I started this blog to vent my anger at the Abbott government. To keep myself sane. To mitigate against the real likelihood of alienating myself from polite company. And to share my thoughts with like-minded Australians in online communities, many of whom are speechless with horror at what we are becoming, and grateful for support in putting that horror into words.

There are many brain-dumps on here. Some are mocking, some are furious, or disgusted. I won’t be deleting anything – we still have implied freedom of political communication in our liberal democracy – but I am changing my style. Sane people change their behaviour when circumstances around them change. As Einstein observed, to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different outcome amounts to insanity.

What has changed?

I no longer trust my own government. I do not feel that it is safe for me to furiously and hastily say what I think of government actions (in the hasty immoral way that the press does to the Muslim community). I am afraid that the brain-dump approach risks attracting the attention of a band of heavily armed men with the legal power to use force against me. If I wrote in haste what I really think of the Abbott government and its oppressive nonsense, I would be afraid for my children. As many Australians know only too well, particularly the Aboriginal community and now the Muslim community, children are deeply traumatised by heavily armed men breaking down your front door and using legal force against innocent civilians. And yes, they are civilians. They are not members of the armed forces of a nation state. And yes, they are innocent. We have the presumption of innocence in this country. You are innocent until proven guilty in a properly constituted court of law. And so am I.

So.

I have decided to try and make sense of events in Australia on 23-24 September 2014 using evidence-based arguments instead. I would rather scribble off an angry rant about the ugly rhetoric and extreme violence being deployed around Australia on the flimsiest – or absence – of evidence. But that is dangerous now. Here is my thinking on the danger: armed agents of the Australian government are convinced or deluded about the level of terror threat to Australians; and impervious to their role in increasing that threat. And because they are probably convinced and likely deluded and definitely impervious, they might accidently mistake a middle-aged mother of three sitting at her computer for a threat to national security.

I have written before on the clash of civilisations thesis, I have drawn on theology and history and law and peace studies and international relations and political economy to make sense of the rhetoric about what is happening in Iraq and here. Today, I think the news stories are best addressed using intersectionality, a recent development in our understanding across social categorisers such as class, race and sex. In particular, intersectionality brings together critical race theory with feminism, where race theory also illuminates (religious) sectarianism.

In the current climate, adherents of the Muslim faith are conflated with any person ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ (whatever that means). Muslims are conflated with all Arabs, who frequently bear a striking physical resemblance to Jews, both being of Semitic ethnic origin (whatever that means). The facts do not get in the way of government and media enthusiastically reproducing ethno-religious stereotypes to foment fear in the Australian population, so we need to make sense of both.

What we have been told

This comes from the joint press release issued by the Victorian and Australian Federal Police. An 18 year old man was wanted for questioning. He agreed to meet police at 8.00pm on Tuesday 23 September at Endeavour Hills in Victoria. He carried a knife. He used the knife to stab two officers. He was shot dead. His name is reported to be Numan Haider.

There are conflicting statements about what kind of threat the teenager posed before agreeing to meet police to answer questions. It is said he was under surveillance for at least two months, and had been seen by authorities to be acting ‘strangely’. Some say it was suicide by cop. This is as plausible as any other hypothesis. Such events typically involve a young man with a mental illness (depression can be fatal: its worst outcome is suicide). A young man who had been acting strangely and voluntarily attended a police station for questioning is as likely a candidate as any other to seek suicide by cop.

The other explanations are various versions of this: the young man was a terrorist, an extremist who hates our way of life. He was simultaneously a lone wolf even though the entire Australian community is under threat from an organisation of terrorist Muslim extremists on another continent. So he is depicted as a representative of an organised group but acted alone and independently of them. He was a terrorist but this is not about Islam. But the group he represents calls itself Islamic State. There is no specific intelligence that the man made threats against the Prime Minister. But the loosely labelled ‘press’ has ‘reported’ that police killed a man who made threats against the Prime Minister. Imagine US security forces allowing a man to stab two officers while making threats against the President before shooting him. Plausible? No. This narrative is incoherent at best. Most of it is probably propaganda. As the old saying goes, the most effective lies contain a kernel of truth.

