"When the polls go down, the vileness goes up."

It’s been a while (over a year, in fact) since I’ve added anything to this so-called blog, but this morning I watched the video linked below and felt the need to respond.

The simple response is this: “Yes! This! What Adam Bandt said!”

A more considered response is this: I have a grudging respect for John Howard, not because I agreed with his policies or cheered when he led us into a complex, deadly and endless war in the Middle East, but because of a political shrewdness that allowed him to hold the top job for eleven years. The very best example of this shrewdness came during the “children overboard" affair of October, 2001, when Peter Reith and John Howard, in the lead-up to a tight federal election, alleged that asylum seekers on boats had threatened to throw their children overboard in order to secure safe passage to Australia. This very quickly spiralled into reports that the asylum seekers had done precisely that. However, when it emerged that this was untrue, John Howard showed what a clever politician he really was by saying, “I never said that those people threw their children overboard – I simply asked if we as Australians would want to welcome the kinds of people who would throw their kids overboard.” Back covered, bullets dodged, election victory secured.

From Fairfax Media.

And now Peter Dutton, a man with all the political acumen, nous and dexterity of a fifth-grade debating alternate, suggests that some babies and children in our camps on Manus Island and Nauru might follow Baby Asha’s case and turn to self-harm in an effort to get to Australia via the world-class socialised health system that others in his party are concurrently trying to weaken. But not content with suggesting the absurd, he went on to suggest the outrageous and despicable – that Baby Asha’s mother might have deliberately thrown boiling water on her baby in order to circumvent the harsh no-settlement-for-boat-people policy shamefully adopted by both major parties. Refugee advocates have told us that the mother was repeatedly asked whether she had been "coached" by advocates to burn Asha. 

There are two things I need to say about this. First, to even make such a suggestion is disgraceful, even with the convenient Howard-Reith “I was speaking in hypotheticals” caveat that is certain to come. All I can hope is that when Dutton’s statement is related back to Asha’s mother, some of the disgusting innuendo is lost in translation, just for her sake. Second, if it were to emerge that parents were harming their kids in order to get them into Australian hospitals, as unlikely as that might be, I would hope that rather than allowing that to be seen as some kind of xenophobic reflection on their worth as people and parents, we might recognise it as a symptom of the absolute desperation of these men, women, children and babies held in prison for a period without an end in sight. But to be completely clear, I would be very surprised if this turned out to be the case.

It was infuriating to hear Dutton say yesterday that refugee advocates have used the Baby Asha case to “raise their own media profile, which is disgraceful”. No, what is disgraceful is finding a way to turn this thing around to reflect badly on the good and kind people who are standing up in representation of voiceless people. And speaking of voiceless, it was revealed three nights ago that Asha's mother was not allowed to make or receive phone calls or meet advocates, on the orders of Serco staff. To put it another way, the distraught and frightened parent of a burned infant was treated like a common criminal and denied basic rights of communication, not by police or correctional officers, but by private contractors hired by our government. Just let that sink in.

Finally, note the timing – all this is happening just in time for what is sure to be a closely-fought election campaign. As Adam Bandt said, with the L/NP brand of politics, when the polls go down, the vileness goes up.

Interstellar - movie review

(Spoilers yada yada...)

Cards down: I don’t know much about quantum physics, black holes, wormholes or how differing gravities affect the way time behaves. I guess I was sick the day we covered all that stuff in Mr Webster’s physics class circa 1985. I certainly don’t know much about the fifth dimension – I have enough of a struggle navigating the three I can experience first-hand.

But this much I do know: if I were a retired astronaut/the last chance for humanity and had been asked to pilot an against-all-odds lifeboat mission to another part of the universe, and knew that I would really need to understand how wormholes worked, mainly because a crucial part of said mission was piloting a spacecraft through a wormhole, I’d probably ask the eggheads at NASA to explain that stuff to me before I took off. I certainly wouldn’t want to have that stuff explained to me using a pen and a scrap of notepaper mere moments before I gunned the throttle and blasted through said wormhole. You know, because boy scouts.

