Tom Tanuki-Looking at the new gold standard in antilockdown influencer: Hoody the pilot preacher. (First in a series looking at the Convoy to Canberra.)

Click here for Tom's Video

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. He has worked in political comedy online, on stage and at protests, through projects including direct action anti-racist group Yelling At Racist Dogs (Y.A.R.D.) and the satirical nationalist group Million Flag Patriots. His premiere theatre-comedy show, 'Yelling At Racist Dogs: Just As Bad', performed to sold-out crowds at the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki, Facebook here and YouTube here.

Information wars: are we getting a fair view of China’s treatment of Uyghurs? Michael West

Michael West in this broadcast Information Wars: are we getting a fair view of China’s treatment of Uyghurs goes into the growing issue of Australia's belligerent and hostile relationship with China. That is is promoted by pro-US think tanks and politicians. In this broadcast Michael West discusses this topic with Michael Sainsbury has more than 25 years’ experience writing about business, business politics and human rights across Australia and the Asia Pacific. He is a former China correspondent who lived in Asia for 12 years. 

TANKS A LOT SCOTT! by Michael West A Youtube broadcast

 Michael West sums up brilliantly the current situation in Australia with  COVID 19 TANKS A LOT SCOTT! and the failure of the LNP to protect the Australian population from the virus with their Let It Rip politics on COVID. 

Michael West

Journalist

michaelwest.com.au

Description

Michael West is an Australian investigative journalist. He is the founder of MichaelWestMedia, a news website specializing in investigative journalism in the areas of business, finance, tax, and energy. Wikipedia

Dear politicians in Canberra and Sydney: caring for us means you need to tell us the truth By Mary Chiarella Jan 14, 2022

 We don’t want spin and false promises. Even if the “system” is in good shape, many of the people in that system are not feeling the same.

So here we are in NSW, to quote Jim Stanford, with a state and federal government that have managed to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”. I think it is fair to say that most of us feel overwhelmed and deflated by the spiralling (and even then only partial) numbers, deaths, hospitalisations and supply failures. I certainly feel abandoned by both my state (NSW) and federal government, hung out to dry on a cocktail of ideology based on personal responsibility and economic rationalism.

As concerned citizens we are taking our personal responsibility seriously. We are self-isolating to avoid infection and (if infected) self-isolating to avoid cross infection. We are avoiding social contacts and public gatherings. So, in fact, we have a Clayton’s lockdown. But we are experiencing this virtual lockdown without any semblance of governmental support or care.

So, what might governmental care in the Age of Omicron look like? Well first and foremost, they could give some extra thought to our healthcare workers and other front-line staff who have given their all for two years and were thinking blithely of holidays and breaks. Now they don’t even get a break if they’re an asymptomatic close contact! I believe that some financial remuneration (the unions can best determine what that might be) would be at the very least an indication of appreciation.

Free rapid antigen tests (RATs) are on the cards, but not currently in abundance and maybe even some vouchers for future use – these could be for education, for recreation, for exercise, for massages. Understood they can’t be used now, but they would be a concrete indication of gratitude. Similarly, an acceptance and acknowledgement that, if our healthcare staff say they feel overwhelmed, they DO feel overwhelmed, not some blanket statement that the system is “in good shape”. Even if the “system” (whatever that is without its staff) is in good shape, many of the people in that system are not feeling the same. Just do them the courtesy of honouring their sentiments, politicians. You might just be wrong.

Now let’s move to businesses. Also made up of people who are either sick or isolating – AND —  if they’re service businesses, serving people who are voting with their feet and spending less than ever. Staff need to be paid, but if businesses are struggling, they can’t pay their sick and furloughed staff. They can’t even pay their staff who are turning up to work with no customers. But while the governments state that we are “pushing through” (I loathe that expression), they can deny there is any form of lockdown and thus deprive businesses of any support to pay their workers. Care would be a reintroduction of support funding in a similar form to JobKeeper and an acknowledgement of our Clayton’s lockdown.

Moving along now to the public. Us. If you care about us, don’t lie to us. Admit you made a mistake. Don’t talk to us in binaries. “It’s either push through or lock down.” No it isn’t. I’m offering all sorts of great ideas of things you could do to help us, as have numerous economic and health experts within the past week (leave alone the past two years). The vast majority of us want to be safe. We want to have jabs and boosters, to take tests (PCRs or RATs), to keep away from people if we are sick and to avoid super spreader events.

