A Mackellar Girls’ (public) School student protesting about her cancelled Yr 10 2022 graduation ceremony, in which she was to be awarded a dance award. The ceremony was cancelled because a number of girls turned up to school with fake nails/manicures, thus violating the uniform code. Our local, regional public high school often experiences multiple lockdowns per week due to extreme violence.
I live in regional Australia and my kid goes to a private, independent school. The entire debate around private schooling in Australia is oriented around urban schools and urban children. This makes sense – most people live in urban areas, so they’re the biggest chunk of the demographic.
I’m a strong proponent of the public school system, but the reality is that where I live, the difference between sending your kid to a public school, and sending them to a private school, is having a teacher in the classroom. Many kids at our local public high school don’t have access to a maths teacher, for instance. I know two teenagers who didn’t have a maths teacher for an entire year (year 9). This actually makes quite a difference to your education, unsurprisingly. Other classes are supervised by teacher aides, but no teachers. The purpose of school teeters towards ‘childcare’ once you remove teachers from the equation.
For ‘gifted’ children the public school offers an online school, hosted in a small, dark computer lab, where the nerds run the gauntlet to slide in the door before getting hammered. For everyone else, there’s no ‘online’ option.
Our local public high school has a unit at the back of the school where children with behavioural problems are housed. This is effectively a lock up. It is known as, ‘the cage’. It holds approximately 90 students, one third of the school’s student body. There’s no teaching going on in there, obviously, but these kids are removed from the rest of the student body.
Half of the high school aged children in our area attend private high schools, compared to about 40% in NSW. Our region is characterised as a low socio-economic area and I would strongly suspect that regional areas would have the highest level of kids at private schools, despite having the least ability to pay the fees.
Our local public high school (one of two in the region) has facilities that put the private schools to shame. Multiple rounds of ‘capital funding announcables’ provide periodic upgrades. The problem of course, is that there aren’t enough staff. Teachers are paid relatively well, but not well enough to subject themselves to endless violence from adult sized children, and certainly not well enough to afford to buy a house in the area. Like everywhere, the housing crisis is acute.
Add to that the reality that many children arrive at high school completely uneducated. And, many of the teachers themselves are poorly educated. This is not their fault – we’re now looking at two generations of under-resourced education. This makes for a really, really tough job. It enrages when I hear politicians shift the blame for poor education outcomes onto teachers. The problems are almost entirely structural. Well-paid. educated and supported teachers can do excellent work.
When I hear smarmy toffs like Jane Caro suggesting that everyone who sends their kid to a private school is a boater-donning wanker, all I see is the staggering privilege of a woman can’t imagine that a public high school with 300 kids might not have a maths teacher for a year or two. Jane Caro sits in her lounge room surrounded by houses that cost upwards of 3 million dollars and sneers at regional parents playing 5k a year for private school fees. If I lived in Warringah I’d send my child to the public high school too. I bet they have a maths teacher.
In many smaller regional areas the Catholic schools specifically provide education services that the government simply won’t. The Catholic archdiocese cross-subsidises regional and remote schools with income from the urban counterparts. In terms of utility, that is, ‘bang for buck’, Catholic schools in remote areas probably provide more educational improvement than any other school in Australia.
Of course, this is deeply problematic – this is the church’s ongoing attempt at inculcating generations of young people into the faith – but it is also motivated by charitable intentions. In a Good Australia, schooling would be completely secular.
Next time…..how Foucault changed my view on chaplaincy (and I’m still a left-wing atheist)
A friend has recently started a social media project about peri menopause, as my generation is the first to encounter every phase of life with a terrifying kaleidoscope of physical horrors of womanhood projected annually onto the Sydney Opera House at Vivid.
To be a woman is to be endlessly subjected to a narrative of biological frailty, a meandering pick-a-path of portentous foibles and malevolent corporeality. It begins when you’re about 9 – the whispering hints about periods and ‘developing’, then there’s the reality of dealing with menarche, and then, for the Gen Xers, the ongoing attempts to convince any and all medical professionals that whatever is wrong with you, from rashes to heart failure, probably won’t be solved by going on the Pill.
It’s not just the simple story of contraception, although that is enough of itself. It’s the rise in the preoccupation with this stuff, the deafening roar of body-fear. We are taught to fear every single aspect of our womanhood, to approach it with something between trepidation and naked dread. Limitless news articles warn of the nuanced chaos that our hormonally responsive bodies are plotting against us, a constantly evolving foe just waiting to bring us down.
Obviously some periods are worse than others – pregnancy is a particular nightmare. The culture of pregnancy, in case you didn’t know, provided an early model for all social media – the most dramatic stories are nourished, sensationalised and amplified. In my early motherhood days, surrounded by women who were pregnant or trying to be, I found myself surprised at the reaction to my ‘birth story’, precisely because it was completely ordinary. I’d say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, it’s really painful, but let’s face it, we’re in a modern western society with free healthcare. If it all turns to shit, and there’s a good chance it will, it will still be OK. in my case, it turned to shit and it was OK’.
I truly believe much of the trauma associated with birth stems from the fact that women fear it, or that they have ideas about ‘the right birth’ and then feel ripped off when it doesn’t happen. These are all emotional responses. They have nothing at all to do with the actual physical reality of birth. If you can keep your shit together you will have a ‘good birth’, no matter what happens. If you lose your shit, it’s going to be awful. To be sure, there are women who end up with injuries from birth, and it’s reasonable to expect that this is difficult to adjust to. I’m not dismissing the fact that women can experience trauma but I think the way we go into this stuff makes us our own worst enemies. And we are encouraged to do so.
