Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are killing people. Fellow humans and citizens are dying because of the decisions they are making and the deliberate policies they are pursuing. I cannot see into the future. I don’t know what the final death toll we will let them get away with is. I don’t know exactly whose children, whose brother, whose sister or whose parents will die because of their decisions. I only know that there will be a death toll and that each of us knows someone who will die.
We are being made to sacrifice not only our standard of living but our very lives for “The Economy”. The economy though isn’t some Old Testament God that demands a sacrificial lamb – it is simply how we all relate to each other in order to make a living. Despite this Abbott and Hockey are placing our next generation on the altar – the knife held to their throat – all to appease “The Economy”. Take the $7 GP double payment – it’s not the amount necessarily that will kill people – it is the fact that the federal government is placing a barrier between patients and medical care. This will kill people – the crucial visit that gets postponed until the next pay check and then forgotten about. This is a reasonably foreseeable death and there is a word for this sort of crime – manslaughter.
Putting the cost of higher education onto the next generation will kill people too. This barrier (asking the young to be debt slaves for life) will stop some people from achieving all that they could be with their education – it will lower living standards and make people die earlier. But it is not only the lives of those who will miss out an education that will be cut short – there will be others. When we cut short someone’s potential we cut short what that potential could do to transform all our lives. Who knows what medical and scientific breakthroughs we will miss out on? We are all travelling together and when you kick someone off the bus you’ll never know how it will hit you later.
Cutting off under 30s from unemployment income for 6 months will see more deaths. Austerity policies cause suicide rates to sore. There comes a time in any population when you make some people desperate enough they will take their own lives. Imagine how desperate you’d feel if you were cut off from all sources of income? And where some are desperate enough to take their own lives, others will be desperate enough to take it out on others. Crime is like a virus – cutting off the means of survival to any one group creates the conditions for the contagion of crime to spread. That’s the thing about a “targeted strike” – there’s always collateral damage. You just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So who is it that benefits from these crimes against our fellow citizens? It is the business barons who from their fiefdoms demand more and more of the crops that we mere serfs labour to grow and harvest. Each year we get to keep less of what we work to create but in the name of our religion “The Economy” we can never give enough to our business barons. It is the barons who can sit back and let us peasants revolt against their stooges Abbott and Hockey – the high priests of the “The Economy” – knowing that we will just get some new high priests in to demand yet more sacrifice from us. We don’t need new high priests, we need to kick out the whole caste of them – we need a deep transformation in our society. It’s time for us to stand together and win back a country that places our systems in the service of “We, the people”.
The question I have for you is this – are you the sort of person who stands by while someone kills your family, friends and neighbours? Will you run and hide while the lives of those you love are in peril? Would you let Abbott and Hockey run free while the their crime spree continues? Or will you stand to defend your loved ones?
