Monday 15 June 2020

Hello all,

Well, here we still are. Since I last wrote—and you theoretically read—Victoria’s restrictions have eased somewhat. Open again are some cafes and restaurants, with 20 patrons permitted inside premises. Camping and tourist accommodation is open again (though not with shared toilet facilities). 

These current restrictions are set to be eased further from 22 June, sadly just a day late for all you winter solstice ravers to howl at the moon or stand an egg on end or something.

Happily for us, playgrounds are now open which means the chances of Finn crying manically at his inability to have a swing have dramatically decreased. Good news all-round.

Although the opening up of playgrounds et al. is welcome, working arrangements—at least in our household—remain the same. ‘Work from home’ is the continued normal and although it has benefits in theory, in practice, having to wrangle the kids and work and everything else life entails is bloody hard. For this reason, I do hope these restrictions are relaxed sooner than later, preferably before my hairline is more a hair crater where hair once grew.

At least with cafes open, Archer and I can do our usual pre-Kinder coffee ritual, where I get to sit down and have a coffee, he has a babycchino and we get some of that father/son bonding time (usually while watching a dinosaur short on YouTube!).

Following on from my discussion in the prior missive about the awe and wonder of old ‘multi-media’ software, I managed to pick up a rather old IBM Thinkpad 380ED on eBay and wow...what a beast. According to the literature of the day (1997—IBM’s press release is titled ‘IBM ThinkPad 380E/380ED Features High Performance and Gigantic Capacity’), this computer features ‘desktop PC capabilities’ in a ‘conveniently mobile package’. Yeah. Not so much. This thing weighs 3.2kg—about two-and-a-half times the weight of a 13.5″ Surface Laptop 3—and is about as thick as a Tom Clancy hardcover (the first edition of Rainbow Six is 58mm thick; a Thinkpad 380ED is 62mm thick).

Inside, it packs an Intel Pentium 166MHz with MMX Technology (I won’t even bother making a comparison with today’s processors, suffice it to say if there’s a list of the 1,200 fastest computer processors, a 166MHz Pentium would sit at about number 7,429), a ‘massive 5.1GB hard disk drive’ (again, orders of magnitude less capacious than today’s tech), topped off with a ‘large 12.1-inch , 800 x 600 resolution, display’ (bigger than an iPad, but with 86% fewer pixels). But boy, does it play Microsoft Encarta well!!

When I picked it up from the seller, he had ‘updated’ the software as far as Windows XP (2001), but this wasn’t what I wanted it for. I wanted it for the real 90s multimedia computer experience—the classic Windows 9x monolithic kernel sitting atop the sturdy foundations of MS-DOS. Windows 98 Second Edition is, of course, the best way to experience this (the computer originally came with Windows 95, but Win98SE is better in every conceivable way).

I won’t bore you with the technical intricacies of restoring a computer back to an older operating system, except to say that computers generally don’t like going backwards and it took a bit of work. Sadly, the computer didn’t have any original factory restore disks, so I had to find my own OS disks and drivers to install. Fortunately our house is a veritable cave of erstwhile tech wonders (thanks, Rob) so I had a copy of the Windows 98 Second Edition upgrade version to install over my own old Windows 98 disk. I also had to make a boot disk! Wow, that took me back. 

Anywhom, I burnt a CD with IBM drivers (yep, I have a spindle of CD-Rs I haven’t touched in years) and got everything up to scratch circa May 1999 (WIN98SE’s release date). A website called WinWorld came in very handy as they’ve preserved a lot of old Microsoft, IBM and other software that would otherwise be unavailable, thus I was able to install Office 97 Professional and have some fun with Clippy and friends. 

Of course this computer wasn’t for me, so I set up the computer with a user account, ‘Archer McKenzie’ and made the password difficult to forget: ‘archer’. It was a lot of fun guiding Archer across the keyboard as he typed his name in for the first time. And what a keyboard it is, too. It puts most modern laptop keyboards to shame with its full-sized keys and substantial key travel. It feels like a real keyboard. Of course, when your laptop is thicker than a copy of the Macquarie Concise Dictionary Seventh Edition, there’s plenty of space to build a decent keyboard. I can’t help but think modern laptops could split the difference and be, say, the thickness of a textbook (instead of a credit card like so many laptops are today) and feature a decent keyboard. I mentioned how much I like the Surface Go keyboard last missive and, yes, for a keyboard of its type, it’s decent. But compared to the Thinkpad keyboard of yore, it’s not great.