I’ve digressed. My point, I guess, is we live in a culture that is increasingly presented as a dualism – either we’re constantly scared of our bodies in a low level way or we’re ’embracing our bodies’ and completely ignoring the fact that they can kill us (the ‘always homebirth’ crew, I’m looking at you).
I don’t want to receive an upbeat blog-newsletter with meme-ified 90s pop references that forewarns me about the next reign of terror my body is plotting against me. For instance, apparently changing hormone levels in the next stage of life will alter my gut biome [problem] and change my metabolism [problem] and also my hair might fall out [problem] .
But I simply don’t give enough of a fuck because I’m now old enough to realise that this, like all of the ‘techniques of the body’ is nothing more than marketing and control, and, moreover, I’ve managed to work out all the other female-body shit that has happened so far without much incident. The first time you give birth your overwhelming observation is, ‘JFC none of that is ever going to come right’ but it does, and quickly. This is the thing about being a placental mammal.
And, without wanting to get too philosophical, I have a dear friend who is in her early 40s and is in the final throes of breast cancer. She will not experience these, ‘horrors’. Her hair has already long since disappeared. It feels so utterly wrong to be fuming about the minutiae of peri menopause or whatever it’s called this week when you’re chatting with someone who is actually dying, someone with children, someone who is so unbelievably loved. It’s just rude.
So, if you are a young woman, perhaps a woman who is thinking about having kids, or is having problems with your female arrangements, I would recommend only reading medical papers, if you’re really flummoxed, you could try WAITING IT OUT. Because the one thing that no one ever fucking says, with all the female-body-doom-scrolling is that things do change, and often, it’s for the better. You have a baby and your body heals. I read somewhere the other day that ‘birth trauma’ is defined as, ‘not fully healed after 3 months’. Who the fuck decided that 3 months was the cut-off date? This only makes sense if you think of this as part of a medico-marketing scheme to convince you that normal things should be pathologised. Another example – I can’t tell you the number of women I know who had terrible migraines throughout their childbearing years that remitted with menopause and yet I bet that if I googled, ‘menopause’ and ‘migraine’ I would get a litany of articles about how migraine is worse with menopause etc. etc.
Men do not get this shit, and partly it’s because their biology is different, obviously, but it’s not that different. Men’s hormone levels change over time. They enter different phases, their metabolism changes, they find themselves losing their hair, or at a higher risk of reproductive cancers. Where are the endless instagram accounts chirpily warning of their imminent demise?
So, my feminist anthem remains the same as it always has – fuck right off with that.
Disclaimer, first up – I’m not a social worker and I don’t know much about training to become one other than knowing it requires a degree. A neighbour is undertaking this degree and informed me that she was required to role-play and pretend to be someone in need of assistance from a social worker, like a homeless person, or perhaps someone who needs to navigate the intersection of aged care and hospital. The aim of the exercise is to present some real-life scenarios and practice techniques for helping people who might be distressed or unable to adequately communicate what they need.
I thought this sounded like a good idea. The students disagreed. They refused on the grounds that it was unethical and potentially harmful to, ‘pretend to be’ something they are not. The teacher accepted their position wholeheartedly and the exercise was abandoned.
The trouble is, social work is about helping people who are almost always different to you. To me, the fact that students refuse to imagine the lives of those less fortunate than themselves represents a triumph of neoliberalism – the celebration of the personalisation of problems. A person who is homeless becomes a “homeless person” – it is an identity, rather than a situation. We know it is now part of their identity because 23 year old social work students refuse to role play, ‘being a homeless person’. They’re not role playing being homeless. They’re role playing being a homeless person.
This conveniently switches the focus from the structural reasons for homelessness, to the homeless person themselves. Everything is oriented around the “homeless person’s” experience of life, obviating the need to examine, discuss or mobilise around the reasons for becoming homeless in the first place.
There are various terms to refer to the cultural shift towards the individual and their identity, and away from the broader structures and institutions of society. Many of these terms have been adopted and bastardised by the far right. We are warned about ‘identitarianism’, where newer identities are dismissed as nothing more than rarefied, gilded narcissism.
In the last week Viktor Orban genially explained this phenomena to a credulous Tucker Carlson, whilst the latter squirmed with delight. In America and the rest of Europe, the focus is on the self. In Hungary, he opined, the central unit of society is self sacrifice to the [Christian] family. We, in the West, are all a bunch of self obsessed cry babies, with no understanding of our broader place in the world, the explicit suggestion being that we should stop supporting Ukraine and all be nicer to Russia because Orban lives next door. Orban’s performance was a master class in populism, playing up accessible, domestic issues (culture war) while ignoring the broader context, (that the US is helping Ukraine to escape from Russia’s control, just like it did with Hungary 50 years ago). Perhaps Orban is hoping for a window-office when Hungary becomes part of Russia again – who knows?
Anyway, my point is that all of these culture wars are nothing more than naked power. Every time someone asserts the terminating clause, ‘I don’t identify as….’ any and all other considerations are rendered null. The idea that one’s personal identity is so sacrosanct it cannot possibly be imagined by another human being has been floating around for a long time, but it’s taken a while for it to realise its full power – the complete sterilisation of political change.
