I’m a poet. I’m also a former newspaper journalist. I just read the News Corp piece claiming that a poem by @omarsakrpoet accuses Bluey of genocide. I then read the poem.

Let me list 10 problems with this beat up.

https://twitter.com/omarsakrpoet/status/1742669612930695569

1. It places genocide in quotation marks (“genocide”) which usually means that Sakr uses that word. He doesn’t.
2. Therefore the article is based on a fabrication.

I grew up in a newsroom. I believe you can’t have a healthy democracy without a strong, independent media. I know how hard it is to be a good reporter. I know there are plenty of good journos. So why do I feel betrayed by the profession I love? 1. For 25 years it’s failed to come to terms with the threat of the internet.
2. It’s allowed bean counters to run the industry, leading to clickbait churnalism and the clearing out of newsrooms.
3. It’s given too much power to too few publishers and broadcasters.

Bolt is peddling BS. Read Blainey and Pascoe. Both detail the ingenuity of Aboriginal Australians.

Blainey in 'A History of Victoria': 'The way of life varied ... depending on the terrain, the climate, the foods available, the traditions ... and their own ingenuity.'

https://twitter.com/BushfireFacts/status/1296016354059919360

Blainey: 'The northern plains possessed no suitable stone from which axes or spearpoints could be made, and so the stone arrived as part of a long chain of barter. The finest quarry of such stone in Victoria in the past 5000 years was Mount William.'

I see Ita Buttrose has sparked another intergenerational shit fight where the old farts annoyed everyone, the young farts blamed everyone and the middle-aged farts bleated that they've been forgotten by everyone.

But the Boomer v Millennial v Gen X blather misses the point. The real issue is economic.

There is a large and growing underclass of working (and increasingly not-working) poor in Australia who largely missed out on the boom times.

I interviewed Sue Salthouse on March 30, 2020. It was a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present and future of the disability rights movement in Australia. Sue was an insightful, generous, deeply impressive person. We've lost a giant. Vale. #disability Sue Salthouse: 'People gravitate to the people who are most like them and unfortunately people who look different, sound different, act different doesn't fit into that spectrum, so, that there is inherent discrimination around us for people with disabilities.'

Regarding the @VerityLa blow up over Stuart Cooke’s ‘About Lin’: I’m a poet. I’ve also worked in politics as a press secretary. That’s the communications equivalent of crisis response. With that in mind I have some advice for the editors and author. First of all: it’s not about you. It never is. You have to listen to and try to understand why people are upset. That should be pretty easy in this case.

You may have heard about the killing of #WillowDunn.

If you haven't, I'm sorry to share the news.

Willow was four. She lived in Brisbane with her father.

Willow's mother died when she was born. And now Willow is dead, too.

Her father has been charged with her murder. I'm not going to name the father. This post is not about him.

I'm not going to go into the details of the crime, either. This post is not about the horror of it all.

This post is about Willow.

You see, Willow had Down syndrome -- and so does my eldest daughter.

Want to know why Australia’s inaction on climate change is bad for everyone, especially the working families looking for a way out of carbon-intensive sectors like coal?

Think of the national economy like a car.

Australia’s vehicle is a tough diesel, circa 1948.
#auspol We love our national set of wheels.

It’s taken us from an industrial backwater (Australia’s economy was a horse-and-buggy up until WW2) to one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

But times have changed.

What a sickening end to the year and decade. A decade that was not wasted. No. Canberra knew what needed to be done. They knew about the dangers of climate change ... and the time bomb of our ageing population ... and that working families here were going backwards. They knew. They knew that the future of the great Australian project oh shared, sustainable prosperity demanded a decade of reform and action. But they squibbed. Aside from the NDIS (which was driven by the disability movement, not Canberra), our nation’s leaders indulged themselves.

Today is the birthday of my father, Barry Deane (1941-2017). Barry worked all his life, until he had a quintuple bypass in his 70s. He was a clerk of courts, door-to-door salesman, real estate agent, milk bar owners, newsagent, fruit picker, taxi driver and Bunnings worker. Dad was a fifth-generation Australian. His family came out from Tipperary during the Great Famine. He loved this country. Said he didn't need to travel because Australia was the best place in the world (although I suspected it was because he was always working). But here's the th

A few more things about #StKevins. In 2015, the school responded to the Royal Commission by putting out a statement that effectively washed its hands of sex abuse against old boys prior to 2008, directing victims to the Christian Brothers for "support, care & advice". That statement was outrageous. Those old boys were sexually abused by Christian Brothers, but those Brothers were employed by St Kevin's. It made me wonder whether this was partly an attempt to sandbag the school against legal action.

Been reading Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat -- a contemporary account on France's collapse against the Nazis in 1940. As I go through the book, parallels between then and now keep occurring. This Bloch quote reads like a warning:

"I, with most of the men of my generation, had built enormous hopes...on the trade-union movement. But we made no allowance for the narrowness of outlook which, little by little, choked the enthusiasm of the early, epic struggles." 1 of 2

I have, over a glass of red, come up with an alternative list of public holidays. #AustraliaDay 1 of 11 26 January: Rum Rebellion Day. Yep, It happened on this day and Captain Cook wasn’t there. 2 of 11.