So that’s a good concern, I think. Quite reasonable. However, for me this concern is much less of a problem than a symptom of the several much larger problems Christopher Nolan faces in Interstellar.

But first here’s what I liked.

Matthew McConaughey. I was never much of a fan, at least until I saw Dallas Buyers Club. I always found him a bit smug. Cocky. Too pretty for his own good. Plus it’s always seemed clear that he’s allergic to whatever they make shirts out of. But it turns out he can actually act. I mean, really act. So that’s something. Yay for epiphany!

The girl who plays his daughter, Mackenzie Foy; she can act, too, as can Jessica Chastain, who plays his grown-up daughter. Anne Hathaway is never given much to work with in this project, but we know she’s a good actor because... Les Mis? Michael Caine can act as well - it’s just that we don’t get to see it in this performance. ("Do…not…go...gentle…into…eurgh…beeeeeeeeeeeep…” Please.)

Oh, do you see what’s just happened? I’ve already digressed from the bits I thought were good. Fortunately I don't have much more to say in that vein anyway. The visual exploration of the fourth and fifth dimensions is mind-bending in a good way, the sound editing is dynamic (if a little too loud for the dialogue), Hans Zimmer plays the hell out of that pipe organ, and much of the cinematography is very good, although not to the standard that was set by Gravity. The science is…well, not my bag, as I pointed out at the top, so in that regard I will have to defer to greater minds than mine and stick with what I do know, which is storytelling.

So these are my main concerns.

Length. Yes, it’s just too damn long. The pacing around the beginning is all right, but the bit between him learning about the mission, making the decision to go, pissing off his kids and then actually being in space doing the mission is ridiculously rushed. And after than…more slow bits, punctuated by a couple of less-slow bits. Christopher Nolan is a seasoned film-maker, so I’d assume that he should be able to count to three. That is to say, the number of acts most movies need and/or manage to make do with. But if the experience of making Inception taught Nolan nothing else, it should have been that just because you can have the standard number of acts, then have another, doesn’t mean you should, even if you’re the writer, director and producer. But evidently Inception didn’t teach him this at all, because he counts to three then, like Guy Pearce’s character in Nolan’s best film, Memento, forgets where he’s up to and decides to start over. Sidebar: perhaps its the rising price of movie tickets and the resultant fear of a decline in multiplex-style entertainment, but it seems to me that movies seem to be getting longer with no real added benefit to the viewer (American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street and The Hobbit, I’m looking at you.)

But it’s not just the amount of film stock Chris Nolan and the other producers allow Chris Nolan to burn through for his own self-indulgence. I question the very premise under which McConaughey’s character Coop finds NASA, which is (apparently) run by a committee in a board room, an old scientist still working on a chalk board, and some teamsters in a concrete silo. In the mountains just near Coop’s inexplicably verdant farm. Undetected by the rest of the world, and accessible by dirt roads. Which (presumably) also serve as the supply route for all the stuff an interstellar lifeboat mission would require. Which is, by any estimation, a lot of stuff, not least of all the ageing Saturn V rocket which, bizarrely, later turns into something vastly more advanced, and capable of getting in and out of the gravitational orbits of roughly earth-sized planets with the ease of a Suzuki Swift delivering pizzas on a Saturday night.

Perhaps the greatest error in the storytelling of this film isn’t the plot holes (Back to the Future is like Swiss cheese, yet remains completely satisfying) or even the over-arching premise, but that Nolan seems unable to decide which story he’s telling. Is Interstellar a science-fiction adventure/thriller? Then plot holes and pacing are a legitimate worry, as is as the implausibility of the requisite science being explained on a scrap of paper (for instance). Is the film about being forced to choose between family, personal legacy, and the survival of humanity? If that’s the question one really wants to ask, it shouldn’t take almost three hours to answer it. Or is this movie a morality tale that asks that most troubling of questions – what happens if we continue to treat our planet like a frat house during mid-semester break?

