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Another temporary 10 Things while sites migrate…

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Tyrannicon

Yes, TheVine is tidying up the internets again so, in the interests of putting things in places they can be seen, here’s a sneaky 10 Things. Or you can read all my old 10 Things bits here.

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10 Things: Revvin’ up the class war with Diamond Joe Hockey

Your slightly-delayed plunge into the heart of current affairs darkness

Diamonds are the poor’s best friend!

Diamond Joe Hockey, your federal treasurer, is very, very good at thinking things that are not true reflections of reality.

For example, he thinks that the budget will somehow pass – which, three months and counting since it was presented, seems ambitious.

He thinks that Australia is in a debt crisis which – as we never tire of pointing out – absolutely nobody else does, including the sorts of economists that he’s been perfectly happy to champion when it suits him.

(And to parenthetically repeat the same tired thing we keep saying: there are things that could be done to address our level of interest repayment that would be good to do, since that stuff does get more expensive, but a) it’s prudent, not urgent and b) that’s not at all what the government is doing right now in any case.)

But the biggest delusion that Diamond Joe has is the notion that poor people are much better off than the rest of Australia, based – as best I can work out – on the following reasoning:

1. The poorer someone is, the less tax they pay

2. I, as Federal Treasurer making $397,869 per year before adding my additional $150k-odd salary as an MP for North Sydney, pay a large tax bill every year

3. Poor people don’t get hit with these sorts of bills

4. Therefore the poor have it better than I do

…or he might just straight up not give a shit, of course. That’s also a possibility.

In any case, he wanted to increase the fuel excise earlier this year, a move that was blocked in the Senate (somewhat controversially, by the Greens) and was bitching and moaning about how this was a tax that was going to affect the rich more than the poor and was therefore equitable. Keep in mind that this tax didn’t pass, by the way.

Here’s what Diamond Joe Hockey, your federal treasurer and grown adult, said on radio yesterday:

“What we’re asking is for everyone to contribute, including higher-income people. Now, I’ll give you one example: the change to fuel excise. The people that actually pay the most are higher-income people, with an increase in fuel excise, and yet the Labor party and the Greens are opposing it. They say you’ve got to have wealthier people or middle-income people pay more. Well, change to the fuel excise does exactly that; the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases. But they [Labor and the Greens] are opposing what is meant to be, according to the Treasury, a progressive tax.”

Oh Diamond Joe, you adorable melonhead.

Where to start?

How being poor in Australia works

First up, let’s very quickly abandon the use of “progressive” when talking about a flat tax.

Flat taxes (as in taxes that are not staggered by income) like a fuel excise always hit those at the bottom more heavily because the effect of spending an extra $10 on petrol makes a much smaller difference if you make $1500 a week compared with $120. All flat taxes punish the poor for being poor by making them poorer. This principle also applies to the proposed Medicare co-pay, of course.

In fact, the Australian parliamentary library research paper entitled Petrol and Diesel Excises, published in 2000, said as much: “petrol and diesel excises are regressive in that people on low incomes pay a higher proportion of their incomes in the form of excise than people on high incomes, given the same level of fuel use”. So the literal opposite of “progressive”, then.

It’s also worth adding that the figures that he used to make his claim showed the opposite of his claim: even accepting that individual high income earners are spending more on petrol, “households in the highest quintile spent 1.37% of their income on petrol and those in the lowest quintile spent 4.54%“.

Then let’s move on to the fact that most of Australia’s jobs are in and around the biggest population centres, and most of the affordable housing is not.

Australia’s population clusters around the five biggest cities, and poor people tend to live out of the city and away from the desirable coasts – in Brisbane and Sydney that’s the outer west, in Adelaide the outer north and south, in Melbourne the outer north and west, and in Perth there’s a cluster around the airport in the industrial eastern suburbs.

Where the cheap houses are not, however, is in the inner suburbs near all the jobs and easy transport.

The further away from the CBD you get, the lousier the public transport becomes. In Sydney and Melbourne the outer suburban public transport is, to use a technical term, shit. In Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, it’s basically useless: if you need to be somewhere by a specific time, such as for a job you need a car. This is especially true if you also have a family and want to see them at all.

Poor people tend not to have great jobs where they can lob in whenever they fancy it. Many have shift jobs with inflexlible start times and stern supervisors who don’t take kindly to “sorry, there’s trackwork on this week”-style excuses.

So for the working poor of Australia, if you have a low-paying job and you live a distance away from it, a car is a necessary investment if you want to avoid being fired.

And what sort of car do poor people buy? Do they buy excellent brand new hybrids with great fuel economy? No, they do not: they buy old second and third-hand shitboxes that guzzle fuel, because they are cheap.

So, to recap:

A significant majority of Australia’s poor people drive a lot by necessity as they live and work in distant, badly-serviced areas, and they drive old inefficient cars.

So, Joe, let’s try that again: explain why the rich will be affected more by fuel excise than the poor. Go on. Give it a shot.

Beep beep, beep beep, yeah!

Of course, there’s also the fact that Diamond Joe is already perfectly aware that lower income people are driving cars. How do we know this? Not just because the demographics are blindingly obvious, but because the federal and state governments are using said demographics to sell big showy infrastructure projects.

And note that these big showy infrastructure projects are not, say, new rail corridors or dedicated bus lanes or bikeways or any of those other utopian bullshit: projects like the Perth Light Rail, Brisbane Cross River Rail and the Melbourne Metro have all been axed, as have planned (and much, much needed) expansions and developments on the Sydney rail network.

No, instead we’re getting big disruptive expensive road developments. The East-West in Melbourne, the second lane to the Southern Expressway in Adelaide, West Connex in Sydney: there’s no shortage of the things.

Governments love that stuff because they get to look all masculine with shovels turning earth, they get to go “this is a huge boon for employment!” and not mention that the bigger the project the more likely the investment is coming from (and profits will be going to) companies outside of Australia, and that they don’t work especially well if they work at all.

Either they charge so much for tolls that people actively avoid them (there’s no drive in Australia more peaceful and solitary than 20-odd minute drive along the toll roads from Brisbane airport to the city – and it costs only slightly more than would a similar-length massage) or they merely facilitate the congestion they seek to alleviate – after years of forcing traffic onto alternative routes while the things are being built, of course.

And if those new roads happen to raze low income areas, bringing with them with noise, traffic and compulsory acquisition at below market rates – well, it’s not like those people are voting for the Coalition in the first place, are they?

Then again, Diamond Joe couldn’t care less about what you think

Of course, Diamond Joe doesn’t need you and your stinking legislation to make random, painful cuts. He can just stop paying people whenever he likes because he’s the treasurer and therefore has access to the money-spigot.

