First published in Time Out Sydney June 2014

Pastor Graham Long takes Andrew P Street through five decades of unconditional love

An extraordinary man.

In 1964, Ted Noffs established the Wayside Chapel in a downtrodden area of Kings Cross. What started as a few chairs in a back room of a crumbling building has grown into the city’s foremost organisation providing frontline assistance and support for the city’s most marginalised people.

For the last decade the Wayside has been under the leadership of paster Graham Long, whose enthusiasm and good humour does nothing to hide his passionate advocacy for social justice, even as he’s dealing with the frantic preparations for Celebration Sunday.

“Actually, yeah, ‘frantic’ is not a bad word,” he laughs. “You go into these things thinking ‘this is a big occasion, we should do something’ and everybody’s got a great idea – until you get close and you think ‘god, who thought of all of this?’ But it will be absolutely enjoyable – when it’s over.”

He’s very clear on why it’s happening though. It’s because Wayside means a lot to people in Sydney – in the most direct, personal ways.

“For the ten years I’ve been here, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere – a party, a wedding, anywhere – where someone hasn’t come up to me and said ‘I was married at the Wayside’ or ‘my kid was buried at the Wayside’ or something like that. Ted Noffs did 18,000 weddings, although that was the days before civil celebrants, so if you were a Catholic and wanted to marry a Protestant Ted was the only show in town,” he chuckles. “But that’s still thousands and thousands of people touched by the Wayside.”

“And the other day I had Ita Buttrose telling me ‘oh, Ted had me working hard around there’ and Jonathon Coleman was telling me he used to sweep the footpath! So many people have been touched by the Wayside, so it would be a shame to let the 50th come and go. There’s enormous value in just stopping for a minute and being thankful that somebody’s here.”

Even when Wayside started Noffs’ determination to help those at the bottom at the pile has drawn condemnation from all sides: the church told Noffs he was wasting his time when he founded the Wayside, and there was even the possibility of arrests and closures when the Wayside decided to open a safe drug injecting room rather than leave people shooting up in the streets.

“We’ve been on the cutting edge many times,” he shrugs. “And we really suffered over that thing – but what it led to was the injecting centre, and that’s led to an 88 per cent reduction in overdose callouts, and deaths on the street have gone down from around 130 to about 12 a year. You couldn’t criticise it on rational grounds. But there are shock jocks and politicians whose job it is to peddle fear. That used to be the job of the church,” he laughs darkly. “Compassion is out of fashion.”

So Long’s noticed our immigration policies, then?

“Oh, there is nothing about our recent history that makes any sense whatsoever,” he declares. “We call these people detainees – but they’re prisoners! In PNG, they’re calling refugees clients. Clients! It would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. When you divide the world up into goodies and baddies, you divide your own soul.”

Language is something that Long is very aware of. Those that visit the Wayside are not clients, patrons, users, customers, or any other euphemism.

“We’ve never found the perfect collective noun,” he says, “but the one we use is ‘visitors’. Because when people visit your home, they’re visitors. They’re people, exactly like you and me.”

That’s what the Wayside offers, more than anything else: unconditional love.

“Most people who walk into Wayside believe they’re alone. And if you can overcome that sense of ‘I’m handling this on my own’, when you realise that there are others with you and you are there with others and for others, people just move towards health. We’ve seen it over and over,” he says. “We’ve seen people come to life, and it’s not because we have any sort of therapy going: what we’re creating is community.”

And once the 50th is passed?

“We’re very conscious that this is the beginning of the next 50 years. We’ve been significantly staffing up, and we’ve been building a lot of stuff very recently: we’ve created a garden up on the roof and homeless people can learn to grow their produce, and there’s bees up there as well so we create our own honey,” he enthuses.

“And we want to go further with that: one day when we’re rich and famous we want to build a greenhouse up there. And I have a bit of a dream that we’ll farm fish up there as well. I reckon it’s doable!”

He laughs heartily. “All we lack is a little bit of money, and if you say that quick enough it doesn’t seem like such a barrier!”

First published in Time Out Sydney 22 May 2014. Art by Robert Polmear

So very responsible!

Dear the Internet,

You know what changes hearts and minds? Mascots!