Let’s assume it’s the latter. If Interstellar is intended as a morality tale, it has, at its heart, a disturbing caveat: that if and when science finds an escape clause for humanity's self-destructive narcissism, our social and moral imperative must be to grasp that opportunity as soon as it appears. In other words, don’t miss the lifeboat when it’s being lowered from the sloping deck. But who amongst us wants to be waiting for a mysterious wormhole to be discovered so a committee can send a reluctant corn farmer, a woman who acknowledges her own level of emotional compromise, and a packet of Mr Fothergill’s winter vegetable seed mix to the far reaches of the next galaxy in the hope we can start over?

Here’s an interesting stat. Interstellar cost almost $165 million to make. In 1979, George Miller made Mad Max for $400,000. Indexed, that would be roughly $1.7 million today. About one hundredth. As two cautionary tales of dystopia borne of environmental neglect and social decay, I know which one made me think twice about the world we hope to leave for our kids.

Stop the train, we want to get off.

It takes no more than a passing interest in history to recognise that Adolf Hitler had a real talent for harnessing public mistrust and dissatisfaction, and using that to cultivate the Nazi brand through the first third of the last century. As a result the so-called ‘War to end all Wars' was followed by an even more devastating global conflict barely two decades later. Or to put that into a timeline with some contemporary context, if the first World War ended when John Howard came to power, the second would be kicking off… oh, about now. 

A brief glimmer of hope shone on Germany during the period between the end of WW1 and WW2. In the 1920s, she shook off some of the deep shame and humiliation of losing the Great War and the pain of reparations and treaties subsequently imposed upon it to enter a period of relative stability known as Goldene Zwanziger, or literally 'The Golden Twenties'. This period lasted from around 1924 to 1929, in which time the economy grew, civil unrest began to settle and, remarkably, Germany started to find her feet.

But in late 1938 came Kristalnacht - the 'Night of Broken Glass' - during which German paramilitaries and sympathetic civilians destroyed Jewish businesses and homes, killed around one hundred Jews, and arrested thirty thousand Jews who were placed in ‘internment camps'.

And we know where those actions ultimately led - to the second global war, and the Final Solution, and of course what is now known as the Holocaust, with those ‘internment camps’ rebadged as ‘concentration camps’, ‘extermination camps’ and ‘death camps’.

So far this is all old news, and mostly common knowledge. Sobering, troubling, even distressing old news, naturally, yet it is somewhat tempered by frequent retelling. Plus there’s the feeling that all of this horror ostensibly took place in the grainy black-and-white of newsreels rather than in the vivid, living colour of HDTV.

So with that said, here’s a thought to ponder: somewhere between Goldene Zwanziger and Kristalnacht, Germany society was in the same place as Australia finds itself today. 

Too much? In my lefty hysteria, have I overstepped some line? Perhaps, but let me finish.

Somewhere on the continuum which features peace, recovery and growing prosperity at one end and murderous fascism, summary executions and gas chambers at the other, there must have been a comparable point to the one on which Australia currently stands as a society. Without wanting to attract accusations of hyperbole, it seems clear to many that we’re heading in the wrong direction along that continuum. We’ve found ourselves on the wrong line, and one of the next stations we pull into will be Press Gagging, followed shortly after by Kangaroo Court. We didn’t spend very long at the last station, but the stench of Mandatory Detention is still funking up the carriage. We can’t get into the cabin or the guard’s compartment to raise the alarm, and the emergency brake isn’t working. But we are being told that everything’s under control.

Many will argue that in young, naive, lackadaisical, larrikin Australia, with our famous ‘fair go for all’ ethos, we don’t need to worry. We’d never let it reach that point, would we? After all, it’s 2014, not 1934! Plus we’ve got all of that history to inform us, and to view as a cautionary tale. It might have happened in another hemisphere, but we’re not idiots. I mean, we can read. And we wouldn’t let that happen here. Not in Australia. No way!

Ah, complacency, tyranny's best friend.

