Doctor 25 May17

I visited the GP and she said:

 

1  that people who have experienced abuse in childhood often have fibromyalgia ... so my chronic pain is not unusual.

2 that my experiences have left me with a high degree of empathy

Diary 11Apr17

I'm changing the purpose of this blog .... till now it's been a rant blog but I've realised that it's the best way to make a daily record of my activities.

So..... today ....
EFTPOS terminal
Reconcile CWBC cc
Payslip for Nat
Expense record

Normality

The other day the lunchtime conversation topic revolved around school experiences, tertiary study, work etc.  I listened to the common themes of student life ..... study life ..... and my inside voice was screaming at me .... my experiences were utterly different .... tales of student gathering ..... I had no friendly experience that I can recall .... instead I remember the aching loneliness of going into lectures and wondering where to sit that wouldn't result in pain and rejection.  

The table conversation delved into study habits and exam cramming ..... my memories are of feeling completely confused and useless .... not having even the most basic idea of what I was supposed to be doing.  ..... of reaching the time of exams and knowing that I knew absolutely nothing.

At the table I sat listening .... and thinking "This is normal life that I'm hearing about .... my life has been nothing like it." How can systems fail so badly that children/adolescents can be left out so completely.

Ornery issues

I'm surrounded by people who refuse to try to get better.  One has leg pain similar to mine but he won't experiment with the medication to find a dosage that works .... he just says "I tried that medicine at XYZ dose and it didn't work" .... I know that it works at a different dosage but he won't try it.

Another just complains and won't try to find remedies .... apparently it's better to make life miserable for other people.

18c

Since when did the person spouting racist hate speech become the victim?

We didn't need to have another inquiry to figure out that 18C is a necessary law. That fact was established 25 years ago. The overwhelming finding of that National Inquiry into Racist Violence was this: many victims considered the sub-physical forms of racial violence -- the insults, intimidation, harassment and aggression -- had a more severe impact than actual cases of physical assault. The violence of words could be as debilitating as physical violence.

The psychological effect of continual exposure to abusive and insulting language cannot be overlooked. Racial hate speech can result in insecurity and depression, preventing people from participating fully in society.

A major hurdle for this early inquiry into racist violence was that people who had experienced it were too afraid to come out and talk about it. Some said they feared retribution. Others said that nothing could be done to make the racial violence -- the abuse, insults, and harassment -- stop, so they'd rather not draw any attention to themselves. The inquiry had to create an outreach program to assure them they would be safe to talk.

Racial hate speech can result in insecurity and depression, preventing people from participating fully in society.

Through this early inquiry they also found that verbal violence often precedes physical violence. So section 18C was born. It functioned well for 25 years before being attacked by the Abbott and Turnbull Governments.

In those 25 years, only 1.8 percent of racial vilification complaints have ended up in court. Most are withdrawn, rejected or, most often, conciliated by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Andrew Bolt, Bill Leak, and QUT cases may have dominated the news cycle in recent years, but the latter two cases were withdrawn and dismissed respectively. We'll get to Bolt.

Opponents of 18C like to stylise themselves as champions of 'free speech', and will point to the Bill Leak case to declare that 18C is broken. But the Bill Leak case proves the exact opposite. That case was withdrawn, but even if the case had progressed to court, it would have failed because section 18C does not function alone. There is section 18D, which defends statements that are in the public interest, in creative works, in debate or if they are genuinely held belief. Even though Bill Leak's cartoon was tasteless, and offensive to many, 18D covers artistic purpose.

Twenty percent of Australians say they have been subject to verbal racial abuse. That figure soars to 90 percent for Aboriginal Australians.

What's not covered by 18D?

Let's take the famous Andrew Bolt case. Bolt lost the case for two of his articles. In one of the articles, titled 'It's so hip to be black', he individually names several fair-skinned Aboriginal people saying they only claimed their Aboriginal heritage for personal benefit.

He did not lose this 18C case because he questioned issues of Aboriginal identity, as he claims. That conversation might have been found to be of genuine public interest, and covered by 18D. The court ruled his articles unlawful because they contained "erroneous facts, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language."

Twenty percent of Australians say they have been subject to verbal racial abuse. That figure soars to 90 percent for Aboriginal Australians. This law provides assurance to Australians of all backgrounds that, in the eyes of the law, they are not fair game. It says that public acts of racism are not tolerated. But this inquiry has sent the message that, under a Liberal government, the right to racial hate speech must be protected.

There's a sentiment that running through this debate that says racial hate speech is "just words".

