On my soapbox

An Open Letter to Dick Adams Federal Member for Lyons

by frogpondsrock on September 6, 2011

in arseholiness,headfuck,On my soapbox,politics,real life

An alternate title to this post could well be Dick Adams staff don’t care about his constituents opinions.

Dear Mr Adams,

Yesterday I decided to ring your office in Perth, Tasmania and voice my concerns about the offshore processing of refugees.

Your own website Mr Adams clearly states that

My priority as the Member for Lyons is to listen to the community and work in the best interests of all my constituents.

As your local Federal Member of Parliament, please feel free to seek assistance from me if you have any enquiries in your particular area. My priority is dealing with those issues that are directly related with Federal Government such as Centrelink, Veterans Affairs, Health, Immigration, Superannuation to name a few. I know there are other issues that cross all government boundaries and I am happy to help with those as well.

So I felt pretty confident that I could ring your office, politely tell you that I was concerned about the offshore processing of refugees and then I could happily go about my business, secure in the knowledge that my federal member was listening to me.

What I didn’t expect Mr Adams was your female staff member to be extremely condescending and dismissive of my concerns. I did not expect to be rudely asked where I had received my information about the governments refugee policy. I certainly did not expect to hear a tone of condescension and incredulity when I told your staff member that I receive my information about current affairs via twitter.

Twitter? She scoffed, as if I had just said I received my news bytes via the fairy telegram service at the bottom of the garden.

That was the end of the conversation as far as the office lady was concerned, I could hear the derision and laughter in her voice as she dismissed me as another bleeding heart, lefty, greenie nutter.

And that stung.

Way to go Mr Adams.

I would like to remind you Mr Adams that it is the 21st century. It is also the 21st century in Tasmania.

I use twitter as my main means of information gathering about all world events.

I tweeted my displeasure at your offices condescension and dismissal of my concerns to my 1518 followers

frogpondsrock Kim

just rang Dick Adams office to say I was concerned about offshore processing of refugees. Office girl was very dismissive of my worries.

My tweet was then retweeted by two twitter friends within Tasmania with a combined following of 4053 people.

You do the maths Mr Adams, three people in Tasmania with a follow count of 5571 people between them, tweeting the one message.

That is a lot of fairies at the bottom of a lot of gardens.

Yours in despair,

Kim Ponds Rock

Southern Midlands.

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I should publish the photos of the naked St Kilda players as well!

by frogpondsrock on December 28, 2010

in arseholiness,On my soapbox,politics,social justice

As an act of solidarity with the St Kilda Schoolgirl.

I have been following the #dikileaks saga very closely and my heart goes out to the girl in the middle of this whole nasty mess. A young girl who became pregnant to a St Kilda footballer and was told to piss off when she asked for help.

A seventeen year old schoolgirl.

Who met some football players when they held a footy clinic at her school.

She was 16 when, in February, several Saints players visited her high school in Melbourne’s south-east for a community event. A month later, she was at an athletics meeting in Sydney when the Saints beat the Swans at home. She waited with a friend by the change rooms after the game to see the players.

“They didn’t even question my age from the start because they recognised me from the school clinic. When we went back to the hotel room, [they asked] how old I was and I said ‘I’ll be 17 in a few months’ and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, that’s legal,’ ” she says.

Two St Kilda players were later cleared by police and the AFL of any wrongdoing.

Are any alarm bells ringing yet?

I have watched as the St Kilda players have held press conferences and talked about invasion of privacy, shame and distress etc etc.

A word to the wise boys, if you had kept your dick in your pants none of this would be happening.

I have watched as the St Kilda Football club have vowed to pursue this child for the next fifteen years.

I have watched as a hungry media pack have pursued a minor and managed to successfully portray this young girl as a predator and malicious troublemaker and I am angered and appalled at the way this girl’s reputation has been systematically destroyed.

The only journalist as far as I can tell that has asked any serious questions about the whys and wherefores of grown men having sex with a schoolgirl has been Derryn Hinch.