That’s why McDonalds have launched their new mascot Happy – a gaping red box, playing on the universal desire of children to be helplessly engulfed by a sentient cube.

Meanwhile the mining industry have come up with their own character – Hector the Healthy Lump of Coal, who was invented by the company that owns Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal, looks like a giant, terrifying turd in a safety vest, and has a website that teaches kids all about how to enjoy non-renewable energy.

And in that same spirit of taking something which is objectively harmful and transforming it into something which children will bond with, spend money upon and eventually die as a result of, the government are preparing to launch a range of new fun-loving mascots to help get some popular support for some of their more hard-to-swallow legislation.

Hey, Australia – forget those budget blues and say hello to your new, Coalition-approved BFFs!

Mr Snips, the Federal Funding Scissors
Snippy-snip-snip! That’s the sound of fiscally-responsible Mr Snips, the fun-loving budget scissors as he goes after his two biggest foes: red tape and programmes implemented by the previous government.

He hates inefficiency, duplication of services, oversight committees, non-industrial advisory groups, and anything not mining-related. And with your help, that deficit will be down to zero imaginary dollars in no time! Snippy-snip-snip!

Ol’ Silty, the Barrier Reef Mining Runoff
All Ol’ Silty wants to do is give out big, warm hugs: to you, to your friends, to the coral reefs inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park – everyone!

Ol’ Silty is happy to explain that he helps increase the dangerously-low level of particulate matter currently covering in the current ecosystem and how YOU can help keep this unique environment safe for future generations of supertankers and coal transport vessels.
That cough you’ve developed? It’s like a hug for the inside!

Captain Privilege!
Dressed in his trademark cape and fedora and with Shannon Noll’s version of ‘What About Me’ playing on a constant loop through his belly speaker, Captain Privilege! is ready to leap in and ask why white, straight males are being excluded from the conversation, regardless of what the conversation is about.

Feminism? But what about the Captain? Immigration? But what about the Captain? Marriage equality? Indigenous health and poverty? The National Disability Insurance Scheme? Violence against women? Why are you even having these conversations, since they’re not about the Captain? The Captain is bored now! Let’s talk about the Captain!

Slowpoke Moe, the NBN Tortoise
Lovable old Moe is here to explain why Labor’s vision of a national fibre-to-the-premises network is foolish and wrong. Anyway, no-one even uses computers except for secretaries and personal assistants, and why use the internet when you have Foxtel? That’s the tech of the future, right there.

His presentations are scheduled for 30 minutes. They never come anywhere near that length though, despite lengthy pauses and frequent restarts.

The Welfare-Scrounging Palz: Bludgey, Slutsy and Rollaround Sue
One can’t find a job, one can’t keep her legs shut, and the other can’t even be bothered walking!

The Palz just love to carp and moan: Bludgey would go to the doctor, but can’t afford the GP co-payment since he’s probably blown it all on ciggies and middies of beer, while Slutsy is asking where her kids will sleep if she’s evicted. Oh Slutsy: you couldn’t keep a husband, and now you can’t even keep a lease!

Rollaround Sue is ready to jump her wheelchair through hoops to demonstrate she “genuinely” needs her pension – but first she needs to get it up these stairs, of course. Don’t try the accessible toilet either, Sue: Captain Privilege! is using it for storage.

Toot Toot the Border Protection Tugboat
“It’s a sailor’s life for me!” says Toot Toot. He loves the salt in the air, the waves against his hull, and the plausible deniability of accusations of torture at sea as he scoots merrily back and forth across the Indonesian maritime border, keeping Australia safe from wicked asylum seekers who are deviously planning to [INSERT JUSTIFICATION HERE]

Invite Toot Toot to your school, where he’ll hand out delicious Operation Sovereign Burgers to all students who can provide documented proof they were born in Australia. Where will he visit next? That’s an operational secret!

Whitey the Freedom Of Speech Bigot
Well, technically that’s just attorney general George Brandis.

Yours ever,

APS

First published in Time Out Sydney 15 May, 2014. Art by Robert Polmear

Dear the Internet,

You’ve probably watched with excitement as the all-dancin’, all-smokin’ treasurer handed down his budget earlier this week and thought “heck, I like the sounds of this massively inequitable and unsubstantiated cut-fest!”

