The random song quotation post - even more disappointing than usual

For some reason, this section of the Things of Stone and Wood song 'She will survive' popped into my head last night at around 2am:


But at night she will have haunted dreams
Of monsters crawling, from the Deep
And faces white that press against her eyes.

But we will sing and they will go away
They might come again some other day
And we will just sing twice as loud


And she will survive
She will survive this


Random musing to accompany quote: In 1997 (or thereabouts) when I used to walk regularly down Westgarth Street in Fitzroy as a back way to Brunswick Street, TOSAW* frontman Greg Arnold and I would regularly cross paths. He always said hello to me, which suggests that either a) he thought I was some one else or b) thought he knew me from somewhere (possible, but not likely) or c) was so perplexed by my teaming of dark-coloured slip dresses as outer-wear with grannyish cardigans and sandals that he was momentarily moved to uber-politneness mode.

Or perhaps he's just a nice bloke. And certainly given his own penchant for cardigans at the time he was hardly in a position to judge.


* Anyone who was working in music press or endlessly engaged in creating and applying street posters at this time may appreciate this abbreviation, which seemed to be everywhere in Melbourne in the mid-90s. Or at least in the blocks surrounding the Dan O'Connell.

I want something to think about/Nothing fancy, just new...

Advertising frequently reminds us that people who are different to us can’t possibly share our experience, or know what we’re talking about. It’s a common advertising theme to claim that the things that you know are better, safer, more reliable.

“Speak to some one who knows”, ads tell us. The most recent series of Commonwealth Bank ads is a good example. In the most recent one I saw, the American ad agency contracted by the bank suggests they turn the "traditional" dollarmite moneybox into a transformer-like robot. One of the CBA reps remarks “Yeah, but the kids kind of like the money box”, i.e. the way it is. This message is reinforced when the new-fangled transformer bursts into flames.

You can watch the ad here.

What I wondered when I saw that ad was, notwithstanding the bursting into flames bit, how does CBA know that “the kids” would prefer the plain old plastic money box to one that turns into a robot? As the mother of a five year old boy, I’ll bet CBA its last quarter profit that market research of the whole moneybox versus robot thing might garner them some unexpected results.

Anyway, what I’m getting to is that I’ve been contemplating the politics of newness. In many locations, difference is very much defined by obvious external appearances: different skin colour, gender, religious observances. Social inclusion rhetoric is based around this notion to an extent, that social cohesion relies on recognising the group disadvantaged by some means (and experiencing what is broadly termed “exclusion”) and drawing this group into community life.

Social inclusion has an obvious currency in areas where poor outcomes against community indicators such as crime, poverty and poor health are the norm: the more meaningful inclusion of people in community life can have very dramatic outcomes for crime reduction, improved health, better employment prospects. In many instances, strong communities are healthy ones, regardless of their size.

Where I live, however, difference is defined by longevity. Some take the view that if you haven’t lived in a particular town for more than a generation, then you have no claim on the place. If your parents lived here, you might be okay, but better if you have a grandparent who moved here in 1927. Being a local is where it’s at. Another way of looking at this is that people don’t just reserve their intolerance for ethnic groups, they’re happy to extend it to anyone.
Of course, the problem with this argument is that it leads to stagnation and the stifling of new ideas. For every idea that is met with the uncomfortable shifting in seats at a Rotary* meeting, there’s:

“Change? Yeah, we tried that once in 1972 and it didn’t work, but you wouldn’t know that because you weren’t here”

One of my friends, at a new mother’s group after the birth of her first child, introduced herself to another mother and observed that she had been in town for less than six months after moving from Melbourne. The mother in question replied “Yes, well it’s all you new people who are ruining the place” and then turned on her heel. This is not the first time I’ve heard this observation, and it’s reinforced by community members who have remarked to me that people “just aren’t what they used to be”, which in many cases is code for

“I didn’t know their mother” or

“I suspect they’re on the welfare, not that I’ve ever talked to them” or

“Drugs! They’re on drugs!”

One of the defining features of this attitude is that it assumes that new people have either exercised no judgement about moving to a particular town or that they have moved there for the wrong reasons. What’s wrong with choosing a town to live in based on its cheap rental market? Or cheap house prices? If your kids came to you with a bargain priced house, that would be cause for celebration, wouldn’t it?

The problem with this attitude is that it is creating two very separate groups in some small towns, with the kind of disconnection which defines the difference between Altona and South Yarra all jammed into a town the size of Pearl Bay.