That’s his latest threat to the Senate: start passing some shit without negotiations, or I start cutting and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing! Mwaaa hahahahahaha! [thunder crash]

“Either we make the decisions now or you end up doing what [Premier] Campbell Newman and [Treasurer] Tim Nicholls have had to do in Queensland, and that is take emergency action in order to address the problem you inherit.”

Cool, Joe. Just start cutting, then, rather than obeying the tenets of democracy. Let’s see how much the Australian public will thank you at the ballot box.

And given the shakiness of the Liberal governments in Victoria and NSW, who both will be facing state elections inside of a year, we’re certain the party are really, really keen for you to basically dare voters to punish the party further.

He’s also doubled down on his claims today, saying he’s sorry if you’re too greedy and stupid to understand facts. You know, ones he made up.

“The fact of the matter is that I can only get the facts out there and explain the facts, how people interpret them is up to them,” he said, factfully.

So, remember: you’ve got the weekend of August 30 and 31 down in your diary for March in August, right? It’s going to be the biggest yet – with heaps of regional centres joining in, because we’re an awesome country and we’re all in this together.

Mark your diaries, like and share on Facebook, and start working on your posters now!

Cooler heads, keep on prevailing

On the slightly more plus side, the Gaza ceasefire has been extended by another five days, even in the face of the occasional rocket fire and air strikes, as both sides claim they are close to reaching some sort of agreement over a more lasting truce before wading back into long-term peace negotiations. Baby steps, team. We’re taking baby steps.

The negotiations are taking place in Cairo and Azzam al-Ahmad, head of Palestine’s negotiation team, explained “We had two options: not to reach an agreement, or to extend the ceasefire. And in the final minutes we decided to extend the ceasefire by five days until Monday.”

It appears that some positive outcomes have been negotiated – including breaking the siege to allow supplies to travel into Gaza and allowing their fisherman access to the Mediterranean – but security issues are the sticking point. It’s not 100% clear what those are, but they’re thought to include Israel requiring the disarmament of Hamas, which… yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Still: every day without missiles is a good day, and this is more positive discussion than has happened in months. Fingers are painfully crossed.

Meanwhile, in African pandemics…

In perhaps less positive news, Nigeria is now definitely seeing cases of Ebola after late diplomat Patrick Sawyer inadvertently brought the disease on a flight from Liberia to the continent’s largest city, Lagos.

There are now eight confirmed cases in the city – including the guy sitting beside Sawyer on the plane and the nurse that treated him when he collapsed in the airport – and the WHO has calculated the the total number of cases including the outbreaks in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea are 1975, with 1069 deaths.

On the plus side, Lagos is richer than most other African countries and actually has facilities to treat infectious disease. On the other hand, it’s also a huge, largely undocumented and transient population in a city with no sanitation service, scattered medical networks, a less-than-corruption-free government and a nasty civil war brewing with the Boko Haram terrorist organisation. So, y’know, swings and roundabouts.

A good, hard trucking

And in our other favourite nightmare zone, Ukraine, the Russian aid convoy we talked about yesterday has been refused entry amid perfectly legitimate fears that it’s the precursor to a military invasion.

Russia insists that the 280-truck convoy contains nothing but humanitarian aid and that they just want to help. Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has countered that unless the aid is directly provided by the Red Cross, it ain’t crossing the border.

There’s also some doubt that the convoy is moving at all: Moscow insists that it’s heading to the border, although was coy about where exactly it was, while there are reports that they’re parked at Voronezh military base in Russia. Which isn’t likely to make anyone feel too relaxed about it, frankly.

Reports that Ukraine officials have also denied entry to a giant wooden horse could not be confirmed at press time.

Oh good, the internet’s full

And while today’s delay was due to technical problems – the site’s being migrated, y’see – it wasn’t due to the larger, more far reaching problem that the internet is now full.

See, as with the Y2K panic, back in the early days of the world wide superhighway digital net matrix, an arbitrary number was set as the maximum amount of “routes” that your commercial router could use to get through the interweb tubes. That number, which was obviously too high to ever be reached, was 512,000.

And guess what’s just happened?

It’s mainly because people are not just using computers to get on the internet: there’s tablets and phones and presumably neural implants if science fiction hasn’t been lying to us. There’s also a limit on the amount of IP addresses available, although making them alphanumeric has put that particular doomsday scenario on hold for a bit.

The newer routers have a much higher arbitrary limit so this only affects companies with older hardware in their voluminous server farms. So just the ones that have been around a while. Like, you know, most of the ones that the internet is based upon.

Get ready for more regular outages, internetanauts!

Mono-X-treme!

And finally, let’s get totally patriotic with a baby echidna. They’re called puggles, you know. Puggles! Oh, echidnas, you are truly the most underrated of monotremes and you are awesome. And happy Thursday!

The Whirlpool

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Tyrannicon

As my Facebook feed filled with people mourning the death of Robin Williams, seemingly by his own hand, I thought back to a conversation I had with my psychiatrist less than a week ago.

I only see him every few months now, more for a catch up than anything particularly medical, and he remarked on how mundane my issues were: professional stuff, logistics for my upcoming wedding, other domestic trivia, normal life stuff. And he also pointed out how it contrasted with what we’d discussed not 18 months earlier when I’d been explaining, in some detail, how I planned to kill myself.

“You’ve written about how difficult it is to go through therapy,” he said, “but have you thought about writing something about how much it’s helped you?”

And I said no.

How insufferably smug such a piece would be, I pointed out. If anything, it seemed to be tempting fate – like those New Idea happy couple celebrity photo spreads that turn up on the newstands just ahead of the divorce announcement.

And, I added, it’s hardly a big selling point to say to someone “once you get over your overwhelming desire to vanish, you’ll have the energy to deal with sorting out your mortgage”.

And then the Robin Williams news came through, and I was reminded of how much I’d notice every suicide when I was seriously depressed. “The writer and humourist Spalding Gray opted out,” I’d tell myself, “and he was a hell of a lot smarter, funnier and more accomplished than you. Can’t help noticing you’re still here, though. Why is that?”

And so I wrote this.

—

In my experience, depression is a condition as mundane and annoying as diabetes: once you have it under control and make some lifestyle changes it’s pretty straightforward to maintain, and if you ignore it, it will absolutely, undoubtably kill you.

Everyone has their own metaphor for it. A friend of mine once referred to depression as “soul cancer”: deeply personal, infuriatingly hard to treat, and coming back just when she thought she’d beaten it. Others talk of the Black Dog or The Pit or The Tunnel.

For me, it’s always been a whirlpool. I can hear it rushing away behind me and the closer I am to the lip the more effort is required to paddle enough to retain my position, and I know that once I finally tip over I’m never going to be able to row my way back up again.

