Some True Facts About Immigration Minister Scott Morrison

I have from a distance always had a special spot of loathing for Scott Morrison. I mean anyone who continues to promote and condone Australia's utterly xenophobic, fear-driven and cruel policies of handling supposed 'boat people' is worthy of such scorn, particularly in the sense that it is now more to do with vote gathering politics than it is with dealing with, you know, real people who have suffered terribly in their home nation and have seemingly run out of options. But Mr Morrison is a whole other kettle of shit in a party, nay parliament, filled with vessels of shit. A grotesque flabby excuse of a human being at the forefront of the Coalition's (and in some respects Labor's) race to the bottom in matters of how to address our apparent 'problems' of refugee boat arrivals: a question of who can establish the most craftily nasty way of 'turning back the boats'; of making Australia so damn unappealing that the risk of escape and resettlement is just not worth it. Pathetically (and pathetic is a word that goes hand in hand with this trumpet cunt ((TC is back))), Morrison acts out like a kind of Big Brother, desperately trying to control the refugee narrative through his controlled, infrequent press conferences, limitations of media access and continual insistence to incorrectly alter the semantics of the issue by amending the title 'illegal' to refugees. They are not 'illegal' refugees. They are simply refugees. It is not a matter of legality. It is simply a matter of an inherent strand of racist fear that runs through Australia that politicians are all too keen to play on, rather than try to change.

But the latest to come out of Morrison and the Coalition is one step too far. Essentially (I am speaking generally here throughout), they are dramatically altering the terms of whether or not a refugee is in danger in their home country, which in turn decides whether or not they will be forcefully sent back. The current threshold that decides whether a refugee is in real danger (I'm talking torture, deprivation of rights and death here) is around 10%; that is, if there is a greater than 10% chance of them facing serious danger, they will be considered for protection and not sent back. The proposal by Morrison is to raise this to above 50%. The refugee needs to prove that if they were to be sent back there is a better than 1 in 2 chance of them facing torture. By the way, they need to prove this on their own because they are refused, or not allowed, legal aid. Hypothetically, if you can only prove a 48% chance of torture, tough titties you're heading home. How these statistical probabilities are to be established is a bit of a mystery. Indeed, how the likelihood of danger can be measured in any respect seems fairly screwy. Who puts this numerical value (even the 10% threshold) on a person's life? To assume that 55% is better odds than 35% when we're talking about FUCKING TORTURE is utterly unhinged - this isn't a bet, this is someone's well-being; their goddamn existence.

We've already boiled these people down to being little more than words - 'illegal refugees' - little more than statistics - how many boats last month? - little more than mouths to feed and bodies to cater for on an island out of sight, out of mind, and now the Coalition is making a mockery of the kind of perpetual danger these people are escaping from by boiling it all down to the chance of this danger doing bodily harm, conveniently forgetting the kind of psychological hardship one has to face when there is still a 35% chance they might be tortured or killed; forgetting that in a place with a 35% chance of horrid things happening there is no standard of living that would be considered acceptable by most people (although, fuck me, but I don't have the statistics to back that claim up).

As a grand get stuffed, I present Some True Facts About Immigration Minister Scott Morrison:

·        He feasts on baby pugs. They are his primary source of protein.

·        His bloated, unhealthily red, piggish appearance is a tribute to both Kim Jong Un and Al Capone. He believes that his fat expresses power and prestige. He always enjoys second helpings of pug.

·        He denies the existence of rainbows.

·        He only reads Ayn Rand.

·        His closest cousin is a sack of rancid potatoes.

·        He sleeps in a coffin draped in the Australian flag, surrounded by poison ivy, in Western Sydney.

·        He believes that the Earth is still flat, the fractures of the ozone layer a myth, and that somewhere right near the edge of world is a nifty temperature control device that is just waiting for someone brave enough to venture that close to the precipice of nothing to turn it down a touch. This will solve global warming.

·        He feels that he is too valuable a human to risk getting that close to the edge of the world. He likes to point out his credentials: media control, genuine understanding of the supposed refugee ‘plight,’ wordsmith, penmanship, pastry chef par excellence, and Parliament hotdog eating champion.  

·        His favourite hobby is to continually push over children. He is particularly fond of nudging toddler’s off-balance.