Tell that to the woman who comes home in tears because she was abused on a train. Tell that to the child who is trembling because they've just watched their parents be harassed at the shops.

Since when did the person spouting racist hate speech become the victim?

Invasion Day 2017

Richard Di Natale
Leader of the Australian Greens

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and others have been organising major, organised protests on January 26 since at least 1938."

We all want a day on which we can come together as a national community to reflect on where we're at and celebrate what we are: a wonderfully diverse, open and free society.

But January 26 is not that day.

Many of us don't think too deeply about it. We assume that January 26 is all about barbeque lunches or Hottest 100 countdowns or cricket at the Adelaide Oval or just a day off, if we're lucky enough to get one.

But for January 26 to be about those things, we need to forget what it really commemorates: the First Fleet's arrival at Port Jackson in 1788, and Arthur Phillip's raising of the Union Jack on the land of the Eora nation.

It's only by forgetting that historical moment that we can ignore that January 26 is the anniversary of the beginning of an invasion -- an invasion that had catastrophic and tragic consequences for all the peoples and nations who had lived here for tens of thousands of years, and for their descendants.

Whatever else the history of the Australian continent since 1788 has been, it's also been a history of killing, colonising, dispossessing, converting, "protecting", assimilating and discriminating. All these horrors have been perpetrated by non-Indigenous people on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. And January 26 is a potent symbolic reminder of that history and our efforts to airbrush it.

Non-Indigenous Australians have been very adept at forgetting. Within a few decades of colonisation, our legal systems had convinced themselves that Australia was "terra nullius" before the Europeans arrived, and therefore that what happened afterwards was a "settlement". For the first six decades after Federation, history books barely contained any references to First Nations people or their experiences at all. I was still being taught at school during the 1970s and 1980s that Australian history was uniquely peaceful, that there had been no wars here.

The forgetting was so complete and so entrenched that the anthropologist Bill Stanner famously called it the Great Australian Silence -- a "cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale". To continue to celebrate Australia Day on January 26 is to participate in that cult of forgetfulness.

But that Silence is not universal. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and others have been organising major, organised protests on January 26 since at least 1938. Beginning in the 1960s, historians have returned to the historical evidence and corrected the record. The High Court dispensed with the fiction of "terra nullius" in 1992.

Most of what non-Indigenous Australians thought they knew about First Nations' cultures and connections with this land has been proven to be false. At school I learned that Aboriginal society was essentially a hunter-gatherer society -- one of many colonial myths that have been used to justify the dispossession of their land. Bruce Pascoe, among others, has shown the extent to which Aboriginal nations managed and cultivated vast tracts of the continent, to regulate all aspects of their relationships with the land from food production to bushfire control. Historians have obliterated the myth that the European "settlement" was in any way peaceful, or that there was somehow little resistance.

Australia's past still gets divided -- falsely -- into "black armband" and "white blindfold" history. Holding an Australia Day celebration on what is also known as Invasion Day or Survival Day is inherently divisive. It locks us into one position or another -- either we're celebrating "Australia Day" and forgetting its history, or we're remembering and resisting.

Unlike other nations with similar histories, Australia has never undertaken a national truth and reconciliation process which would force us -- and our governments -- to acknowledge the history of what has happened here and its contemporary consequences. There have been Sorry marches and official apologies and commitments to Closing the Gap, but sorry without consequence -- without a genuine reconciliatory process -- is not enough.

It means the history continues. Right now, Australia is locking up Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at up to 24 times the rate we lock up everyone else. Right now, Australia is removing children from Indigenous parents at a rate that is higher than during the periods of the Stolen Generations. Right now, Australia is still subjecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities to levels of policing and and welfare surveillance that very few other groups endure.

At the very least, all Australians should be able to participate in a national celebration.

While it's true that I'm not directly responsible for the bloody history, I do benefit -- like every non-Indigenous person -- from the original act of dispossession. To ignore this is to diminish all of us.

There is much unfinished business. The Union Jack is still part of our national flag. There are still sections in our Constitution which authorise the states to disqualify particular "races" from voting, and which authorise the federal parliament to pass laws discriminating against particular "races". There is still no formal Treaty. And we still celebrate "Australia Day" on January 26.

At the very least, all Australians should be able to participate in a national celebration. Moving it away from January 26 is not that difficult. Australians all let us rejoice... in changing the date.

5 Nov16 Status

I'm finding it harder and harder to do more than an hour or two of an activity .... and part of the problem is short term memory.  I start something and see a related task .... often it has to be done before the original task ..... by the time I've finished that I've forgotten the original task.