The context and the analysis

The police in Victoria, as elsewhere in Australia, have a long history of shooting young men dead. The young man may be unarmed or, more commonly, armed with a knife. One memorable incident at Bondi Beach involved multiple officers shooting and killing a mentally ill man who was wielding a knife. One of the officers who fatally shot Roni Levi was later convicted on drug charges.

You will search high and low, however, for news of a policeman shooting a woman, or a policewoman shooting anyone. Police have a deep and abiding interest in young men, particularly brown young men, or bearded young men, and especially black young men. Do not be any of those people, and the chances of being stopped, searched, detained, arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned go through the floor. Add poor. Poor young men. Our jails are full of young men with very little formal education, who are from low income areas. They are survivors of child sexual assault, bullying, physical abuse, neglect. Many have a mental illness, an intellectual disability, substance addictions, and histories of being victimized by, and then perpetrating, violence. This is the lot of many poor young men in contemporary Australia. It is a disgrace, but it is the case.

Across human history, these people were traditionally sent to war. They needed a role in society, and the role chosen for them by patriarchs is, typically, to be frontline guards of whatever territory the society regards as its own. This was seen as a good job for young men, and for the society. When young men are killed in the line of this duty, it is a tragic terrible loss for the young man’s family and friends, but for everyone else – namely, the patriarchs – it seems like an excellent idea to send young men to kill other young men at the ‘front’. The front is any border of the territory the society calls its own.

And so it is today, with two key exceptions.

The first exception is that we now send young women as well. This is stupid. Young women have the most crucial role in the survival of any society. No-one else can fulfil the function that young women can do. They do not have to fulfill this role in Australia if they do not want to, thank goddess. Or more specifically, thank feminism. Nevertheless, all patriarchies treat young women with contempt, as human incubators, and ignore their rights. Patriarchies are violent and careless towards women; and lie about the singular, crucial role young women play in the survival of humanity. Using threats of force and actual force to ensure its own survival is a classic behaviour of any patriarchy. It is ugly and cruel, but it is the case.

To reiterate: It is a social fact that we fail to honour the humanity of young women. It is a scientific fact that no-one else, no-one but young women, can do what young women do for the survival of humanity. To hold any other position is to remain deaf to the lies told by the patriarchs.

And the patriarchs tell many lies. These are dangerous lies. Lies which cause massive, tangible harm to humanity and to the planet. Patriarchs dishonour young women for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs send young men to war for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs plunder and poison the planet for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs tell more lies to cover up the true power-seeking purposes of their dishonourable and bloodthirsty actions. This is so whether they are white patriarchs or black patriarchs or Muslim patriarchs or Christian or Zionist patriarchs. Yes we get the odd Golda Meir or Maggie Thatcher. They are women, but they operate a patriarchal paradigm It is not that a woman can not imitate a patriarch. Some choose to, and some are really quite good at that. It is that we can not imagine an alternative reality where young women are honoured for their crucial capability and young men are found something more constructive and less abhorrent to do than kill other young men.

Which brings us to the chief patriarch in 2014 Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Here are some grabs from his statement in response to the shooting of an 18 year old man.

“It is clear that there are people in our community who are capable of very extreme acts”.

Yes it is. Are any of these people young women? Are any of them matriarchs? Are some of them young men and some of them patriarchs?

“I have spoken to the wives of both the officers concerned”.

The Prime Minister did not discuss the international meeting he is attending and the global response to terrorist acts. He did not outline our foreign policy objectives in the face of terrorist threats. He did not even have to imply that the dead young man was planning a terrorist act, regarding which no evidence has been released.

