It is 2025...
...and an Australian Labor staffer in Josh Wilson's office is getting defensive that they personally aren't in charge of Australia's punitive welfare system.
It is 2025...
...and an Australian Labor staffer in Josh Wilson's office is getting defensive that they personally aren't in charge of Australia's punitive welfare system, and suggests places I can go to seek, but not necessarily receive, help from for relief. Instead of just helping me.
See, I'm not even going to post the emails, I CC'ed Senator Jordan Steele-John's office a few times throughout this obscene display of "not my problem"-itis Labor offices around the country are coming to, while the Australian government is challenged on the very legality of its Targeted Compliance Framework underpinning too many welfare payments, including younger people accessing the Disability Support Pension.
Between 2018-19 and 2022-23 there were 2687 instances in which a jobseeker had “accepted” a mutual obligation failure raised by an employment service provider despite having a reasonable excuse or not being subject to obligations at the time. These figures are for people already in the “penalty zone” of the compliance framework. The actual numbers across the system are much higher.
Exclusive: Government warned over ‘legal basis’ of welfare system, August 16, 2025
I don't need to tell you how fucked it is that people who are vulnerable for the simple fact they are in poverty, on top of any other marginalisations they struggle through, are being penalised despite not even having to cop to it, purely because the system is maliciously designed to do actual fucking harm to welfare recipients.
I for one don't accept that kind of treatment, and yet, you fight back, that's just another opening for them to beat you with a pillowcase of door knobs that is "non-compliance", a term I was strongly discouraged from using as a student nurse, precisely because it takes away agency and bodily autonomy - something which the Australian government is more than happy to do, whether it's red or blue branded.
If it was just employment, that's one thing, but when you've had Emma Dawson, Nareen Young, Dee Madigan, and Tim Lyons, all conveniently major supporters of Australian Labor, all tied to Per Capita Australia, lying about my own words, and having that defamation published in right wing rags. Saying I support the violent assault of a public servant carrying out their Prime Minister's will in threatening a man, tied to a welfare payment by choice of target, in all likelihood following some kind of payment suspension or threat. These people support that retaliatory violence more than I do! I want to end the abusive system that produces these results! They don't!
And they want me to look for a job while their own defamatory lies hang above my head.
The system is violence, and I genuinely wonder how much more I can take, clear now there's no easy ways through or out. And I still have to watch my P's and Q's, because I don't actually want to be rumbled by another less-than-sympathetic pig who's more attuned to sexually assaulting women suffering psychosis than providing mental health care.
