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Disabled people, and those that love them, have told the latest hearing of the Disability Royal Commission about their experiences in the health system. Neglect, abuse, violence all featured, with medical people and systems often talked about, not as caring health professionals, but as callous and cruel.
One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.
Rather than credit their physiques to intense exercise and diet regimens, celebrities now owe it all to 'wellness'. And you owe it to your health to get on board the wellness express. When it comes to conversations regarding women's health and noncommunicable diseases however, this talk of wellness becomes problematic.
Before that first September, my experience with grief was fairly limited. I was no stranger to death, but I hadn't yet felt the type of grief that makes you ache in places you never realised sadness could reach. My first experience with this was September 2014.
As a society we have tended to ignore ageing women, and menopause has been read as a signal of our descent into decrepitude. The sales pitch for a procedure to delay menopause buys into this way of thinking. For many women menopause is not a burden, but a gift: no more menstruation, no more pregnancy, new purpose.
This is the influence Christian schools retain under current legislation. Faith-based schools are given the right to maintain teachings around sexuality, but that shouldn't be given higher priority than students' wellbeing. It's why I fell through the gaps. It's why 13 years later I and the public health system are dealing with the consequences.
The debate around climate change shows the danger in believing we humans are principally rational. History gives example after example of how our biases can make us do very irrational things. In the words of Dan Ariely, our species is 'predictably irrational'. It is helpful for us to know this, so that we can become better.
By 'belly to earth', Orwell meant not only the uncomplicated, hands-on approach he threw himself into at Wallington. It also denoted a quality of engagement with the natural world that he saw to be threatened by the nature of what he considered to be the 'evil' times in which he lived — a feeling familiar to many in 2019.
At 4am on a cold morning, my brother phoned from the hospital. My final conversation with my mother, while harrowing, was not unexpected. My attempts to thank her for who she was and what she had given to me did not suffice. Mother Merle was in a hurry to leave this life, and the cancer that had drained her strength. She was over it.
This was the nerve touched by Bill Shorten when he spoke of his mother's lost opportunities. Women who shared their own mothers' stories in response under the #MyMum hashtag did so with an acute awareness of both the gulf that separated them from their mothers, and the entrenched structural discrimination that remains.
A proposal to take decisions around welfare payments out of politicians' hands is the best way forward. If the major parties are going to put supporting the most vulnerable in the 'too hard' basket, let an independent commission determine the rates at which various welfare payments can allow people to live a dignified life.
Labor's $2.3 billion cancer care package and promise to roll out more mental health facilities away from the major cities are positive policies. However it could go further with its health platform of funding specialist care by finally sinking its teeth into putting dental for all on Medicare.