The AFP has categorically stated that there is no specific evidence of a threat to the Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister has categorically stated that he has “spoken to the wives of the officers concerned.” Remember what our alliance in Iraq is called this time? It is called the Coalition of the Concerned. Abbott is our chief patriarch, keeping Australian women and children safe from the barbarians at the gate. Sending young men (and now women) to do it.

Many will not be convinced by this analysis. Some will complain that I have left out a detail here, or omitted context there. Well, yes. Yes I have. That is what writers do. We choose to tell this story, and by choosing this story, we discard every other story there is to be told. We choose this particular story for a reason, and we often provide those reasons. My reason for choosing to present the particular analysis I have presented here is because the cognitive dissonance is so great. The only framework for understanding the events of 23-24 September 2014 in Australia available to me and my experiences is the frame of the violence and deceptions reproduced by patriarchs. It will not work for everyone.

A final word on when the penny dropped that the violence and deception of patriarchs would clarify my understanding of this uglier Australia the Prime Minister is determined we should be, regardless of facts on the ground.

Each morning I wake to an ABC radio news bulletin. I set my clock radio to 6.00am and the theme rings out and I listen to the news and weather as I begin preparing for the day. For the last few days the lead story has been the Australian Prime Minister’s decision to send the country to war again. Each piece of rhetoric I hear, every piece of propaganda dressed up as rational argument, from the so-called experts and leaders and commentators, describes the disregard our enemy has for humanity. Each description also communicates exactly what “we” are doing to “them”. Over and over I heard a head of security, or intelligence, or government, or police, using language that would not be out of place at a fiery sermon from the middle ages. Or at a radical mosque, temple, synagogue, or tent of the roller variety. It all sounds the same. I heard someone saying of the enemy that ‘some people are attracted to the thought of the end of days’. Well Christians certainly are. It is all there in the Book of Revelations.

The sad thing , the cause for despair, is this. The task of demonising the “other” is an easy one, because there the patriarchs have been doing it for centuries. It is embedded in the languages and cultures that have sprung from across the ancient world, in the collective memory of humanity.

This leaves me in no doubt that there are patriarchs of communities across Australia preaching hate. Here’s the main difference between these various patriarchs of various cultures, languages and faiths, from my perspective.

Our chief patriarch is waxing lyrical about the barbarians at the gate, with very little evidence. (By waxing lyrical I mean Abbott is awkwardly stumbling over his words which contain either religious imagery or vacuous rhetoric or both). I do not doubt the blood thirsty intent and actions of Islamic patriarchs in Iraq and Syria. I do doubt that Islamic extremists represent as serious a threat to Australians as we are told.

I also do not doubt the blood thirsty intent and actions of patriarchs in the USA and Australia. We are going to other peoples’ countries to blow up human beings and their ancestral homes, from a massive (and probably previously safe) distance.

I most certainly do not doubt that our current actions will ensure that the rate of slaughter of women and children in Iraq and Syria, by us and by them, will become much much worse. And it is women and children who ensure the survival of humanity.

The Australian government has decided that Australian taxpayers should spend half a billion dollars per year fighting a war against someone.

Not so long ago we had a budget emergency. We were drowning in a debt and deficit disaster. The problem was so dire that it justified starving people under 30 to death. It justified gouging pensioners to see a doctor. It justified disinvesting in people with disabilities, disinvesting in universal education, hindering access to university for all but the wealthy. This talking down of the economy as though there is no relationship between confidence and economic growth justified gutting the most important 21st century infrastructure and productivity boost the country ever attempted, a national high speed broadband network. These appallingly brutal policies, which are terrible for business and consumer confidence and will have a negative multiplier effect, had to be installed because the government’s political opponents. That is the argument. Plus something about poor people and car ownership. Really. Leaving aside foreign minister Julie Bishop, who has stood loftily above mundane domestic issues like whether young people can eat, we have a room full of white men and one wannabe white man, a group whose combined education cost millions. Here is what they decided: hey we can kick the poor people yay because the Labor Party.

