Another Race Bait Election

Mark Latham proposes we test the DNA of those claiming Indigenous Blood.

This is meant to IMPLY Indigenous Australians enjoy privileges over and above those enjoyed by the non-Indigenous majority, though nothing could be further from the truth. Funny how genetic testing was never required when taking stuff from Indigenous Peoples in the first place, like land, way of life, children and – let’s face it – lives, in fact.

This is just blatant race-bait electioneering which, sadly, will probably be rewarded. Let us add this tool and his proposal to Australia’s growing shame file.

Okay, point 1
the human genome project is not yet complete and is inadequate, and won’t correctly identify the true genetic ancestry of many of those tested at all.

Point 2
cultural identity in this country is not based on DNA. To change this basis of identification would involve some sort of retrospective legislation – a dangerous thing for any nation to play with.

I am a white, anglo-celtic Australian – although only 6% Irish genetically, I was raised 100% Irish Catholic. Does this make me some kind of con merchant? Can anyone presume to dictate or know another person’s cultural identity based on appearance or bloodlines?

Point 3
race is a social construct, not a biological one. It is a real construct, but not necessarily a moral one. The whole point of race always has been and probably always will be to assess a person’s socioeconomic and political class.

As for the notion Indigenous Australians are somehow privileged – I beg to differ: Karma is rarely instant but it is on its way.

Here’s something that should concern any white citizen of Australia.
Section 51 of our constitution is a shameful pox on our history.

Seriously. I am not just taking the piss now, I really want to know - in how many other countries on earth is there a constitutional provision giving the government the right to make laws with respect to:

"The people of any race

for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws".

Every time someone tells me the government gives a free Rolls Royce and other special treatment to Indigenous Australians I wonder in what fucking sane universe they imagine everyone who is Indigenous even ticks the box on forms? I know one shire where I used to have some workmates who were Indigenous yet the Census figures said there were none in the area at all. Obama granted amnesty to some “illegal immigrants” in America, for example, and his successor is using the list of those who registered to round them up and deport them.

Latham’s proposal is a good example of why, given S51 of the Constitution, we should all be afraid. The Constitution does refer to “any race”.

Yes, there have been and sometimes still are one or two schemes that did not apply to whitefellas.
The earliest of these focused on rounding Indigenous People up and murdering or torturing them. In more recent times, some of them were kinder schemes or even favoured Indigenous People.

There have been and sometimes still are one or two schemes that do not apply to blackfellas, such as when rich private schools get money to build things like auditoriums or pools. Just a few years ago this happened in my old electorate while the local public schools - also attended mostly by whites - only got a tied grant to fix their toilets. Okay, the grants were not made using the race powers of our constitution, but it's not hard to look at the colour of the students as they walk through the gates. Financial favouritism always has been and always will be practised by politicians - it's how they buy votes or feather their own nests.
Should we blame the rich white schoolkids who attend classy schools? Should we vilify them simply because some politician chose to favour them? Assault them? Hate them for these policies?

Just look at Latham's face in the photo above - he seems inordinately proud of how pissed off he appears.

This would just be more "special treatment" using a Constitution that would have made Hitler dance.

Often today, though not always, benefits paid to Indigenous and white people are the same but simply have different names - this is usually an accounting thing with some government advertising thrown in. "Aren't we wonderful we paid income to Indigenous People and can claim we are trying to close the gap".

To our shame, there are also negative programs deliberately aimed at Indigenous Australians. There are also "non-racist" government programs aimed at "all" Australians that are only ever tested in areas where huge numbers of Indigenous people rely on benefits, like the Indue Card program. And "tested" repeatedly.

https://theconversation.com/the-cashless-debit-card-causes-social-and-economic-harm-so-why-trial-it-again-74985

We have such a deficiency of provisions in our constitution for anything that matters, but s51(xxvi) this gobsmackingly blatant piece of racist engineering, survives! It could be used for good...

In Australia our Systemic Racism is sometimes subtle but if we look it's not really hidden or hard to find - for starters our Systemic Racism is right there in black and white in our Constitution and laws as much as in the outcomes these laws deliver. What is most telling is that most of us can't see what is under our noses or don't care enough to look.

But the whole of Section 51 of our Constitution is not just about making laws with respect to Indigenous Australians - this section is so bad on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin - it certainly gives an enormous amount of power to a handful of undemocratically elected people who rarely do anything to inspire trust.

