Five Things Make a Post 15 JUL 2018

[megpie71]

1) Our government is currently reviewing the JobActive contract. This is problematic, because the conversation around unemployment in Australia is very much built around the assumption jobs mysteriously appear when unemployed people look for them, and therefore anyone who is unemployed for longer than six weeks is either lying when they say they've looked for work, or they aren't looking hard enough. There's also an underlying assumption all you have to do in order to get a job is look hard enough - employers apparently have no say in this process whatsoever. So all the questions they're asking are built around these two assumptions; all the answers they're going to accept are built around those two assumptions; and the submissions they're going to receive are largely built around these assumptions as well. Which means the resulting system is basically going to be another iteration of "the floggings will continue/increase until morale improves".

I suppose I ought to get organised and write up a nice submission for them, in full academic language and with all the citations in place and all the references put in nicely, pointing out that really, the thing you need in order to chase the goal of full employment is a fully functional social safety net, which is designed to remove barriers to employment rather than fixing them firmly in place. So, things like increasing the number of psychologist visits allowable under Medicare from the current 10 per calendar year (which is at best a maintenance schedule; it certainly isn't an improvement schedule); putting more money into public housing, so people who are on welfare for the long term can at least have "housing" taken off their list of anxieties; making childcare both available and affordable (when the cost of childcare basically eats up a second wage, it isn't affordable); increasing the rate of the unemployment benefit so it's possible to afford things like nutritious food, decent clothing, shoes which don't leak, accommodation which doesn't leak, reliable transport, and so on; providing access to education and training and allowing people to actually complete them without interruption; and, in certain cases, accepting there is no way known to humanity you're going to be able to get this person into conventional employment and keep them there, so maybe you should be concentrating on something else for them.

All of which would conflict so heavily with our current government's priorities (which are primarily to have an economy which functions like clockwork... tough luck if you get caught in the gears) that it would be discarded entirely.

(There's a reason I decided to go into cultural studies rather than sociology. At least in cultural studies I'm not supposed to expect to see change as a result of my work).

2) While I'm on the subject, I've wound up with a new consultant/case manager at my JobActive provider. I have an appointment with them on Tuesday (because I decided to stop by after my visit to the provider's psychologist on Friday and get one booked - I haven't had a case manager for about a month, and if I don't attend regular appointments, I can wind up with a demerit, which will affect my income. What little there is of it). It remains to be seen where this one falls on the spectrum of JobActive consultants. The best tend to be effective but hindered by the overall system; the majority tend to be benignly ineffective; some of them are actively incompetent (to the point of "why haven't you attended your appointment?" "I did; you folks didn't mark me off as attending"); and the worst of them are outright malignant (I haven't run across too many of those, thankfully - mostly, I suspect, because I can simulate shocked white-middle-classness when I have to).

3) The weather continues cold and this week it is setting in wet. Rain expected every day for the next week, and the best chances I have of getting things dry on the clothesline look like happening on Tuesday (30 - 40% chance of about 0.4mm rain so far) and Thursday (20% chance). But for the rest of the week, we're looking at approximately 2mm of rain per day with 80% or greater probability. Which means I'm drying clothes inside the house on the clothes rack. Or, depending on how fed up I get how quickly, I may be drying some bits out (or at least finishing them up) on the heater in my bedroom. Which reminds me - need to check the progress on the damp absorber in my room, because I suspect I'm going to need to be supplying myself with a new one sooner rather than later.

4) On the gaming side of things, I'm still chipping away at Mobius Final Fantasy. I mostly play this one as a way of winding down in the evenings before bed, and I'm enjoying the whole business of chasing around doing various things on single-player (I haven't looked at the multi-player side of things; I tend to find myself and multi-player tend to clash a bit, because I have a very "I'm just noodling away here taking my time" style of play, while most people on the multi-player games I've been involved in seem to be very much on the "high speed, must win, gotta get 'em all" side of things, or they're focussed on goals they don't articulate, and that I don't share. Plus, of course, I'm in Australia, eight hours out of synch with just about everyone, and at the end of the standard NBN "tin cans and string" arrangement. (Thank you so much Mr Turnbull, for that!). Which means my connection can be as laggy as all hell at the right time of the day (namely, any time outside the period between about 2am - 8am). So I tend to skip multi-player stuff, because I find it frustrating. Maybe I should give it a go. But I'm not sure.

5) Still gaming, I pulled out the console handsets yesterday, and played a bit more Persona 3 (I'm working through it again, to see whether I can finish the game) on the PS2. Steve enjoys it when I play the console games - he'll come in and join me on the sofa in front of the TV, and we can spend a bit of time together having a sort of snacky dinner (party pies, chicken nuggets, and small hot dogs) rather than doing anything particularly formal with our time. At the moment we have a few issues with our "coffee table" (it's a 52L storage crate with a bit of scrap fabric draped over it to make it look fancy) because the lid of the storage box is a bit bumpy, which makes it hard to figure out where to put your drinks. Unfortunately, our current media room is also the store-room, which means there's not enough room for our actual coffee table (a big glass-topped bamboo thing we got second-hand from Steve's folks) or the nesting tables. Instead, 52L storage crates all the way. Oh well, I'm gradually creating space in there as I go through the boxes of books. It's taking forever, but I'm getting there.

How's things for everyone else?