Representing an identity that is not your own opens the door to taking liberties, for sure, and it should not be done lightly. We are right to have championed the views of marginalised perspectives to obtain better insights into how things actually are in the world, and how they differ for different people. However, there’s a point where things get silly – women arguing, for instance, that men cannot be obstetricians (this is a remarkably common position). Men’s and women’s bodies are different in many ways, not just the grosse reproductive stuff. Our organs, endocrine systems, vascular systems……so many things. To suggest that a man cannot be an obstetrician leads us to a place where women cannot ever perform a surgery on men and vice versa. Can we only provide services to people who are exactly like us? Do I need to find a surgeon who is a red head, has working dogs and a motorbike?
Because that’s where this stuff leads. We should always encourage ourselves and others to try to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes, to have someone else’s identity. We should listen to others and let it inform our own views. Yes, we might fuck it up, but it’s important to try. The fidelity of identity is the most dangerous game of purity politics.
Are all those YA books about foppish vampires are written by actual teenagers? Or actual vampires?
We are all subject to fanciful narratives that upholster our own sense of self belief. From childhood, we’re told that if we work hard at something we will inevitably improve. Malcolm Gladwell cheerfully informed us of the 10000 hours maxim – that if you spend 10000 hours doing something, you will achieve mastery. What this overlooks is the vastly divergent levels of mastery. Some people, for example, really get the hang of failure.
Mastery can be defined as excellence or competence. Natural or innate talent is the final arbiter of whether we attain excellence or even competence, it is the necessary catalyst for achievement. Almost everyone, however, can put some distance between themselves and their starting point, regardless of their attributes, through simple practice alone.
What we never discuss is the cost.
I am uniquely positioned to observe the myths of mastery. This is because, unlike almost everyone my age, I have never mastered anything, despite applying thousands of hours of effort. I’ve attained some degree of improvement in some things, for sure, but this achievement is infinitesimal. For my entire life, both as a child and an adult, I have taken the orthodox approach – that applying oneself would yield results, and that there would be a linear relationship between the two.
As the years have worn on, I have applied literally thousands of hours to learning languages, sports and music, with breathtakingly unimpressive results. In my 40s I came to realise that perhaps the one thing I am really good at is doggedly working on my latest divertissement in the face of compete failure. The futility of my determination borders on the absurd.
Our culture informs us that this is a laudable thing. Eventually, if we try hard enough, we will improve. Hard work is honourable and productive, an antidote to our presumed feckless moral turpitude. We’re constantly told that we should improve ourselves, but the utility of this – the bang for buck – is discounted or ignored.
There are children at schools across the country who struggle to read. These children are nonetheless forced through the entirety of the school system, humiliated at every turn, constantly cajoled into ‘trying a little harder’ to improve their skills, with minimal results. Time, effort and humiliation are enormous costs, and yet we discount them entirely. We need to think more clearly about counterfactual. What would happen if that kid learned the bare minimum, instead of the theoretical maximum?
I realise of course that there are vast differences in opportunity represented as ‘ability’, and that it is important to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake. Laboriously teaching a young kid to read is important, even if there’s nothing in your mental toolbox but sandwiches, because there might just be more than sandwiches. In other words, your circumstances have an impact on your ability, and the education system should recognise that.
But at some point, usually in the teenage years, it becomes apparent that not everyone is good at everything, and for some, the work involved in a small improvement is simply ludicrous. You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but we seem to think there’s something uniquely moral in the attempt, regardless of the amount of time, effort and heartache involved. At the end of the day, the silk purse becomes a polished artefact of one’s hard work, rather than an intrinsically valuable sui generis.
We never talk about giving up, let alone celebrate it. At what point should you give up? In engineering, you would make some kind of cost benefit analysis and make decisions accordingly. In every day life, on the other hand, we give things up with a kind of resignation. We subject ourselves to tech-bro jingoism, we ‘fail upwards’ – which means we’ve also failed to comprehend gravity. We drift away from things, we find other ways to spend our time, we lose interest, we make excuses, we ‘change direction’. We never say things like, ‘I tried really hard to master this, spent thousands of hours on it, and I still suck, therefore, I will stop’.
If there is one upside to the latest iteration of late stage capitalism with its trust-fund babies, lavishly rumpled oligarchs and nickel plated presidents, it is the blatant assertion that effort does not always equal reward. In fact, there is now an entire generation for whom the distance between effort and reward is furnished with the pathos of a Greek tragedy.
My only innate ‘skill’ – stoically pursuing mastery in the face of continued, abject failure – is a representation of the culture in which I grew up, a culture of hard work, self sacrifice etc. etc. As a child I was endlessly told that I was not good at anything, and at best, my sole utility would be eventually realised as compost. This is part of the narrative. You’re supposed to hear this and think – that can’t be right! I will work hard and improve myself! It is folly, a marketing campaign on behalf of the capitalist machine, selling us slightly better images of ourselves and profiting off the effort.
This is not to suggest that everyone is in the same boat. As I said above, I’m not particularly astute, rather, I’m simply in the unique position of being functionally useless at everything, immune to the efforts of studied practice. I suspect that this is actually quite rare – everyone I know is good at something, even if they aren’t an expert. Everyone has at least one thing, usually more, that they find easy, or enjoyable, something they can attain a sense of mastery over. Maybe this will happen to me, but I’ve had a pretty varied life so far, and, as outlined above, I’ve given many things a red-hot go. So far the effort to reward ratio hovers between laughable and pathological.
Mastery, nor self improvement is not the ultimate goal, rather, it is the triumph of a cult of individualism, at once coddled and mined by late capitalism.
The cult of self improvement should be tempered with a frank discussion about the costs of such rampant individualism. As above, I’m bad at everything, but I am generally kind to people, I try hard to help those who are less fortunate, I care about the environment and my community, and I try to be a good parent. These, I think, are overlooked in our headlong rush to worship at the alter of self improvement.