Caring for us means you need to tell us the truth. Tell us if you haven’t got the workforce to deliver all the vaccines, tell us if you’re rationing PCRs (which you are), tell us how you’re going to keep our kids safe when they go back to school (if you can until they’re vaccinated). It might seem like a long bow, but research on kids whose parents are in prison shows that they don’t want unrealistic promises of presents and gifts, they want honesty.

We your public are not children, but we also want to know the truth. We don’t want spin and we don’t want false promises. Like the advice to dads in prison, we’d prefer it if you’d tell us if you’ve let us down and make it clear to us what we can expect. That would be responsible caring.

Another form of responsible caring would be working out how to help people to do their RAT, rather than threatening to fine them if they don’t report a positive test. I have performed two RATs on myself so far, one on request prior to attending a small gathering on NYE and one before minor eye surgery. The latter wasn’t requested, but I felt it was a judicious use of my second precious test. Now, I am well educated and capable of reading instructions normally, but I did have a slight vision problem for both tests (now happily resolved).

With the aid of both my spectacles and a magnifying glass I was able to read the instructions that involved the following: a nasal swab, a small plastic test tube, some lotion to go into the test tube in a small plastic vial, a flat test recorder and a torch with a blue light to read the test after 15 minutes (and a battery supplied to go into the torch).

It did make me wonder how difficult it would be for someone with worse vision than mine was at that time, for someone who wasn’t a nurse and therefore unused to taking swabs and mixing things in test tubes, for someone whose first language wasn’t English, or even for someone who couldn’t read very well or indeed at all.

Rather than threatening people for not reporting their positive tests, care from our government would be about providing clear multilingual and/or visual instructions on TV or through advertisements on how to perform the different tests. Maybe the federal government could spend the money on those advertisements and save money on telling us about its positive energy. Care could be about an information package about how to take a RAT on healthdirect. Care could be about signs on bus stops and advertisements around the state directing people to some of this extra multilingual and visual information.

There is a lot more that could be done to care, politicians. Your personal responsibility extends, by virtue of your positions, to your public, to your electorate, to your state, to your country. You need to demonstrate your responsibility through better care.

Mary Chiarella

Mary’s career spans 40 years both in the United Kingdom and Australia. Mary is Professor Emerita, Susan Wakil School of Nursing at the University of Sydney. In 2003/04 she was the Chief Nursing Officer, NSW Health Department and prior to that was the Foundation Professor of Nursing in Corrections Health, with the University of Technology, Sydney.
Mary is a Board member of Northern Sydney LHD and chairs their Health Care Quality Committee. She also serves on the Health Ethics Advisory Panel to the NSW Minister for Health and the Clinical Governance Advisory Committee to Healthdirect Australia.

Mary was awarded an AM for significant contributions to nursing and midwifery education and healthcare standards in June 2019.

Pearls and Irritations 15-1-2022

2021-2022 Let It Rip COVID Summer, Brief Observation One by John Tognolini

 Walking into Coles tonight, around 7pm on a Thursday night and this supermarket had so few people in it. I’ve seen more life in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery than this place in Katoomba, from what I’ve seen on the media it’s a common scene across New South Wales.

People are scared about COVID and I’m one of them. I see a woman in her NSW Health Blue workwear and she’s tired. She's waiting to get served behind me. After I finish and go up to her and say. ‘Thanks for all the great work you’re doing. She was surprised by my praise and thanked me. I then said, ’You people are the frontline. No, we’re the frontline. You’re the last line of defense.’ Again she thanked me and wished me, ’Good night.’

We are the frontline and need to mask up, do the QR Codes and social distance. We need to get vaccinated. However, where are the RAT Tests and vaccines? Such is Premier Domicron Perrotet’s Let it rip COVID NSW.

Why I'm re-activating Togs's Place.Com

“It is quite time that our children were taught a little more about their country, for shame's sake.”

Henry Lawson 1867 – 1922 Australian writer, bush poet and considered Australia’s best shorty story writer.

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005 American journalist and author, and the founder of the gonzo journalism movement.

At the age of 62, and over years after I endured a stroke that nearly killed me on June 28^th 2018. I’ve decided to reactivate my blog Togs’s Place.Com. I’ll also get back into producing books.

I write in a style that can be described as Henry Lawson meets Hunter S.Thompson, it’s Gonzo meets Faces in the Street. It’s like the way I play some Johnny Cash songs like the Lenard Cohen, that so upset the Wellington Country and Western Club, when I lived out in the bush town of Wellington, near Dubbo in Central West New South Wales for eight years.

Henry had his faults. He suffered from the racism that afflicted the union movement of his time in the Nineteenth Century Australia, the Worker’s Paradise of the British White Australia Policy. 