But I digress. I installed Microsoft Dinosaurs and wow—what a treat! Well, it was for me anyway. I think Archer might have been expecting something...more? It is pretty tame, but it’s also from 1993, so I’ll give it a pass grade. I don’t think my harsher-marking son will though! It’s basically a book with some noises and voiceovers. The multimedia aspect of CD-ROMs did get better and to that end, I managed to acquire two The Magic School Bus CD-ROMs: Exploring the Solar System and Dinosaurs. These are quite wonderful. I remember playing these both at home and at school and having a lot of fun with them. Archer and I have spent some time with the Dinosaurs one (interrupted by a dreaded Blue Screen of Death) and he seems to enjoy it more, though I think his 21st century expectations are somewhat ahead of what Scholastic and Microsoft could do circa 1995. Still, it’s a nice thing to have and a nice way to spend some time together in an otherwise tech-saturated world.

Other miscellaneous ways to pass the time

Finn and I visited Westgate Park a couple of weekends ago, in the shadow of the eponymous bridge. Well, the sun was coming from the complete opposite direction, so there was any literal shadow, but it was within the ‘footprint’ I guess. It was nice to get out with just Finn (I love both my children but sometimes it’s just nice spending time with one) and he is a genuine raving maniac to be with (see below for evidence of this). 

We still go for our walks and our rides and try to be outside as much as possible. Even in this colder weather, it’s better to be outside than inside with the kids. It’s better for them—and for us! It’s just a pain to always be having to rush home from kinder or what have you because I have to continue doing work. For parents anyway, working from home means far less work/life balance. One of the cafes at Deakin has recently reopened—just outside the law building construction site—meaning that, during the week, we can have a babyccino and watch the diggers do their thing.

Can you dig it? Well the contractors on the Level Crossing Removal Projects can. Thanks to a tip-off from Chris, we wandered down over the long weekend to see the many, many, many diggers and cranes and rollers and bobcats grade separating Cheltenham and Mentone station level crossings. It’s really rather amazing the work they are doing—and the speed with which they are doing it. Archer and I crossed the pedestrian crossing at Como Parade and looked up towards the Balcombe Road crossing and could only see a rather amazing tunnel. It’ll certainly make a hell of a difference for the Mentone and Cheltenham shops when it’s all done.

Our National Shame

Oh dear. It seems we’ve entered the realm of politics again. Yes, it’s important. No, I probably won’t stop. Why? Because we seem to be under the deluded impression that Australia is a ‘fair’ and ‘egalitarian’ society.  We believe that we’re the land of the ‘fair go’ and all that mythmaking. And while this can absolutely be the case within family, friend and community groups, it is absolutely not the case on a national scale. 

Exhibit A: Indigenous Australians. Above is the front of last week’s Saturday Paper—about the only worthwhile news publication left in this country. In the wake of the continued Black Lives Matter protests in the US, it’d be tempting to think how ‘lucky’ we are to live in a country that doesn’t have the same problems. Spoiler alert: we do. It’s worth reading the whole article, but Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island make up 3% of the Australian population, yet constitute 27% of the national prison population. 

Commission after commission after inquest followed every black death in custody, yet still nothing changes. We like to think of ourselves as a fair and equal country, free of racism. Yet these 432 (since revised up to 437 in the last few days) lives lost since 1991, in what should have been safe places, indicate the opposite. Accurate deaths in custody numbers are difficult to come by (itself a travesty), but between 1979 and 2018, it’s estimated Indigenous deaths in custody constituted around 20% of the total number of deaths in custody. Twenty per cent. This from a population group that constituted anywhere between 1% and 3% of the national population during that time. If that isn’t a problem, I don’t know what is. A pub in Darwin had a ‘no blacks’ rule—not in 1919, but 2019. Much more lurks under the surface. We’ve a long way to go … and I can’t help but feel we are going backwards.

Robodebt

Exhibit B: ‘Robodebt’, a government debt-recovery program deliberately targeted at the vulnerable and, the other week, was found to be illegal.