So, my goal for 2024 is to not to embrace failure as a ‘learning experience’, as something personally improving or laudable in itself. It is simply a waste of time. 2024’s motto might be; Fuck This. Find Something Better To Do.
I’m not going to get too carried away here, but I just have to express my utter wonderment at the fathomless depths of stupidity paraded around in the mainstream media.
During the pandemic silly ideas coincided with a perfect moment in media, combining increasingly accessible technology with a toasty reach-around from ‘serious money’. We saw slickly produced films that alerted us to the most creative interpretations of available information, all connected by a single trope – the truth was being hidden from us all by powerful and well organised cabals of academics, corporations and government.
In a crowded field, however, Ancient Apocalypse (on Netflix) is a surely an example of the most breathtaking fabulism to ever see the light of day. In a clinquant colonnade of gilded turds this film makes assertions that would embarrass a preschooler.
Our guide through this intellectual wasteland pantomimes the bespectacled British academic, politely gesticulating to the camera, in his slightly too large linen shirt and padded leather brogues. Basically, he tries to convince his audience that Atlantis is a real thing and existed before a ‘cataclysmic event’. The details of this whole thing are so farcical I’m not even going to bother furnishing this description any further.
Others have no doubt panned this show more comprehensively than me, but what I find astonishing is the production values. This chap is literally travelling all over the world to illustrate the ways in which he is wrong about everything. His conclusions are wrong, illogical or completely fanciful literally hundreds of times. How anyone could not notice the inconsistencies in his statements is a depressing reminder of the absolute parlous state of education in the western world.
The irony is – the kind of low-key bio hacker bros that watch these things are the exact same people who claim that China is somehow brainwashing the west into stupidity, through TikTok.
Sometimes, I have to explain things to people. I do this in words, numbers, Greek symbols and dance. The things themselves are not complex. What complicates matters is that most people have had a lifetime of being trained to think about things in a certain way, a kind of scientism-of-everything. We’re all familiar with what this looks like; it’s an internally consistent logic framework where each piece can be related to another. There are heirarchies and eddy currents, inefficiencies and stochastic events, but ultimately, the system is knowable in these terms.
Economics, on the other hand, is merographic rather than nomothetic. It is the cross-fertilisation of an absurdist artwork and a banana.
It’s easy to see how we think it’s a science. Economics likes to tell us that it is reproducible and objective. And it’s scalable. That helps with the illusion.
Let’s talk about the everyone is familiar with – the Philips curve, the hottest thing to come out of Dannevirke since those grey-flecked Norsewear socks.
The Philips curve holds that there is a relationship between wages and unemployment and inflation.
It is intuitively credulous, but does it reliably explain inflation? Indeed, the relationship between wages and prices, if there is one at all is usually overshadowed by confounding factors. But we stick with it. The Reserve Bank of Australia clings to the Philips Curve like a heavily-pilled Stinky-Blankie.
Downtown Dannevirke in the lead-up to the Huia Primary Year Six Swimming Carnival. The influence of the town’s eminent economist, A.W Phillips (1914-1975), is still seen in the opulent grandeur of the town, often called the Monaco of the Ruahines.
In principle the Philips Curve works like this.
We are all familiar with supply and demand. When there is increased demand for goods, the price of the goods goes up. Imagine there’s increased demand for washing machines. The price of washing machines goes up.
Imagine you are the CEO of a big washing machines company. The reason that you charge more for washing machines is because you need to make more washing machines.
You need to employ more workers and buy more materials, like steel and those little plastic display buttons decorated with sanskrit runes that appear to relate to the five different stages of rocks being electrocuted.
Buying more materials to make more washing machines, and buying more workers is a cost. It costs you, the washing machine company, money. And, you’re competing with all the other washing machine companies for materials and workers, so the price of wages goes up.
All the other washing machine companies are doing the same thing because of an increasing in demand for washing machines.
Remember, demand for washing machines is high – the industry cannot supply enough to meet demand. Wages are rising while the industry tries to buy more workers.
At this time, you can charge more for your washing machines, even MORE than it costs to employ workers and buy materials. You’re taking advantage of a shortage. This is profit. Companies have grown attached to it.
So now you’re doing two things; you’re spending more money buying materials and workers BUT you are MORE than offsetting that by charging more for your washing machines. You are making a profit, so that even after you’ve bought all the workers and materials to scale up your washing machine production, you’ve got a healthy profit.
Now, who buys washing machines? People with wages. And if more people have more wages, more money in their pocket, they will want to buy more washing machines. And you know they have more wages in their pocket because the industry os bidding up the wages, as they compete for workers.
So, more wages, or money, is ‘chasing’ more washing machines. You can see how this ends up being a spiral. The demand for washing machines keeps growing because people’s wages keep increasing, and people keep increasing their wages because the washing machine companies are competing for workers.
So, the money that you are being paid ends up being less valuable, because the price of the washing machines keeps increasing in real terms. The price increases just ahead of the increase in wages. Machines get more xxxy. People get paid more but not quite enough so their money is valuable cos shit got more expensive.
There are a few ways of addressing this.
One is to stop wages from increasing. In theory, this will dampen demand, because people won’t have enough money to spend on washing machines. Then the companies will calm down, and the competition for workers will calm down, and wages will stabilise. But it’s unpopular right? Because people are going – hey, I’ve got a serious washing machine addiction to feed. I really need more money. Give me more wages.
