Obsessed

ABC's Drum (Episode 115) introduced the author of a book Wellmania. Bridget Delaney is a senior writer at The Guardian, and had spoken about her book at the Sydney Writers Festival earlier this year. Time Out, written about that, had said “Yoga has been commandeered by capitalism. Wellness is all very... well, but what it often boils down to is big business lining its pockets with the spoils of people's narcissism”, and printed what Delaney has said. “You can’t let yoga be your god,” she had said. “Self care is really important but we need to step beyond it and remember it’s feeding a commercial beast.”

So many words I wrote down from that program: yoga, diet, “Mediterranean” diet, no processed food. It was very interesting to hear how each person on the Drum looked at “wellness”:

• be clean, lean and serene
• obsessed with people who tell us what to do
• get off the yoga mat and get into social change
• exorcise demons which are toxins
• religions which celebrate aren't communal
• celebrate – for example, Australia Day – then detox
• feast/famine

Two decades ago I was overweight: I lost 40kgs at the start of this new century. After moving to Australia in 2005 I was down around 72kg. I'm 5'11”, so I felt pretty thin. Before I lost all that weight I'd been up and down and up and down, feeling pretty depressed that my weight was hanging around me. Yes, I know that's a disparate saying, but that's how I've felt about it. I shed my overweight – maybe I cut the rope so it could no longer hang around.

I kept it off for 15 years, but since my brain aneurysm and stroke it seems to have crept back on. Not all of it, but too much for me.

At the beginning of this century I had joined the Les Mills gym where I was living in New Zealand. I worked on the treadmill and the weights almost every day, and I fell in love with Body Combat, a musical session which included punching, side kicking, front kicking, jumping, elbow punches and anything from karate, boxing, taekwondo, tai chi and muay thai which anyone doing combat might recognise. I loved it! I stuck with Body Combat when I moved over here, at first in a gym in Ipswich and on to a gym at Sunnybank Hills when I moved to Camira. The Sunnybank Hills gym soon gave up Body Combat and started in a different sort of body combat which they called Group Combat, I think. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the Body Combat I had fell in love with. Later I moved to Parkinson, and went to the AJs gym where they had Body Combat too. AJs also had two decent sized swimming pools, one indoor and one outdoor, and I got back into swimming – I was swimming up to 80 lengths – 2km - three days a week with a plan to go to an ocean swim in Vanuatu. (I never got there, long story – read my other blog Aneurysm Aphorisms).

My last home before hospital was Inala, and I joined the PCYC gym with much of the equipment I was used to. After hospital, when I moved up to Redliffe area, I joined Dolphins gym and started a recovery class with a heart recovery team. I started swimming again. Very recently I've moved to Eagleby, and there are no indoor pools around here, no gyms with Body Combat, and a PCYC which I fell out with in Beenleigh.

So what am I doing that Wellmania says I shouldn't be doing in order to lose weight instead of continuing to put it back on? Or can I just be happy with how I now am?

“Is it possible to integrate good habits into your daily life? What does our obsession with wellness say about us? And why do you smell so bad when you haven’t eaten in seven days?”

This was what Black Inc Books said about what Delaney has written. I'm thinking about buying this book, because what they said about it would (I hope) make me feel very good about where I am – I don't really feel too good just right now!

Who wrote this?

How many newspapers – online newspapers – are the same? How many print the same as the other online newspapers print? Are they owned by the same company? Why? 

I did a little bit of research the last couple of days and found out something fairly interesting. If you already know this, don't hold it against me – I didn't know about it because I didn't really want to if Murdoch's name popped up. I've had a long beef against him and his “fake news” papers.

The first onliner I looked at was ABC. Their journalist Michelle Brown had started her article with the title “WestConnex contractors seeking $1b in compensation, according to documents leaked to Labor” and her first paragraph started with “Contractors on Sydney's WestConnex have handed the Berejiklian Government a $1 billion compensation bill, the New South Wales Opposition has said.” She'd written it about 2 hours ago – around 1.20pm.

The second was News.com.au, which published an article by the Australian Associated Press writer Dominica Sanda at 1.38pm, titled “ WestConnex $1b claims budgeted for: govt”, which started with the paragraph “Sydney's WestConnex motorway will be completed on time and within budget despite a $1 billion compensation bill from companies tasked with building the multi-billion dollar project, the NSW government says.”