One of the quotes doing the rounds on Twitter of late is by one Hermann Goering - you might have heard of him. At the Nuremburg Trials he said the following:

"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

I think it’s rather appropriate that this quote is getting such a run on Twitter in particular. In the world of the early 21st century, social media is playing an increasingly important role in political dissent. This is no less true in Australia. The Marches in March and subsequent associated protests such as the 'Bust the Budget’ rallies all around the country were organised and their details disseminated almost entirely through social media. (Sidebar: It also seems likely that the conservative side of the debate has not embraced these techs as well as the left, judging by the fudged numbers on internet polls and the army of troll-bots that emerge whenever Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin get jumpy. Shhh - don’t tell them that we’re onto ‘em...)

At this point I feel slightly hesitant in my convictions, since I am mindful of Godwin’s Law which, in one of its forms, states that in any heated internet debate, eventually someone will accuse the other of being a Nazi. Or of being like Hitler. Sometimes it’s as simple as 'You know, this is exactly how Nazi Germany started.' But you get the idea.

The problem with Godwin’s Law is that by its very nature it can often shame us from making those comparisons. It makes us queasy about drawing those parallels. But here’s something else to think upon: Nazi Germany wasn’t a fictional place, like Westeros or Middle Earth or Narnia. It was real. It happened. Which means there was a time when it was exactly how Nazi Germany started. Which presumably - and tragically - means it could happen again.

Now that I’ve invoked the dreaded Godwin’s Law, I figure in for a penny, in for a pound. So check this… 

Hitler achieved power by infiltrating the legislature and then, bit by bit, persuading that legislature to change the laws to grant him additional powers and, in the end, ultimate power. He also did what Goerring articulated above - he identified a cultural scapegoat to blame for the parlous state of the nation, and denounced anyone who spoke out against said blame-shifting. Meanwhile he encouraged the people to carry on, go about their normal lives, let him get on with fixing the mess. Hitler cosied up to like-minded leaders of like-minded countries. Driven by braggadocio, he engaged in mission-creep. He almost certainly burnt down the Reichstag and blamed the Communist Party so he could crush the Communist Party with full approval of the people who democratically elected him. And perhaps most relevant to the events of the last week, Hitler controlled information, both in terms of using flagrant propaganda through sympathetic news outlets, and by directly threatening the press. 

A few years ago I visited Dachau, and was surprised (and slightly embarrassed) to learn that that camp was never an extermination camp in the style of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. It was initially set up in 1933 to hold political prisoners - journalists, academics, rabble-rousers, union leaders. By 1945, around 3.5 million such prisoners had been locked up in the 1,500 Nazi camps.* 

Of course you can see the comparison I’m making. And it’s an uncomfortable comparison, isn’t it?

Yet the point does bear consideration, especially in light of George Brandis' recent knee-jerk (or opportunistic, if you prefer) amendments to our surveillance laws. If, on first viewing, the outstanding German film The Lives of Others seemed to be an earnest yet quaint examination of another, simpler time, then I urge you to watch it again without the popcorn. Or if you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in the German capital, visit the Hohenschonhausen Stasi Memorial Centre in the back blocks of old East Berlin. Or, at the very least, read Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Any of these experiences should remind us of what happens when secret police, spy agencies and, by extension, the government overseeing these bodies can watch, report and detain their citizenry with what amounts to impunity. Of course, we are a very long way from Kristalnacht. Except we’re not really. An excellent, savagely beautiful piece by Alex McKinnon over at Junkee lists just a handful of the multiple attacks on unrelated Muslim Australians by non-Muslim Australians in just one week by the press, politicians and, yes, civilian Australians in the wake of the terrible events outside Endeavour Hill police station.

It can happen again. It shouldn't, but it can. Perhaps the case can be made that Hitler and the Nazis would never have gained the traction they did had Twitter and Facebook been around to help inform and forewarn the people in the absence of a free and balanced media. But that such a case need even be considered should be alarming in itself.