Another thing you can do is say, – FOR FUCKSSAKE, YOU DON’T NEED ANOTHER WASHING MACHINE. Instead of spending your money, put it in your bank account. Interest rate rises help encourage people to put their money into a bank account and slow down spending. When the RBA increases the interest rate, it basically means that commercial banks increase their interest rates.
Another way of dealing with this is to say; RIGHT THAT’S IT, WASHING MACHINES CAN COST NO MORE THAN $1500. For fuckssake etc etc.
This is called a price control. This hardly ever happens – it’s used for things like war time shortages to prevent companies from price gauging. In reality what it does is suppress demand by making consumers pay for something through more than just money – like sitting in a queue for hours on end to fill up their car with fuel.
In Australia, we do the first two things. We basically curb spending by increasing interest rates. This means people with savings are more likely to keep their money in the bank and save it (therefore, they’re not driving up the demand of goods) and people with debt spend all their money servicing that debt (paying their mortgage) instead of spending it on washing machines, driving up the demand for washing machines.
We also try to curb wages growth. This has been less effective and as you know there have been a couple of news stories about how there have been wage increases to keep people’s incomes in line with inflation. It’s very unpopular to try to limit wages at a time when people are spending more and more of their household income on servicing debt, like mortgages.
The thing is, the system I explained about is a pretty simple one. Two things – wages and prices are related. Demand goes up, companies pay more for washing machine workers, workers have more money to buy more washing machines, the cost of washing machines increases because demand stays high. Basically your money isn’t worth as much. More dollars chasing less goods. This is the Phillips curve. Wages go up, prices go up, inflation goes up.
Then a boring fart in a navy suit says, “let’s increase interest rates”. Interest rates increase, people start saving money instead of spending it, demand for goods goes goes down, goods get cheaper for consumers but wages also drop, which means people can buy less.
What’s missing here is that there is another thing that feeds into inflation. We already talked about this, but it’s company profits. You remember when I said that the demand for washing machines went up and so did the cost of producing them, because companies were competing for workers and materials? Well, they also charged a premium OVER and ABOVE their increased costs. That is, they new the demand was very high so they gauged. They said – we can basically charge whatever we like, because customers know there is a shortage. At this point, all the washing machine companies started bidding the price of washing machines up based not just on the expected increases in the cost of production (wages, materials) BUT ON THE PERCEPTION OF SHORTAGE ITSELF.
And they pocket those profits. We’ll come back to this.
Let’s talk about shortages. Remember during the pandemic? Remember how there was shortages of goods? People were all staying home and they couldn’t spend their money on travel or eating out, they just wanted to buy more stuff, like Oodies to put in their thermomixes. But the companies couldn’t get workers to produce the Oodies or the thermomixes, because people were all locked down at home. So prices went through the roof, because demand was extremely high. You might be thinking – ah, but if people couldn’t go to work because of lockdowns, then they can’t get paid wages, so they can’t buy lots of shit, so this will naturally dampen demand……..
Except it didn’t because the government provided massive stimulus. Instead of people earning wages, they got given money from the government. And, remember, interest rates were almost zero, so people were spending up BIG, which really drove up demand in the housing sector, but elsewhere too.
What this did was kept demand really high, especially in the areas where people could buy stuff that already existed and didn’t have to be made – like houses but also products too.
To be clear, the normal limit on inflation – that companies respond to increasing demand by paying more money in wages to recruit workers – was gone. Companies weren’t paying wages to workers who in turn would buy their products. Workers were instead being given stimulus money, which drove up demand for goods and created huge shortages because companies couldn’t make enough goods because workers were at home.
So during this period, you’ve shortages, huge demand and free money being tipped into people’s pockets and super low interest rates. All of this drives demand sky high. BUT companies were increasing their prices based on more than just demand. They were basing them on THE PERCEPTION of high demand, consumer expectations. This massively increased their profits. This began during the pandemic and is still happening now. The Australia Institute says,
As of the September quarter of 2022 (most recent data available), Australian businesses increased prices by a total of $160 billion per year over and above their higher expenses for labour, taxes, and other inputs, and over and above profits generated by growth in real economic output
Excess corporate profits account for 69% of additional inflation beyond the RBA’s target. Rising unit labour costs account for just 18% of that inflation
So, the reason that inflation is rising now is because there were shortages during the pandemic. Companies increased their profits because of a huge increase in demand, which was partly fuelled by stimulus, which was money from the government, NOT money that companies paid in wages to employees. The usual limits on inflation – the relationship between wages and spending – wasn’t there because wages were replaced with stimulus.
What this means is that companies were increasing prices over and above the price of producing stuff during the pandemic because of not just real shortages but also the perception of shortages – because ALL their competitors were increasing prices too. It means that goods are more expensive because there is more company profit built into the price.
That government stimulus money went into company profits.
We are still feeling these effects now – prices remained high after the pandemic, and there was an increase in employment, and an increase in wages, but the price of goods was still artificially inflated from this price gouging during the pandemic, and all the stimulus. So, we emerge out of the pandemic, we’ve got good wages to spend, but stuff is already expensive because of increases during the pandemic, and getting more so, because demand is still high. So real wages – what you can actually buy with your money, have decreased. The value of money is decreased. This is inflation.
So now the RBA is having to pull the emergency lever, that is, trying everything it can to get people to stop spending by increasing interest rates again and again.
But the other problem is that Australia has used housing as an investment scheme for a long time – and during the pandemic this increased more and more. remember those zero percent interest rates? That drove up house prices a lot.
