For those of you not up with the state of play here in Oz, it's Australia Day, this country's version of Waitangi. Here we celebrate with cricket, a VB, a bit of lamb on the Barbie, thereby commemorating the landing of some English bloke on the barbarous shores of Sydney harbour. Excellent.
Look, I'm the first to admit that if the English gentry and their Irish convict labour hadn't pushed the remnant Aboriginal people into little internment camps called 'Missions' and taken the Roo by the tail, as it were, this country wouldn't be the economic haven for impoverished Kiwis it is today. However, this doesn’t stop Australians from either grabbing an opportunity to try and remind people about the horrors exacted against a tribal people by Prince Harry's ancestors, or a chance to crow about the glory of the 'Australian achievement'. Either way, everyone gets a day off to do nothing but lounge, and that's never a bad thing. Never.
And all this happening while New Zealand digests the shock and awe tactics of Brash and the much-vaulted son-of-Orewa speech. Jesus, what an anti-climax. Look, I know it's so hot right now to point out that Donnie is merely repeating National policy a-la the Ship (no offence to anyone who's done so, after all, you're right), but I want to reiterate that labelling beneficiaries as the national albatross is so passé it's becoming ridiculous.
I'm sure you all think that this one has got my goat on account of me being a bona fide dole bludger over here in Melbourne, but hey, I'm kiwi, going on the dole in Australia is a tradition amongst our people, remember? I used to show my New Zealand passport and immediately ask the stuffed shirts at customs check-ins at the airport where the nearest dole office was. You could tell their bungholes were puckering from the strained look on their face (one eye in spasm while the other kind of bulges).
And all of you who haven't spent time sitting on the beach thinking, "some sucker in an office is paying me to do this" probably take yourself waaaay too seriously.
Go to Ikea and buy something. You'll feel better.
To be entirely honest, my time sponging off the system is all but at an end. I have in fact been actively seeking work over here for about six months, and also in New Zealand (honestly). But as ninety percent of my work experience is in the service industry, the world-wide mainstay of casual employment, moving across to being a salary drone is proving difficult. For some reason being paid to clean/pick up after people doesn't translate well into the world of answering emails and moving paper around for a living. Regardless of this technical hitch, we battle on.
Now, I have very good reason to dislike the want of people to get stuck into beneficiaries. I know I'm committing the cardinal sin of opinion-stating by referring to a colleague to justify what I think, but as Graham pointed out yesterday, it wasn't the content of Orewa One that was the problem, it was the way it granted the more vociferous and angry an excuse to vent their spleen about "Maoris".
As I'm sure you've all read me say before, you can't suppress this kind of thing, sometimes letting people have a little hissy fit is the way to deal with entrenched prejudice. You know, bring it out into the open so that bigots can be seen for what they really are. But, just because in a liberal democracy even poorly-informed fools get their day in the sun, it doesn't excuse anyone who acts like a dick in making their opinion known.
In making this pitch to the talk-back-angry-first-time-caller demographic Brash is really only moving himself firmly onto safe conservative ground. It's just a pity that the old two-party system has faded into obscurity along with dinosaurs like 'job security', and 'a fair days pay for a fair days work', implying that National can't wedge the public enough to secure a few extra seats.
I reckon this is probably straying way too far into the realm of 'personal information', thereby breaking a second cardinal law of blogging (and considering that this is a very public forum), but something has to be said. I dislike people who bash beneficiaries because I'm the child of one.
Once again, people seem to be referring to the 1990s and policy that got stuck into dismantling the welfare state, but in my experience the real beginnings of this problem began in the 1980s, when 'that' Labour Government started the reforms that took us away from social democracy. It was then that solo mums really started to get the bash.
I know this because I remember very, very clearly the stigma that was attached to 'solo mums' and the way people used those words. The fact that the State was supporting us because my father, and my step-father had both died was of little consequence; a woman with kids and no man to take care of her was a target to every pasty-faced weasel with a penchant for misogyny.
And this is what I see in this kind of target-the-vulnerable policy making. It's not that Brash and the right isn't 'sympathetic' enough, or that there aren't genuine cases of people on the benefit gravy train, it's that people who have no fucking idea what it's like to be a state ward will cast dispersions on people who may simply be struggling to get by.
If you've never actually tried to live on a benefit you've no idea how difficult it really is. They design those things to make sure you're barely above the poverty line. Once again, I'm hardly guilt-free when it comes to sponging off the system myself, but just because I was brought up inside that culture of beneficiaries it doesn't mean I'm trapped in the system. After all, I'm a straight, white, male. The world is my oyster.
Christ, I don’t what else to say, besides quote a line from “Madeline Avenue” on DLTs Altruism that’s always struck a chord.
While bourgeois faces smile,
over houses, lives and sins,
covered up and bulldozed in,
on a street called Madeline Avenue.
How dare you call this our street of shame.