It takes work to be out of work

We’ve had a few days of storms here in Brisbane, but today they’ve given way to blue skies and warm breeze and a very happy cat reclaiming her spot on the balcony.

I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday morning answering email: replying to quote requests from folks interested in book and cover design; responding to authors I owe responses to for Brain Jar (alas, I’m still behind, for reasons that will be clear below); clearing some tasks on the NEIS training program that’ll eventually become the NIES assistance scheme helping the press along next year.

Then I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon trying to navigate the complex bureaucracies of Australia’s unemployment system for the fourth time this week, which is starting to feel a little like I’ve stepped into Kafka’s The Trial in the sheer absurdity of trying to get a simple problem resolved.

It’s become particularly frustrating because I first called because they’d overpaid me, and I let them know and suggested I’d rather like to pay back the extra before it became a source of stress. Now, four calls in, this starting point has largely been forgotten and the tenor of each successive conversation is increasingly “we’re going to fuck you up for this debt, son, if you don’t pay it back.”

Nobody, of course, will tell me how much I owe or how to pay it back because some switch has been flipped and cannot be unflipped and therefore they can’t actually move me to the debt repayment department until the black cock crows thrice after sunset and the devil rides into town on a white horse.

Nor, for that matter, pay unemployment benefits until this gets resolved.

I post this not to complain, but because there’s a mythology in Australia about the dreaded “dole bludger.” This fear that people will go on unemployment and stay there, feeding of folks tax dollars like a tick.

And the irony of it is: it’s fucking time consuming to be unemployed in Australia. I ‘bludged’ far more when I was a salaried employee than I ever have as an unemployed person.

The system is complex to navigate, the folks who run it are understaffed after years of successive right wing governments gutting any kind of public service, and the complexity is magnified by successive attempts to privatise parts of the unemployment services over the last few decades. Which means you need the right hand of a complex system to talk to the left hand of another complex system to keep everything rolling.

All of that takes hours of your life on the phone, then on terribly designed online user interfaces, and then back on the phone again, to get pretty basic things done.

And I’m a reasonably well-educated, polite, well-spoken, white male who struggles to jump through the various hoops–I can’t imagine what this system is like for the folks who don’t fit the demographic that gets to play through western culture on “easy.”

To say nothing of the fact that when you’re not doing all of this, you’re constantly managing the fact you’re unemployed. The sheer stress of managing on so little money is hardcore, and managing your mental health is a twenty-four seven project.

“Bludging” is a concept that only really makes sense when you’re employed, and the prospect of letting your guard down for a second isn’t an invitation for ongoing financial troubles.

#

So why am I musing so much on my unemployment experience at the moment? Honestly, because I read this while checking twitter:

The entire thread that follows is, basically, people pointing out that the original Hellblazer run largely a response to Margaret Thatcher’s England and you’d have to be largely blind to miss it. John Constantine has a long history of being a political character, and a left wing political character at that.

Which is, yes, entirely true.

But also reliant on a context that is now forty years old, so I can understand how folks would miss it.

At the same time, the problems with Australian unemployment are largely descended from the wet dreams of the 80s political right. I often find myself working under the belief that Australia tends to lean left, for all that it has massive issues with racism and sexism.

In truth, that’s a hold-over from growing up in the eighties, when the political left was actually a powerhouse in Australia that had governed for twelve years. Since turning eighteen, and actually participating in the voting process, the country has predominantly been governed by a series of right-wing ideologues that started with 11 years of John Howard, took a six-year gap in which the Labor left started the revolving door of PMs, and then another five years of right wing majorities that were led by a batshit crazy ideologue that reminded me far too much of Patrick Batemen in American Psycho (Abbot), and a pair of palatable masks that were placed over an increasingly dangerous right wing ideology (Turnbull and Morrison).

And aside from a few brief years of the Labor Left’s run, their period in power was largely as a minority government that needed to navigate a complex balance of power.

People in Australia often argue that all politicians are the same, there’s no difference between the major parties, and nothing ever gets done. I would argue that’s hard to really assess when we keep electing right wing governments who believe governments should do less and big business should do more as a core ideology around 75% of the time.

Frankly, I would really like a twelve year run where we tried giving the alternative a shot.