It’s March 2016. For the Liberals, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Under Malcolm Turnbull, they were meant to romp home in the upcoming federal election against a Labor opposition led by a damp cloth also known as Bill Shorten. But the polls were tight—very tight—and the Liberals, self-proclaimed ‘better economic managers’, had discovered a dreaded ‘black hole’ in their promised election spending Their solution? To go after the most vulnerable in society through welfare debt recovery!

Of course going after the vulnerable is nothing new from the Liberals. They have transformed the demonisation of welfare and its recipients into an artform over the past 30 years. To the point where society at large is quite comfortable demonising any welfare recipient as some sort of bludger subclass. That excludes, of course, ‘self-funded retirees’ or big businesses who receive billions in taxpayer largesse, because, well, reasons.

In order to cover the ‘black hole’, data from the ATO and Centrelink would be ‘matched’ in order to discover which dole bludging bastards had allegedly received too much from Centrelink. This would be calculated with a crude formula: welfare recipients’ annual income would be averaged over the year (divided by 12 to achieve a very imprecise and inaccurate monthly income) and this would be compared with how much the recipient received from Centrelink. There’s just one problem with this—and it’s a big one. It completely contradicts the fundamental basis of receiving welfare in Australia: you must report your income fortnightly and welfare is paid based on that reported fortnightly income. 

Let me tell you from my own experience when I was the blessed recipient of Youth Allowance and honoured to receive a Robodebt letter.

When I suckled from the taxpayer teet a decade ago, I was studying at Monash and working on a casual basis at JB Hi-Fi. Like with many casual roles, shifts were allocated on a fortnightly basis. Some weeks I had one shift (say, five hours); other weeks I had 25 or more hours. This variability meant that when I reported my income to Centrelink, some fortnights I’d receive close to the full amount of Youth Allowance, others I’d receive nothing as I’d worked too much, precisely the way our means-tested welfare system is meant to work.

But you see the problem Robodebt’s income averaging throws up? By taking your annual income and dividing it evenly throughout the year, it completely ignores the income peaks and troughs experienced by the hundreds of thousands of people without secure employment. The whole program ignored the fundamental basis of the system it was supposed to be defending. I can’t stress this enough—a government program aimed at protecting the welfare system deliberately ignored the fundamental basis of that very same system. 

In late 2018, I received an official ‘please explain’ letter in the mail, asking me to explain an alleged discrepancy between my annual income and the Youth Allowance I received. I knew this program was complete and utter bullshit, but I’d also read harrowing tales of people trying to fight the system. It reduced them to nothing. People have died. Let me repeat that—people have killed themselves because they received a Robodebt demand for payment in the mail. 

Like all Robodebt ‘please explain’ letters, it reversed the onus of proof, forcing me to prove my innocence, as opposed to the Department of ‘Human Services’ having to prove my guilt. Basically, the only way to ‘prove’ I was in the right was to trawl through payslips and bank records from 7+ years ago (even the ATO doesn’t mandate such records be kept that long) and demonstrate that, yes, I had reported the correct income at the time. I was basically re-reporting months of income as I’d already done years and years ago. 

This was no trivial task. Who has payslips from 7+ years ago? I sure as hell didn’t. So I had to log on to my (old) online banking and trawl through my income from JB Hi-Fi for the months Centrelink was demanding records. But even then, the salary deposited in my bank was net income, as opposed to gross (before tax) which Centrelink required, so I had to recalculate every wage I had been paid during that time, plus take into account other non-salary payments such as sales commissions. I spent hours and hours getting these records together before submitting them. The response? Nothing. Not a ‘thanks for your info, you’re off the hook’, not a thing. I had to call up and check and the response was essentially ‘no, there’s no problem, why would there be?’. Thanks. 

Now, I’m a reasonably well-adjusted individual with reasonable means. I know where my records are and I can generally access them in one way or another. And, if worse came to worst, JB Hi-Fi is still solvent and might be able to provide me with these records. But you can imagine how this Robodebt scheme could be a huge burden on people who are already living with mental illness or trauma, as so many on welfare are.

What happens if you don’t have any records (not unreasonable given no other government department requires you to keep records for that long)? What happens if your employer from a decade ago no longer exists? Or kept shoddy records? Well, if you don’t respond to the ‘please explain’ letter, Centrelink will automatically raise a debt against you, even though the debt is likely completely incorrect and bears no relation to reality. This caused people to kill themselves.