Well, we have some great news: you can bring down your own unnecessary and nationally-damaging budget in the comfort of your own home, simply by playing the Department of Treasury’s exciting new spin-off product: the 45% interactive Diamond Joe Hockey Federal Budget and Class War 2014 game!

Using the same cardboard and string technology that’s now being rolled out to replace the National Broadband Network, you can recreate all the manufactured panic and pious condescension of your federal government in the comfort of your own home! The rules are below, so don’t wait for the Senate to ratify it: start playing today!

RULES

1. The aim of the game is to fix the nation by owning as much of it as possible.

2. Every player starts with $200. That sounds socialist, actually. Scrap that.

3. With the richest person choosing first, every player selects their piece: Mining Magnate, Media Mogul, University Professor, Nurse, Manufacturing Worker, Single Mother, Unemployed Person, and Pensioner. On the box it will say there should be a Disabled Pensioner figure in there, but that’s now been deliberately left out.

4. Mining Magnate and Media Mogul take $5000 each. Everyone else gets $40, except for the pensioner who should have acquired their money before the game began, and the Unemployed Person who has to wait six rounds before getting whatever the Mining Magnate determines is fair ($5 maximum). Single Mother also has to pay a $5 “wanton harlot” levy (not a tax).

5. Everyone gets their wage each time they pass Go (although this requires a $7 co-pay).

6. At the beginning of the game every piece has the choice of paying a $100 upfront education levy (not a tax), or paying 15% of their salary every round. Similarly, there’s a first round $200 “private health cover” payment, or a 30% health levy (not a tax) per round for any player that chooses not to pay.

7. By landing on a property the player has the chance to buy it, although the Mining Magnate can block any purchase by playing her unlimited supply of “fracking” cards.

8. Any purchase must be negotiated with the Bank, except for Mining Magnate or Media Mogul, who can take unsecured no-interest, no-repayment loans from the Bank at any point.

9. Landing on a Utility requires the payment of a $5 fee, unless the utility has been privatised in which case it’s $20, plus a $20 late fee.

10. Every 12th round requires all pieces to pay a flat 30% Contribution Levy (not a tax) for being part of the game. Except for the Mining Magnate and Media Mogul pieces, which for tax purposes are based in Connect Four.

11. The winner is the first person to own the country and become King Patriot. Unless it’s not Mining Magnate, in which case the result will be challenged and Mining Magnate will be declared King Patriot.

RRP: $12 billion (plus $12 billion in operating costs). However, you’ve already paid for it via your forthcoming temporary board game levy.

NOTE: It’s not a tax.

Yours ever,

APS

It’s certainly not because of the cost of dealing with asylum seekers, since it was orders of magnitude cheaper to house people in Australia, process their application and then either deport them or release them into the community, as opposed to the millions it’s costing us every month to use our Navy to drag ships back out to sea while we imprison people indefinitely on isolated islands where all food, water and fuel needs to be expensively shipped in.

It’s not because they’re a danger to us or our way of life: people who’ve given all their money to people smugglers in a last-ditch effort to escape their country aren’t exactly brimming with resources and options.

Sure, some folks argue that there are people who deserve to be here and people who do not. And I can’t help noticing that those who apparently do not deserve to be here coincidentally tend to have complexions rather duskier than those of our federal front bench.

And we know it’s not a matter of gosh-darn principle about people playing by the rules. After all, we don’t incarcerate Irish overstayers. We don’t send US students with expired student visas to Manus Island. We don’t jail English folks who’ve decided to do sneaky bar work while ostensibly here on a holiday visa.

So let me spell it out in nice, unambiguous terms: the people that want our help the most are varying shades of brown, and Australians just don’t like brown people.

We sure as hell don’t like the brown people who were here when the First Fleet arrived, since then we’d have done something about the fact that they live, on average, a decade less than non-indigenous folks – and even less if they live in remote communities (between 12 and 14 years less, specifically).

And let’s reflect on our recent history.

In February a young brown man named Reza Barati was murdered during a detention-centre riot on Manus Island. And our government are not at all keen to investigate this murder properly, hence shrugging at the deportation of the chief investigator and the refusal of the Australian Federal Police to help local police in PNG, despite a direct official request. That came after a human rights inquiry into the centre was shut down, incidentally.