ELDER ABUSE OF GAY, LESBIAN, TRANSGENDER, HIV MEMBERS OF OUR AGEING POPULATION

This letter has been sent to two seniors newspapers: Victorian Senior and Fifty~Plus. We hope that one or both will publish it as it is an issue that will not go away!

ELDER ABUSE

7 July 2012

Elder abuse takes many forms and the one to consider at the moment is the abuse metered out to the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and HIV (GLTH) members of the community.

Consider that for many years of their lives GLTH people were considered pariahs by society, were treated with contempt, derision, homophobia, discrimination, bigotry, hatred and exclusion.

On 1 July 2009 the federal government became one of the biggest perpetrators of GLTH elder abuse. On that day, after GLTH people aged over 60, 70, 80 and more were suddenly outed and made into married couples (if living in partnerships), called de factos, and those who were single pensioners suddenly became “married pensioners” and each in a partnership received “married” rates thus losing some few hundred dollars each per fortnight of Centrelink payment.

There were campaigns around the country for some months before the legislation came into effect asking the government to “grandfather” the legislation, because many GLTH retired elders had had to make provision as best they were able, to plan for old age without the benefits of relationship recognition because of ongoing homophobia and discrimination.

The campaigns being waged requested the government to consider doing away with the “couple” pension rates and providing single pensions for all pensioners receiving benefits from Centrelink. The campaigns were not supported by any of the Seniors organizations such as Council on the Ageing (COTA), Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association (CPSA), National Seniors Australia.

Amongst the points raised in the discussion were those that pointed out that “married” pensioner rates had been introduced when pensions were introduced because in those early days, many women had not worked in paid employment and governments still considered women to be “looked after” by their husbands who had direct control of the household income.

Those days vanished some several decades ago as women achieved changes in employment situations and became independent from having to rely on men for their handouts.

The government ignored the proposals because it was obviously going to save them millions of dollars for GLTH couples to be treated as married couples without providing the other securities which marriage would provide, legally and in other social ways.

So elder abuse of the GLTH communities writ large by a homophobic government and other ageing institutions came into force on 1 July 2009 and not a word of protest about this ongoing abuse.

How many of these organizations will take up the call to have this abuse stopped now?

Don’t hold your breath!

Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne; InterSection

"UNDER OUR SKIN" - AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY DONALD MCRAE

Donald McRae's autobiography "UNDER OUR SKIN" is subtitled "A White Family's Journey through South Africa's Darkest Years."

As a South African who left in 1978 during some of the darker years which became progressively darker in the decade and a half which followed my departure, I read McRae's story with increasing absorption and horror as his story unfolded.

Of course one of the more horrific parts of his story was the saga of the two white doctors, Neil Aggett and Liz Floyd. Apparently Neil Aggett was the only white person to die in police custody during the whole criminal activity of the apartheid years.

Much of McRae's story paralleled my life in South Africa, and I was acquainted with the work of Ian McRae, Donald's father, as I had two periods of working with the Electricity Supply Commission (ESCOM) of South Africa, from 1952 to 1954 and again from 1974 to 1978, during which time Ian McRae went from strength to strength at ESCOM.

It is a flaw in Donald's story that he persists in referring to the organisation where his father worked as ESKOM, because after the organisation was changed from the Victoria Falls Power Company to the Electricity Supply Commission some time between the 1930s and 1950s, the Afrikaans version of the Commission's name was EVKOM, a translation of the English version, and it was only in the late 1980s that ESCOM became ESKOM.

Proof-reading and editing are also a problem in the book because a very serious mistake was letting Sidney Kentridge's name be printed once as Stanley Kentridge, and another was calling the Great Hall at the University of the Witwatersrand the Grand Hall.

Maybe these are small quibbles in a book which tells such a graphic story of life in apartheid South Africa with its abominable army and police and criminal history such as the murders of Steve Biko and so many countless thousands of others before Nelson Mandela's release from his 27 years of incarceration, and even for the 4 following years before the election of 1994 when he became South Africa's first black president with a new constitution introduced for the governments of South Africa to be governing for all its people.

To me the book would have been greatly enhanced if it had had an index, because there are so many issues which it would have been useful to have looked at more often without having to search through the book to find where the particular reference was, but again, maybe these are small issues in relation to the story of apartheid South Africa through the eyes of one family member and relating to the rest of his family, his friends and those around him, both black and white in the context of apartheid South Africa.

Strangely enough, the more I read of the brutality of the police and the army, the more I thought of apartheid South Africa and its offspring apartheid Israel.

However, Donald McRae has produced a biography which is absorbing as well as horrifying as events unfold, and he holds the reader's interest until the very last pages.

