave from work. The situation there became unbearable yesterday to the point I saw a doctor and got a certificate out of there.
Just taking time off doesn’t completely solve the problem though so either some changes are going to have to happen or I’m going to have to find a new job.
For now though, I’m trying not to think about work. I might get some writing done, a bit of reading and just some general relaxation.
#SpokenSunday: Coup d’cash
This week’s #SpokenSunday recording is my flash piece, Coup d’cash.
For more recordings of reading, spoken word and poetry, search for #SpokenSunday on Twitter where people will be posting links to their blogs and AudioBoo’s with their latest recordings.
#FridayFlash: Coup d’cash
Coup d’cash
Were you there when money finally became alive?
Photo by John Harvey
I was. Supermarket tellers were the first to find out and the first to fall to their bloody coup. Shoppers stood in stunned silence as the cash registers rattled and shook.
Ca-ching! And the only change they got were 50c pieces slicing across their frozen faces like ninja-death-stars.
Like bugs, they flew, scuttled and rolled, the coins led the charge and the notes marched slowly past leaving that new money smell over shoppers that had fainted at the checkout.
Mark from the Deli had been gorgeous before then, with his huge guns, his rough stubble making his smooth skin just a little bit less pretty-boy. I had been planning to ask him out that afternoon, before the 5c pieces surrounded him as he tried to cut up the mortadella.
Now, he lay there with his hand over the other side of the Deli after accidently cutting it off. I saw his pretty little face, ruined with criss-crossed cuts of coins that would’ve been slightly more appealing had he shaven the stubble off then.
“Enough with the capitalism crap, Ted,” they had always told me when I claimed the problem with the world was that money had too much power and it was all about profit. “Money doesn’t rule the world. You’re mad!”
They had even maintained this for a while after it all went to shit.
That was until they saw the arcade. Awesome Games H.Q. was a bloodbath. Innocent gamers had been mowed down when the change machines had become a mind of their own, converting to the artillery unit. $2 coins had flown in all directions until kids lay scattered on the ground or slumped over steering wheels.
Little Matty Kingston had skipped school that day to try and reach 1,000,000 points in Dance Dance Revolution but had fallen short when a barrage of gold coins had knocked him off his 60-move combo less than 100 points from the magical 7 figures. Game over flashed on the screen as his legs hung off the mat in odd angles and his blood stained the technicolour carpet.
They had all stopped telling me I was the mad one after that and started asking me, the Marxist nerd they had laughed at, for answers. I had said it wasn’t just money, but those who had it.
Charles Davies (also known as AnarchoNerd1905) had disagreed with me on the fundamental point; he thought money had a mind of its own. I was going to prove him wrong as well.
I had never met him in person until today. We’d met in the tunnel between Flagstaff Station and Melbourne Central. He looked so far from what I’d imagined. He was in his 40s with a V for Vendetta t-shirt and spoke less than half as much as he did online. Suddenly his know-it-all attitude shrivelled up – and we hadn’t even entered the light of the real world, where the streets were covered with $20s and vending machines were like death traps.
“They run out of the Mint, I’m telling you,” he finally says after I asked him to repeat himself a fourth time; the mumbling was becoming irritating. He tells me how he thought $1,000,000 Bonds were at the head of the operation.
“Ah,” I say as I run ahead up the escalator, “But who wrote those Bonds?”
He doesn’t answer me, and I think that makes me right until I turn around to see his mangled body, twisted and cracked upside down with an ambush of $5s stuffed in his mouth, choking the last shreds of life out of him.
I had to find out who was behind this.
—
This story wasn’t inspired by anything in particular other than something weird inside my head. I may continue this one in another piece next week.
For more flash fiction, search for #FridayFlash on Twitter
Digital Publishing: Smashwords v Scribd
With work on Sanity Juxtaposed almost over, after the proofreading and those changes are made, I’ll be left to format it into the various media types in order to publish it into the wider world. The eBook is due out by the end of the month and then the POD version through lulu.com some time after that.