What checks and balances? "Tradition" you say? Excuse me while I go to the bathroom so you won't notice I just PMSL.

--oo0oo--

(This is an edited version of a larger post on my other blog, where I discuss what systemic racism is and what we need to do to fix it.

https://maudesdramaticreviews.blogspot.com/2018/12/sets-systems-race-other-isms.html

 

 

Hopping Mad

 

 Seroquel.
 

Instant obesity, just add water.

When I was a kid, I was warned not to swallow chewing gum; that it stays in your stomach forever and swells up, but they didn’t warn me about anti-psychotic medication.

 

You know how, no matter how old our bodies get, in our minds we are always 20?

Well, no matter how fat I look, in my mind, I’m thin. If I do not look in mirrors or shop windows, or see myself the way others see me I’m the weight I was before I started taking the wonder drug; I’m 30 kilos lighter.

They say, the more effort you expend, the more calories you burn. If that’s true, I should lose a kilo most days just getting out of bed. Because mood stabilisers and anti-depressants can smooth out highs and lows and help you cope, but they can’t cure you.

So this is not the face of madness,

 

what you see of me and my tribe from the neck down, this is what madness looks like:

Trying to function on Seroquel is like trying to run through wet concrete. Trying to function on Seroquel is knowing you’ve lost your mind so you seek it out and destroy it completely. Trying to live on Seroquel is finally being propositioned by Sean Connery or Helen Mirren – or your age group’s equivalent – and realising you couldn’t be fucked.

TRIGGER WARNING

Trying to live without medication is leaving a hotel in the middle of the night because someone MIGHT be watching you through the mirror on the wall, even though you know they aren’t, but what if they are? Trying to live without medication is not being able to wash your hands because there MIGHT be razor blades in the soap, even though you know there aren’t, but what if there were?

And living with madness, medicated or not, is saying “fine” when people ask “how are you?”, because if you try to explain about mirrors and razor blades they don't believe you, or you don't "seem mad enough" or they just tell you to get over yourself.
It's saying "fine" out of fear of the fact that everyone is an expert on mental illness.

 

Living with madness is having people ask you “and what do you do?” and the shame of knowing the answer is “not much”. [I'm a good, kind person is not a socially acceptable answer.]
Living with madness is the embarrassment of being asked how many children you have, and knowing the answer is “none”, because you think the gene should not be passed on.
Living with madness is having unprotected sex with any bloke anywhere, anytime, anyhow, because normal coping methods like cutting yourself or overdosing in back alleys are less appealing.

It’s having the government tell you to pick two days a week to work and thinking – if you could just pick and choose which days to be well you would choose to be well seven days a week [and maybe I could have my sense of humour back?]

 

This

is not the face of madness, this is the face of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all. Someone who believed in alternative medicines, and astrology; someone who loved animals and didn’t eat meat.

Real madness is listening to people pooh pooh multiculturalism, while they use Arabic numerals to count their money.
Real madness is a culture of bullying kids for being different, then being surprised when they are so desperate to belong somewhere they sign up with thugs.
Real madness is being a nation of basically good people who, individually, would give anyone the shirt off their back, but mostly live in denial about how we are collectively failing each other.
Because every nation is other than the sum of its parts.

Insanity is tolerating the worst parts of this party 

because the best of these are crap.

 

They are crap because they have the mic and they have nothing to say of any interest or importance that anyone wants to hear. They are crap because they have the mic so they don't have to listen. They are crap because they are destroying the environmental and economic and moral legacy of this country's children and grandchildren and subsidising that destruction, the whole time saying "see, we're the good guys, we are not hating our fellow man, we are hating our future man."

To you mainstream pollies I say, being so crap the extremists have the floor is the height of madness... and a total abnegation of responsibility. [I'm watching you, Greens: your website is pretty but the silence is deafening.]

Madness is when racists are the only candidates who seem to have any integrity. The only people we can trust to say what they mean, however appalling it is. The only people who sometimes do say something we are waiting to hear.

Australia has performed well economically while the rest of the world has struggled but,
I repeat, the whole is other than the sum of its parts, and while the country has prospered its people have not.
Too many people have lost their jobs and, losing their jobs, lost their mortgages, and hope.
Too many well people, now unemployed, are sent off to do Mickey Mouse training courses run by corporate mates of elected representatives. [Yes, we did notice how she made her money].
Too, too many tasks that are the responsibility of government have been privatised and offshored: Our money is flowing out of the country in a subsidised pipeline while honest, decent people are being told the age of entitlement is over - by politicians who believe the age of accountability is over.