Yet when a strong Aboriginal/First Nations Goa Gunggari Wakkawakka Murri Dgin Woman actor, writer and director such as Leah Purcell, adapted his classic moving story, of a women’s isolation in the bush, The Drover’s Wife to the stage. It’s time to take stock of the man’s writing, especially when her adaption of her play has been described Quentin Tarrintino meets Henry Lawson.

Another reason why I like Henry is because I saw Max Cullen play Henry in the Wellington and bought a copy the CD of Dead Poets Talking, the stage show Max devised that had Henry bouncing off A.B. “Banjo” Patterson played by Warren Fahey.

There’s another thing about Henry, I learnt how he lived in the Sydney Inner Western suburb of Petersham. He worked as railway workshops labourer at Sydney’s Western suburb of Auburn and composed his classic poem Faces In The Street when he lived in Petersham’s White Cockatoo Hotel. There is plaque on Petersham Railway Station celebrating Henry. I’ve attached this poem as it is so relevant to Australia today.

The poem yells a strong defiance to the 1890’s Depression. He describes the poverty inflicted on Working People and shows his empathy with them, when they were thrown on the scrap heap in a time when there was no dole or social security. Henry knew what they felt like because he was one of them.

The only fault in the poem, and I say this from 2021 is that he saw Australia as a young country. He did not know of First Nation's Australia and their 60,000 year history, the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth. 

He did not attempt to tap into it, which means challenging the Dispossession of our Indigenous Peoples and institutionalised and cultural racism that inflicts its foul stench in Australia in 2019. Nor did he really have that desire to write of Indigenous Australians except in a paternalistic way. 

Yet despite his faults, there is many things I admire about him such as that fire in his being to challenge the moneyed classes and the big end of town. He was no saint and I do take him on boots and all but when I point out his mistakes. I write in a style of Henry Lawson meets Hunter S. Thompson.

I remember vividly being told at the University of Technology, Sydney by a journalism lecturer in the early 1990's, “This is Australia John, we don’t do that Hunter S. Thompson stuff.” I’ve always looked back on that moment and thought, what a narrow way to write about the world we live in?

Rowan Cahill historian, teacher, and journalist in his review of my fourth book, my 2015 A History Man’s Past, Other People’s Wars (which I will be updating) I believe sums up my writing in this review.

…………my liking for John Tognolini as a dissident/radical. His latest book is only part of the answer.  The full reason lies in the way Tognolini operates; in a self-directed way. He makes his own spaces for dissident interventions and comment, demonstrating a media savvy that was/is no doubt helped by his academic studies; he has a First Class Honours degree in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney, gained at a time when the institution had a reputation for producing independent journalists/communicators.  Tognolini  publishes his own books. Since 2006 he has run a massive website/blog (Tog’s Place.Com) as a platform for his own writings and commentaries, and also as an alternative leftist news, information and cultural site. The site takes its name from the Cobb and Co way-station run by his Italian grandfather and his Australia-born grandmother (from English/Irish convict parentage) near Castlemaine, Victoria, during the 19th century. Tognolini has also been involved in community radio since 1987, and with the socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly since 1990. He has produced radio documentaries for ABC Radio National/RN.

Tognolini’s independence as an intellectual/communicator is rooted in his employment background;  before becoming a school teacher in 2000, he variously worked as a labourer, scaffolder, rigger, dogman, railway fettler, and painter and docker, and whilst in these employments was a trade unionist. This long and varied employment background means that the language of Tognolini is from the world of public communication, and not from school-to-academia niche worlds; his long and deep immersion in the labouring workforce also means he developed strong self-respect and individuality that have helped him resist/escape the cap-in-hand-defer-to-intellectual-power-elites mode of conduct that tends to come with professional writer training and with academia.

Involvement in unionism, militant unionism in Tognolini’s case, led him to make two documentary films that are worth chasing down, one (1992) on the deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation in Victoria, the other (with Frances Kelly) on the three-month occupation/strike by militant trade unions of Cockatoo Island Dockyard, Sydney, 1989, in which John was involved. Both substantial films are available on Youtube.

Tognolini does not need peer- reviewing or permission to speak, nor does he need the approbation of pecking orders to comment and create his brand of opposition and dissidence. He does not agonise as to where to act, where to ‘say’. He simply goes out and does/say it, and as I said earlier, makes his own spaces. There is a valuable message, and example, here that I regard highly, and respect.

I had a falling out and major parting of the ways with Green Left Weekly in 2020 over differences in trade union work, in particular New South Wales Teachers Federation. Since then my decision that it and political party behind it, that I resigned from Socialist Alliance has become a sectarian group over their opposition to COVID Vaccination Mandates.