You'll be able to read Sanity Juxtaposed on things like the Sony Reader with either Smashwords or Scribd.
For the eBook, the original plan was to publish it via Smashwords as it could then be available in multiple formats and it’s generally easy to work with in terms of selling it and all that.
The problem has been that the requirements for formatting a document to meet their standards have been, quite frankly, a pain in the arse. And the task of turning the final copy into something to go on Smashwords is looking quite tedious. It would also require the final eBook version to be stripped down to something quite basic and nothing more than plain text.
But now looking at what format to go with when publishing the digital version of The Red Pen, Scribd.com is beginning to look more appealing for both. Scribd works well for the zine because it maintains the visual structure and won’t require so much work. And I can still charge for it if I choose.
So doing this for Sanity Juxtaposed as well would be quite simple and then it wouldn’t require completely different formatting between the print and digital versions.
I’m now at a loss as to what to do and am considering abandoning Smashwords all together in favour of Scribd.
Have you had experience with either or both? What are your thoughts? Or are there any better alternatives?
Asylum seekers: Rejecting the logic of needing to stop the boats
The current debate around asylum seekers, refugees, ‘boat people’ and immigration has shifted so far to the right heading into the election that even so-called critics on the ‘left’ of the debate accept a lot of the logic of those wishing to ‘tighten our borders.’
Used with permission © Pope/The Canberra Times
ABC’s Q&A is frustrating for this reason. John Elliot (ex-Liberal party leader and now wastes his excess cash on overpaying football players) said the other night on the panel, and this is paraphrasing, no matter what side we’re on, we all want to stop the boats.
Now some of those quoted in the media attacking Gillard’s plan from the ‘left’ have accepted and entered into this terrain around the debate claiming that Gillard’s policy fails because it won’t turn the boats around.
Now this is not what we should be saying. We should be saying that the boats should be welcome and that any attempt to stop the boats is a racist attack on those seeking asylum, especially when it is so few and especially when it’s compared to the swarms of white British backpackers that overstay their visas.
Those that do want to stop the boats try to gloss their racist attack in compassionate terms to throw off those who are unwilling to wage a sustained attack on Labor. The Liberal and Labor parties argue that stopping the boats would be compassionate because it’s dangerous to go out to sea on leaky boats and if the borders were tight, they wouldn’t attempt the voyage and put their lives at risk.
This argument misses a lot of key points. Read more ›
Project Update: Sanity Juxtaposed
I don’t usually update my blog that much anymore with news and thoughts regarding how my writing is going or how certain projects are coming along. There’s the writing goals posts and I did do some ‘writing project updates’ type posts a while ago but the general day to day commenting of what I’m working on and how I’m going has largely been taken on by my Twitter account. If you’re into that sort of stuff, you can follow me there.
But I used to do a lot more of it. Whilst compiling pieces and such for my collection Sanity Juxtaposed, I noticed a lot of my writing posts were in the form of updates, how many words I’ve written, how I feel about the story etc. which was useful for me but I’m not sure they were particularly interesting.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Sanity Juxtaposed, getting together all the shorts, poetry and flash fiction up until 2009 and also including a selection of blog posts that either have some life in them or give an indication of what this blog is about.
These pieces, the introduction and the short intros to the sections are all done and compiled into one master document that is currently being proof read and tweaked. As I said in my goals post this month, I hope to have the eBook out by the end of the month and we’re looking mighty close.
I just want to make sure there are no errors, typos or major blunders in it (unlike last time in 2005) and that it’s a decent quality despite the fact I’ve included some of my first short stories!
It was originally intended to be for amongst friends and family and for my own records but it’s developed into a bit of a demo book or sample of my work that hopefully people will want to buy to get a taste of my writing as well as to support me with a little bit of cash and a little bit of encouragement in the form of actually caring about my work enough to want to read some of it, in print.
Hopefully we will have the final copy of the cover by the end of the week so I can unveil it here and get you all excited because the art is spectacular.