The third was The Australian which printed exactly as News.com.au had printed; theirs was printed at 2.08pm. 

The fourth was Daily Telegraph – exactly the same as the last two. They said theirs was printed about “an hour ago”. My time was 3.20pm so they must have printed their copy around 2.20pm. 

The next story I looked at was ABC's article titled “Flammable cladding: Baillieu, Thwaites to head taskforce to 'accelerate' investigation of Victorian buildings”, which started with “The Victorian Government has appointed a taskforce to fast-track the investigation into flammable cladding on the state's buildings in the wake of the deadly London tower fire.” No writer quoted.

The second, News.com.au, printed at 11.57am the article written by an apparent Australian Associated Press writer Christopher Talbot, titled “Vic cladding task force examines fire risk” and started by saying “Former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu will spearhead a new cladding task force assessing fire safety in buildings across the state following the deadly Grenfell tower fire in London.”

That, of course, was picked up by The Australian (1pm) and the Daily Telegraph (also 1pm) – and by Sky at 2.24pm.

So why were News.com.au, Daily Telegraph, the Australian and the Sky printing the same stories? Who owns them?

If you know this it's very old news, but News Corp Australia over the years bought Daily Telegraph, News.com.au, the Australian and many more, and very recently also bought Sky. News Corp is Murdoch.

A story from the Sydney Morning Herald interested me. SMH was from Fairfax. This story explained a lot: until 2015 Gina Rinehart owned more than 14.99% of the shares for Fairfax, which she had to sell. According to Wikipaedia, “Rinehart was denied a place on the board because she would not agree to Fairfax's charter of independence, and sold her stake in 2015.” That was reported in SMH (Sarah Thompson, Anthony Macdonald and Jake Mitchell), Reuters (Byron Kaye), Mumbrella (Nic Christensen), Business Insider (Sarah Kimmorley), Crikey (Paddy Manning and Myriam Robin), ABC (Pat McGrath), the Guardian (Sean Farrell) and many more.

AAP reported this through News.com.au with no name of the original writer.

Now, as you probably know AAP (Australian Associated Press) was a Murdoch agency which had been started by Rupert Murdoch's father in 1935. It's the back-up of Murdoch newspapers, printed or online.

Back in 2013 The Conversation wrote an article about a query made about something that Kevin Rudd had said before he lost his PMship. Rudd had said that Murdoch “owns 70%” of the newspapers. The Conversation found that incorrect, but that Murdoch's papers counted to nearly 60% of the total sold newspapers. They also said:

the overall number of newspaper sales is declining... The major reason for this decline is the migration of news consumption to the internet, where news.com.au and other News Corp sites face stronger competition from ninemsn, Yahoo!7, Fairfax Media, the ABC, and other sites such as The Conversation, Crikey, On Line Opinion and Guardian Australia. The extent to which some of these sites either gather original material, or have the influence of the News mastheads, is certainly debatable, but the online news environment is far more diverse than that for print newspapers.

The Conversation is a non-profit trust which started in 2010 and provides good information about them. Read this.

Fast-forward to 2016 and say that Murdoch companies own 70%, according to Gizmodo. Gizmodo is owned by Fairfax. 

Gizmodo writers – or readers - it seems are as much against Murdoch as I am. This year, one comment from Silverdrone for Charles Pulliam-Moore's 15 May article said that he would “want to watch it but I have a moral objection to funding anything that benefits Murdoch.” Hugh Manatee, commented on the article on 3 May by Rae Johnston, said that his ISP is downgraded, which “I feel is in accordance with the Murdoch government's wishes.” Oh dear... Murdoch government? Libby Watson's article on 18 April said that “RT, Australian news site News.com.au, and British tabloids Daily Mail and The Sun, ran stories on Monday suggesting that the recently revealed jobs site would allow employers to see users' search history.” Lee578 responded with a very short comment: “Rupert Murdoch as ever the first with the fake news.” Straight out of the anti-Murdoch online papers' mouths.