Last week, the government announced it would repay 470,000 debts collected during the scheme, totalling some $721 million. Gordon Legal, who is pursuing a class action against the government in the Federal Court (and essentially forced the government to announce the repayment), is continuing the case despite the announcement so victims can claim interest and damages against the Commonwealth. 

The Prime Minister was asked about this rather humiliating backdown (remember, ‘better economic managers’) last week. He had the opportunity to apologise for the distress caused to thousands of people in the raising of illegal debts. His response? ‘The income averaging principle is one that has been followed by Labor and Coalition governments for a very long period of time’. No apology for the pain caused. No apology for the families who have lost loved ones, just a fob off and ‘blame Labor’ (jeez...it’d be nice if I could blame my predecessors for my mistakes 7 years after the fact).

And, aside from the callousness of his response, it’s simply not true. ATO data has indeed been used for a long time in conjunction with Centrelink data by governments of both colours, however precisely because of its coarse inaccuracy, previous governments have never used it to automate debt recovery, only as a tool to flag possible human investigation.

Does any of this sound like a ‘fair go’ to you? If we measure the fairness of our society by how we treat our most vulnerable, then we are failing—and failing miserably.

The government knew their scheme was, at best, legally questionable and, at worst, outright illegal, yet they persisted, even as court cases, legal advice and common sense indicated otherwise. This is why the class action is continuing—Gordon Legal is seeking damages for ‘negligence’, arguing that the government knew the whole system was a sham, yet they continued to pursue debts anyway. Judging by the records that have come out so far, this stands a good chance of succeeding.

We like to tell ourselves, when it comes to the law, if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about—except that's simply (and sadly) not true. The vast majority of people who received letters from Centrelink had done nothing wrong, in fact they had done precisely what was asked of them. Yet here they were, treated like criminals by the system that was supposed to protect them.

Malcolm Turnbull went on to narrowly win the 2016 election, losing 14 seats in the process. This phyrric electoral victory irreparably damaged Turnbull’s authority in the party, leading to the endless leadership shenanigans, culture wars and denigration of evidence-based policy we’ve endured for the past four years. Oh, and the minister who concocted this illegal scheme way back in 2016? The then-Minister for Social Services: the Hon. Scott Morrison MP … I wonder what he’s up to now?

Note: I started writing this section on 4 June. The figures quoted above were correct then. In the intervening week, it’s been reported the total value of illegal Robodetbs to be repaid will be $1.5 BILLION — not $721 million. About three quarters of the total raised through the scheme. But yes, the Liberals are Much Better Economic Managers®.

A ‘pink’ recession

Exhibit C: the child care sector. After being assured JobKeeper would remain until September, the education minister announced that the federal government would roll back free child care and withdraw the JobKeeper subsidy from the sector. This will put many, many businesses and jobs on the line in a sector that is, by-and-large, poorly paid and 95% women. Apparently the male-dominated construction industry needs a $688 million stimulus package for the wealthy (but not too wealthy) to extend their house (but not by too much), but industries with large female employment such as higher education, media and the arts don’t deserve anything much. As I mentioned in my last missive, it’s very difficult to see these choices as anything other than deliberate—designed to inflict maximum damage on sectors seen as ‘not friendly’ to the government. Hardly surprising given 80% of the government’s lower house members are men.

Oh, and remember the ABC? The other week, during the bushfires royal commission, the ABC was praised for ‘saving lives’ during our blackest summer in memory. The reward for this trusted institution? $783 million in funding cuts since 2014 and the announcement last week they need to sack 250 staff to manage a budget shortfall from our friends, the Much Better Economic Managers® of the coalition. 

We could be so much better than this.

Remember The Lucky Country

Donald Horne’s seminal book about Australian culture and identity should still be required reading. It’s lost none of its potency in the 56 years since its publication. The phrase ‘the lucky country’ is still often invoked in complete ignorance of Horne’s central thesis. He wasn’t praising Australia for its youthful enthusiasm or happy-go-lucky spirit, he was chastising it for its civic and cultural mediocrity, for its political and corporate leaders who could barely muster the energy or creativity to organise a piss-up in a brewery. It’s worth remembering the rest of what Horne said in the final chapter:

‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.’

As with missives prior, I’ve been working through some more film scans and digital photographs from the past AGE...like months and months...and here are some of the results, along with more recent images that don't fit anywhere else. Pls tap or click to embiggen.

Well, the end of another period of time. Hooray. Congratulations for doing that thing.