#SpokenSunday: The Flip of a Coin
For this week’s #SpokenSunday, I read my #FridayFlash piece for the week again. This one’s called ‘The Flip of a Coin’ and is based on a prompt from Write Anything‘s [Fiction] Friday.
You can listen to more #SpokenSunday pieces but searching for ‘#SpokenSunday’ in Twitter or alternatively in the next day or so, a wrap-up of all the pieces will be posted on the #SpokenSunday blog at spokensunday.wordpress.com
I hope you enjoy.
[Fiction] Friday: The Flip of a Coin
The Flip of a Coin
She stands, all of a sudden frozen, listening for it but can only hear the drip drip of where she’s been.
Photo by Steven Higgins
In one hand, she grips the loaded pistol tighter wondering if it will be of any use anyway. And when she opens her other hand, the coin says tails. She darts to the left down the cavernous tunnel.
Around her the walls reveal moist green so radioactive you can see it despite the pitch black. Toxin leads her down somewhere she was sent, in the trust of nothing but currency.
Her mind is constantly distracted by the rumbling in her belly. She rests her hand on it and can’t remember when she’d last eaten, but she’s glad it’s not full of other things, squirming around her insides, a hostage to her own body.
They could not make her do it.
And then the glowing green becomes bright and solid, filling her vision straight ahead, on the ground, up above and side to side. She stands frozen again, a flip of the coin unable to tell her where to go.
She curses putting her trust in money once again as she can hear it slup-slup closer and closer, its shadow blacking out the mould that once offered her some sort of light, able to see what she doesn’t really want to.
She had learned that if you were unwilling, they would try to force you. Choices did not exist so much anymore. Sometimes you would get the flip of a coin if you were lucky, but either side was at the whim of their tokens of exchange.
She squeezes the trigger, firing into the dark, for once hoping it was bigger and therefore more likely to be hit.
A wet scream, as if phlegm clogged a megaphone, fills every part of the small place. She can’t help but drop her gun when her hands go to her ears, but she can still hear it make its way forward, slowing consuming the light from the walls.
She feels it before she sees it. Its warm breathe oozes out its skin, so damp it clings to her own skin in slime that dribbles down her arm. She steps backward, and the mould on the walls feels so much like it does as if they were the same; the tentacles that were slowly wrapping around her waist seem to be coming from the underground trap.
It squeezes gently like a sleaze in a bar might try to act like it gave a shit about you and then she tries to shut out the thought of something soon to be squirming inside her.
This piece was inspired by the [Fiction] Friday prompt from Write Anything: “In her right hand a woman holds a loaded gun, in her left, a coin that just came up ‘tails’…NOW WRITE…”
For more flash fiction posted this Friday, search for #fridayflash or #fictionfriday in Twitter.
I’m from Sydney’s Western Suburbs and I’m not concerned about boat people
My name’s Benjamin Solah; I’m from Sydney’s Western Suburbs and I’m not concerned about boat people.
I’m not anxious or worried. I don’t feel threatened that they’re going to affect my way of life.
What I am concerned about is Julia Gillard assuming to speak for me, a working-class person, and assuming what my fears are.
Don’t get me wrong, many people from where I grew up do have these fears, can be racist and xenophobic and full of these myths about asylum seekers.
But these fears don’t come out of thin air. It is the likes of Tony Abbott, the Liberals, racists like Pauline Hanson, shock jocks like Alan Jones and sensationalist media outlets like The Daily Telegraph run by Rupert Murdoch that speak to spread myths and rile fear in people about what amounts to quite a small amount of people coming here.
If Julia Gillard had any guts, she’d counter those fears with the truth, she’s show leadership to turn the debate around, input reason into the debate. But Gillard and the Labor party have no guts, no principles. They’re interested in racing to the right, collapsing to every right-wing demand and appealing to people’s manufactured fears.
But people from working-class areas like Western Sydney are also concerned about other things. They’re worried about losing their jobs, or finding jobs or not being paid enough to keep themselves and their families properly looked after; they’re concerned about shit public transport and inadequate infrastructure as well as hospitals and schools that seem to get less funding than the ones in the North Shore.