So, there are some people who are making lots of money out of this period. People who have money in the bank. People who own property. People with savings. And the people who have money are the people who have money that has come from rents rather than productive or labour. In 2020 There were almost as many households renting in the private rental market as homeowners without a mortgage. People without a mortgage have money coming from wages and they can put it in savings.
These people – think boomers – are still spending, and the more that interest rates go up, the more money they have. They have superannuation funds. They’re not hugely indebted. They have money to spend. And they are driving consumption.
From the Commbank data mid May 2023 – “Spending among the over 55s, by contrast, increased at an above inflation rate over the past year, with CBA customers over the age of 75 boosting their spending by about 13 per cent”.
They are doing the same thing as companies – they are making profit from increased demand, and they are also stimulating demand by keeping some of their houses empty. The rate of house-per capita – that is, the number of dwellings per person – in Australia has never been higher than it is now.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t a case of boomers ruining it for everyone which is why they have to resort to calling their kids to reset the fucking wifi twice a week. Boomers are a big chunk of the economy but not the biggest.
The pandemic also has a role here. There was an increase in demand for housing during the pandemic because there was a 17% increase in ‘new households’. IN other words, a lot of people cracked the shits with each other during the pandemic and got divorced. One household became two.
This doesn’t get talked about much but it had a big increase in demand.
Ok, at the end of this – what’s my point?
My point is that the usual explanation for inflation rises – that wages are rising and there’s a shortage of goods – isn’t a good explanation for why inflation is rising.
Rather, something happened during the pandemic – namely, stimulus and companies increasing their profits because of extreme shortages – that led to sustained higher prices for goods. This means sustained high prices which means real wages are dropping – your pay check buys less stuff. in fact,
Real wages in Australia fell 4.5% in 2022, the largest fall on record
And, on top that, when we increase interest rates we hurt those with debt, mortgages etc., and provide an excuse for landlords to drive up rents, but we don’t dampen consumer demand because it’s still being driven by those who have savings and property.
So – prices for goods remained high AFTER the pandemic but wages didn’t increase enough. this cause a profit-price spiral, where companies are increasing their profits even though they are being forced to pay slightly higher wages AND in theory, demand is declining.
the normal checks and balances provided by the phillips curve got broken by the pandemic, with its increased demand through shortages, and supercharged demand through stimulus rather than wages growth.
What the RBA is doing right now is trying to control the spending of those who have debt – by driving up interest rates people with mortgages have less money to spend.
The final moral of the story is that the wages/price relationship only works if everyone is buying goods using wages. If some people are buying goods with rent or investment money or stimulus cash or shells, then it doesn’t work very well at all. So why are we still obsessed with this curve?
Attempting to write something every day is not as easy as it sounds. Each day I’ve thought of a couple of things to write about, but then I get tied up in angst over the expression of half-formed ideas. And then I realised that lots of people don’t even have larval ideas, so I might as well just open the laptop and crack into it.
Let’s begin with the book I am reading; the Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow. It’s great. The narrative runs alongside the history of anthropological ideas of ‘society’, dipping and weaving through it, reconstituting some of the dustiest of Old Farts and examining their insights and prejudices.
The main theme of the book (so far) goes like this.
If we want to understand inequality, we need to accept that we are dogged by presentism. Our views about ‘how things are’ is legitimised by inchoate ideas of, ‘how things have always been’. This is folly, partly because these have never been the same, but as the authors point out, we’re actually in a period of what I might call startling rigidism. Our unequal societies, all broadly integrated, to varying degrees, into something resembling capitalism, are remarkably fixed compared to any other period in history.
Up until the last 500 years or so, human beings had more freedom. The authors are pretty cagey about what freedom means, enlivening and critiquing the false dualism between Hobbes and Rousseau which holds that humans are either unfathomably violent shitheads or naive primates who can open tins. Humans are neither entirely noble or entirely savage, In fact, in a refreshing assertion of the obvious, we’re more or less the same as we are now.
What’s different is our lack of imagination about how to live our lives, and how to organise ourselves collectively to do this.
Graeber and Wengrow present us with evidence that for most of human history, all over the world, we have institutionalised the idea that we could change our circumstances if they did not suit us. They cite ceremonies where the usual social rules were inverted, mocked or thrown out altogether. Shamans and lunatics were often positioned in important roles as they represented a new way of doing things. People can and did change the way they organised themselves, with remarkable frequency.
Our modern era, on the other hand, is characterised by a remarkable fixity of thought, bolstered by a woefully traduced interpretation of history. History tells us everything about how the powerful would like us to see things now, rather than how things were ‘back then’.
I’m only halfway through the Dawn of Everything, so I’ll let you know how it ends.
Failing to see misogyny when it’s in our faces always surprises me and yet when I mention it, people often can’t imagine what it looks like.
In this video (which I haven’t posted, deliberately), which went HUGE on social media, the woman in the white top confronts the driver of the removalists’ truck, because he is double parked and preventing her from driving down the street.
She yells at him and retreats to her car. Another woman pulls up behind her and comes to her car window to also abuse her for not moving her car. The ‘hilarious’ part of the video is that the second woman has a working class accent. Too funny.
As you can see, the video attracted thousands of comments. I read about 100 of them, all of which were promoted to the top of the list by their popularity. All of them were abusive towards the woman in the white top, claiming that she was an entitled bitch, and that her vehicle was too big (and too ostentatious) and that she was probably married to a cop, and that she was driving the car that her husband bought for her and that should should have never left Long Island. People also cheered on the second woman who abused the first woman. Many people praised the truck driver for his calmness in dealing with her.
Yes, the truck driver who calmly but heroically blocked the road in the first place.