Earlier, I alluded to a train. I should tidy up that metaphor. This ‘train' isn’t charging along apace. It’s not a runaway train full of passengers holding one another and mouthing silent prayers as they brace for the impact. No, this train has a driver, and he is being very careful to keep it rolling along smoothly. After all, gently rocking trains can have a profoundly soporific effect, and who doesn’t like to snooze on a train? The driver is also being very considerate of his passengers. He’s frequently on the PA, telling us all that he’s got everything under control. 

We’ve all seen the bumper stickers helpfully suggesting that if we don’t like where the train is going, we should get off. And maybe that’s it. Perhaps for those of us who don't like the scenery or the destination, our best choice is to leap bodily from the doors and windows and take our chances ‘out there’. 

Except most of us don’t want to leave the train. Many of us have been on this train all our lives, others joined at an earlier station. This used to be a nice carriage going to a nice place. With each passing day it becomes incumbent on those who can still see out the windows to wake up the rest of the passengers and find that damned emergency brake. Maybe then it won’t be too late to get things back on the right track. 

 *Yes, you read those numbers correctly.

Who said anything about fair?

Last evening, on a social media site, I was part of a debate around the left's collective outrage in response to the government's asylum seeker policy and "we've stopped the boats" claim, a triumphant claim immediately followed by the arrival in Australian waters (we think, since the government won't talk about it) of two boats carrying around two hundred refugees. This was written by one participant in the discussion:

Ok... So to clarify...are we speaking about illegal asylum seekers...eg boat arrivals? If we are I find it interesting that what you are all advocating is an open door immigration policy where right of passage is granted to the highest bidder. After all, that is exactly what is happening is it not? Those that can afford it pay for illegal passage to Australia whilst those that can't afford it rot in some cesspool of a refugee camp somewhere while they wait for their spot. Hardly sounds fair to me...

First, I don’t know anyone credible who is advocating an "open-door immigration policy". No one - not Labor, not the Greens, not even the asylum seeker advocates I’ve spoken with. What a great many are saying is that the off-shore processing should end, on-shore expedited processing should occur forthwith, and that having unattended kids (or in fact any kids at all) in detention is unacceptable. Now, Labor has disappointed many by not voting against offshore processing, myself included. But you can oppose the govt’s approach without aligning with the ALP’s approach.

The greater concern at this stage is that it seems clear that the government is using the harshness of the conditions under which asylum seekers are detained as a disincentive to seeking asylum. This suggestion seems to be reinforced by the stern tenor of the recently-leaked Scott Morrison video message to detainees on Manus. This is further reinforced by the incidents mentioned above - the kids taken from school, and the detainees at Villawood being moved in the early hours of the morning, clearly to avoid detection and protest from concerned citizens.

Furthermore, we have an Immigration Minister who is saying that unless a person's chances of being tortured or murdered on their return are 50% or higher, they'll be returned, all whilst not telling us anything about the operations being undertaken by our navy in our name, while boats of up to 150 people, down to 20ml of water per person after two weeks at sea, and with sick and vomiting kids on board, basically disappear. In other words, policy and politics trumping kindness and compassion. Not to mention “there are no boats to report” despite several journalists and advocates having actual conversations with people on board those boats. Unless they’re all lying, but this govt is daily proving itself less and less worthy of being believed, so for now (and until proven otherwise) I’m going to throw my hat in with the Fairfax journalists and refugee advocates.

Oh, and meanwhile, we have a prime minister who, in a piece of political sleight-of-hand that would make Howard and Reith proud, is quite happy to draw a loose but clear connection between jihadists and boat arrivals, despite having no evidence of any such link, in the most cynical of dog whistling exercises.

And finally, we have the oft-repeated “all they’re doing is paying Indonesian people smugglers while the real refugees are languishing” line trotted out by Bolt/Devine/Jones etc. Which might have some merit, except that one of the two boats from the weekend originated not in Indonesia, but India, and according to the "passengers" spoken to, no people smugglers were paid. 