They’re concerned about a lot of things but Julia Gillard doesn’t seek to relieve these concerns. If she did, maybe she’d install programs that built schools and improved public transport, giving the unemployed jobs. Maybe she’d improve union laws, raise the minimum wage, and reinstate unfair dismissal.
She wants you to be concerned about ‘boat people’ so you forget about being so concerned about these other things. Kicking refugees while they’re down fits into the agenda of the rich and powerful whilst seeing to the other concerns about jobs and living standards contradict that agenda.
Julia Gillard does not speak for me. I’m concerned about her. I’m anxious about racism. And I want to stop the flow of myths, distractions and hysteria leading up to the election.
And I’m not going to stop this by voting for someone. I’m going to do it for myself. I’m going to do so by standing with others who want to stand united and to show Julia Gillard that we make the world move and we will not stand for her trying to tell us what we’re to be concerned about.
Asylum Seekers: Gillard returns to the Howard era
Following my piece on Monday arguing that we needed to oppose Gillard and not just accept something ‘better than the Liberals,’ Gillard seems to have really turned the screws tighter in regards to policy toward asylum seekers.
All the rhetoric of xenophobia, learning English, political correctness, and the pledge to ‘stop the boats’ reek of Howard’s rotten era. And plans to process claims in East Timor are barely distinguishable from Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’ of processing claims in places like Nauru.
So it’s shocking to hear that some refugee groups have been so soft, welcomed some of her policies, made mild criticisms at best or just not come out as hard and loud as they should.
But I attended a demonstration at Treasury Gardens this morning before work with some refugee advocates like Pamela Curr willing to condemn Gillard’s policies for what they are: pure racism.
I will post photos when I get home tonight.
We can all see an election is around the corner. They love the refugee issue to whip up fear about something else and distract voters from looking at policies where people might see that both Labor and Liberal’s desire do things in the interests of the rich and powerful are the real cause for concern and anxiety.
Gillard and Labor on asylum seekers and why not being the Liberals is not good enough
Julia Gillard’s appointment as Prime Minster has been followed by policies and rhetoric that indicates she’s not as great as commentators seem to think she is. She’s made it clear she does not support same-sex marriage rights, she’s backed down on the mining tax and now her comments in regards to asylum seekers show that she’s not about to stop racing to the right with Abbott in a desire to win the racist vote.
Both Rudd and Gillard in speeches around the spill made appallingly false comments saying they weren’t interested in a race to the right with Abbott on the question of arrivals by boat. Current policy says otherwise and Gillard’s comments yesterday indicate further a shift to the right, at least rhetorically, on the issue.
Attacks on ‘politically correctness’ have always been a dog whistle to the right to be confident about whipping up racism. It reeks of the scaremongering that Howard and the Liberals used when they were locking up refugees in barbarous conditions.
Gillard even went as far to defend Howard against claims he was a racist which I find astounding and an indication of how far we’ve shifted back to the right considering Howard couldn’t get away with these kinds of comments leading up to when he got kicked out of office.
It’s probably too early to predict a shift to the right in terms of policy just yet but Gillard needs to announce whether or not she’s going to extend the freeze on Tamil asylum seekers when that expires tomorrow.
Labor are making every indication that they intend to neutralise the racist debate by becoming just as racist as the Liberals with Gillard saying she empathised with racist hysteria in the community about a measly number of people arriving by boat to seek asylum, that is perfectly legal, in a country that is responsible for them needing to flee in the first place.
When people on the left of Labor defend voting for them on the basis that they’re the lesser-evil, that they’re not as bad as Abbott, or when they refuse to mount a serious attack on Gillard and Labor, they leave the door open to Labor shifting further and further to the right.
Labor doesn’t need to court the Left vote because there’s no left alternative to go to and everyone is too willing to still vote for them, to not criticise them, to not fight them. Since when is the bar so low that not being the Liberals is some how good enough?