So we are dealing with a bunch of heartless economic illiterates for whom power is its own end. They do not want political power to run the country for all Australians, to invest in our future, or to make sensible fiscal decisions based on a coherent ideology and our shared, national future. They do not even have a coherent ideology. They did once, but it has been jettisoned. Cogency? Principles? Values? Nah, no need. This is the age of neoliberalism gone mad, a ramshackle outfit of nasty incompetent brutes who have their greedy hands on the levers of power and are determined to bring the rest of Australia across to their grim and destructive outlook. That way they are returned to power, and that is all they seek. Nothing more.

When domestic politics go wrong, as with the spectacular failure of this first Coalition budget since 2007, men in power look for a distraction and a common enemy. I would call this an old trick except it is something more serious than a trick. It is a tired unimaginative political ploy, but it is also stupidly expensive and globally destructive. The current Australian government has chosen ISIS. Or ISIL. Or is it Islamic State. Hard to know.

We could be spending half a billion dollars a year on foreign aid. Or combatting Ebola. Or re-building Gaza, a recurring, urgent need that will never go away, or not for as long as Israel refuses to get over itself. We could invest that money in education, or health, or infrastructure. We could just distribute it evenly across the Australian population and save millions in welfare compliance costs. It would pay for itself in the year, easily. But instead, the government is pouring massive amounts of our own money into scaring the shit out of us. For the same old shitty reason: to stay in power. That is it, that is all. Nothing more.

Putting to one side all the constructive efforts in foreign affairs we could be doing instead, here is the problem with naming the enemy. The enemy calls itself Islamic State. This is clever. It is brief and pithy and to the point. Islamic, and a state. No need to use the word caliphate, but a caliphate is clearly implied. It is the same with the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad. Apart from colonial imperatives, which were numerous and powerful, Pakistan was created as the territory neighbouring India for people of the Muslim faith, and as such named its capital Islamabad. It is nigh on a teetering failed state, of course. No people can be at the whims and tides of colonial imperatives for centuries and then be expected to function democratically when the coloniser cuts and runs. It never works, and it will never work again in Iraq and Syria.

For a while, the news media went along with most Western leaders and called Islamic State Islamic State. There was an exception, however, and an important one. President Obama resolutely and consistently referred to ISIL. This is an acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Obama conspicuously did not refer to ISIS, the alternative acronym which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This week, the Australian Prime Minister finally got the memo and switched his language too. He had already committed the death and destruction machines, the money, and the human beings, to fighting this super terrible threatening horrific terrorist terrorist terrorist threat. Remember, it is a threat. No Australian has been harmed in any way. Then yesterday the Prime Minister also worked out what he was supposed to call the enemy. Well done, Tony.

Words matter. Words are powerful and influential and important. Using words in war is always as important as the killing machines. This is why we quote the ancient and modern iterations of that famous phrase ‘the first casualty of war is truth’. It goes to such truisms as ‘we have to win the battle for hearts and minds’. So naming the enemy is a pretty basic starting point for committing our country’s resources – human and capital resources – to an obviously poorly considered, expensive, unwinnable war.

Here’s the thinking behind the words, or the best explaination I can figure, which is not easy, because I don’t think the way these war-mongering idiots think.

Naming the enemy by its own preferred moniker is giving succour to the enemy. We can not call Islamic State Islamic State because we want to demonise its Islamicness but not credit it with statehood. It is a powerful armed group seizing territory by force, just like England and France and Spain and Portugal and all the other imperial powers have done in the past. But we must not allow this now because Islam. Or democracy. Or subjugation of women. Take your pick.