Do those in the bigger parties, the establishment parties, really think we don’t know what is happening to us? That when they take jobs away or allow them to disappear without a trace then tell people to get a job at lower pay in crappier conditions, we do not know we are being, as psychiatrists would put it, gaslighted?

 

Who keeps buried, in libraries, the truth about pre-colonial, Indigenous Australia?: The permanent dwellings? The respect for human life that governed the way people conducted themselves? The swift but certain systems of justice? The trade routes, the baking and the aquaculture? The land management systems, [incredible given the absence of western style plants and animals and the challenging ecosystems]?
Who still teaches us in our schools, if we learn anything at all, that Aboriginal religion is only “myth”?
Who maintains the silence about successful farms, snatched by white governments? Houses cared for only to be bulldozed? Endless lessons in the pointlessness of trying?
Who doesn’t want us to hear about heroes like William Cooper, who went to the German Consul in 1938 after Kristallnacht to protest the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany ?

 

Rather than celebrate someone who stood for something, who threatens a city council for not celebrating Australia Day on the one day of the year that commemorates illegal occupation, the declarations of war that followed, the cultural genocide, the stolen labour, the stolen children, and the ongoing, deliberate, perpetuation of ignorance?
This politician from this political party, who uses his political appointment to assert Australia Day should be apolitical:

Truth is, we have a new national curriculum that makes some of the truth optional for students at years 9 and 10. This means in 20 years time there might be a few people in our parliament who know or care about Australia's real history. Few people in our parliaments today think it is urgent or relevant.

Sadly, I won't be the only one dead before anything changes for Indigenous Australia, but the most insane part of this is that it's a collective loss; reflected in our attitudes to each other, our unwillingness to listen, our disdain for our environment and future generations, and a lack of pride in who we are as a nation. If we made the effort to learn about our Indigenous brothers and sisters, we could learn a lot from them.

In most of Australia, suicide is no longer a crime. An enlightened move, we’d think, except the suicide rate in parts of Indigenous Australia is criminal.
When will the past end, and tomorrow begin?
Didn’t Moses keep his people in the desert for 40 years because even he understood, thousands of years ago, that you can’t build a successful community overnight from traumatised, reasonably untrusting generations?
Because he understood, long before the British Empire existed, that a simple "get over it" would just sound like the "fuck you" it really is?

 

This is the place where every sitting opens with the Lord’s Prayer.
Three out of ten Australians have no religion at all and not all believers are Christians but let’s just suppose, for a minute, that most of the people who sit and talk and belittle each other here in our name, without exchanging many useful ideas, actually believe in this Middle Eastern bloke and what he supposedly stood for.

 

He’s supposed to represent a God of love. A God, the Bible tells us, that is present in each and every one of us, so that whatsoever we do to each other, we do to Him.
     I say,
          Fuck the poetry of Suck-It-Up Beatitudes;
     I say,
          Fuck the Platitudes that just highlight Un-Christ-Like Attitudes;
     I see,
          given what they do or fail to do,
               they don't think very much of their Parliamentary Christ-God at all.

 

This not the face of madness. This is the face of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all.

If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that Muslims have been in this country for nearly 200 years, no worries mate, or that there are over a billion Muslims in the world and if they all wanted us dead we would be dead already, he would be the one telling us that hijabs don’t look right; that they are as ugly and confronting as body fat.
He would be the one assuming fat people don't deserve medical care because they waste their Sennalink money on unhealthy food and won't help themselves.

If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that we can save a million dollars on that already wealthy school’s new arts centre and instead do the Christian thing and help a dozen poorer public primary schools, he’d be the one focused solely on telling us we must choose - that our only choice - is between pensioners and foreigners.
If he were here today he wouldn’t be proposing that if we don’t want people seeking refuge here maybe there's a way to help them where they are.

If he were here today he would be the one framing and narrowing debate and turning those of us, who are already here, against each other. But he is not here today, so why is it happening?

Living on anti-psychotics is like trying to run through wet concrete. But trying to live in the real world, unmedicated, now that would be just plain crazy.


.