When Labor can rely on getting votes from the left no matter what they do, they are then left to compete with the Liberals for those votes to the right and that means maintaining the ban on same-sex marriage even when the majority support equality and it means racist hysteria about asylum seekers.
The asylum seeker debate is useful for both sides of politics and for the rich and powerful in Australia more generally, because it’s a divisive distraction away from real problems. The hysteria that says a paltry amount of people arriving by boat are somehow a threat aims to divert attention away from the fact that it’s the government that’s attacking your rights at work and the companies, like the miners, that are reaping untold profits at your expense.
If there was a left alternative that didn’t fight with both hands behind their backs by defending Labor on the basis that they’re not the Liberals, and actually mounted a serious campaign that said both parties weren’t good enough, then there would be more pressure on Labor to swing back the other way.
And one way that this pressure from below can have much more effect is within the unions. The unions are connected to the Labor party and if they actually went back to their roots and stood up for worker’s rights and social justice then they could force Labor to shift. The problem wasn’t the unions influencing the spill, the problem was that the unions were right-wing and influenced it in the wrong way.
But I think this alternative and pressure from below needs to go beyond just electoral alternatives like the Greens and needs to mount a whole criticism of parliamentary politics and capitalism in general.
It’s clear that parliament does not represent the views of the majority when most want troops out of Afghanistan and most want same-sex marriage. When it is becoming increasingly apparent that there’s little difference between the two major parties, then it is understandable why people shy away from politics, feel powerless, and disconnected from voting.
I think we can do much better than ‘not the Liberals’ and we’re only going to get anything much better if we’re uncompromising in who we criticise and that means mounting a serious opposition to Labor and Gillard.
#SpokenSunday: Hard Brown
For the first week of #SpokenSunday, I’ve done a reading of my #FridayFlash piece ‘Hard Brown’ that I posted this Friday. You can find the recording below and links to others will be posted on the #SpokenSunday blog in the next day or so.
#FridayFlash: Hard Brown
This Friday’s #FridayFlash is brought to you by a prompt I saw at Absolute Write. Also, come back Sunday to hear a reading of this piece as part #SpokenSunday, a new meme through Twitter where writers are going to do readings of their creative writing in a kind of open mic for the internet.
Hard Brown
Photo from Orin Zebest
In winter, you don’t feel like going to work at the best of times. The ice outside keeps you in. Your bed is warm, a sanctuary, enticing you to a day of nothing.
But the alarm clock rang in my ear, the piercing yells bouncing around inside my head, amplified through the fog. And I awoke with it all running up my arms. I sat up with eyes wide, my pupils racing up and down my shocking limbs. I had beautiful skin, but it was now ghastly; specks of red and brown and wet plasma swirling around like a bleeding snail had spent the night racing around my body.
They ache and I could barely move them. I don’t know how I’ll get to work. But I need to. I need the money. My legs, warm under the dooner, try to pull me over to their side and hide under, but the phone rings, joining the alarm clock. Panic turns up to 11.
My fist ges down, one ringing off and I pick up the other. My arms cry in pain as I pull my mobile to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Jeff, where are you? We need you today. I thought we had a deal. Double or nothing.”
“I know. You still do. I’m just having some trouble this morning but I’ll be there.”
“You better be. The next bus is going through at 10.”
On the way in, I can feel everyone stare at me, their eyes on the white bandages wrapped up my arms to my shoulders, but they can’t see the cold lotion soaking underneath keeping me from screaming and turning back.
They need me. If I could do this for them, they’d pay for my medical expenses, surely they would.
He was waiting for me beside the door to the packed bus. He also says time is money, always tapping his feet as if it was going to hold off cash falling from his trousers.
“What the fucks with your arms boy?”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” I nod my head and wave my colourless pipe cleaners around to prove it to him despite the feeling of burning only relieved slightly with marbled swirls of lotion sliding around underneath.
“Fine, it doesn’t matter. Just get on the bus.”
I scrunch my face up when I see the front. The bull bar has been replaced with a cattle catcher, pointing sharply ahead with the metal stained red.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says when he sees me staring with my eyes a little wider, “Just get on the fucking bus. There’s only so many hours in a day and I want to make money from every one of them.”