Or barbarian hoards at the gate. Aha. Here it is. Invoking barbarism is a typical appropriation by imperial powers, in this case of the Berber identity, dehumanising and demonising a whole group of people. The Greeks saw the Berber as ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’ as they came from across the Mediterranean, the sea at the middle of the territory. The Berber of the ancient world, from North Africa, or the Mughrabe, provide the linguistic origin of the imagery invoked by barbarism. Much the same was done to the Philistines by those who wanted their country and identity. The Philistines are the Palestinians, and thus it is a cinch to invoke notions that Palestinians are uncivilised in the western/Christian mind. Bethlehem and Nazareth are of course in Palestine, hence the desire of the Christian west to appropriate Palestinian identity and cast a whole people as deserving of subjugation, dehumanisation and, in the case of Western support for Israel, mass murder.

Whatever, just keep arming this side or that and profiteering from the sale of weapons and the deaths of human beings. This is obviously the work of violent and inept men in thrall to the military-industrial complex, but it is unfashionable to say so.

That little journey through geo-political history and nomenclature brings us to why Obama and now Abbott call the enemy ISIL and not ISIS today. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria presents a problem: it names Syria. The western intervention wants to stop at the imaginary line, drawn by colonial powers in the first place, between Iraq and Syria. As the enemy has so neatly captured in its name, the actual human beings who live there did not consent to this border, and it has been used ever since by powerful leaders for their own ends rather than for the good of local populations. Iraqis and Syrians have always had cross-border family and friendships and tribal connections and enmities and all the other relationships that humans create. But it suited Assad and other Syrian and Iraqi leaders before him to go along with the borders of a nation state. As Palestinians know only too well, it is nigh on impossible to function in the contemporary world without the rights and interests that are conferred with the existence of a nation state with borders. This is so for individuals and for groups, for societies and religions and polities. It is a relatively recent development, and it feeds all sorts of violence and problems and vested interests of rich and violent men. But there it is.

Australians tend to overlook the significance of borders and the colonial powers that created them at huge cost and heartbreak for local populations because our borders are so clearly delineated. As a great big island continent, we know where we are and who we are more clearly than possibly any other country. It is only when some minor short-lived clamour is raised, like that around our navy entering Indonesian waters to tow back asylum seekers – more human costs and misery – that we are reminded that we even have borders with other countries.

The point of writing Syria out of the story is that its regime has killed almost 200,000 of its own citizens in just three years. This mass slaughter, this crime against humanity, this revolting atrocity, is not apparently worthy of Western intervention. So if we name the enemy Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, we risk awkward questions about our failure to give two hoots about the lives of the Syrian people. And as the meme goes, awkward questions are awkward. So to spare the sensibilities of a gung-ho war mongering buffoon like Abbott, we don’t mention the war. Or not the Syrian civil war.

That leaves the final label, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This one is tricky. The ancient world was understood and labelled as Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the Mughrabe. Mesopotamia centred on modern day Iraq. Think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The starting point of Abraham’s journey. The Levant is further west. Think the twelve tribes of Israel. Hold that thought. And finally, the Mughrabe, the northern swathe of the African-Arab world. It stretches across much of the area where the Arab Spring, that moment of hope, originated.

Why on earth would we in the west choose this invocation of the Levant, with its anachronistic imagery and biblical overtones, to refer to our present-day enemy?

Easy. It triggers all the associated geo-political and religious imaginations, the clash of civilisations thesis. It implies that Israel is in danger, again. Israel is always in danger in its collective Israeli mind despite being the most heavily armed territory in the region, with the fourth biggest army in the world, on a permanent war footing and undisclosed numbers of nuclear warheads. Saying ISIL feeds this and other useful imagery. It implies the backwardness of those violent sectarian Arabs, always at war with each other. It erases the massive damage wreaked upon the region by the imperialist west, from colonial times to the 2003-09 carpet bombing of Iraq. It shifts responsibility from us, us who clearly have the most fire-power, global power, and capacity to harm. It simultaneously evokes biblical overtones while managing to imply that Muslims are sword-wielding primitives who nevertheless pose a grave terrible horrific terrorist terrorist terrorist threat to our way of life over here in wealthy, distant, peaceful Australia.