And there is nothing more tiresome than someone’s depression memoir (summary: depression is arse) so I’ll spare you the tales of unceasing lethargy, the inability to care less about anything, the bone-crushing certainty that things would never relent, much less improve, the vast swathes of wasted time. I’ll also leave out the nightmarish effect it had on the people I love most – my parents, my siblings, my partners, my friends – and the emotional debts that I’m never going to come close to repaying.

Instead, I want to tell a story that doesn’t get told all that often. It’s about how I found the right doctor and how then things started to get better.

I’ve seen psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors on and off since I was 15 years old and dealing with my father’s death from cancer, and every single one of them was useless.

Some were well meaning. Some were indifferent. Some attempted to convince me that I was a special precious snowflake that just needed to learn to love my own precious specialness. Some told me that the problem was that I was insufficiently motivated to try, with which I’d have argued had I any energy left after getting out of bed and putting on pants.

None of them – not one – was any help to me whatsoever.

Similarly, the medication I was put on was at best useless and at worst harmful. Most gave me side-effects that I was assured weren’t important enough to worry about, like the inability to concentrate and comprehensive sexual dysfunction. Being told that the ability to experience orgasm was trivial did little to convince me that these people weren’t idiots.

In any case, I had convinced myself through hard experience that meds and therapy were useless and dangerous for me and therefore I had zero intention of ever riding that particular pony again. Until I got seriously, suicidally depressed once again despite things being objectively decent in my day-to-day life and seriously doubted that I had the fortitude to cope.

My GP, bless him, listened to me as I broke down in his consulting rooms. He knew me well enough to know what a difficult, bloodyminded bastard I am. And he made a referral.

—

I saw my shrink for the first time and poured out how much I hated therapy, was not going to consider meds, and what a waste of time this all was and how I’d be better off walking into the ocean.

And he listened. And he asked some questions. And he took me seriously.

And then he said that he could help.

It would be hard, he made clear. There would be dead ends. He’d need me to trust him, and to be honest about my expectations and my experiences. And meds would probably be involved, but that he understood and agreed with my problems with side effects. “By the time someone walks in here, they’ve probably tried all the obvious solutions and they haven’t worked,” he explained.

And it did take a while. And it was hard. But – and this is important – it was not quite as hard as I expected. And each step made the next one easier.

—

So what’s the point of this?

It’s to let someone – maybe you – know that if you’ve been through the wringer of meds and shrinks and feel like it’s all bullshit, then you’re absolutely right. Those people you saw, unfortunately, were the wrong people. It’s like online dating: almost everyone you meet will be wrong for you. On the plus side, you’ve now eliminated them from the search.

And once you find that right person and things click, you’re more than halfway there.

Go to your GP and tell them that you’ve seen nothing but jerks so far, and add you’ve only got a finite amount of strength for this fight left so they’d better find you a therapist that’s pretty damn good. Be clear, and be blunt. And if you meet that therapist and think “…you have no idea”, go back to your GP and tell them to try again.

It made all the difference in the world for me.

These days I feel like I’m a mile or so upstream from the whirlpool. I can still hear it, and I probably always will. But the current is lazy and right now I can maintain my position without paddling furiously.

One day, if I’m not vigilant, I might drift further down and then I’ll be dashed to pieces. But not today.

Seriously. One more go. This could be the one, you know?

For help or information regarding depression, call Lifeline on 131 114 or visit beyondblue.org.au.

A rogue 10 Things (until the Vine is successfully live again)

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Tyrannicon

Friends, I take 10 Things very seriously and god knows it take long enough to write. So while The Vine is undergoing some technical rejiggery, here’s today’s column (at least until The Vine is back live again).

10 Things: Awwww, did the mean media make Diamond Joe sad?

The diamonds are his pretty, pretty tears

Poor Diamond Joe Hockey. All he wanted to do was pass a budget that would reward the wealthy for all their lifting, punishing everyone else for their recalcitrant leaning, and stop spending money on all that dumb “helping people” stuff that’s totally for jerks – and then the media come along and start bullying the government for figures under Freedom of Information requests! Why, the very idea!

Now, usually the Treasury make their modelling public when they issue a budget, because it means that the media can very quickly do their traditional “what does this budget mean for YOU?” spread with pages and pages of pretty infographics and some photogenic families and go-getting young people and elderly couples and so on.

So everyone thought it a bit odd back in May when the budget announcement was not accompanied by these figures, despite this government loudly insisting that it’s all about accountability and transparency.

Of course, now we know why: because it would have lead to multi-page spreads showing shocked elderly people wondering which cat food they’ll be eating for the rest of their lives, young people facing a mortgage’s-worth of debt to complete a degree and families wondering how bad the baby’s cough should get before they consider seeing a doctor, with a mining baron criticising their laziness from atop a throne made of discarded environmental laws.

And that’s not quite as good a look.

So, in other words, the government knew full well what its budget was going to look like, who would be the winners (the very wealthy), the not-winners (the upper-middle class) and the absolute losers (everyone else), and they deliberately withheld that information because they felt that there are limits to both transparency and accountability.

And oh, the tantrum that Joe threw yesterday!

Those figures don’t tell the whole story! What Fairfax said “does not represent the true state of affairs”! They “fails to take into account the massive number of concessional payments such as discounted pharmaceuticals, discounted transport, discounted childcare that goes to lower-income households”!

OK, said the media, show us the “whole story” using the supposed Cabinet documents which you’re claiming absolutely exist and show something other than that the government was entirely aware that lower-income households would be hit hardest by the budget.

And then things went eerily quiet, except for a statement via a spokesperson explaining that documents prepared for Cabinet are not covered by Freedom of Information laws.

So, to recap: Diamond Joe totally rejects the data that Treasury prepared for Diamond Joe, insists that he has much better data that refutes it, and won’t show it because he doesn’t have to. Which is a level of plausibility similar to that of Mark Mangan, who lived up the road from me when I was a kid and who insisted that he had every single Star Wars figure that was ever made, except they were in the attic and he wasn’t allowed to take people up there.

Seriously, Joe: your political capital is pretty much vapour at this point. Maybe people would actually respect you more if you gonaded up and said the truth: that of course treasury did the modelling, that obviously the government realised that the budget would favour the wealthy over the majority, and that this is precisely the point.

What, you think that we’ve not noticed all the welfare cuts, Work for the Dole schemes, plans to let unis raise fees and GP co-payments? We get it: this government wants to punish everyone that’s not wealthy and reward those that are. We understand what’s going here. This little dance just makes you look like a fool.

The Ministry of Love

The government might not care about you, but you know what they do care about? Love. Specifically, heterosexual love. More accurately, married heterosexual love – the only kind of love there is!