I've been reading online newspapers that I feel comfortable with, not newspapers owned by Murdoch. Why? So many people feel the same way I do. These articles have been back quite a while ago:

• The biggest media scandal in the modern age is exploding and the world's most powerful family is under siege, yet some key players in Australia still don't understand that the media power game has changed forever. ABC, Stephen Mayne, 28 Jul 2011
• News Ltd's capacity to influence the opinions of the vast majority of less engaged citizens - whose political understanding is shaped directly by the popular newspapers and indirectly through the commercial radio and television programs that rely on newspapers for content and, more deeply, for the way they interpret the world - is unjustifiable. The Sydney Morning Herald, Robert Manne, 2 September 2011 
• Make no mistake: Murdoch’s press is waging class war on behalf of the extremely rich, and it’s being done in the name of a phoney popularism. It takes quite some nerve to push a distortion of this magnitude down the throats of the people on whose behalf you’re supposedly speaking. More to the point, it takes power and money. Global Comment, Chally Kacelnik, 6 September 2011 
• Free reign to control every last newspaper, TV and radio station in Australia - Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy could become a frightening reality unless we stand in his way right now. Independent Australia, 19 January 2012 
• Murdoch(s)... newspapers had spent the past three years waging a relentless campaign against the government of Julia Gillard and all its works. The Monthly, Mungo Maccallum, September 2013 
• Not only do newspapers have a shrinking readership, they also have an ageing readership. Older people, already disproportionately Coalition voters, are more settled in their political preferences and outlooks. The key to a Labor victory will be how the younger age groups, perhaps especially those under forty, will vote, and these groups are not reading Murdoch’s newspapers. Inside Story, Rodeny Tiffen, 23 June 2015 
• Ever since Rupert Murdoch decided to enter the television game in the early 1980s, his newspapers have waged continuous war on public service broadcasters... The Conversation, Julian Petley, 26 August 2015
• The competition watchdog has raised concerns about Rupert Murdoch's News Corp gaining a monopoly on print newspapers in Queensland if allowed to buy its rival's mastheads. Brisbane Times, Lucy Battersby, 6 October 2016

and continue this year:

• As this new year starts – one in which Parliament will debate changes to Australia's media ownership laws – News Corp and the Murdoch family have set about expanding their level of control over media in this country. The Sydney Morning Herald, Lucy Battersby, 14 January 2012 
• Opponents of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take full control of Sky have called for it to be blocked because the mogul’s family are not “fit and proper” owners following the phone-hacking scandal. The Guardian, Mark Sweeney, 8 March 2017 
• Only a tiny fraction of voters would have read The Australian newspaper’s editorial on Friday in which the paper implored West Australians to vote for Colin Barnett’s Liberals... Rupert Murdoch’s great vanity project, which for decades dominated the nation’s journalistic landscape, has lost the plot. The West Australian, Ben Harvey, 13 March 2017 
• Even though phone-hacking is now a dark part of its history, Murdoch's media empire continues to churn out partisan and sometimes highly abusive content. Independent UK, Neena Gill, 29 June 2017

There are comments from a blogger:

• These results are very disturbing because effectively the biggest Australian newspapers are lying to their audiences although journalism is supposed to be about reporting as truthfully and accurately as we can. News Corp is responsible for most of the articles that don't accept the consensus. Desmog, Graham Readfearn, 1 November 2013

and a reader:

• Rupert Murdoch's media empire is a negative force in the Western world, poisoning the politics of the US and the UK especially. tjefferson Jun 28th 2012, 21:21

So much of what is written and published online is against Murdoch's politically penetrating, immoral, vicious and malicious ownership of media empire.

When I started this blog I titled it Who wrote this? That's my problem – I don't trust, don't enjoy and would never buy any newspaper in the Murdoch harem if I knew that whatever I was reading was Murdoch's. There are many others which I can read, can enjoy and can trust. I hope that every reader of this blog will read all this, read every link, find truthful information against Murdoch, and feel that same way.

Have a wonderful life away from such an evil media empire!

Millionaires, billionaires, who else?

How many millionaires in Australia? You don't know? Okay, I'll make it easier. How many billionaires in Australia?

There are 32, according to the Forbes 2017 list. 32 billionaires in Australia. Do you know what 'billionaire' means? I looked up the online dictionary for a definite definition: a person who has assets of finance at least 1,000 million dollars. That is $1,000,000,000 – one thousand million. Any idea how this sort of assets or finance competes to your own? I can't even work that out.