At the other end of the market, what’s wrong with choosing to buy a sprawling four bedroom house on 40 acres because you’re kind of burned out with city life and would like a change? Apparently, a lot. Because it’s not only economically disadvantaged people being locked out of these towns, it’s also “high-flyers”, whose ideas for small town renewal are being rejected by a dominant group who refuse to change, or even to accept the need to do so.

The real question is: if you already have a low population, and your town is diminished by the flight of youth** and an ageing population, can you really afford to be making ANY new residents feel uncomfortable? I worry that in twenty years time, some of the local citizens I’ve met will be sitting on their verandahs together, idly reminiscing about the time when their town had 200 people, in the good old days before everyone moved away.

I care very deeply about the area in which I live, and I want to see it survive and flourish. But it will not do so until it begins to acknowledge and address that it is not as welcoming as it could be, and that new blood is perhaps the most obvious key to prosperity.


* Rotary is a stand in for any small town organisation.

** “The flight of youth” always has me imagining teenagers in jeans and Megadeth t-shirts soaring over the rooftops. Now that’s a National Geographic Special I’d like to see.

Lazy Town

Okay, so I haven't written much lately.

I swear I've been busy doing other things and not just tooling around on facebook.

I did write a piece on kids tv for SESA, you can read it if you like....

kthanxbye

Everybody wants to work

The other morning I heard Noel Pearson on the radio, talking about a new plan to increase Indigenous participation in the mainstream workforce. It’s an initiative by Andrew Forrest, who has announced a plan to create 50,000 Indigenous jobs.

I know that many will see this as a golden opportunity, and in many ways it is. But as I listened to Noel Pearson talk, he spoke consistently of “entry-level” jobs, ones which didn’t need a high level of literacy and numeracy. In fact, Pearson raised literacy and numeracy more than once as a reason that Indigenous people fail to secure jobs. No doubt, it is a major impediment.

And clearly, it is better across a range of indicators (health, happiness, economic prosperity, etc etc etc) to have a job than to be long-term unemployed.

But let’s say that you’re working for the first time in your life. And your “entry level” job is a full time one. And exhausting. And given that you’ve just had a whole bunch of training from the Federal government, your new workplace is reluctant to give you training leave to attend school or TAFE courses.

In what way is this new scheme NOT a means of creating a guaranteed under-class of Indigenous workers? A group of people who will be forever condemned to work low-level, low-skill jobs because their literacy and numeracy shows only enough improvement to meet the needs of their current job? Make no mistake, this isn't a problem peculiar to Indigenous people: I know truck drivers and process workers who have never developed these skills either: mainly because their job didn't require it of them.

I think industry should take responsibility for employing Indigenous people, because there is no doubt that structural disadvantage extends well and truly into the workforce. But I think industry should take responsibility for providing a pathway, not just a job.

This isn’t only a problem in the Indigenous community, although it can very well be argued that it is a major problem there. It’s also a problem for refugees and Non-English speaking migrants. I know of an employer that almost seems to rely on the fact that their workforce cannot communicate with one another. But if you work in a low-skill manual labour job where not only do very few people speak English but almost no one speaks your language, how are you supposed to develop the language skills to extend yourself beyond that work “opportunity”? More to the point, how are you supposed to “integrate” with society as we seem hell-bent on insisting that people do?

Migrant workers with limited English skills and disadvantaged workers with poor literacy and numeracy will always struggle to move laterally and up through the workforce because without language skills, the jobs which would further develop language skills (as well as a range of other job and life skills) such as hospitality, telemarketing, administration and secretarial jobs, are already out of reach.

I know, I know, some one reading this is sitting there thinking

"Gigglewick is on crack...telemarketing isn't a skilled job. And it kinda sucks"

Well sure, it's not astro-physics, but it does develop all kinds of skills that come in very handy in other work. And if you think that telemarketing or waitressing is no better than other kinds of jobs, perhaps you'd like to go work in a meat processing plant and tell me how good the career pathways are there.

But back to industry and its expectations of government. Industry is far too reliant on government spending when it comes to skilling its workforce. While most businesses are happy to take government money in the form of R and D grants, or infrastructure development, or export grants, they’re more than happy to slag off government for failing to provide heavily or fully subsidised training places for their workers, particularly around “non-job” skills such as reading and writing English. But if industry is not prepared to invest in its workforce, then maybe it will have to live with the fact that it doesn’t have one.

But we need to be more insistent too. Let's argue more strenuously for increased investment in skills, and better pathways for workers. For those of us with staff, let's think about the professional development opportunities we offer them, both in training and in extension of their skills.

And let's agree with Noel Pearson and Andrew Forrest: that discrimination on the basis of race is never, ever, okay.

Last night I dreamed of Afghanistan

Skateistan is a co-educational skateboarding school in Kabul.

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