Your family services minister Kevin Andrews wants de facto couples to stop dithering and get married because de factos split up at a higher rate than married couples. The statistics, he assures us, don’t lie. Of course, he doesn’t provide any actual of these non-lying statistics, because that’s not something this government does.

However, it does make a certain immediate sense to think that maybe, just maybe, there’s a difference in the level of commitment between couples that spend a shitload of money and effort holding a public commitment ceremony in which they commit to making a lifelong commitment to one another, and couples who don’t.

Still, the divorce stats demonstrate almost half of those couples turn out to be wrong, so maybe making the commitment doesn’t somehow magically fix everything for some reason.

Marriages end, people split up, and it always sucks. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. Breaking up is arse.

Here’s the thing, though: So. Fucking. What. Question mark.

First up, Kev, before you suggest marriage as the cure-all panacea to human unhappiness, might we suggest that perhaps de facto relationships start for reasons other than making a lifelong commitment? It’s not that people don’t care, Kev. It’s simple household economics. You know, of the sort that Diamond Joe gets furious if papers dare to ask about.

For one thing, because housing is incredibly expensive in Australia – especially the biggest cities – a lot of people initially start living together less because they think they’ll be together forever and ever and ever and ever, and more because it’s cheaper than living separately and less disruptive than being the non-rent-paying part-time tenant in a sharehouse. You want to ensure people don’t live together too early, Kev? Start with doing something about spiralling rental costs.

Secondly – and I’m going to make this as clear as possible by using capital letters – BREAKING UP IS OK.

In fact, in almost all cases, breaking up is better than not-breaking up. It’s sure as hell more common. Think about it: how many breakups have you had? Now, how many unbroken lifelong commitments have you had? Is the first number greater than the second?

Kevin Andrews’ statement about how de facto splits and divorces are a stain on our society only makes sense if the point of all relationships is to meet and then stay together until at least one person dies – which is a ridiculous and largely impossible aim.

US sex and relationships advice columnist and stone-cold genius Dan Savage wisely said that “all relationships end until you’re in one that doesn’t, and you only find out which one that is when you’re dead”. Sure, nobody goes into a serious relationship thinking “sweet, this is going to be the ultimate love of my next-three-to-five-years!” but the idea that it’s better to stay in a situation that everyone hates than get into a situation where everyone’s far happier is just plain stupid.

“Look, people can enter into whatever relationship they want. That’s a matter for them,” K-dog said to News Ltd. “It becomes a question for the government and the community when relationships break up. The people who suffer the most out of relationships breaking up are kids.”

Kids suffer when parents are unhappy, Kev. And parents are unhappy if they’re forced to endure each other day in day out after their relationship has died. Again, if you really want people to be happy and therefore make things easier on the kids, charging $845 to apply for a divorce seems like adding insult to injury.

But you do get $200 towards you marriage counselling! $200! Why, that’s almost enough for a single session! Love is saved!

By-the-by, what was Kev’s pre-ministerial gig?

Relationship counselling is not a terrible idea, of course. But it’s also not a popular idea, as evidenced that 98,600 of the 100,000 vouchers he’s made available are still going begging.

And we’ll just quietly cough and suggest that a family services minister whose main idea for family services is to offer relationship counselling vouchers for relationship counselling services including the Catholic relationship counselling organisation founded by the family services minister and his wife might have something of an agenda at work.

Yes, they’re no longer financially involved in the Marriage Education Programme – but, as the About Us page makes clear,

“The Marriage Education Programme is an organisation approved and part-funded by the Federal Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The Marriage Education Programme is a member Agency of the Catholic Society for Marriage Education and Catholic Social Services Australia.”

…so your voucher can go a little way to clawing back the money you’ve already spent on the service that Kev and Mags founded. Thanks, Kev!

Seriously: ending a committed relationship is painful and expensive and stressful and time consuming. No-one does it for kicks. Pushing an agenda to slow the rate of divorce and of de facto breakups without addressing the reasons people split up (hey, maybe one of the parties has to move away to find work, since that’s something the government now thinks is perfectly reasonable!) is just plain stupid.

Gotta spend money to recover money!

If there’s one thing that we all know is a terrible idea, it’s having an educated and skilled populace. After all, what has knowing stuff ever done for us?

That’s why we all appreciate that universities are, at best, fripperies – pointless luxuries that have absolutely no bearing on the quality of human life. You know they’re worthless empty buildings, which is why surgery is carried out by enthusiastic amateurs on buses and sewerage systems were designed and built by helpful municipal elves.

So it just makes sense to stop funding them, and to make it cripplingly expensive for people to go there. Hey, we don’t subsidise the rollercoaster ticket prices at Australia’s Wonderland, so why should we support someone working tirelessly for years to learn to save human lives? They’re basically the same thing, right?

After all, the first question on applications for entry to a PhD programme in any discipline is “Are you enrolling in this course of higher study for a) shits or b) giggles?”

This is the opinion held by people who decide whether or not the Australian government should fund unis. And they should know, since they already have their degrees and therefore already have all the professional and personal benefits that accrue as a result. Privilege is only privilege when someone else has it, after all.

And if you’re one of the handful of Australians who got a degree, had a HECS debt and then fled the country like a dirty traitor, then get ready to start paying your debt back.

Christopher Pyne has already started work on putting together a debt recovery arrangement with the UK, because fuck you people. The Grattan Institute has caculated that a system could bring in as much as $177 million over two years. As the already-reduced budget for higher education is $8.97bn for 2013-14, that means we could recover a much-needed 0.001% of the money over those two years, minus whatever it costs to implement a worldwide system of income garnishing and debt recovery.

And on the face of it there’s a certain “that seems reasonable” element to it – hey, those of us that stayed in Australia gots to pay our HECS here after all – but there’s a serious question mark over the whole “would chasing after this money cost more to implement and enforce than it would ever hope to actually recover” thing, and the answer appears to be “yep, easily”.

Professor Chapman, director of policy impact at the Australian National University’s Crawford School, told reporters that bilateral debt recovery arrangements were “too much trouble and too political”. He also suggested that it would be easier just to make all overseas workers over the threshold pay the minimum payment of $2k a year instead, since it’s easier – and thus cheaper – to calculate. Debts get paid, cash goes back in the system, no need for expensive departments calculating tax rates on overseas currencies. Everybody wins!

But that ignores the fact that Pyne knows all too well: greedy students need to be punished for their damn book-learnin’ one way or another.

Dollars vs sense – see what we did there?

Of course, if the government wanted to save some pin money they might want to stop hiring celebrity speakers to address the Defence Department at $10k-plus a throw. Especially when they’re currently offering staff a below-inflation pay rise.