Gina Rinehart has $15 billion. She's 69th richest person in the globe. The richest person is Bill Gates, from Microsoft, with $86 billion. This year there are 2,043 billionaires around the world – 233 more than last year: the first time more than 2,000.

This year there are 559 billionaires in the USA (Donald Trump is one of them). There are 317 in China; 108 in Germany; 101 in India; 93 in Russia; 66 in Hong Kong; 53 in the UK; 41 in Brazil; 38 in Canada; 36 in France and South Korea; 34 in Italy and Switzerland; 32 in Japan (and Australia); 30 in Sweden and Taiwan; and many other countries which have less than 30 billionaires.

The youngest billionaires this year are from Norway - Alexandra Andresen, age 20, and Katharina Andresen, age 22, both making money from their investments. The oldest this year is David Rockefeller Snr, from USA – he's 102 and makes his money from real estate and investments.

So why do people save a billion dollars, and why do they keep that money instead of helping other people – who, like in Australia, live in poverty?

• Algeria has one billionaire who made his money from food.... yes, food! Al Jazeera wrote about Algeria in 2014 saying that 23% of that population lives under poverty! 
• Chile has 12 billionaires who made most of their money from mining, paper and banking, but according to Contact Chile there is 14.4% of poverty in this country.
• Colombia has a severe poverty of 29%, but it also has 3 billionaires who made their money from banking... and soft drinks. It has been reported by the Borgen Project that Colombia's poverty has cut quite a lot, but there has still been a lot of violence as rural land is stolen from the owners. 
• Georgia has one billionaire but Georgia has 17.1% population in poverty. 
• Guernsey has one billionaire but Guernsey had 22.3% population in poverty (2014 reported in their 2017 pdf).
• Iceland has one billionaire but Iceland had 9% in poverty. 
• Romania had one billionaire and yet it had the “highest relative poverty rate in the EU”, according to Romania Inside. 25.1% of the population.
• Slovakia has one billionaire who got his money from real estate, but Slovakia has a poverty of 13%.

Nigeria has 3 billionaires with their funds made from cement, sugar, flour, telecom and oil, and yet it is the only country I found which has increased its poverty between 1990 and 2013. Why on earth would billionaires live there if they would never give to their countrymen?? 

The Philippines is one of the worst – 14 billionaires live there, while around 26% live below poverty. That would be around 26 million people with their population at 103 million. The Philippines is rated as 13^th populated on the globe – yet it is far behind many western countries for poverty. 

So how does Australia fare? ACOSS (Australian Council of Security Services) wrote a report in 2016 titled Poverty in Australia 2016. Australia is considered against OECD countries, and ACOSS found that 13.3% of the Australia population is “living below the internationally accepted poverty line”. There are, on the DSS spreadsheet workpage titled 'Payment by Rate', 2,497,468 beneficiaries not counting aged pensioners. Forbes said there are 32 Australian billionaires. There are, undoubtedly, many, many millionaires, but Forbes didn't count them in the report I looked at. There are, this year, somewhere around $89.7 billion dollars in Australia belonging to just the billionaires. I used to think I'd be angry when I found out this sort of stuff. Now, I'm just sad.

The DSS spreadsheet is very interesting – I can use that in the future. But for now I am looking at the Australian billionaires, thinking of the Australian millionaires (I even know some of them) and thinking of where I am living now. I'm pretty sure no rich people live here.

The quote I've printed here says what I feel – not just for children, but for anyone who does need it. I hope a millionaire – or a billionaire - will listen to me.

What is "religion"?

I know that Wikipaedia information is not believed by everyone, but bear with me and read on. According to Wikipaedia “Religion is any cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, world views, texts, sanctified places, ethics, or organizations, that relate humanity to the supernatural or transcendental. Religions relate humanity to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has referred to as a cosmic 'order of existence'.”

The trouble is that there are rarely, throughout the world, countries which agree! Word Atlas said that Christianity is an Abrahamic religion, the same as Judaism, Islam, Ba'hai and others. Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and others are Indian religions. Taoism (or Daoism), Cao Dai, Shingyo, Shintoism and others are Asian. Wikipaedia has a breakdown of the denominations.