I don’t have much sympathy for rich people driving Urban Assault Vehicles, but to not see the blatant misogyny in this scene is breathtakingly obtuse.
American culture has a weird relationship with wealth. On the one hand, it is idolised. On the other it supercharges what our politicians like to call, ‘the politics of envy’. And when there is resentment, it will always fall along the traditional ley lines. In this case, a middle aged woman (no longer considered a sex object and therefore of no intrinsic value) is driving a car that represents wealth (which she no doubt illegitimately gained through her relationship rather than ‘earning’ it herself). And, she has the audacity to speak up and say that a man has done something wrong (blocking the road).
It is also a perfect example of lateral violence – the second woman abusing the first woman, because of frustration that neither of them can do anything about (the man who blocked the road).
The term ‘Karen’ is truly a word of its time. It is recognition of the threatening power of a new generation of middle aged and older women who are naming things that are wrong, representing themselves and often others. This is inherently dangerous and so must be vociferously shamed.
In a meeting recently I complained about the lack of accessible doors in a building that is used by people in wheelchairs. I’ve complained about it before, but nothing was done. I was congratulated on ‘going the full Karen’. I said that I prefer to use the term ‘Kevin’.
If the woman in the video had been a man, none of this would have attracted attention. Social media is a shaming-machine and the repercussions are immense for groups who have traditionally been subjected to dispossession and violence. I know for a fact that if I commented on that video above, pointing out that this would not be a viral tiktok video at all if it were a middle-aged man who yelled at the truck driver for blocking road, that I would also be shamed and told that this is clearly a wealthy white woman and therefore, I should join in on the vitriolic shame-fest.
This proves my point. Women who are the closest to realising power – wealthy white women – must be kept down first. If anyone thinks this will stop with rich white women I’ve got a bridge they might be interested in.
The second example of misogyny I’ve encountered in the last couple of days comes from the odious pits of a Twitter shitstorm over a ‘spa’ (whatever that is) in California that legally admitted a man who claimed to be a transwoman (and may be – I haven’t had the belly to delve into it and it’s not really relevant to my point) into the changing rooms. He/she/they was the subject of complaints from customers because their genitalia was visible – essentially described as ‘flashing’. The Spa was operating legally and it turned into a showdown between the usual suspects in the culture war. It transpired that the person in the changing room was a convicted paedophile, which is of course why it blew up on social media.
What’s disturbing is that some of the most staunch feminists posted about this even on Twitter, claiming that the 9 year old girl who had been the subject of ‘the flashing’ should have not looked at the person’s penis etc.,. Multiple self-described feminists accused the 9 year old girl of being rude and inappropriate, poorly parented etc.,.
This, to me, is in direct opposition to the previous social media #metoo campaign of, ‘believe women’. ‘Believe women’ was obviously far too dangerous and needed to be effectively shut down. To be clear, the pushback against male sexual violence that took off a couple of years ago encouraged people to think about warning signs and expressions of entitled behaviour that were indicative of male sexual violence. It was no longer just, ‘random violent acts’ – rather, the focus shifted to ‘rape culture’ – the prevailing set of ideas that normalises male access to women’s bodies, and shames women for being fearful of it (the fear part isn’t new, it was just drawn to people’s attention). And so, we saw campaigns where women attempted to illustrate all the ways in which they kept themselves safe my male sexual violence (from the obvious like not walking in the dark to the more subtle, like making sure they didn’t ‘look’ at a man the wrong way, or find themselves alone with a man in a secluded place). This campaign was quite shocking to a lot of men, as they came to terms with the kind of implicit violence that women structure their every day lives around.
And, part of this discussion of what we now call rape culture is the idea that if a woman asserts boundaries, or keeps herself safe in a certain situation she should be shamed as being hysterical, or paranoid or a manhater etc. etc. The point is to place the onus for the sexual violence onto the woman. Victim blaming is one of the most obvious illustrations.
I don’t think the feminists who shamed the 9 year old girl for looking at the paedophile’s penis thought they were undermining feminism or women in general. This is how the culture war works against all women. Everyone gets so caught up in defending their positions they lose sight of the previous gains, and ultimately this is why the shaming machine must be kicked into high gear.
Aotearoa is heading into election season. It’s a showdown between The Thumb (see pic, Q.E.D) and whichever Labour candidate happens to be sitting in the chair with the sticker on it.
I’m not up to date on NZ politics, not by a long shot. But yesterday it became apparent to me that National is in a good position. I hadn’t read a poll, or an editorial in one of the (shamelessly captured) daily mastheads. No, I realised that National would win the election because yesterday my entire social media feed tipped into a frenzy about banning phones in high schools.
I wasn’t actually aware that phones were permitted in New Zealand high schools at all – they’ve been banned in NSW for as long as I’ve been paying attention.The policy here in Australia isn’t 100% perfect but it seems to work.
I was surprised, therefore, that New Zealand, which seems to be administered from top to bottom by doughty, cardigan wearing teachers, hasn’t banned phones altogether. To be clear; Having mobile phones in schools is plainly stupid. Teenagers will concentrate on their phone rather than their school work. The folly of this is so apparent it doesn’t bear belabouring.
That’s not my point. What’s interesting is that Luxon was on National Radio talking about a phone ban instead of talking about the absolutely critical housing crisis, the crisis in healthcare, the failing education system, the cost of living and the crime rate. You know – the domestic stuff that actually really matters. And that’s before we get into the broader economic issues.