·        His laugh sounds like a dehydrated goat bleating through a crackly megaphone.

·        He attends Hillsong and subscribes to their evangelical, religious-right doctrine, except the bits about caring for your fellow human beings. This, he believes, is open to subjective interpretation. One can admire Jesus, but gee whiz he sets some lofty standards.

·        He believes that the role of the press is to write what he says. He views his press conferences as a kind of circus act where he is the ringmaster and the press corps his clowns. He honestly believes he could get them all to fit in a two-door Nissan Mirage.

·        He believes he could have been a ringmaster in another life.

·        Information and fact is what Scott Morrison says is information and fact. Scott Morrison is, in fact, the embodiment of an absolute Information and Fact. He is the Truth.

·        He knows the danger, for he is the Danger.

·        He believes that seeking refuge is an illegal sin.

·        He thinks 49% is still pretty good odds.

Arthuring Your Hangover

My brother and I went out last night.

            Today I feel like a well-trodden area of grimy dirt speckled with dead flies, some bird shit and a few scraggly weeds. It’s just moist enough to be squelchy and clings desperately to anyone who passes through it. Nothing will grow there. It is utterly barren.

            We started with a bottle of wine at home. We then went to Kong (a new, and excellent, Korean BBQ joint in Richmond). We had to wait for a table, so pottered down to the Prince Alfred for a couple of ales served by surly bar staff with flaccidic[1] dispositions. We received a call from Kong informing us of our table’s availability. We ordered a litre of the house wine. We ate and drank with overly enthusiastic gusto. We left Kong. We were both a little drunk. We wandered down Chapel St to the Sweetwater Inn behind the Jam Factory. We drank five dollar tinnies of Melbourne Bitter. We watched a snowboarding video.

            …

            I don’t really recall much more of what happened. I do remember feeling like I stood out at the Inn due to my lack of hat and beard, along with the aesthetic anomaly of my boisterous blondeness and neatly cultivated neck/chin fluff. I vaguely recall talking to various hospitality people my brother knew about waiting work, slurring credentials that probably went: ‘Mate, I’d love to work there. I know Russian.’ Or: ‘Buddy, you’ve never seen a man with hips as snake-like as mine. I weave through tables like a granny knitting a particularly egregious scarf. I also know Russian.’

            I also know we caught a cab home. But I only ‘know’ in the sense that I woke up this morning in my bed with my pants only half-way off, a receipt from the trip dangling out of one of the pockets. For all I remember, without the evidence of the receipt, we could’ve saddled some salamanders (that’s not innuendo for a particular type of person by the way, I actually mean overgrown lizards) and ridden them home, gleefully whooping at the fun of it all.

I took the receipt because when I reach a certain level of intoxication I completely lose all faith in cabbies as honest human beings, levelling them with distrustful, hate-filled stares of blonde malice, accompanied by muttered unpleasantries and curses (as in Gypsy curses where I don’t just curse the driver, but also his entire familial lineage). I always demand (not ask, demand) receipts in case they decide to add a little something more to the fare, examining them through the narrow slits of my drunk, angry eyes before disembarking.

            Anyway, to speak in general and understated terms, my brother and I were not in particularly high spirits upon waking. Our rooms had the pungent odour of alcohol, our eyes were bloodshot and leery, and the best we could say to each other was, ‘I have a headache,’ dosed with a liberal use of the word, 'fuck.' Reckless pantlessness (my brother was also vesting hard with no shirt) was the order of a large chunk of the morning as we took to that hopeless, dazed, zombie-ish wandering around the house that is the affliction of any hungover person trying to make sense of the cruel world.

            We decided to go and get breakfast. Over the course of the drive we heard Steve Winwood’s ‘Call On Me’ and Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown.’ Neither of these songs were at all reflective of our state, it was just a neat run of songs. We tried to crank the radio in the Party Mirage, cracking the windows so Chapel St could enjoy their majesty with us, but it pathetically begins to crackle over ’20.’ Still, the Party Mirage presides.

For maybe an eight minute drive, the conversation got surprisingly weird really quickly:

·         We discussed hybrid dogs that have been bred from poodles and other hounds. Our favourite was the spoodle (part cocker spaniel, part toy poodle). This quickly degenerated into using the term as pure euphemism. As in: ‘Dude, I’d give her the spoodle.’