In Wikipaedia, Christianity was shown as at 2010 as the predominant religion, followed by Muslims. The third is atheism – no religion. What surprised me the most was that New Zealand, where I was born, had a 42% of atheism within their country! That % includes agnostics. I had a look through the 2013 census which was quoted on Wikipaedia as a reference, which noted 41.9%. That has increased a lot between 2006 (34.6%) and 2013 (41.9%). As mentioned earlier, 52.1% for the 2016 census were Christians – a large drop. The next census will be 2018 – I will be watching.

Gabe Bullard wrote an article for National Geographic in April last year, talking about how non-religion is growing - and quickly. Bullard said that the lack of religious affiliations has changed how people bring up their kids, how they react to death and how they are now living. And he said that “France will have a majority secular population soon. So will the Netherlands and New Zealand. The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been...” Maybe that's where it should end up.

In Australia the predominant religion is Christianity, including all the sub-dominant affiliations, but it's now losing out. The ABS stats report of the 2016 census said that 52.1% of the people in Australia were Christians, but a further 30.1% said they had no religion, which includes atheism, agnosticism and 'Secular Beliefs and Other Spiritual Beliefs and No Religious Affiliation'. What surprised me in this country is how many people truly believe that Islam is “taking over”, when, on the census, only 2.6% people claim Islam as their religion.

News Limited wrote in an article titled ‘No religion’ tops religion question in Census on 28 June that Australia is growing into a non-believer country. It mentioned 1966 as 88% Christian and has now dropped. Maybe that is why people like me moved here – a decent life, good jobs, good money... until you end up homeless, unemployed and in poverty. That's another story... but non-religion is the present. It should be.

ABC's religion and ethics writer, Barney Zwartz, a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity, media adviser to the Anglican Primate of Australia and a freelance writer (he said), wrote in August about the demise of religion. Zwartz converted from agnosticism many years ago when he was 24 and considered himself up to date with his religion, yet “the fact is the world of religion, for most newsdesks, is an alien world, and as budgets and space have shrunk they have focused ever more on politics and sport, court or crime stories - which are cheap and easy - lifestyle stories, and eventually clickbait.” He thinks that “anti-Catholicism” is a new “anti-Semitism”. Could he be right? I dislike the fact that he thinks he is.

At the end of his article Zwartz quoted. The first was from Sir Noel Coward - “It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” Coward was agnostic. He wrote “Do I believe in God? I can't say No and I can't say Yes, To me it's anybody's guess.”.

The second was from Joseph Heller's novel Something Happened - “Every change is for the worse.”. In an interview in Australia in 1998 Heller had said that “The only wisdom I think I've attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people's ideology and other people's arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don't like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don't like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people. It's one of the reasons I keep a distance from all religious beliefs. I think in this country and in Australia too there's a late intolerance in most religions, an intolerance, a part that could easily become persecutions.” Non-religious?

The third was from a previous USA Vice President Dan Quayle: “The future will be better tomorrow.” I haven't read anywhere in his biographies that Quayle was religious, but that wouldn't worry me. What worries me was reading his quote in a religious article. Zwartz finished his article with another comment after Quayle's quote: “Isn't that comforting? But Christians know it is true.” Zwartz gave me a shiver up my spine. I'm atheist. If the future is better tomorrow, then seriously, we need a NEW government, NEW beliefs and NEW trust of people in this country who say they are “religious”. Unfortunately, religion drags money far too far away from Australia – and everywhere else around the globe. Poverty? In a country like Australia?

Atheists know it's true.

Australia's Health

On Monday this week I'd been into the local library to do some photocopying. Normally, after that, I'd leave, but this time I had a strong feeling about looking around. My preference was non-fiction, so I looked at the signs on the shelves and found the social and law areas. I don't know just what I was looking for, but that sounded like me. 360-363.9 was Sociology to Social welfare, problems & services – yes, that would be me. I took a couple of books out of the shelf and had a look through them, and the third one really got my eye – it was titled “Australia's Health 2016”, provided by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). Maybe I would have been counted into whatever they reported.

I checked the book out and took it home to read.