Negotiations are going on at the moment with the 20,000 civilians employed by the defence department, in which it’s been patiently explained that they’re getting a bump that in no way keeps parity with inflation. And that seems like reasonable belt tightening by a government desperately trying to maintain our financial survival – at least, it does provided that the government wasn’t also doing things like, say, dropping $50k flying out celebrity chef Shane Delia of Maha to knock up a spread for Diamond Joe’s gala G20 dinner in New York, which happened in April.

Now, let’s be honest: the government does have to spend money on flashy things so we don’t look cheap in front of the other countries. It’s just that it can’t simultaneously cry poor and then get a fancy new watch in the same afternoon.

But that’s because we’re not actually in a budget crisis. We can absolutely pay $10k for someone like Wil Anderson to MC an event (and he’s worth it too. Seen him live? The dude’s sharp as a tack, and it’s not an easy gig).

And that’s because there is no budget emergency. Just a common-or-garden class war.

Gaza: the fighting has stopped… for a bit…

…but it could all be back on by the time you read this. However, right now Israel and Hamas have agreed in principle to an Egypt-brokered 72 hour ceasefire that could kick in this morning, Gaza time, and open the way to some sort of a truce.

Representatives have agreed to travel to Cairo for meetings, and there is hope that it might even see the end of the siege of Gaza (although that’s only on the Egyptian side – which will inflame the already warm tensions between Israel and Egypt but let’s let that be a problem for down the road).

In the event that this actually does end the four-week war (and yes, it’s a fucking war) then the final tally is 64 Isreli military and three civilians vs over 1,800 Palestinians. So, y’know, draw your own conclusions as to who is a bigger threat to what.

On the sorta-plus side, those numbers are going to make it easier for the Israeli government to sell the idea to its people that it’s negotiating from a position of strength and therefore can stop the missile strikes. Conversely, Hamas need to find a way to sell a similar argument to not only the people of Gaza but the Palestinian people generally and especially the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which whom they’re attempting to hammer out a deal for political unity for the future of Palestine despite deep cultural differences. And that’s going to need some serious finesse.

But: let’s not look a gift truce in the mouth right now. Gaza might know a moment of peace shortly. God knows its people deserve it.

We R Legion

Meanwhile the war is continuing on the interwebs with Anonymous deciding that enough is enough and taking out various government sites, including that of Mossad – the Israeli secret service.

They’ve been clear that this isn’t an anti-Israel thing but an anti stop-bombing-the-shit-out-a-tiny-civilian-filled-stretch-of-land thing.

“As a collective ‘Anonymous’ does not hate Israel,” an anonymous spokesperson told Mother Jones in the US, “it hates that Israel’s government is committing genocide & slaughtering unarmed people in Gaza to obtain more land at the border.”

And it’s a PR win for the group, but we all know that Denial of Service attacks are annoying rather than destructive, right? You’re stopping people seeing a website, not bringing down their internal computer systems. If anything, the biggest disruption that’s going on is giving their online content managers an excuse to duck out early.

Plaguewatch!

If you were hjoping that the whole Ebola thing in western Africa was pretty much sorted… um, maybe you’ll want to postpone that Sierra Leone holiday for a bit.

Corpses have been reportedly lying in the streets of Liberia for days, not least because burial and medical teams have been fleeing for their lives after ebing run out of town by terrified communities. In fact, the army had to move in to protect a team clearing two corpses from a street in the capital of Monrovia.

Meanwhile Nigeria have their first confirmed local case after Patrick Sawyer collapsed and died after getting off a plane from Liberia. Now the doctor that treated him has tested positive for the virus in Lagos.

Oh, and now it’s been reported that the flight that brought Sawyer from Monrovia to Lagos also had stopovers in Ghana and Togo. So… um, yeah.

Ever played the iPad game Plague Inc? It’s really fun and interesting, right up until the point where you realise that it’s using WHO data and is basically playing out a series of terrifying human futures…

Except that you’re not going to die of Ebola

That being said, you have zero chance of catching Ebola unless you’re exposed to fluids from someone with the virus. And since you’re probably not in Africa, you can rest easy. Seriously, you’re going to be OK.

That’s worth making clear because already the internet is being flooded with panics at the moment. Ebola is very contagious, absolutely, and it’s got a higher than 50% mortality rate and is a horrible way to die… but you have to catch the thing first. Which you won’t, unless the virus is running rampant in your community. Which it isn’t.

And yes, Australian airports are already on the look out for anyone looking flu-y when they arrive. Plans are in place.

So, y’know, chill.

Moment of Joy

And finally, a tiny hamster in a tiny house. Yes, this is what we’re reduced to. I hope you’re happy, internets – happy like a Tuesday.

Malcolm Fraser interview

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Tyrannicon

First published in Time Out Sydney, August 2014

Australia’s 22nd Prime Minister asks, how many dangerous ideas can one person have?

Vale, sir.

Malcolm Fraser has been remarkably busy since leaving the Lodge in 1983. His legacy as PM is overshadowed by the circumstances under which it began – the Constitutional Crisis of 1975 that saw the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government – but over the last three decades Fraser has been a tireless advocate for refugee rights, Indigenous rights and greater Australian involvement in Asia.

Needless to say, these values do not align with the current government. Technically Fraser is no longer a member of the Liberal Party; he resigned in 2009 in protest of the party’s lurch to the right with new leader Tony Abbott. And he’s not shy when it comes to sharing his feelings on the matter.

Over the space of a half-hour conversation with Time Out, Fraser expresses his genuine, heartfelt disappointment in the current state of politics and is scathing about the “Abbott and [Julie] Bishop” government, and expressing his genuine concerns about the current geopolitical environment and the risks of continuing with our current military alliance with the US – which is what has inspired his new book, Dangerous Allies, and his upcoming appearance at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

“The major point is because of the uses of [the US-Australian joint satellite tracking facility] Pine Gap, which is capable of targeting drones almost in real-time and contributes to the arming of a number of highly-sophisticated US weapons systems, what used to be a defensive facility has in many ways become a thoroughly offensive one,” he explains. “And you’ve also got that [US] task force in Darwin, and the Prime Minister here talking about America maybe increasing the number, maybe establishing another task force close to Townsville.”

So we’re making ourselves a target?

“We’re not only making ourselves a target, we’re making ourselves totally complicit in American actions,” he declares. “We’ve abdicated our soverienty to America. If they go to war in these circumstances, we go to war. And that wasn’t perhaps as important when it was in South Asia or the Middle East, but this is our part of the world – and if there’s a conflict here of a serious kind, it would end up being between China and the United States. Japan, it seems to me, would be the most likely trigger.”

The rhetoric has been heating up betwen Japan and China over a disputed and largely deserted island chain in the East China Sea, and the US has already made clear that they would back Japan if matters escalate. And that’s where we could be drawn into war with China, whether we wanted it or not.