·         Spoodling, as we came to affectionately call it, continued into a conversation about ‘docking’ or, more amusingly, ‘aardvarking.’ From UrbanDictionary: When two men touch their penises together tip to tip and one man rolls the foreskin of his penis over the penis of the other man. It is necessary that one man is uncircumcised. We wondered at how this ever came about and, indeed, how one would proposition another man to a bit of the old ‘aardvarking.’

·         ‘Aardvarking’ reminded us of the children’s cartoon Arthur. The titular character, an aardvark, looks nothing like an aardvark (see below) and presumably behaves nothing like an aardvark. Of course, I am only assuming that aardvarks don’t wear lame sweaters and learn lessons of basic morality/growing up on a daily basis. ‘Aardvarking’ became ‘Arthuring.’

·         Some flannelette shirts in a store distracted us from the peculiarities of ‘Arthuring’ and aardvarks with rabbit best friends (I know, what the fuck?), and we robustly discussed that weird trend of not actually wearing the shirt, but using it as a belt. Like inverse grunging. Flannelette is a shit belt was the gist of it. 

·         We arrived at the café.

So, all this aside, I still feel really quite terrible. My eyes are trying to gnaw their way through vision, I keep breaking out into awkward sweats, and my stomach has expressed continually to me its displeasure. 

Please let know if you’re open to gently swaddling me in a blanket and holding me. You can whisper sweet soothing words of nothing into my ear and feed me bacon. We can watch episodes of Arthur together.

Think of me as the puppy. Look how much it needs your affection and soft touch. Look at how fun it is. I can be this fun. After the right amount of bacon.

             

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[1] ‘flaccidic’ – a floppy, cranky acceptance of being in a mental state akin to erectile flaccidity – example: ‘he appears full of hopeless scorn and anger, what a flaccidic gentleman’

why I don't drive

I'm known for many things: my charming disposition, my way with grilling most meats, my attachment to cream cheese, my extensive library, my odd predilection to remember random passages/information I read in some leftist newspaper I found in a city alley months ago but almost always forget where I am and sometimes where I am going. Everyone's favourite trait though is that I don't drive. At the ripe old age of 27, edging dangerously close to 28, then even closer to 30, I am without a license. This state has unfolded in a variety of ways: frequent close proximity to public transport, friendly friends, an almost obsessive foreknowledge that I will perish in a car crash, the unbearable truth that I will never get my hands on the ghostbuster station-wagon. Yet, there is more to the story. A list:

·      I’m too cool.

·      I need to be known for at least one annoying trait, for otherwise I have none.

·      Someone needs to be the designated lift weasel.

·      I’m a Triple A-Plus Mark Seven Walker. Meaning: I recklessly stroll into a strut purpose designed to take me places, like the shops, park, or the spaces between Time.

·      I worship at the altar of the Walk.

·      A gypsy named Olysandra in a prophetic cask-wine dream foretold of The Blonde Man Who Should Not Drive, sometimes referred to in gypsy culture simply as, The Blonde. He is an awe-inspiring figure of natural movement; the harbinger of The Stride; the final bastion of The Leggéd Shuffle. I am this man.

·      I am a defender of fossil fuels. I believe them best left in their natural habitat, not in the slave service of the car.

·      Cars have a tendency to startle me.

·      I’m sure cars are haunted by (literally) blank-faced Papua New Guinean children with self-esteem issues. They are their doomed vessels to the afterworld, which we are burdened with never arriving at.

·      I have the spatial awareness of a blinded-folded, thrice spun around, drunk toddler with Attention Deficit Disorder and a severe fear of not being able to see, while being attacked by a falcon This is not a state conducive to driving a car.

·      Steering wheels are one of life’s great mysteries.

·      I’d probably be prone to ramming people with very little reason. Cut me off: ram. Beep your horn at me: ram. Drive slowly: ram. Drive quickly: ram. Friendly wave: ram. Old lady walking across the street with her basset hound, a portrait of her deceased war hero husband and an armful of knitting: ram.

·      They call me Angry Dave for many reasons, and I’m sure driving will bring forth the Angriest of the Angry Dave’s. My eloquent hate-filled rage, though, would be something to behold: I’m thinking ‘Cock Goose,’ ‘you Bryan Fucker’ or ‘Empty Arse Sink’ will be frequently uttered; as in, 'you morally inept cock Goose! Go and fuck Bryan you vapid, empty arse sink!'