So is it fair? Of course it’s not fair. No one is saying it’s fair, and no one is saying it’s easy. But when you’re genuinely scared for the life of yourself, and your kids, you’ll do anything. You don’t give a shit about fair. So the onus is on Australia, as the more fortunate party in this drama, to find a way to handle things that doesn’t require punishing people who have done nothing wrong apart from “jump" a non-existent queue, and find a way to get their families to relative safety.

Once again, no one is saying it’s simple, and no one is saying that it’s fair. But do we have to be cruel? Or is that the actual point? Because there must be a better way than that. Doesn’t there? 

Why I'm not embarrassed to read YA

So then there’s this, an article by Ruth Graham on Slate titled Against YA, with this tagline: Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.

I won’t lay out every argument Graham makes – you can go read it for yourself – but suffice to say that the tagline is exactly representative of the rather superior position she takes.

In her article, Graham makes many points with which I take issue, but I’m going to focus the convergent beam of my disagreement upon a couple of her more general points, precisely because that’s what they are – extraordinarily generalised.

As far as I can tell, all books written for adults are about people having affairs. Or people being missionaries. Or about surviving cancer, then not surviving cancer, then saying goodbye to the rest of your family as they watch you fail to survive cancer. Of course this is an absurd claim, and to make such a claim is to make it abundantly clear that I’ve only ever read books about affairs, missionaries and people failing to survive cancer. 

This from Graham’s article:

Most importantly, [YA] books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with 'likeable' protagonists.

This is a little like saying that all country music is simplistic and sentimental. One can make a strong case, using myriad examples both prominent and obscure, for precisely this assertion. Except it’s not true. And it can be demonstrated to be untrue by anyone with a more than passing familiarity with country music. 

Okay, I think that’s enough of that. That point needn’t be laboured, except to quote Graham from later in her piece:

I do not begrudge young adults themselves their renaissance of fiction. I want teenagers and ambitious pre-teens to have as many wonderful books to read as possible, including books about their own lives.

To acknowledge the breadth of variety within YA in one breath, but to then generalise so bluntly in the next feels lazy at worse, dishonest at worst. But to then double down by characterising John Green’s juggernaut The Fault In Our Stars as 'a nicely written book for 13-year-olds' as she does is at once arguably true and unarguably narrow. Add to this her suggestion that YA is all about 'escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia' (apparently we “defenders” of YA fiction “admit” this) followed by this quoted line from Jen Doll: 'At its heart, YA aims to be pleasurable'; and you have a wilfully restrictive view of what is not so much a genre as an entire market. Restrictive and, in many, many cases, downright wrong. Demonstrably so.

But even that’s not my greater concern. My greater concern is touched on ever so slightly by Graham, when she opines: 'There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott.'

I’d go considerably further than that. I would argue that a great many of the books and stories now considered classical mainstays would, if published today, find themselves on display in the young adult section of our bookstores. Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickelby, Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles are all about young people finding their way in the adult world. Finding a place of belonging, if you will, or an identity beyond that of their childhood. Romeo and Juliet, published and premiered today, would be YA. Even the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet, calmly and systematically checks off many of the tropes often associated with the YA 'genre'. We can list them: 

• Hamlet is an “emo”; 
• his father is dead; 
• his mother is in a bizarre rebound relationship; 
• his best friend is so cool that it hurts; 
• his girlfriend is so crazy she ends up face-down in a pond; 
• he’s suffering from suicidal ideation; 
• he’s talking to himself a lot; 
• and in the end, pretty much everyone dies.

So Graham is right – there is no shame in writing about teenagers. As I hope I’ve pointed out, there is a long history of doing just that to be found amongst the work of some fairly handy writers. But even in making that point, I think a greater point is at risk of being missed: that there is no shame in writing as a teenager. And I don't mean teenagers who write, necessarily, but adults who write from the teenaged part of their experience.

You see, while I can’t speak for any one my YA-writing colleagues, writing as a young adult is what I see myself doing. All the time. Finding those stories that resonate so strongly with the fourteen-year-old James that the forty-five-year-old James has to tell them.