We all have stories to tell about our lives in apartheid South Africa, but not many of us would be able to tell them as well as McRae has in his book. Hopefully he has more tales of his life in South Africa to relate to a wider audience.

FAIRFAX MANAGEMENT AND JOURNALISTS HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME!

Mark Scott moved from Fairfax to the ABC, and the ABC has followed a downward path on a similar trajectory to that of Fairfax in the ensuing years.

Fairfax management agenda has been on a particularly right-wing reactionary path since the Howard years, following a political direction set since at least 1996 onwards.

Instead of responding to what many of the Fairfax readers have hoped for over the years, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalists have allowed themselves to forget about in-depth investigative journalism, and being seduced into the reactionary maelstrom of gutter journalism at its worst.

Where stories cried out for "deep and meaningful" investigation into allegations and counter-allegations of various breaking-news issues, most journalists have gone for the superficial, meaningless slurs and innuendos, the latest of which is the story about Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson, James Ashby and Kathy Jackson.

Why is it that independent journalist investigators, people who are not working for Fairfax, News Limited, the ABC and other like-minded media outlets, managed to get the factual information so lacking in those organisations' reporting of the important parts of the story?

Is it because they illustrated graphically their determination to bring down the Federal government and cast aspersions on all those who support it in the current parliament to the extent that most Fairfax journalists have worn their politics on their sleeves, and in the process shown what their mettles are like as journalists and reporters.

Some of the most senior reporters at the Fairfax newspapers have become so reactionary in their reporting of stories from the current federal parliament that they could easily be mistaken for members of the opposition parties without too many doubts about their interests and aspirations.

The only difference Rinehart would make to the editorial direction of Fairfax is to put the stories in her own image.

As things stand at the moment, they are not far off!

TEACHER PLAN TO GET RID OF BAD BAILLIEU MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

The main headline in today's Age newspaper reads:

"Baillieu plan to get rid of bad teachers."

It is difficult to work out which century the Baillieu government functions in, because the ideas it is propagating belong in the 19th and 20th centuries. Going backwards has been the hallmark of the Baillieu government since it was elected about 18 months ago.

Core and non-core promises seem to have been made during the election campaign during which a main core promise seems to have been to make Victoria's teachers the best-paid teachers in the country. Now they are in danger of being the worst-paid and on top of it all to be oppressed by some of the most punitive legislation in the state.

How do you get rid of bad teachers? What are bad teachers? Is the government also going to legislate to get rid of bad teachers from the private school sector as well? - not forgetting the religious exemptions from tax enjoyed by so many religious organisations!

Teachers perform much as workers throughout the employment sectors perform - some are good, some are fairly good, some are middle-ground, some are fairly ordinary and some are not really happy in their jobs. Think of any organisation which employs a fair number of people - including state parliaments and the people they employ to do all their hard work for them, and let's see some performance indicators of the Baillieu government's parliamentarians.

Where to start?

Well, there is the transport debacle with Myki - Myki is a disaster and continues to be so, and we fear for the future without the Metcard system which wasn't broke but the previous government decided to fix!!

Then we have the desalination plant and all the industrial and other issues involved such as the espionage allowed by the government for the builders of the plant to spy, not only on their employees, but also on the protesters who have railed against the project from the beginning.

Also we have the nurses' pay dispute which only got resolved because one of Baillieu's relatives made an obscene gesture to the nurses and it was caught by the media.

Then there is the special arrangement with the police but no mention of good police and bad police in a pay arrangement!!

And much, much, more!!

To be added to as these issues come to light - but let us not forget the teachers are amongst the worst-served by this government to date, and the government ought to be brought to book over the whole nasty business!

HAWAII VIDEO - TRYING TO STOP MONSANTO POISONING THE ISLAND

BRADLEY MANNING - A FEW UPDATES

The above interview is of Kevin Gosztola who was reporting for Nation of Change.




This interview was on the US show called:Democracy Now and Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interview Denver Nicks on his biography of Bradley Manning, "Private".

MIRIAM MARGOLYES TELLS WHY BDS IS NECESSARY

This item comes from Antony Loewenstein's blog on 28 May 2012:

ACTRESS MIRIAM MARGOLYES SAYS WHY BOYCOTTING ISRAELI THEATRE GROUP ESSENTIAL

More on this story here

The following response by "Boycott Israel" was below the article in the Guardian newspaper in the above link in response to a previous response and dated 4 April 2012:

In 2010, in front of the Israeli parliament/Knesset, Habima co-manager Odelia Friedman said: “As a national theater company, Habima will perform for all residents of Israel. Residents of [illegal West Bank settlement] Ariel are residents of Israel and Habima will stage shows for them" In response to the Guardian letter by Rylance, etc, Habima's artistic director Ilan Ronen has reiterated in Haaretz this week that illegal settlements are part of Israel.