All the others stare out of the window, blank, perhaps looking at a world far removed from here. No one says a word to each other. They barely move their heads when I take a seat up the back.
My eyes catch someone’s neck as the engine’s brought to life and we take off. His skin’s speckled like mine, the same snail trail of blood – but with bigger flecks of hard brown.
I try to think of yesterday, the bad food, the dusty air and wonder if we’d caught anything. I can see sores on the others as I look down the aisle at the rows of statue like heads.
Peeling aside my bandage, I see the brown dots harden up from my skin. My heart races as it compels me to pull aside a little more, revealing a little more hard brown, and again until the bandages lay in a pile at my feet, red and white like a candy cane.
Up and down my arm, the red seems to harden before my eyes. Bending makes them crack and pierce. The dead heads around me don’t seem to notice.
I barely notice the dull roar around the bus. Placards and angry faces slap against the windows, shaking the vehicle on its suspension.
“Fucking arseholes,” he screams from up front. “Go through, go through! What did you think the cattle catcher was for?”
I run up the front with my infected arms flailing around out straight, all in time to see the first one go under. Through the windscreen, a yell turns into a cry for help as he drops below the window frame, taking his slogan on a stick with him.
“What the fuck?” I call out to him as he only reacts by tapping his feet faster and faster.
The bus jumps as the guy goes underneath. The bastard doesn’t even flinch.
And then my eyes go to my arms as they tickle from hand to armpit, as the hardened brown covers all over, my body stiffening, unable to move as we enter inside the fence, the picket line behind us in a mess and I realise what I’ve become – a great big scab.
Writing Goals: June to July
Heading into June, the main thing on my mind was getting things done and preparing before I started writing my Chinese Whisperings short story. I mentioned that I was using Google Calendar and Tasks more but I went into overdrive with it and planned spaced out deadlines and steps along the way to each goal. It’s slightly obsessive but it really paid off.
June Results
- Read all The Yang Book stories before the 20th – I spaced it out to roughly read a story every two or three days with some hiccups along the way and read them all in time to begin writing on the 21st.
- Write the first draft for Chinese Whispering’s The Yang Book and begin the editing process – I was pleased that I got out a 3,800 word draft in the two days working full-time on it. I wish I had time to do that with more first drafts of shorts. Over the next couple of days, I did a rewrite via retyping it up and rewording things but haven’t done a major edit yet.
- 2,000 words toward All Fascists are Zombies! – I wrote Chapter 6, which was like 1,800 words in about a week and then didn’t write another 200 words beginning Chapter 7 until yesterday but I’m finding the voice with this piece slowly.
- Analyse the story of Abused Mind and either rewrite it or move on to editing the writing – I went through the piece with red pen and decided that it was sound and I could just go on to editing. Part way through though, I rewrote the ending and now it’s edited, with a new ending and a new title, Playing with the Big Boys.
- Edit From Persecution to Persecution and finalise – I really went through this one and with the help of some critiques, tightened it up a lot, gave it a new title – The Same Place – and I’m really happy with it. It’s all ready to go into the zine. I think it’s one of my strongest pieces.
- Edit The Red Pen stories that aren’t at the ‘copy editing’ stage – There were mainly two that needed editing and I managed to edit one of them but the other still needs to be worked on.
- Copy edit ‘Flash fiction’ section of Sanity Juxtaposed – I compiled all of the flash fiction into one document and went through it and didn’t find too many typos or errors, but I’ve handed it over to someone else for a more objective proof read.
- Read 3 short stories (Cultural Goal) – I read a piece from Kill Your Darlings, a piece from Voiceworks and a piece from Overland and enjoyed all of them. This really shouldn’t be a chore and would probably be less so with an eReader.
