Friday, March 20, 2009

Greetings Housos, we have come to train you!


One of the joys of unemployment at DH's age and level of infirmity is that you get to do a lot of fun courses to prepare you for jobs that you are unlikely to get because of age and disability discrimination.

Thus it is that DH found herself shoe-horned into a Cert IV in Workplace Training and Assessment.

The objectives are to:
  • round up a bunch of people with some native talent for teaching
  • teach them to gibber in incomprehensible bureaucratese
  • discipline them into course-delivery robots
  • turn them loose to replicate
And it takes 8 agonising days!

Why can't they learn from Dr Who. One blast of the electron gun, and your brain is rehoused in a shiny new cyberman outfit.

Tramp tramp tramp. Target Learning Objective. Obliterate independent thought. Deliver Learning Outcome. Tramp tramp tramp. Evaluate Performance Criteria.
Obliterate obliterate obliterate. Objective accomplished.


Thursday, March 19, 2009

4F: Family First F*wit Fielding

Any chance of electors getting our cash back on this joker?


DH is increasingly horrified by a democracy that allows idiots to flourish.

When DH was a girl, idiots seemed to knew their place and kept their mouths shut. Talk about a sense of entitlement! Now they even feel they can stand up against the will of the Australian people, and position themselves as the most powerful player in Aussie politics!

And nothing is more idiotic than an idiot who believes himself to be on a mission from God
.

Who voted for this idiot anyway?
Oh yeah... apparently, he got in on some preference deal that Labor set up to keep the Greens out of the Senate.

... On second thoughts, there can obviously be such a thing as too much cleverness.

Oh alright, so idiots have always flourished... but never with such a sense of entitlement.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Renovate this!

[Update Nov 20. 6 kitchen floor tiles, the rotting window frame, and the subsiding bathroom floor have now been replaced. Thank you HNSW!]


Thanks to the Labor government for the $130 million to maintain our homes and prop up our economy. And lest we forget, thanks for reversing the 12 years of housing neglect by the Howard Government.

Meanwhile in public housing in NSW there has been no money for years for anything but emergency maintenance, and stock has run down.

Here's an example just from DH's place, which is only about 25 years old.



The list includes: a subsiding bathroom floor, dry rot in the windows and door frames, poor quality carpet fraying everywhere, perished kitchen flooring, subsiding kitchen cabinets, no insulation under a hot tin roof windows that won't open, water damaged architraves.

To be honest, DH is so grateful to have a place at all that she is not much bothered. As Capitalism slides down the gurgler, being houseproud hardly seems like a priority.

Friday, March 06, 2009

How "Labor" treats the unemployed

How many people are on Newstart because they are denied the Disability Pension?
The bizarre rule for being accepted on the Disability pension is that your condition must be long term and stable.
Centrelink forces those whose condition is long term and unstable (eg not responding to medication) to stay on Newstart.
When such people apply for a Disability Support Pension, they are forced to remain on Newstart, with reduced job search requirements.
In other words, their inability to get work is tacitly recognised.
So what's the difference?
Oh, about $100 a fortnight per person in the government's coffer, extracted from the hide of some of the Australia's weakest and most unwanted..

The unemployed are the most stereotyped, stigmatised and reviled group in Australia.
Yet how many of them are actually
  • chronically sick
  • moderately disabled
  • low-level mentally ill
  • near pension age and unemployable due to age discrimination
And to add injury to insult, all these people, who are trying to get by on $225.15, a week were denied the $900 stimulus package that might have seen them catch up on a few bills at last.

And to add the 'Labor' government's irrationality to injury, these are the people who would have turned over the money most quickly! While those whose fancy lawyers and tax minimisation schemes reduce their income to $100,000 will not only receive the money, but can squirrel it away to do the economy no good at all!
All because the unemployed are the nation's scapegoats, and governments can get away with it.