And remember, it is still a threat and a threat alone. No single Australian has been harmed by the enemy. Not one.

Responses used by Israeli officialdom each time the state is exposed as having acted in violation of international law, or inhumanely, or immorally, or with extremely poor judgement.

1. Israel does not comment on security matters.
2. Israel denies it violated international law.
3. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
4. Hamas are terrorists.
5. The IDF is the most moral army in the world.
6. Israel has acted decisively to discipline the IDF member/Israeli citizen.
7. Arabs in Israel have more rights than in any Arab country.
8. Israel is under existential threat.
9. Israel has a right to defend itself.
10. Israel has a right to exist.
11. Israel is surrounded by enemies.
12. Israel wants peace.
13. Israel has no (viable) partner in peace.
14. Iran wants nuclear weapons.
15. There are other, worse human rights violations around the world.

These responses have been successful in maintaining the position of Israel as the Jewish state, and its influence in the world. This is so regardless of the passionately debated and ultimately repetitive reasons put forward by Israel for its military campaigns. None of the major world players, from the Middle East Quartet to the United Nations Security Council, has ever halted or prevented Israeli military action. The ‘Middle East Quartet’, by the way, is basically everyone: its membership is the USA, Russia and the EU and the UN itself.

At 05.16 hours this morning Tuesday 16 June 2014 that old fashioned charmer Tim Blair confirmed his hysterical fear of intelligent articulate women: http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/crown_our_crazy_queen/

While the gracious Dee Madigan suggested that no lefty femmo would be so crass as to post a response, I had no such qualms. Except perhap a small qualm about responding to Blair’s list of formidably fabulous women by naming the chief whitemansplainers (neologic credit: Celeste Liddle) who should be wanted for crimes against humanity, and the English language.

Here is my mirror call.

They blather, they jabber, they drone. They crow of their “democratic” victory (that’s the Abbott government, to you and me) from the towers of triumphalism, these chicken hawking megaphone kings. They are Australia’s dominant elite; oppressive, mendacious members of the white man ruling class NOT ALL WHITE MEN (why, a decent white man raised me – to think for myself). Their sexist, racist, homophobic (/self-hating) poor-hating chorus rises in ridiculousness to a panicked stampede following the rise and rise of today’s smart articulate women.

Only one of them can reign as our solitary shepherd of the petrified men-sheep. Only one can run screaming down the same road with all the others, clambering over each other to complain, whine and whinge that the women are out of the kitchen, and the First Peoples are asserting the universal rights that are inherent to us all. Who is the most threatened by intelligent voices everywhere? I can’t list the choices of frightened white man commentariat or I’d be sick in my mouth and besides, you know them already.

Recently I finished re-reading the Steinbeck masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. Re-reading books is an old habit of mine, from childhood days when I used to run out of books to read. Like most people I know, books pile up by the bed these days, half- or un-read as deadlines loom and children are ferried about the countryside. Re-reading is rarer, a forgotten pleasure. It is easy company. There is no urgency. You know what happens. The book is an old friend to be curled up with at night in the sure knowledge that the prose is comfortingly exquisite, the finale the same.

A few weeks ago my daughter, frustrated with her homework on the equally grim Steinbeck novella Of Mice and Men, decided to clean out the shed instead. She is that kind of person. I can think of no better way to pass a rainy weekend than in bed with a good book. My daughter and her metabolism start climbing the internal walls, silently and not-so-silently screaming for physical action. Hence the shed project, in which The Grapes of Wrath was re-discovered and thence re-read.