“If America uses those troops in Darwin, even if an Australian Prime Minister says ‘look, we’ve joined America in too many wars that have ended in failure, we’re not going to participate in this one’, I don’t believe such a statement would be believable if Pine Gap’s being used to target missiles on the mainland of China,” Fraser points out. “They’re being targeted from Australian soil.”

…and that’s when I realised I was being tailed by security

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Tyrannicon

This was originally written for Confession Booth at the World Bar, April 2012. I presented it again at the Sydney Film Festival’s ‘True Lies’ in 2013.

The site that used to house the old Confession Booth has expired, and I particularly like this piece so I decided to give it a permanent home here.

I was once a very, very talented shoplifter.

I should add that I didn’t shoplift because it gave me a thrill, or to be cool or to fit in or to get back at my parents. Initially, I shoplifted because it was lucrative and it funded my nascent musical obsessions during my high school years, once I realised that I could steal porn mags from Flagstaff Hill Newsagent and sell them to the boarders at my high school, and use those proceeds to fund my record collection.

True Lies, June 2013

It became doubly lucrative when it eventually dawned on me that I could also just steal the records themselves, and exponentially more so once I realised these same skills could get me other things that I might find useful. For anyone planning to steal three-packs of TDK blank cassettes in 1986, might I suggest putting them in your armpit under a jacket: they fit snugly in there, and your arms retain almost complete range of unsuspicious movement. That’s a tip for the discerning time-travelling kleptomaniac with a passion for audio fidelity.

Anyway: my point is that I was nimble of finger and deft of hand, which was good because it meant that I had plenty of Smiths and Cure records by April 1987, which was when my beloved father died of cancer and when I needed those records more than I needed anything on Earth. It’s no great exaggeration to say that my well-thrashed cassettes of The World Won’t Listen, particularly Asleep, and The Head on the Door, especially A Night Like This, made all the difference between me being here now and perhaps not being here at all.

Incidentally, that’s the somewhat mawkish reason why I’ve used my middle initial for well over half my life: it’s a living tribute to the late Peter William Street, who was only a few months older than I am now when he died and who would have been amazed at the way the next quarter century turned out, if not necessarily been all that impressed with some of the academic and career decisions of his first born.

In mid-1989 my mother married a Cowra-district farmer named Lance Hocking, who had moved to Adelaide with his three children following a year long correspondence. He was a widower: his wife Gaye – an old school friend of my mother’s – had been killed in a terrible car accident not long after my father’s death, and Mum had written to Lance to offer her condolences, support and – this being Roslyn Street – some practical advice about what a suddenly single parent with three children should do in these sorts of terrible circumstances. So in the course of three years I went from being in a family of five to a family of four to a family of eight, and while the transition was unusually smooth – as anyone who has experienced the ear-splitting joy of a Street-Hocking family celebration can attest – it was not without some bumpiness.

I was fine with Lance, for the most part. He seemed like a good man, he didn’t muscle in on my position, at age 17, as the male head of the house, and – importantly – he immediately backed down when his suggestion that we would start attending church as a family was immediately dismissed and roundly mocked by my sisters and I. From the outset he knew to tread carefully with me, and I knew that he was making life easier for my mother, so I returned the courtesy. In any case, it now 1990, I was in first year of uni and not far off turning 18, so I knew my days of having to remain in the family home were numbered regardless.

What transformed Lance from being The Guy That Married My Mum into being the person I refer to as my Dad was the following:

I had not long embarked on my first serious relationship and was therefore heading towards fucking up my first serious relationship, because I was 17, had now had sex and was obviously completely incapable of working out what happened from here. My poor girlfriend, who was beautiful and smart and funny and absolutely didn’t deserve to be dumped via the briefest of phone calls a week after the events of this story, thought that everything was fine and that of course guys got weird and distant after they took your virginity, and was to verbally unload her subsequent confusion and fury regarding her fuckwit of a first love onto my eldest sister when they bumped into each other in a London pub some years later.

But that was to come. At this point I was still trying to work out how to extricate myself from a perfectly good relationship and so it was that I found myself in the ghastly architectural mistake that was Westfield Shoppingtown Marion, feeling the sort of self-righteous anger that only an entitled middle class 17 year old can, and I thought I’d channel my seething self-pity into a spot of shoplifting. First I nicked some tapes from Myers, then ambled over to Brashes and rifled through their discs-in-the-cases-bargain-bin easy pickings for a few more, then to Big W for some more cassettes and a couple of Far Side books, and finally up to John Martins to see if I couldn’t heft some actual vinyl.

And that’s when I realised I was being tailed by security.

A smart kid would have dumped the contraband and run, or would have tried brazening it out, but that’s not what I did. I slowly, deliberately, and in plain view of both of the casually-dressed men furiously ignoring me, lifted a handful of singles, a couple of books – Catch 22 was one, if I recall correctly – and, for reasons that still remain obscure to me, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figure.

Obviously, it was Raphael.

Then I walked out of the shopping centre doors, sat down on a bench, and waited.

Thirty seconds or so later – longer than I’d expected, and probably long enough to have run had I had any sense of self-preservation, the security guys appeared, came over to me, asked me to open my bag, and told me to come with them.

Once I got into the back room and dumped my haul in a state of complete numbness (except the Far Side books, which I insisted I had brought with me), they explained that since this was my first offence they would normally give me a warning, take my name down and tell me never to come back, but because I’d actually left the building they were obliged to take it to next level and call the police. Which, since I was 17, meant that I had to call my parents.

I sat at the desk, picked up their phone, and called home. Lance answered. I burst into tears.

He was there inside of 15 minutes, said all the right things to the cops about how I was still mourning my father, that it had been an unsettled time and that he was going to sort me out when we got home, while I snuffled and sobbed behind him. I got a warning, we were free to go, and we didn’t say a word to each other the entire way home.

He never brought it up again.

My mother, on the other hand, had a great deal to say, particularly about my shortcomings as a worthwhile human being in civilised society. It was a subject about which my first girlfriend was also to have a lot to say, as I discovered during an international phone conversation with my still-giggling sister circa Xmas 1997.

But that was the moment when Lance first became my Dad.

May as well do a little update on Things What I’ve Written Lately

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Tyrannicon

Morning, internet. You’re looking spiffy.

So, I’m into my final week before going 100% freelance and feeling inexplicably good about it. I’m getting very suspicious about it – like maybe I know something I don’t.

This is what Google Images came up with when I searched for “optimism”. Way to go, Google Images!

I’ve been at Time Out Sydney since 2008 and much as I love the place, I’m feeling like it’s time to do some different stuff. Which, thankfully, includes still writing for Time Out.

