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What does it take to lose hope? For the 4,000 people who attended the anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne last month, an odd coalition of the frustrated, the scared, the angry and the hurt, it takes 18 months of pain and the ensuing changes in employment status, isolation from family and friends, and losses in lifestyle and individual liberties.
I was one of the boat people who escaped from South Vietnam. The escape happened after South Vietnam had fallen to the Vietnamese communist forces in 1975, and my world descended into total chaos with an international embargo, wars against China and Cambodia, forced collectivisation and the insidious spread of what were termed “re-education camps” - but were really communist gulags. My siblings and I grew up in a world of poverty, isolation, oppression and constant fear of what might happen to us or our loved ones.
The biggest mystery of the financial markets is why, when the monetary authorities have been printing money with their ears pinned back, is inflation for the most part not a problem? What happens with inflation is crucial to the short-term survival of the whole system. Global debt, which is running at well over 300 per cent of global GDP, is only sustainable because interest rates are exceptionally low (the base rate in Australia is only 0.1 per cent). And interest rates are low because inflation is not a problem.
When you put rising housing costs alongside stagnating wages, an alarming trend in normalising insecure work, persistent unemployment and underemployment, and statutory incomes that are going backwards in real terms, there’s good reason to be deeply worried about an increase in homelessness.
The late Donald Rumsfeld, twice US Secretary of Defense, a Fortune 500 CEO, and congressman for three terms, did not let evidence and the firmness of facts trouble him. If he had a cause to pursue he would. Morality was merely an impediment to service.
It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.
We are all beholden to our story of origin and the systemic realities we are born into. Regardless, now and historically, politicians, preachers and pundits sporadically look to reintroduce the discredited dichotomy between the ‘deserving poor and the undeserving poor’. The embodiment of that second label, historically, has been the Jobseeker (Newstart) recipient.
I was born Hazara in Afghanistan. It is a place where my people suffer constant persecution and discrimination, and additionally, where women are considered second-class citizens. When I was two years old, my parents fled Afghanistan. We first arrived in Iraq and were subsequently given refugee status in Iran. Despite the challenges of growing up a foreigner in Iran, I completed my teaching degree, and also qualified to be a lawyer.
The celebration of Eid Al-Fitr (the feast of breaking the fast) marks the end of Ramadan fasting. And this year, it has been a relief more than anything. It feels ‘normal’ again.
On the day of the millionth case and half million deaths I drink coffee in a warm, morning living room, walk a small dog at our national Arboretum, eat lunch of seafood and avocado at a local outdoor café, buy two likely looking books on Amazon, tune into a Zoom poetry reading and listen to podcasts from America. I realise it’s the end of the world, as we know it.
There seems something profoundly feminist in the act of running a political meeting in the midst of family life. One of the barriers to female participation in politics (and elsewhere) is family commitments. Doris’s brand of radical hospitality changes this.
Behind the slick advertising and high-tech veneer of on demand apps and services lies a bleak, hazardous and often dangerous reality: tens of thousands of people are working at the fringe of the labour market as delivery riders and personal chauffeurs. When you remove all the tech, the sizzle and pop, it’s little more than modern day iteration of old-school precarious piece work arrangements.