·      I don’t have a license.

escape from camberwell (with kurt russell)

Let us go then, Kurt and I,

leave Camberwell behind just like a sty,

to mimic the cask wine hipsters in a city park

we’ll let loose another calamitous cry:

I’m drunk!

Distorted!

Distended!

Stumbling from the Smith,

my Cherubic features gone awry!

I am no saint,

my halo has fallen to my feet

and, clearly, I am only mortal meat

looking for loquacious ladies

suspect to my suspicious spell

(it’ll all be another poem to tell).

Chapel St shimmers incandescent scintillation.

I’m in Lala Land!

With Grey Goose vodka, ice, and fresh lime in hand

there are no cardigan scarf geriatrics,

no extra hot skim milk caps

served in a poor man’s skull,

no Indian word that means ‘slow death,’

only a sky we call down to us,

snort a star and see resplendent light.

Revs roar for me.

We’ll have another VB.

It tastes like tar gone to cool crystal, but

I could not be anymore goddamn cheerful,

like a man trying to abuse sobriety,

and lose the same old memory,

I run my fingers through the fissures of the sofa fabric,

then ineloquently across my gums,

and my grin, once manic, becomes suddenly plastic.

Kurt is dolewave dancing!

Disenchanted, but drinking!

He’s Dick Diver grinding.

Or is it Melbourne shuffling?

Until some tattoo mask of sinking spirals

stops the fast forward motion.

Kurt stares at me,

his face twitching commotion,

and, over everything, he bellows:

“Have you heard of the portly prince of Prahran, Apollinaire?

Always assumes a Parisian air,

loves an obese obscenity

like a minstrel gently fucking a shark.

He’ll bring the clown car:

the means of our getaway

we’ll take with us to our horizon

—these stars taste terrific.

Did I tell you recently that I love you man?”

He licks my cheekbone.

“Did you know her man?”

Kurt stays behind to seduce the sun.

Solo, I walk High St,

a pinched pint of balmy beer

all that bears witness to an idea

which brings you back in.

These weekends will not be the same.

I need to remember how to forget. 

yo momma

Yo momma so German she’s a Volkswagen.

Yo momma so rigorous she always prepares a litter box when she lets the cat out of the bag.

Yo momma howl so loud she’s destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging herself through the negro streets at dawn looking for a megaphone to further up her decibels.

Yo momma so pedantic when she rides through the desert she names her horse.

Yo momma so fearful of marsupials she equates any enclosed moist space with a pouch and refuses to enter, and never has a nice word to say about kangaroos who have almost had enough of her petty insults.

Yo momma so hirsute her moustache married your dad and gave birth to three yetis: Paul, Arnold and Marilla.

Yo momma so weary of this ancient world she purchased a DeLorean.

Yo momma so cranky the chip on her shoulder is crinkled, has a deceptive gravitational pull and at times seems to illustrate a certain self-consciousness.

Yo momma so confused she spent a season in hell where every wine flowed and she took Beauty in her arms, but thought she was in Ireland.

Yo momma so accepting she don’t just bite the bullet, she makes it into a fine bullet seafood stew.

Yo momma so creepy she’s Abbott’s wink.

Yo momma so hip hop she don’t just raise the roof, she elevates the ozone layer, and when she crunk the world crunk in time with her.

Yo momma is a collage eliminating any notion of her as a single, stable idea: she is a grumpy cat, a Joycean pun, a Grecian urn, Wesley Snipe’s better half, a goat singing Swift, a dice cup, an awkward typographical arrangement, and a love curse uttered by a witch-gypsy in the final throes of her obsession with lust and knitting.

Yo momma so transcendent nothing can describe her.

budget: when a surprise is not a surprise

There is something seriously disconcerting in the post-budget rumbling.