This is the “15^th biennial health report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare”, presented in 2016 to (ex) Minister Sussan Ley. All material in this book is covered by the AIHW copyright under Creative Commons - Copyright © Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Please note that if you will use any of the writing from this book which I have quoted in my blog.

There are seven main chapters:

• An overview of Australia's health
• Australia's health system
• Leading causes of ill health
• Determinants of health
• Health of population groups
• Preventing and treating ill health, and
• Indicators of Australia's health

I moved to Eagleby in November last year. I didn't choose it, but I was mistreated by the retirement village where I'd been for a short time (5 months). For it's population (around 11,900) Eagleby has a lot of retirement villages, including Oxford Crest, Ruby Living Gems, Palm Lake Resort and Sapphire Living Gems and a lot of unemployed people. The unemployment stats were a lot higher than the rest of the country – 12.6% as against 4.9% federally in 2011 - and 47.1% renting against 31.4% federally in 2015. ABC reported in February this year the sort of problems renters have federally with unhealthy rentals, starting with the introduction which said “Let's just say the latest national snapshot of the state of renting a home in Australia does not paint a pretty picture”.

Eagleby is 35.8km away from Brisbane CBD (and only 45.2km from Gold Coast CBD), and it's included in Brisbane's low socioeconomic groups. I'm a DSP recipient due to my stroke with aphasia. Before that I had a job, I had a very good education, but now I can't work so I am included in the low socioeconomic group. This book explains it on page 183 (Chapter 5.1), saying that there is a “composite measure such as the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage (IRSD)” based on “low income, low educational attainment, high unemployment and jobs in relatively unskilled occupations”. Chapter 4 looked at 10 facts about social determinants to low socioeconomic people (Box4.1.1, page 130) – bullet point 6 says “A higher proportion of people with an employment restriction due to a disability lived in the lowest socioeconomic areas (26%) than in the highest socioeconomic areas (12%) in 2012 (AIHW analysis of ABS 2012 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers)”. Very unfair for people with disability.

Chapter 3 provided a diagram titled “Top five leading causes of premature death, by age, 2011-2013”. 'Premature age' is earlier than your age group might be expected to die. In Australia, it seems, the median age of dying was 82 years old in 2013. Perhaps that's more nowadays. Whatever you belong to (by your age), see if you can identify with deaths within your age group. For me, the 'cerebrovascular disease' includes stroke but doesn't include my age (45-64) – and yet that age includes suicide. Maybe they did know me!

The book looks at stroke in Chapter 3.6 (page 90). My heart had stopped during my brain aneurysm surgery, was re-started, and the stroke happened then. According to the book, 377,000 people throughout Australia had a stroke within their lives (171,000 of those were female), and 71% of those were over 75. The people who had a disability from that fell from 45% in 1998 to 39% in 2012. I have no idea how that would work out for me, but my maths are simple: 29% of 171,000 = 45,590. 39% of that = 17,780. That, to me, is 17,780 females who had a stroke throughout their lives who are now disabled. That, it seems, includes me. It also said that “[d]edicated stroke units in hospitals significantly improve the health outcomes of patients.” Many of those under the age of 75 with aphasia don't seem to improve 'significantly' enough to get back to work.

This chapter also said that “[p]eople living in the lowest socioeconomic areas also had higher rates of stroke”, but it doesn't mention that people who had a stroke have been down-graded and moved to a low socioeconomic area from a medium socioeconomic group.

Chapter 5.9 (a very short 2-page sub-chapter) looks at Health of Australians with disability, but it looks at obesity (70% disabled against 60% non-disabled), lack of exercise (46% against 31%), smoking (31% against 15%) and psychological distress (22% against only 1.2%). This part of the chapter only looks at people aged 15-64 and not older people because, they say, “NHS excludes institutional care settings and therefore underestimates disability prevalence among older people”. The 'excellent/very good' stats have gotten worse since 2007-08, even for “no disability or restrictive long-term health condition”, by 2011-12, but the 'fair/poor' have grown.

Obesity is not precluded by people with disability, but it occurs to people like us because many of us can't meet an exercise limit, we feel psychological distress as we are teased or abused by people in 'normal' positions, and we simply feel that smoking is something we can have control of. What else could we control?