I had not forgotten much of this “terrible, indignant” book, as it is billed. Every pivotal scene was seared on my memory as it emerged – the crushed skull of the ex-preacher, Ma’s cold resistance to praise-the-lord flagellants, the Native American mechanic who befriends Tom Joad, and that final scene. In the end, which we know is neither end nor new beginning, the Joads stumble away from the flooded lowlands and across a starving family of two in the barn on the hill to which they flee. The once plump and simple Rose of Sharon has been pregnant throughout the book, until her starving bub is born lifeless in the midst of flooding rain that washed away the work. On hearing the crying boy, who tells how his whose dying lied about not being hungry, Rosasharn shares the one sustenance she has to give with the starving man. It is love, and human dignity, it is gift and spirit and sharing to the ultimate end, but it is terrible, too terrible to contemplate. This, says Steinbeck, in the closing pages: this, in the most powerful nation on earth.

Of course it could never happen here. This fucking refrain makes me screamingly angry. Wall-climbingly, hair-rippingly, arm-wavingly furious. Yes, it could. In fact, it is. Jesus said the poor will always be with us, I heard an arrogant man of god intone tonelessly on the radio this afternoon. He was one of those complacent conservative types from some wealthy diocese or bishopric or whatever its called, the Sydney one which is home to needle-eye squeezing camels, and which lost tens of millions of parishioner dollars in the 2008 global financial crisis. I assume the god-fearing merchant bankers knew their tithes were being gambled on the stock market, and did not care. What with the tens of millions of tax payer dollars rolling through the place in the form of massive government contracts to outsource the essential social services that are the responsibility of the state.

This corrupt and Christian-less rort allows the non-tax paying church to profiteer from the taxpayer while risking its actual income to enrich itself. Or not, in the case if the poor management and judgement exercised in the greedy noughties, indistinguishable from the greedy neoliberal radicals of the nineties. It is also how the government is obscuring our march toward radical US-style “free” marketeering ideology and, thus, government policy.

The poor will always be with us, intoned the man of god. Yes, yes they will for as long as people like you commandeer huge portions of available assets. And make no mistake, the wealthy few, the neo-liberal government and this man of god are all cut from the same cloth. But surely, said the interviewer to the man of god, a state stipend is about human dignity? Must we force the unemployed to go cap in hand to a religious organisation?

And there it is. We are not simply dumping the poor on the street. We are providing a safety net. We do not let people starve in this country. We fund, with taxes, religious organisations to perpetuate and reproduce the crashing failure of the charity model, which is designed to not let Jesus be wrong, and ensure the poor are always with us.

I am talking every category of poor, it does not matter whether we are talking homelessness or disability or Aboriginality or homelessness. Poor is poor, and poor means worse health, higher rates of imprisonment, greater need of urgent and unaffordable dental care, worse education outcomes. The evidence is in. We do not need to prop up more research communities or caring industries or government departments: poor is poor, and goods and services cost money. Either the tax payers provide essential services to those who can not afford them, or they suffer. Where the state under-invests in health and education, and over-invests in force (police, guns, tasers, batons, prisons, wars, ‘defence’ personnel and their eye-wateringly expensive equipment and perks) the problems compound. Even viable solutions like public dental clinics, cost more than the initial fix would have been, once this compound decay sets in for, would have been.

This, the state says, is the fault of the poor. It is not. It is the fault of economic management so bad it beggars belief that its architects are still able to take to the microphones and spout words like ‘economic management’. Those touts have little to no understanding of basic economic relationships, relationships such as that between investment and return on investment, or confidence and expectations, or credit and trust. This is not conspiracy. No conspiracy is required. They all respond the same because they all think the same. Not one has ever been hungry. But they will tell you they have been poor. The code word, the one to look out for, is struggle. I have known struggle, a complacent suited white man in the pink of health will assure an uncritical media representative, failing to mention that it was a pre-selection struggle or some other effort, equally meaningless to anyone but the club. They have never known night after night with a sick child (if they had, we would have heard about it), or no money for school excursions, or shame so intense it renders you immobile. You can be sure they have not struggled with the decision as to whether to share their dead baby’s milk with a grown, starving man. Well, nor did Rosasharn. As Steinbeck tells it, she did not struggle with that decision at all.