It is not that the sounds of discontent are quiet, whispered in simmering rage. Plenty of writers—good writers—have gone on full-frontal assaults against what is laid bare and what is implicit in the Hockey-Abbott budget; who it will impair and who it will outright damage.[1]

It is not even that the response has been too far skewed to a froth-at-the-mouth left. It seems generally acknowledged that the budget has not quite dared to venture into complete austerity economics.[2]

Indeed, people can sort of see the long-term picture of what it is supposedly meant to achieve: return the budget to surplus, eventually leading to decreased income-tax. It is just the means of achievement seem rigorously shifty, framed around cuts to elements like education and health that, otherwise left alone, contribute to a stronger economy in the long term—to generalise: smart, healthy people make more money to be spent—alongside marginal tax hikes (sorry, new levies) for higher earners, which unlike the changes being made to welfare safety nets, are apparently temporary.

It is not even, beyond the print and internet media, that social media has been mute on the topic. People have been exchanging articles and graphs; liking and sharing; discussing and angrily railing against. Memes pointing out the inherent unfairness of it all have already begun their profitable circulation.

I’m sure people are even discussing it first-hand, person-to-person, in the (now-archaic) manner of the water-cooler conversation; that is, over a coffee or a drink, on the way to class, to work, at work, wherever.

No, it is not that a questioning, loudly betrayed and furious discourse around the budget has been non-existent. It is there, in plain view, circulating through disparate groups of people primarily linked through a vast digital network.

What I find worrying—what I have found worrying about politics in general for a long time, irrespective of whether the politicking is coming from the mouths of Labor or Liberal politicians—is the complete lack of surprise: in the blatant lies told; in the disadvantaging of already vulnerable members of society; in the ultimately myopic nature of the policies; even in our own lack of surprise in not being surprised.  

Sharp-Paul writes, “it says something about the cartoonish brutality of the 2014 Federal Budget that it was still an ambush… even after the tough talk.” I can’t say I entirely agree with this. It may feel like an ambush and in feeling like an ambush we believe it is: making the surprise we don’t truly feel an emotional, reactive reality.

Yet, this was all laid out. The Abbott government has never shied away from its underpinning (essentially) neo-conservative ideology: small government and a blind faith in capitalism.

It cannot be an ambush if we willingly walked into a trap we knew was there or chose not to notice.

Our apparent surprise comes from the fact we need a sensation of being ambushed to lend some sense to our shock; to our thick disgruntlement about the whole thing. It’s not comfortable to not be surprised when outright betrayal should be the appropriate response.

It all comes back to what politics essentially amounts to in our contemporary age.

Jonathon Green, writing for The Drum, argues “this Budget marks … another decisive step in the distancing of the political class from the interests of the public it nominally serves, another step toward politics' slow conversion into pure performance.”[3]

This is the spectacle of Australian politics. We should never have been ambushed, or non-ambushed, because the budget is pure theatre with a pre-set populist, vote-driven narrative that, unlike Hamlet or Waiting For Godot (at least on a literal level), has the capability of encroaching on public life. 

We’re always waiting for the next performance to give one star to, the next prime-ministerial lead actor and supporting treasurer to act out their pantomimed gestures of leading the public.

It amounts to politics disconnection from reality that implacably leads to a disenchantment with our elected figures or, more particularly, politics in general. Surprise evaporates.

While we bluster and write scathingly, it is tattooed with a sense of futility; with the helpless hopelessness of being perpetually ambushed even as we see it coming.

Then why, if the state of things is so degraded, do we fail to enact genuine, healthy, pragmatic change towards an admittedly idealistic notion of a greater good?

Is the disconnect between the spectacle of politics and the reality everyday life so great that we are we just too fucking tired anymore to fight, making spectres of us all?

Has the image of protesting, of having a say, of having your opinion heard been irreparably damaged by such groups as the Socialist Alternative or other far left cohorts, so that committing to a loud stance—no matter how informed by fact—now comes with the awkward stigma of a kind of extremism?

Are we shyly self-conscious about speaking out on behalf of other people? Speaking for ourselves? Do we value independence too much? Has contemporary politics fostered such a transcendent notion of independence that it seems the only viable option, despite the biological sociability of humans that needs us to work together?

Has dialogue between the two sides of politics been so eroded as to become a merely a slanging match? Has the necessary balance between conservatism and progressivism been rendered obsolete as each spectrum retreats to their camps? Or has a genuine and important political opposition come to meet, and die, in a nowhere centre where the least amount of people become offended and little is truly accomplished beyond a maintenance of power?

I don’t know. Probably all the above in one way or another.