In fact, in the next issues I’ve got an interview with former PM Malcolm Fraser, for which I’ll put the full transcribe here because it is genuinely fascinating, an interview with Angus & Julia Stone, a history of Redfern’s The Block and various bits in our Redfern cover feature, and a run down of new comedy rooms. So, y’know, there’s still plenty of me in the thing.

I’ve also done a couple of Time Out blog things, like being snarky about Robin Thicke and being snarky about Monty Python. Sorry.

This was #2. Might be a little more accurate.

Aside from that I’m doing more and more at the SMH, including this piece on apps to act as your external late-night conscience, an interview with Angie Milliken, and a thing on Giant Dwarf. And a bunch of reviews of The Voice, but those probably don’t need to be captured for posterity.

I’m a bit proud of my first piece for the King’s Tribune: Scott Morrison and the Conveniently Comforting Doctrine of Predestination, aka “how can our immigration minister possibly live with himself?”

For the Guardian I’ve explained why ‘Don’t Change’ is INXS’s first knock-down classic single, and why politicians always wear RM Williams boots.

At Fasterlouder I talked with Rob Hirst about a possible Midnight Oil reunion, and done a run down on the most underrated Australian songs ever.

And, of course, there’s 10 Things at the Vine, which look like this:

…and there’s print-only stuff in Australian Guitar and a film review for Rio 2 floating around somewhere in the News Ltd-o-sphere. So yeah, it’s been a busy little July so far. Hopefully it’ll keep being busy because heck, I’m going to need it to be.

Yours ever,

APS

Is Morrissey’s new album the worst thing he’s ever done, or just the worst thing ever?

Posted on July 17, 2014 by Tyrannicon

NOTE: As so often happens in my day to day life, I started a conversation that ended in a 900 word article. Uncharacteristically, though, I couldn’t find someone to buy the thing and so instead I present it to you, friends, in its non-profitable entirety. Enjoy!

Morrissey – World Peace is None of Your Business

Harvest Records

No stars

Summary: Despite a chequered solo career, World Peace is None of Your Business is something genuinely amazing: the objectively worst thing Morrissey has ever done.

By Andrew P Street

You know that old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover? I’ve been looking at books for four decades now and I’ve learned that the cover is actually a consistently excellent predictor of the quality of the book inside.

Albums are like that too. I’ve bought many records on the basis of the artwork alone. Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85, Death Cab For Cuties’ We Have The Facts And We’re Voting Yes, Aimee Mann’s Lost in Space, Absentee’s Schmotime, Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy and the Weakerthans’ Reconstruction Site are all discs that I would have initially have missed had I not gone “hey, that looks interesting, I should give this a listen.”

So World Peace is None of Your Business immediately gives one pause because the cover is – and I’ll use a technical term here – shit.

Look at it. Seriously: JUST FUCKING LOOK AT IT.

And not just in the sense that it looks indifferently slapped together, which it does, but that the colour palate is principally based around shades of brown. As a design tip, if you’re looking to entice the casual eye it’s best not to go with an art scheme that evokes feces and vomit.

And it’s not just casual Moz-comers who are right to pause at first sight. If you’re the sort of person that’s spent far too much money collecting Morrissey records the drab cover evokes the artwork from the Southpaw Grammar era (specifically, the 7” sleeve of ‘The Boy Racer’). You know how when people talk about classic Morrissey solo albums no-one ever mentions Southpaw Grammar? That’s not an oversight.

Yet it may as well have been Pet Sounds, because World Peace is None of Your Business is one of those rare terrible albums whose awfulness is so epic that makes all the artists’ previous work worse purely by association.

Ninety seconds in to the title track and already Moz is crooning about how the police will “stun you with their stun guns / Or they’ll disable you with tasers / That’s what government’s for / Oh, you poor little fools”. That comes after railing against paying tax, complaining about how the rich get richer (a problem that’s only ever been successfully addressed by the redistributive power of tax, incidentally) and then sneering “Each time you vote, you support the process”. And look, lots of us went to Socialist Alternative poetry slams when we were 15, but this is clumsy, even by late period Morrissey standards.

He’s had similar hissy fits about how terribly unfair things are in the past – a lot of the same targets cropped up in ‘The World is Full of Crashing Bores’, for example – but the music has never been this limp.

Amazingly, it’s also the album’s best tune. Many of the other songs sound as though a title was knocked up and then the rest of the lyrics were hastily improvised on the spot – ‘Earth is the Loneliest Planet’, ‘Smiler with Knife’, ‘Neal Cassady Drops Dead’ – without a sharp line or memorable melody between them.

Not that it’s much better elsewhere. ‘I’m Not A Man’ is the sort of damp fart of a song that in better times wouldn’t have passed muster as a b-side. “Wolf down, wolf down T-bone steak / wolf down, wolf down cancer of the prostate” is briefly amusing, but the rest of is charmless hectoring over indifferent chords – a theme he returns to in the clumsy, scansion-free ‘The Bullfighter Dies’ (“…and nobody cries.” Zing!).

Elsewhere ‘Kiss Me A Lot’ asks the subject to “kiss me all over my face”, which he promptly rhymes with “kiss me all over the place”. Remember, this is the same person who wrote ‘Hand in Glove’.

Women have an especially bad time of it on this album: ‘Staircase at the University’ has a girl failing to get “three As” to please her father and boyfriend and therefore commits suicide (“She threw herself down / And her head split three ways”). However, it’s a positively uplifting message compared with the odious ‘Kick the Bride Down the Aisle’, the latest in Morrissey’s career-long exploration of how women are all lazy, grasping harpies looking to tie a man down.

“She just wants a slave” he sneers, “to break his back in pursuit of a living wage / So that she can laze and graze for the rest of her days”. At least ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ had a sweet chorus.

But the biggest difference this time around is that Moz has never been this lyrically and musically dull. Kill Uncle and Maladjusted are train wrecks, certainly, but at least they had ‘Sing Your Life’ and ‘Alma Matters’, respectively. World Peace is None of Your Business is a unique entry into the Morrissey canon: an album with exactly zero memorable songs.

Fans, you can stop begging for that Smiths reunion – not because Morrissey’s still got a viable solo career, but because Johnny Marr would be mad to willingly spend time with such a witless and tiresome person.

Then again, as someone once accurately pointed out, the world is full of crashing bores.

Scott Morrison and the Conveniently Comforting Doctrine of Predestination

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Tyrannicon

Originally published in the Kings Tribune July 14, 2014

How can a Christian be complicit in incarceration, torture, and murder? With discomfiting ease, it turns out.

Australia’s Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Scott Morrison is, as he regularly makes clear, a devout Christian.

Dignity. Quiet dignity.