If you'll indulge me, let me offer a tiny slice of my own history. I grew up in a missionary family, and every two or three years our parents would announce that we were moving. Friends, relatives, everyone was going to be left behind while we headed off to do our Christian duty. As a result of this, I got to grow up in some fairly remarkable places. But the down-side was a crippled sense of identity. A kind of arrested social development. An itch between my emotional shoulder-blades that even now I sometimes struggle to reach. The only way I’ve found to scratch that itch with any kind of satisfaction is through my writing, so as a result, that 'trauma' (a dramatic word, I know, but it’s the best I’ve got) has also been one of the great blessings of my life. Without it, I wouldn’t be doing this, right now. Writing for a living. And I love this. 

Graham, in her Slate piece, says: 'I have no urge to go back and re-read [the books I read as a child], but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader.'

In response to this, I would say the following: I’m happy for you. I’m happy that the books you read as a young person set you up so neatly for all those 'real' books you now enjoy. But for every 'literary' reader such as yourself, there’s at least one of me. You see, I couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about someone’s affair, or the search for the code to the identity of the Illuminati, or a glass cathedral floating down a river, or Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power. I'm not saying you shouldn't either – if you want to read about an Indian sweet-maker defying the odds to become a successful businessman, I say fill yer boots! But no, I’m much more interested in a story like that of Arnold in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Because I’m a native American kid from a reservation in Washington State? Of course not. Because I was – and in some ways remain – a kid who, like Arnold, is trying to find my place in the world.

And while I thank you for your concern, I refuse to be embarrassed by that.

Dear Mr Abbott...

Dear Mr Abbott,

I’d like to tell you a story.

The football commentator Warren Ryan tells the story of a player who marched up to a referee he believed to be biased. ‘What would you do if I called you a cheat?’ he asked.

‘I’d send you off,’ the referee replied.

‘What would you do if I thought you were a cheat?’ the player asked.

‘I can’t do anything about what you think.’

‘Then I think you’re a cheat,’ said the player.

Mr Abbott, we’ve all seen what happens when someone in the press says something nasty about one of your team. Your friend Joe Hockey has just this week filed papers against Fairfax for suggesting that maybe he was selling his influence. Maybe. You know, because of the evidence. It’s a little like the words Joe himself tweeted in July last year to suggest that Kevin Rudd was for sale. What were those words again? Oh yes – Access to Rudd, at a price...FACT.

But I digress. As I say, we all know what happens when someone criticises you or one of your team. That’s right – you file papers against them. Because, like, it hurts real bad, you know?

Right now I’m actually not in the best place financially to defend myself against saying bad stuff about you, Mr Abbott, and with Joe needing the lawyers to get heavy with one of the three independent mainstream media outlets in Australia, I doubt that you want the trouble either. That’s why I’m going to save us both some trouble by not actually calling you anything.

That’s right. I’m not going to call you a liar, even though I think you are. I think you told everyone one thing before the election but had no intention of following through. I think you and Joe confected this entire ‘budget emergency’ so that you could pursue your long game, which is to help the big end of town get bigger without interference from those pesky peasants. I think you deliberately denigrated the economists here and overseas who tried to tell us that the budget emergency wasn’t. And I think you lied when you told us that John Howard’s poll numbers also fell after his first budget when, in fact, they did the precise opposite. Likewise, I wouldn’t dream of saying that you’re an ideologue, but I do think that. Nor would I say that sometimes invoking Godwin’s Law is exactly the right thing to do.

Something else I’m not going to say is that you definitely found it funny when that retired lady called you at the radio station and told you that she has to work on a sex line to pay the bills. But I think you found that distressing and degrading story quite funny, mostly because of the smiling, and the guilty look at the camera when you remembered what a camera does, and I think it made you look creepy because I think you’re creepy. I also think you found really odd parts of Joe’s budget funny, because I saw you laughing and grinning during the sad bits, which was most of it. And I think you looked like a petulant jock when Bill Shorten was giving his budget reply speech.