My stroke and I do mean mine because no one else would want it and I can’t blame them. Apart from nearly killing me, it put my writing on hold including my book production. I then learned of my publisher retiring after his wife’s death. Also, I was just getting settled to living back into Katoomba after finishing off my ties with Wellington.

I’ve established a new relationship with another publisher and will be reproducing my four published books and and producing a new one and will take the opportunity to update them: The Mountain City Murders, Singing Johnny Cash In The Cardiac Ward: A personal story about heart disease and music, Brothers - Part One: Gallipoli 1915, A History Man’s Past & Other People’s Stories: A Shared Memoir. Part One: Other People’s Wars and new book  that I stopped when I had the stroke in 2018, 1918: A photo from France.

I will return to the three future volumes to Brothers historical novel series dealing with the Western Front in the years 1916, 1917 and 1918. After I complete two more parts of his historical series, A History Man’s Past & Other Peoples’ Stories: A Shared Memoir. Part 2: Working People/Blue Collar& Teacher Unionism and Part 3:What Is My Nation? History, Racism, Class & Justice.

John Tognolini

8th December, 2022, Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia

Katoomba, Blue Mountains.

Faces In The Street - by Henry Lawson

They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone

That want is here a stranger, and that misery's unknown;

For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet

My window-sill is level with the faces in the street --

Drifting past, drifting past,

To the beat of weary feet --

While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,

To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;

I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet

In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street --

Drifting on, drifting on,

To the scrape of restless feet;

I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

In hours before the dawning dims the starlight in the sky

The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by,

Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet,

Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street --

Flowing in, flowing in,

To the beat of hurried feet --

Ah! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

The human river dwindles when 'tis past the hour of eight,

Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;

But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat

The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street --

Grinding body, grinding soul,

Yielding scarce enough to eat --

Oh! I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

And then the only faces till the sun is sinking down

Are those of outside toilers and the idlers of the town,

Save here and there a face that seems a stranger in the street,

Tells of the city's unemployed upon his weary beat --

Drifting round, drifting round,

To the tread of listless feet --

Ah! My heart aches for the owner of that sad face in the street.

And when the hours on lagging feet have slowly dragged away,

And sickly yellow gaslights rise to mock the going day,

Then flowing past my window like a tide in its retreat,

Again I see the pallid stream of faces in the street --

Ebbing out, ebbing out,

To the drag of tired feet,

While my heart is aching dumbly for the faces in the street.

And now all blurred and smirched with vice the day's sad pages end,

For while the short `large hours' toward the longer `small hours' trend,

With smiles that mock the wearer, and with words that half entreat,

Delilah pleads for custom at the corner of the street --

Sinking down, sinking down,

Battered wreck by tempests beat --

A dreadful, thankless trade is hers, that Woman of the Street.

But, ah! to dreader things than these our fair young city comes,

For in its heart are growing thick the filthy dens and slums,

Where human forms shall rot away in sties for swine unmeet,

And ghostly faces shall be seen unfit for any street --

Rotting out, rotting out,

For the lack of air and meat --

In dens of vice and horror that are hidden from the street.

I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure

Were all their windows level with the faces of the Poor?

Ah! Mammon's slaves, your knees shall knock, your hearts in terror beat,

When God demands a reason for the sorrows of the street,

The wrong things and the bad things

And the sad things that we meet

In the filthy lane and alley, and the cruel, heartless street.

I left the dreadful corner where the steps are never still,

And sought another window overlooking gorge and hill;

But when the night came dreary with the driving rain and sleet,

They haunted me -- the shadows of those faces in the street,

Flitting by, flitting by,

Flitting by with noiseless feet,

And with cheeks but little paler than the real ones in the street.

Once I cried: `Oh, God Almighty! if Thy might doth still endure,

Now show me in a vision for the wrongs of Earth a cure.'

And, lo! with shops all shuttered I beheld a city's street,

And in the warning distance heard the tramp of many feet,

Coming near, coming near,

To a drum's dull distant beat,

And soon I saw the army that was marching down the street.

Then, like a swollen river that has broken bank and wall,

The human flood came pouring with the red flags over all,

And kindled eyes all blazing bright with revolution's heat,

And flashing swords reflecting rigid faces in the street.

Pouring on, pouring on,

To a drum's loud threatening beat,

And the war-hymns and the cheering of the people in the street.

And so it must be while the world goes rolling round its course,

The warning pen shall write in vain, the warning voice grow hoarse,

But not until a city feels Red Revolution's feet

Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street --

The dreadful everlasting strife

For scarcely clothes and meat

In that pent track of living death -- the city's cruel street.