Million Mothers March
Reject Howard’s inhumane laws!
Unite to give each other support

Million Mothers March begins with one step...and one mum!
We started on Friday 2 December 2005 – 12 noon on Parliament lawn, Canberra
and we will keep going until we can see a future where fairness, freedom and "for all Australians" means caring and compassion for each other - not callous competition

10 years ago the Million Man March of protest and unity converged on Washington DC.

Now it’s the turn of all Australians who don’t accept the Howard’s government’s proposed laws on Workplace Relations, Welfare and Terrorism to show our faces and our feelings.
Why Mothers? Many of us are mothers. Most of us had mothers. Mothers will be disproportionately damaged by the Welfare and Workplace changes. But not only mothers. Millions of people in Australia will be adversely affected by these unmandated inhumane laws.

And with the Terrorism sedition provisions you will lose the right to even read about it!

Mothers, fathers, kids, people will have to work in even more substandard conditions and for even less money. Individual workers will lose their rights to get together and act for each other.

The Government pushed these changes through last Christmas.
What a wonderful selection of presents the government gave to mothers, children, and people who are disabled, pensioners, workers, or unemployed!

Unwrap the packaging and what do you get? All this legislation has horrible consequences – not unforeseen either. Anyone can see the disadvantages sole parents and their children will suffer under the wicked Welfare to Woe package. It won't just mean losing out on payments. People will lose current benefits such as health care cards, transport concessions, and access to public housing. Parents in particular -will end up being minus almost everything except the kids they are trying to look after!

Anyone who has a heart – anyone who had a mother or has been a child – anyone who is half way human – join the Million Mothers March. You can do it online, by writing to the media, or to your MP or any other way. Just let us know:

www.millionmothersmarch.org PO Box 42 S. Maroubra 2035 or contact Ariel: 02 9326 2960 ariel@millionmothersmarch.org International Women’s Day 11 March 2006
Million Mothers March
Reject Howard’s inhumane laws!
Unite to give each other support
Please sign below if you are willing to join us in working for a better future
Name Postcode Address or email Phone Sign















Contact:
www.millionmothersmarch.org PO Box 42 S. Maroubra 2035 or contact Ariel: 02 9326 2960 ariel@millionmothersmarch.org International Women’s Day 11 March 2006

Bully for us!

We have become accustomed to being ruled by bullies: in government, at work, and (too often) at home. We don’t produce the “loud roaring noise of sadness and despair” which could be expected from a population of Pooh bears who got their heads stuck in the honey jar of promised economic prosperity. We can manage a few muffled protests which will soon be totally silenced if the Counter-Terrorism laws come into force. And I mean Force. Some hothead may turn on a taunting bully but he or she will get done over by a system that cares more about suppressing emotion and partying on than it does about alleviating pain and preventing deaths.

Why on earth do we need even more repressive laws? Why do employers need to be encouraged by government to show their worst bullying tactics – and actually forbidden to devise more humane agreements? All this in the name of letting the market do its thing. Why do divorced fathers, no matter how violent and vile they may have been, be given even further licence to beastify their families under the changes to family Law?

What is it with us? We don’t seem to care if we get done over as long as some other poor bugger cops it even worse. The great Australian Masochistic Resentment streak that I noticed back in the 70’s has become a way of life.

Who holds the power in this country? It is not refugees, asylum seekers, single mothers, people on welfare (apart from corporate), the unemployed and people in public housing. Loud, bullying pollies pass repressive and inhumane laws and their media mouths beat up verbally on the most vulnerable in our society. Our public (and contracted) services do their dirty work.

The old French Foucault had it right: ”It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.”

The instruments of government bullying are often public servants. As in “Serve you right, bloody public”. I am a coward and I know what it’s like to work as an instrument (no matter how ineffectual) of an unreasonable and despotic regime. I was an employee of the Department of Immigration for more than 12 years (viz New Matilda #59 Dim and DIMIA)

DIMIA is only a microcosm of the other organisations – public, private and community – perpetrating bad policies and worse practices. It is not one lone deviant, it is part of an overall grim picture. The immigration portfolio has long been used as a stalking horse for unpalatable legislation and policies. Like experiments on animals who can’t fight back.

Detention without charge or trial, privative clauses which stop people getting access to the courts, forcing the use of registered migration agents, imposing personal liability for costs on legal representatives , withdrawing government funding from NGOs who ‘advocate’, disadvantageous retrospectivity: all these democratic practices were well-honed by Immigration.

But we didn’t want to know about all that and we still don’t.

Many people in deteriorating situations (eg bully-run workplaces) try not to be noticed and even feel a certain schadenfreude of relief that it wasn’t them – this time.

But masochistic resentment is beyond schadenfreude. It actively seeks to put someone else down and possibly stand on them. Masochistic resenters don’t think that they may one day be affected by the strictures they gleefully apply to others.

Cowardice will destroy us unless we stand together and help each other. Surely anyone who knows anything about Pol Pot, Saddam, Nazi Germany, Chile under Pinochet, Argentina under the Generals, Ukraine under Stalin etc etc would understand something of what Pastor Martin Niemöller was saying in the 1940’s:
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
It would be a great leap forward for Australia if all of us appealed to those in power - in government, in bureaucracies, in politics, in business, in families and elsewhere – to feel ashamed of the bullying they’ve perpetrated or condoned. If only we could encourage each other to come out fighting for people who are worse off than ourselves, instead of bullying, victimising and resenting them.

Food for oil program

With the price of petrol surging up higher and faster than a Texan gusher, when is the government going to realise that some of us can’t afford to feed the appetites of both cars and children? Let alone adults and pets.

Many people need to drive to get to work, where they hope to earn enough to feed, clothe and house their family. This especially true when equipment, people and other items have to be carried and/or where public transport isn’t an option. How are carers, contractors, peripatetic community workers and others supposed to pay for the gas they have to spend (and most of them don’t get ‘mileage’ or if they do, it nowhere meets costs) out of their often minimal wages?

Of course, transporting food from the farm or wherever to the consumer will be much more expensive especially in a circuitous system such as ours where tomatoes and turnips may travel on a sort of cook’s tour (ha ha) from regional and rural field to suburban warehouse to country town shop. This last may be quite close to where the veggies were actually born in the beginning. As for those poor farmers who’ve been sucked in to the ‘farmers’ market’ system, I don’t know how they make a cent anyway but having to journey to and fro accompanied by business class beetroots won’t boost their incomes!

It seems that government garners an excise tax (38 cents a litre?) and then the 10% GST on top of the total price (which includes the levied excise). In other words- a tax on a tax. The federal Treasurer reckons that the states are raking in the GST so they could reduce that. But last I heard NSW, for example, didn’t seem to be to getting back the amount of GST that was paid in NSW and ended up with the feds.

Whatever, governments -state and federal between them -could do something to water down the effect of petrol prices (today around 37.9 cents a litre). But then, by all accounts, water will soon be more expensive than petrol so maybe we should stop topping up our glasses with Chardonnay skins and top up our tanks instead.

There is a lot of talk about how President Bush should have done more about a pre-emptive strike on the effects of Hurricane Katrina. But the oil companies apparently knew Katrina was hoving into their orbit at least a week before she did because the hoicked up the prices 10 cents litre in that week. Then in a post-emptive rationalization, the oil companies said oh wow! Prices will really have to go up now because Katrina has inadvertently knocked over a large tract of Gulf oilers.

Is there any hope that the UN will step in to provide relief to people suffering from the sanctions of economic rationalism and outright government and corporate gluttony? Isn’t it time we had a Food for Oil program??
12 September 2005
Ariel mongrielle@bigpond.com