Whenever this subject is raised people point out, not unreasonably, that he is therefore in for a heck of a time in the afterlife, since the Bible is chock-full of instructions about how Jesus Christ felt people should treat each other:

Galatians 6:2 – Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Deuteronomy 15:11- For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.

Matthew 25: 34-40 – Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherits the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Mark 12:31- And the second [is] like, [namely] this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

…and so on. It’s fair to say that Jesus was pretty unambiguous about how he felt about helping those in need (summation: he was fiercely pro) and also how he felt about those who harm and oppress others (spoiler: anti).

Thus people like to ask rhetorical questions like “how can Morrison reconcile his faith with his actions regarding asylum seekers? You know, who have broken no law, are asking for our help, and are locked away in subhuman conditions to rot until they beg to be returned to the tender mercies of those they fled in the first place?”

And it’s a fair question, and most of the time the response is of the flavour “because he is presumably a monstrous hypocrite”. However, it’s a mistake to think that Morrison’s beliefs are at odds with his actions. In fact, according to the precepts of his church, Morrison’s more on the side of God than that busybody do-gooder Jesus.

Morrison belongs to Shirelive, a giant Pentecostal church in the Sydney suburb of Sutherland. It’s an evangelical Protestant church of the clapping-and-waving variety and falls under the charismatic umbrella of what is somewhat dismissively called “prosperity theology” – the idea that material success is a sign from God that you’re doing His work.

The flipside of this doctrine is that those who are not doing well are clearly not in God’s good graces. Such as, for instance, the poor, or the sick, or those fleeing persecution from repressive regimes by buying passage for their family with people smugglers and being intercepted on the high seas by Australian Customs Vessels.

You may justifiably ask how this can possibly work theologically, given everything that Jesus said about camels and the Kingdom of Heaven and needing to liquefy the rich to get them through the eye of a needle. And the answer is that it’s via a handy bit of doctrinal sleight of hand.

Morrison’s church believe in Predestination, the notion that God knows absolutely everything about everything from the moment of creation until the end of the world. Long before you were born He knew everything about you – what you’d do, what you’d think, who you’d meet, the very specific types of pornography you’d enjoy, everything – including whether or not you were going to Heaven or Hell.

The guts of the idea is in this passage:

Ephesians 1:4-6, 11-12 – For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves… In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.

The Calvinist branch of the Protestant church took this particularly to heart, coming up with a series of precepts known by the acronym “TULIP”, with each point backed up by carefully cherry-picked bits of scripture.

TULIP stands for:

Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints

Before you get too excited, total depravity is recognition that people are completely affected by sin and thus your opinion on what’s right and wrong is irrelevant – after all, you’re just a big old sack of sin!

Mark said “man’s heart is evil” (Mark 7:21-23), Ephesians declared that we are “at enmity with God” (Eph. 2:15), Corinthians says we can’t understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14).

You still think people shouldn’t be locked in prison camps for asking for help? You reckon you know better than God, do you? Ba-bom: wrong! You just don’t get it, because you’re a sinner.

Unconditional election refers to the above idea in Ephesians that God nominates people for salvation and damnation without condition: in other words, your eternal fate is not decided by your behaviour in this life. You could murder your way through your days or dedicate your life to charity and it’ll make zero difference to God since He’s already decided where you’re headed. Romans makes clear that some are chosen and some are not (Rom. 9:15, 21), so: boom.

Seem weird to you? How’s about you just shut your sin-hole?

Limited atonement gets around that whole “Jesus died for your sins” thing: turns out he only died for the sins of those already chosen. Matthew said Jesus died for the “many”, you know, not the all (Matt. 26:28), and there was that whole separating-the-sheep-and-the-goats thing (Matt. 25:32-33). So don’t go looking to the J-dog for moral authority there, Sinny McSinnington.

Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints reaffirm that only God gives grace and once given you can’t exchange it for grace for others, de-gracify yourself, or return it for the cash equivalent. I’m paraphrasing, admittedly.

What’s the upshot of this? Basically, it doesn’t matter what you do in life, your fate is already sealed. Only God can judge whether that’s fair and since it’s God then yes, it is.

Calvinist ideals proved remarkably influential in the United States. Some of the Pentecostal churches have a particularly strong Calvinist influence and are predictably very big on the idea of Predestination, as befits a church that is focussed on one’s individual, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

According to the church, not only can you not possibly understand how God works because you’re neck-deep in sin, the mere act of questioning the reasoning is in itself morally dubious. As Romans 3:10-12 helpfully puts it: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

So what does this all mean for Morrison?

Well, he knows that those who come across the seas are all doomed to damnation – after all, God wouldn’t have plonked them in the middle of the civil war in Syria if He didn’t want to punish them for their unchangeable wickedness – and therefore locking them up indefinitely to self-harm in disease-riddled camps is perfectly fine. He’s not going to examine his conscience on the subject, because the act of doing so would be an affront to God.

Meanwhile, he’s on a sweet parliamentary salary with a high-profile government portfolio, a wife and kids and a lovely house in a quiet Sydney suburb. God’s clearly giving him a tangible version of a spiritual high-five.

So to answer the original question: how can Scott Morrison be responsible for overseeing all these human rights atrocities and call himself a Christian? With absolute ease. And he probably sleeps better than you do.

After all, it was predestined.

Congratulations on the purchase of your hangover!

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Tyrannicon

Dear customer,

Congratulations on your purchase last night of the HANGOVER MACH 5. We trust that it will give you uninterrupted service for at the next 36 to 52 hours.

Please note the following in order to get the most out of your HANGOVER MACH 5.

FEATURES
The HANGOVER MACH 5 has fixed many of the bugs of previous iterations:

Recovery time now tripled
Now 80% less susceptible to painkillers and indigestion medication
Tongue furriness upgraded from “kitten” to “Wookiee”
Feces no longer solid
Sleep-resistent

REQUIREMENTS
It is recommended that the HANGOVER MACH 5 be used in conjunction with caffeinated water, the leftover chicken in your fridge, and television (sold seperately).

SYSTEM DOWNGRADE
If you are 30 years or older, the HANGOVER MACH 5 will automatically downgrade your system to comply with our patented E-Z Slo technology, featuring fresh new nausea, painful muscle spasms and increased sensitivity to the Earth’s gravity.

ONLINE COMPATIBILITY
HANGOVER MACH 5 is fully compliant with all modern forms of social media, allowing you to check the increasingly erratic and ill-advised messages and photographs you posted last night to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest, Linkedin, your employer’s website and the comment thread to Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Miracles’ on YouTube.

DIRECTIONS
Keep in a cool, dark place.

REFUNDS AND REPAIRS
If unsatisfied with the service of your HANGOVER MACH 5, please return unused portion to the bar where it was purchased. It’ll give you a chance to pick up your phone.

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