What I do know is that the budget has produced an exhausted cynicism that although conducive to a certain rage, also leads us straight down the road to no true alternative in our implicit acceptance. Cynicism is a state that exists so much in its own cause that there is nothing beyond cynicism: it compiles its own endless borders. The challenge needs to be louder than these—mine and others’—words.

It needs to become its own reality.

---

[1] Edward Sharp-Paul nails the immediate and symbolic connotations of the budget (from a fairly wide perspective): http://junkee.com/junk-explained-what-we-think-about-the-2014-federal-budget/34215

Matt Grudnoff notes also the attack on ‘core Australian values’—universal education and health— http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/grudnoff-budget-hacks-away-at-our-core-principles/5454328

Although tending towards the hyperbolic at times, Ten Things at thevine.com, has been foreseeing this budget coming for quite some time and has been vicious in its attacks concerning its fractured equitability: http://www.thevine.com.au/life/news/10-things-everything-still-not-awesome-20140515-281349/?utm_source=thevine&utm_medium=featured-rotator&utm_campaign=internal-testing

[2] Ross Gittens makes exactly this point for Fairfax Media: http://www.smh.com.au/business/federal-budget/federal-budget-2014-tough-and-unfair-its-business-as-usual-20140513-3882r.html

[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/green-a-fib-too-far-the-death-rattle-of-political-trust/5453970

sometimes it feels like we only go backwards, baby

There is beauty in every emotion, even the bad. No matter how helpless you can feel before them. It all amounts to a realization of your humanity, of who and how you are. They may resist what you want to be, what you want them be, but as they slip from your grip, inching deeper inside you, crystalizing and evaporating and clarifying and distorting in equal measure, they can only be what you and they are.

It is what it is.

We may recoil from the bad ones, from their immense weight, finding them over and again to be embedded in the everyday as we try to avoid them, but they’re important. They are an aspect of you, of your capacity to feel. Without them, we would have no notion of the spectacle of the good emotions, their significance, their definition of what is, what feels, right. We find balance in our world, we find what is supposed to be beautiful in what is not and this makes them significant. They define us, how we react to and within the world. How we shape a memory, the present, and a future.

In a sense, this is blank idealism, a hopeful reconstitution of what makes us feel ordinary so that we feel less ordinary about it. Within it, we never feel like these are things we are ok with, we’re never likely to think that this will add to the sheen of what makes us happy. It is almost impossible to conceive it that way. They are, in the end, as much us as any other thoughtful motion or intellectual insight or conscious recollection, and as us we cannot separate ourselves from their ominous bearing. We can only see from within, not from without, even as we strive to move through them, to see an other side we implicitly know is there, no matter how distant, impossibly vague.

It’s funny, then, how buried in ourselves, we can still find means to understand ourselves in different mediums; how states of mind open up certain works-of-art—namely music—to a more robust significance, how they can better explain being in a few verses and a catchy chorus than I can in 600-odd words. I guess, this is the other side of emotion; that, without it, we cannot always sympathize or empathize with what a musician or artist or writer is trying to transmit.

I would not say it’s twee as being eye-opening, as having some curtain parted for revelation to shine in, but in moments of being so caught up in yourself that there is only yourself, to hear, observe, be party to something that mirrors an aspect of you is to be suddenly less isolated. You can see that something constructive or meaningful can come out of anything. Someone gets it.

Tame Impala aptly sing, ‘it feels like I only go backwards, baby. | Every part of me says, go ahead.’ This is the way these emotions feel. Stagnating, reversing, even as something better, at least different, waits ahead if only you’d reach for it. Perfectly, the song itself rolls in a blissful melody, searching, wondering, but knowingly so, lost waiting for a reciprocation of affection the singer knows is not, probably will not be, forthcoming. He can only be hopeful, tricking himself destructively into not going anywhere, into going backwards.

It is by any measurement a stunning song, poignant and searching in its simplicity. Pop music always does it best. It, like any great truly sad song, sees exactly the inherent beauty in difficult emotion, bringing forth a capacity to love through its pleading, desperate lyrics. We can only long if we feel distance in the first place, if there is a need for us to reach for something better, even as we recognize that we are feeling this helpless longing—‘oh no, not again.’

There is clarity in opposites. An—our—identity in an other. To fully grasp anything is to know its antonym in all its inverse associative logic, emotions and art included.