And Mr Abbott, I wouldn’t dream of saying that you’re definitely a coward for not turning up at Deakin University because you were frightened of the students. But I definitely think you are, just as I also think you don’t give a shit about students or Australia’s higher education system as a whole, or in fact education in general. Again, just to be clear, I’m not saying that you were happy to take your free university education thanks to the reforms brought in by that awful socialist Gough Whitlam (even though you weren't actually an Australian citizen at the time), only to be equally happy to make this generation of students pay more. But I do think you were happy to take your free education, and I think you’re a complete bastard for making it so much harder for young Australians to get educated enough to land a good job and eventually join you in your leafy, beachside electorate. 

Some of the other things I’m not saying about you, (because lawyers), are these: that you’re scared of gay people; that you are either oblivious to or willfully ignorant of the overwhelming evidence in support of the idea that climate change is being caused by people; that you want to undermine state health and education so you can blame the state governments for the inevitable GST hike; that you don’t care all that much for women, indigenous people, asylum seekers or the disabled; and that you keep knocking back invitations to be on Q&A and 7.30 because you’re between skins, and it takes so much time to rub against the corner of the desk before peeling off that last layer. But I do think that all of the above might be true.

That’s right, Mr Abbott. I wouldn’t dream of saying that you are quite possibly the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had, a man who is a terrible leader and a gormless, cowardly, hypocritical bully. But be in no doubt that I do think each of those things.

I also think you should read something other than the Murdoch press, accept that your personal numbers are now unsalvageable, and resign. But you won’t. You definitely won’t. And that much I do know.

Thank you. I shall waste no time reading your reply.

James Roy

Mean, mean bastards.

This won't be a surprise to anyone who knows me, but today, the day after Joe Hockey's first budget, I'm thoroughly pissed off.

Why am I so angry? I could provide a long and exhaustive list which includes but is not limited to cuts to the ABC/SBS, the increase in the retirement age, the 6 month freeze-out of Newstart applicants, the smack-down of the arts, and the half a billion dollars cut from important Indigenous programs.

But in the interests of my own mental health I'm going to limit myself to two of the new tax/levy/surcharge increases.

So, a thought experiment. Imagine you're a single parent. You have three young kids. You're already finding things to be a bit of a struggle, but you're getting by on your minimum wage. Just. But then one of your kids gets sick. It's nothing life-threatening - just an ear infection - but a visit to the doctor is required.

Now, I bet you think you know what I'm about to say. An extra $7 to see a doctor, even a bulk-billing one, right?

I know, it's only seven dollars. It's not really such a big deal, and besides, now you can get in to see a doctor more easily, since the time wasters have been scared away. Sometimes Andrew Bolt does make sense!

But there's more to this story than finding the price of two coffees in order to get your sick child to a doctor. Because hidden in the less fashionable corners of the 2014 budget is the extra five dollars per PBS script. So that single parent is now up for an additional twelve dollars on top of the cost of those antibiotics. And the ear drops, so that's actually nineteen bucks. Nineteen dollars MORE out of pocket than would have been the case. Chris Bowen is right - this is not what Medicare was set up to be. This is not universal health care. This is a clear and cynical move towards adopting the US health system. Mind you, considering how well it's worked for them... Oh, wait, my mistake - it's been an utter disaster.

But for the single parent we met earlier, a shift in public health philosophy is the least of their concerns. They're too busy trying to decide what they'll do without so they can get their kid to the doctor and pay for those meds. Unless they hit the local emergency department... Oh, wait, that's being headed off as we speak, with talk of adding the co-payment to emergency department visits.

This is a real issue, not a fanciful "extreme example". This exact situation is going to be played out many, many times over if this budget passes.

Now, based on past experiences I fully expect a number of rather strident responses to these, my bleeding heart ravings. If you think you might be tempted to do this, take a hard look at yourself before you post, and ask whether you're responding out of ideology or a place of kindness. If it's the latter, then let's talk. But if it's the former, don't bother. I'm really not in the mood.