The St Kilda schoolgirl is just that, a 17 year old schoolgirl and I have watched in dismay as some very powerful grown men have tried to bully her into silence.

That is why I have weighed into this debate.

I can’t stand a bully and The AFL and the St Kilda Football club are showing themselves to be bullies of the first order.

Shame on you.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

The Weeping Sore, An Article by Richard Flanagan.

by frogpondsrock on December 19, 2010

in arseholiness,Grief,guest post,On my soapbox,politics,real life

The article has been removed because of copyright issues.

Bugger.

You can still read it here on the Tasmanian Times website. or here at the The Guardian.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I hope they bite you!

by frogpondsrock on December 5, 2010

in Animal cruelty,blogging,On my soapbox

Yesterday I was standing in line waiting to buy some crayfish. I was talking to the woman in front of me and we were both watching one of the workers cook a crate of crayfish, that he then snap chilled and brought over to the counter to be bought by hungry locals. The woman and I were casually chatting about crayfish and favourite recipes, when I mentioned that I was buying live crays and that my husband was going to cook them himself. The woman looked me straight in the eye and icily said I hope they bite you!

She then proceeded to buy six good sized cooked crays and walked out the door.

It wasn’t until I arrived home and replayed the conversation in my head that the hypocrisy of the woman’s statement struck me. She was more than happy to buy cooked crayfish but was horrified by the fact that I was buying live crayfish. Her six crayfish had presumably been alive themselves only an hour previously. I wonder if when she ate them, they bit her?

Late yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from my daughter Veronica telling me that one of her ducks probably had a prolapsed cloaca. The duck was obviously distressed and was bleeding from her cloaca. In the course of our conversation we talked about the pain the duck must be in as well as the problems of the blood attracting predators overnight as well as the risk of the duck getting fly strike.

Veronica quickly killed the duck, dressed it out and then wrote about it on her blog.

We have become so divorced from the realities of where our food actually comes from in this western society of ours that sometimes I despair for our future. We are spoiled for choice and we shop in large supermarkets with the most disturbing thing being the incessant Christmas muzak. Children think that milk and eggs come from the fridge and we are never ever bothered by the thought that all those rows of plastic wrapped meat and all those bins full of frozen poultry were raised and then killed by someone somewhere.

As I am eating my Christmas dinner this year I will know exactly where the meat I am eating has come from and who has killed it for me because I will be eating roast duck at Veronica’s.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Sharing the Love #2

by frogpondsrock on November 24, 2010

in blogging,friendship,Hope,On my soapbox,politics

It is time to give a shout out to a member of the Australian blogging community.

Again I have chosen a blog that is sometimes difficult to read, next month I will direct you towards something a bit lighter.

Australia is a very racist country and anyone that says it isn’t, needs to come down from their ivory tower and have a stint in the real world.

I grew up in a rough and ready working class suburb full of immigrants. My father was casually racist and his language was the language of his peers. I was taught to be wary of wogs, wops, krauts and coons. As kids we were disdainful of those that were different, we were taught British history in school and were confident of our superiority.

Of course when I grew up I moved out of my small suburb and ventured into the wider world. I shed my racist skin and discovered that people were just people.

The media and the political spin doctors would have you believe that Australia has also shed her racist skin, that we are a tolerant country dedicated to the ideal of a fair go and mateship. That she truly will be right and that it is all apples mate. Scratch the surface of working class Australia and you will find men like my father, all too ready to believe that all Arabs are terrorists, that boat people are queue jumpers intent upon stealing their jobs and that the only good Abo is a dead Abo.

Mark “Backchos” Mullins is a human rights advocate and member of the Stolen generation and using his blog Blak and Black, Mark will tell you a story of a different Australia. He writes of an Australia that we try to pretend isn’t real and some people will find it easier to attack Mark and attempt to discredit him rather than hold a mirror to their own faces and see the racist reflected there.

The three posts that I recommend you start your reading with are

A day in the life of an Aborigine,

The subtleties of genocide

Men are respectable only as they respect