1. So, here’s a short story to illustrate a point.

I knew a woman at my kids’ primary school. We became friends when our kids became close. A few years later she moved to Brighton as her husband’s business was doing very well. We kind-of kept in touch but she slowly became ...

2. .. one of the “Brighton Set” so we had increasingly little in common.

Anyhoo, we met again at a mutual friend’s birthday do a year or so later. & she was telling me how she found it so hard living in Brighton, and wished she hadn’t moved from an outer rural suburb to there.

3. The reason? She said she couldn’t get a cleaner or gardener in Brighton, or a handyman, babysitter or car detailer. Apparently this was because Brighton and the suburbs around it had become so expensive that people in those jobs couldn’t afford the petrol to travel to work ...

4. ... in Brighton with wages being so low, so they didn’t advertise there & wouldn’t come from further away.

She was annoyed with THEM for refusing to come & work for her. So I asked her the obvious question ... was she prepared to pay their petrol & travel time costs?

5. And she looked at me in horror. Why should she do that, when it wasn’t her fault she lived in Brighton? She “couldn’t afford” to pay more than the going rate for a cleaner, and didn’t think she should have to.

This, friends, is a metaphor for Australia right now.

6. The wealthy have structured govt. so all the benefits are at the top, then blame the poor when they stop spending or (even more revoltingly) go and get themselves unemployed and/or sick during a pandemic. Rather than FIX THE ISSUES that leads to the burden of illness and ...

7. ... pain falling mostly on lower-income Australians, the rich & those in secure work-from-home situations prefer to blame them for spreading illness, and refuse to adequately see that without those workers being comfortable & healthy, the entire country fails.

The spread ..

8. .. of the pandemic is almost entirely due to neo-liberal policies which destroy lives. Yet all over Twitter & elsewhere, the talk is of individual arseholes who won’t follow rules. This is complete fuckery.

It’s nobody’s fault they can’t afford to drive from Sunshine to ...

9. ... Brighton to clean a rich woman’s home for $25 an hour. & it’s nobody’s fault they can’t afford to lose a job for a sore throat (even if they’ve the knowledge & education to navigate the beaurocracy to get an underwhelming payment to do so).

So for you fuckers slamming ..

10. ... the wrong people for whose fault the virus spike is, cut it out.

The spike in VIC & the ones which might be coming elsewhere are all caused by the same issue: relentless demonisation of the disadvantaged & an utter inability to see that yes, actually, we’re ...

11. ... all HUMAN BEINGS and if the poor can’t live decently and with dignity on a living wage, the rich won’t either. If No white civilisation in history has ever learned this, yet still insist on call themselves “civilised”. This is a lie.

12. Because if anything is less civilised than the kind of country which just gave rich ppl virtually free new cars via bullshit tax breaks in June and at the same time gave poor people #COVID19, I’d love to hear what that might be.

End.