National are dictating the narrative. What’s even more interesting was the ‘interview’ itself, where for some reason Luxon’s interlocutor – a national representative of school Principals – described banning phones as a fantastical leap of whimsy that stretched credulity to from root to tip, akin to banning teeth. He seemed blissfully unaware that many comparable countries have banned phones in classrooms for predictable reasons with predictable results.
As I said before, this isn’t about phones. This is about controlling the narrative. The Principal’s description of a fanciful phone-ban is a textbook example of kiwi-exceptionalism. This is the idea that New Zealand is either so unique, or so isolated, or both, that the rest of the world doesn’t even exist, and all problems must be discussed from first principles (excuse the pun). What would it be like to ban phones?
Kiwi exceptionalism is a durable trope and particularly fungible around election time. It reduces the narrative in particular ways. It says – look inside, not outside. Rely on us kiwis for solutions. Trust us.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.
How does one get onto National Radio to discuss a furphy like phones in schools? How does one ensure that their opposing debate partner will have no knowledge of or interest in the pros and cons of banning phones in all the other jurisdictions where this has been done? How does one shape the discussion to preclude these comparisons? It takes someone with a finely honed understanding of kiwi exceptionalism to manipulate listeners’ uncritical acceptance of the premise that NZ is the first and only place where teenagers and mobiles phones exist at the same time in the same place.
I don’t know who Luxon’s media person is but he or she is a bloody genius.
Story-time this morning, for no other reason than the fact that I was ruminating on how poorly adults can do things.
When you’re a kid, you think that adults are more than just sensible. You think they’re omnipotent, and that they know everything, that their views are more than just legitimate, they’re quite literally the unshakable orthodoxy.
And then there comes a period in every child’s life where the thin veneer of adult-truth evaporates revealing wobbly gnosticism. For me that happened quite early on, because like a few other kids in the 80s, my parents divorced. This is not a post where I re-litigate the poisonous immolation of two boomers at war – it’s all very predictable. What I will do is to tell you a story about how adults use kids to get at each other, for no other reason than to marvel at the fact that I am now older than my parents were at the time, and still marvelling at some of my contemporaries who are engaging in exactly the same behaviour. Some things never change.
By the time I was about 8 my parents had both ‘re-partnered’ and ‘the children’ would visit my Dad and his partner in the school holidays, twice a year.
Now, without getting too maudlin I’ll say I was not a happy kid. Things were not going well with my Mum’s partner. And, it was the mid 1980s. I was tall and skinny, an effect amplified by the fashions of the time. Bedecked in pastel ‘stirrup pants’ with my short hair shellacked in gel I resembled a pissed-off toilet brush. Socially, it was a bit of a low point.
So, I looked forward to holidays with my Dad, who was mostly working while we were visiting, but a comforting presence nonetheless. Dad lived in a pretty remote area and at the beginning of the holidays I acquired a sickly lamb from a neighbour that was immediately dubbed Schizo.
Being a miserable, introverted girl I latched onto that poor little animal like an organ transplant. Four times a day I’d mix up a giant bottle of powdered “Anlamb” and gently cradle Schizo while he bobbed his nugetty little head against my chest, slurping down all the milk, often shitting it straight back out again. Schizo had what my Mum referred to later as, ‘the scours’. This lamb was not destined for term three.
But Schizo kept me occupied for the two weeks of the school holidays which was undoubtedly the point. When the time came to go back to school I cried and cried at the thought of leaving Schizo behind, but was assured that he would be taken good care of, and that my Dad, who had never cooked so much as a plate of baked beans for his own children would assiduously stir up warm bottles of powdered milk several times a day for an undercooked lamb.
I hated returning home. Mum would attempt to soften the blow with a nice tidy bedroom and sometimes some new undies, such were the excesses of 1980s New Zealand. The following evening, after I’d returned from my first day back the Ritual Shaming Institute (school) Dad called. Pretty much the only time we had any contact with Dad was in person, twice a year. So when he called I knew something was wrong.
Dad had bad news. Schizo was, of course, dead.
I was devastated and cried for three days.
The beauty of his “play” never occurred to me until last night, when I was furnishing the latest episode of Epic Fails of Pet Husbandry for my daughter with the tale of Schizo the lamb whose only characteristic was attempting to shit himself inside-out every day.
I realised that My Dad and his partner had sourced the sickest lamb in the South Island for me to keep on death’s door, until five minutes after the car pulled out of the driveway at the end of the holidays, at which point they no doubt tipped the Anlamb down the plughole and left the animal outside for nature to tidy the ledger. And then they waited until I was home from school to deliver the news to my Mum so she could relay it to me after they were safety out of harm’s way. The Lamb Bomb.
Now, my Mum grew up on a remote sheep station and so her regard for sheep in general was murderous at its most generous. However, she also possesses a studied, impenetrable calmness that I like to refer to as, ‘The Rock’ and it was The Rock that listened gently as I recounted spending the entire holiday tipping endless bottles of powdered milk into Schizo’s warm carcass, his demise no doubt apparent to her from the moment I burbled out the teary words, ‘his Mum didn’t want him’. By the following day she was presented with an inconsolable child to deal with, whilst managing all the other usual crap that comes with full-time work and parenting.
I’m painting one team as the villain here but as anything who has had any experience with an acrimonious separation can tell you, there is always give and take. All parties covered themselves in glory during The War Years, but the lamb was a particularly apposite example.
The story about The Richardson’s Guinea Pigs was funnier.
Post Script; If you find yourself in a similar situation, the correct response is this; The next time the child visits (months later) you take the child to a paddock full of sheep and point at the happiest one and say, ‘There he is! With his flock! Isn’t he happy!’
The Mutton Flap 