NDIS is not mentioned at all throughout this book, but they have looked, so far, at the National Disability Strategy 2010-2020, and quotes one of the main outcomes as “[p]eople with disability attain the highest possible health and wellbeing outcomes throughout their lives (DSS 2012)”. Previous meetings to 'learn' about NDIS have been written about in my blog before (What will NDIS do for us?, Tuesday 27 October 2015 and NDIS still??, Saturday 15 April 2017). I've seen NDIS too much to even understand it! NDS's 'outcome' quote, above, still doesn't reflect the 'highest possible' recovery for us.

This book is very interesting and very close to 'now'. I've never seen anything like this before (even though it's supposed to have been done every two years), but I think it's confirmed a lot that I now feel about health in Australia, especially to people from low socioeconomic areas. As a person with a disability, I would never have expected to end up here, but I have lived with a disability for the last 3 years. I feel so... frustrated, sad... for the people who have lived in these sorts of areas for most of their lives, either with a disability or a low education. This government – ANY government – owes a decent life to anybody who lives here, regardless whether they are citizens, whether or not they are able to or can work.

I wonder if that will ever happen.

“Retirement” villages

Last night I watched an ABC 4Corners program, reported on ABC News, about Aveo, a retirement village company. Aveo is owned by a Malaysian man, Seng Huang Lee. His father had been jailed in Hong Kong for corporate deceit, yet Seng is very, very rich. He, it seemed, has Aveo as a “get rich quick scheme”, according to Lander, a retired diplomat who wears a bow tie. It had taken Lander many, many months to understand the extortive contract he had signed. This “company puts profit before people”, he said.

The program was about retired people who have been ground down inside their own property, which they had bought. Now, if they want to sell it and move out – or were kicked out – they were charged an “exit” fee, along with anything else that Aveo would take from them. 4 Corners interviewed a number of retired people who were being mistreated by Aveo. One man who's partner had died wanted to stay. He had been together with his partner for many years, he and his partner had bought the unit, but only his partner's name was on the contract. Aveo didn't care how he felt, they just kicked him out – and charged him an exit fee. Others were mistreated:

• One bought for $135,000 but 4.5 years later as it was sold to Aveo; they ended up with only $48k.
• Another couple sold for $159,000 but would only end up with $58k from Aveo.
• One woman, diagnosed – by Aveo – as having dementia was moved in to a hospital but charged a maintenance charge every month while she wasn't in her own unit. She is now fighting Aveo.

“Exortive” is defined by the dictionary online as “To obtain by coercion, intimidation, or psychological pressure”. Aveo is not the only retirement village which does this. The Park View Retirement Village in Bethania, where I stayed for 5 months, was just as bad. That property owner had acted similarly:

• Aveo charges $6,000 per year for “corporate fees”. I paid $100 each week ($5,200 per year) for “management fees”, which I had found out about when I got my Tenant Ledger. I had thought it was supposed to have been for the food I ate, yet even when I stopped paying for their food the “management fee” still appeared on my Tenant Ledger: they were then taking it out of the full rent I paid!
• Aveo changed some of its villages from “Retirement” to “Aged Care”, without telling anyone who already lived in them. Park View Retirement Village didn't changed their sign – it still says Park View Retirement Village – but I was told it was not a “retirement” village but a “senior” village.

In my blog on 1 January this year I wrote of the past year. For November 2016: “Wrote a blog about site manager calling me names - “Nutcase” 1 November. Dom (friend) committed suicide – self-invoked hunger while he waited to die from asbestosis. Blogged about him in “Asbestosis” on 7 November.... Attempted suicide later this month; taken to hospital and kept overnight. Locked out of my unit by the site manager when I got back, illegal. Ongoing communication with police, Tenants Qld, Q-Star, YFS and others for help.” Later, 9 April, I wrote about how I had felt from the illegal mistreatment I'd been under at Park View Retirement Village. The blog was titled Anxiety, Stress, Depression, PTSD, Stroke, Suicide – what's the difference? That was exactly how I'd felt. Like many, many other retirement village residents, I hadn't realised that too many retirement villages are extremely bad with their behaviour and their treatment of residents. Before 4 Corners and now, I have felt very sad for other retired people who are treated like me.