- Watch a documentary on airport security and/or the war on terror (Political Research Goal) – I couldn’t find any documentaries that fit my criteria. I was looking for an episode of Morgan Spurlock’s series 30 Days on being a Muslim but couldn’t find that. I ended up watching episodes of Border Security for a contextual understanding as reactionary as the show is. It made me boil up too at the racial profiling which was useful.
- Write a series of post on short fiction, publishing and reading (Blogging Goal) – I think I should have thought through the series a bit more because I felt like some posts were thin on argument and the main post was the last one which seemed to get the least response. I did it anyway and think they’re a useful way to expand further on a topic.
So aside from one or two things, it was a pretty good month for writing. I’ll definitely be doing the Tasks and Calendar planning again in July.
This month I’m thinking the main thrust of my goals will be around finishing up some ongoing projects such as Sanity Juxtaposed, the proverbial demo tape of all my old writing that I put on this website, as well as The Red Pen, the zine I’ve been working on with some other socialists.
July Goals
- Release Sanity Juxtaposed as an eBook
- Finish ‘dress rehearsal’ copy of The Red Pen
- Continue refining Somewhere to Pray, my Chinese Whisperings short story
- Write 2,000 words toward All Fascists are Zombies! and come up with a new title
- Edit Playing with the Big Boys (formerly Abused Mind), add new ending and post it on critique group for feedback
- Revise Evicted and resubmit
- Write a new short story or rewrite an older one
- Perform a new poem at a new venue
- Organise paperwork, books and journals and clean desk
- Finish Princesses and Pornstars (Political Research Goal)
- Finish Let the Right One In (Cultural Goal)
- Launch alternate theme for the blog (Blogging Goal)
Yes, that’s right. I want the whole thing done and released at least as an eBook by the end of this month. That means: cover finished, forewords written, pages put together, and eBook compiled and loaded onto Smashwords. And just maybe, it will be ready to be bought as a POD paperback as well on lulu.com.
With most of the pieces finalised and ready to print, I’d like to tie up the loose ends and get a finished version together ready to launch in early August. That means finalising the unfinished pieces, writing a short editorial, getting together the cover, laying it out, putting it together and printing out a dummy version – as well as work on the website and get a launch date and venue.
Refining and editing this piece is an ongoing task and so I will doing a lot of it this month, working with editor Jodi Cleghorn to make it the best story it can be.
This is pretty self-explanatory but I really need to keep plugging away with this. It might require me bringing my Mac to work as well. And the title has been bugging me for ages.
After rewriting the ending, I came up with a new and improved one. I need to add that in before offering it up to a horror crit group to be torn into so I can get this to a publishable level.
I received a rejection from EveryDayFiction.com a few weeks ago and there were some glimpses to how to improve it along with a generally more objective view of it due to it being out there for so long.
Writing a complete, brand new, first draft of a short story in two days was really fulfilling and something I haven’t done for a while. I want to do it again or at least in a few sittings, if not one.
Open mic poetry has been inspiring me to write new poetry. I have a poem brewing that I need to go get out. I’m also looking for new open mic venues to try and have a few in mind.
This might seem like not much of a goal but my paperwork, organising personal/financial documents, political documents and writing paperwork are disorganised and all of my writing journals and magazines are all over the place so I need to get this all together. It also provides a good chance to procrastinate i.e. think.
I need to finish this book. It fits in with an idea for an old short story to be rewritten about sexism from the first person perspective of a woman.
I’ve neglected this novel in the interests of reading short fiction, but it’s really good and I’m enjoying reading it when I can but I’ve been taking too long so I need to get it out of the way. It’s horror too which will be good inspiration.
I’ve been meaning to work on an alternate theme for this blog to give readers the option of reading my posts in black text on a white background. WordPress 3.0 was launched last month with a really good default theme that’s going to be the basis of the new theme once I make some tweaks and add in the plugins etc.
This is going to be a packed month but it will be satisfying to get some things out of the way that I’ve been working on for too long.
Apologies for the really long post once again. But these posts are primarily for myself and about making a public declaration of my progress so thanks to people who read this far.
Has anyone taken on using Google Calendar and Tasks to organise their goals? Or are you planning to?