I am just starting to realise (too late) that the behaviour of people in this country has downgraded in the last 5 years. Anyone without decent (any) money is pushed to the background. Many end up homeless. Older people with money are rorted by dishonest schemes.

This program will be repeated today (Tuesday) at 10am, Wednesday at 11pm on ABC and on Saturdays at 8.00pm on ABC News 24. Please watch it if you didn't yesterday.

I will just say that I am now feeling much, much better in my unit which is not part of a retirement village like I had been at the end of last year with mistreatment by two non-Australian managers of the retirement village. They weren't Seng, but they were close. That sort of bad behaviour doesn't fit in here.

We must rid ourselves of it.

School of Hard Knocks

What is School of Hard Knocks? Have you ever heard of them? Well, it seems, a lot of people had. On October 7 2016, the School of Hard Knocks was advertised as participating in a “Hope and Inspiration Tour” at QPAC. I missed it - I'd read about it about two days too late. It had been the 10^th anniversary celebration for SOHK from Melbourne, but I found out that the Brisbane SOHK choir existed – and had been around for 3 years. This choir grabbed my interest, and I contacted them through email – and was asked to join... so I did!

From October last year I've been as busy as anyone else in the choir, and I love it! We meet at Common Ground on Hope St in South Bank for practice every Friday during normal school terms. We had a lot of practice for external trips where we would perform.

My first trip with the choir was to the State Library for a performance with the SLQ “10 years - Library of the future”, which celebrated on 12 November 2016. Our next performance was on 14 November at Moreton Bay College, which was all-girl. We had two shows: first up, Absolutely Everybody choir followed by the Rhythm of Life, which was a “Music Theatre [which] include movement, acting and singing” - also from SOHK. On 9 December we performed for the Qld Mental Health Commission, and our final 2016 performance was on 16 December at the SLQ theatre The Edge for our christmas concert.

That was when I found out about Streetbeat, a percussion group which uses “buckets, bowls, cups and anything else we can find, we’ll have plenty of instruments for all attending”. I was drawn in by the cup song “When I'm Gone” from the movie Pitch Perfect. I joined that too – practice at South Bank every Wednesday morning. This year we started with a Streetbeat performance in Redcliffe on 17 March at the Encircle community place in Lamington Drive. Our team played for supporters, and we even gave them some lessons. Very recently we played a percussion drum beat on our buckets for one of my favourites, the Queen song “We Will Rock You”!

The SOHK choir's first performance this year was one I missed because the floods hit Beenleigh and took out the Beenleigh train station! That was a private concert for families and supporters at Common Ground at the end of term 1. Our next was at Stamford Plaza Hotel in CBD, a riverside stage from where we performed for the Baptist evening.

On the recent Thursday evening we went down to the Gold Coast to the  CEO night-over at the Cbus Super Stadium at Robina. We had a rugby player's room to wait in... it was damned cold outside of there! We went into the open hall area and had some sound streaming before we could go and get some soup and bread for dinner and wait in our area. We did three numbers that evening, including audience involvement with the John Farnham song “You're the voice”. 

Yesterday we had an end-of-term get together. It was a special event for all choir people and some from the Rhythm of Life and we ended up doing a flashmob at the SLQ for a lot of their clients! We were told that the words were written by Melissa Gill, our director – I've printed them here (and my apologies if I got that wrong... but I don't think I did)! There's a post from the State Library on their Facebook page along with a video of the mob – they loved it! We finished there with “You're the Voice” - yes, John Farnham's wonderful song.

This year we're practicing for the “You’re The Voice” choral event which will be held at Piazza in South Bank on 29 July 2017, with 2,500 other choir people also joining in. Have a look at the Queensland Music Festival page, read about why it's being done, and come along and watch us all on 29 July! I've also included links to our own QMF advertisement - where I speak in it! - and the QMF pdf page which was a media publication telling about the whole events between 7-30 July. Printed it out and pass it on to your family, friends, business, community!

This choir is a busy, lovely, great group to belong to, and I feel so much at home. If we advertise anything we are publicly performing, I invite you all – and your family and friends – to come and see us. If you have just a little bit of money available, visit the SOHK website and donate.

Support us – and we'll love you!!