I would never in a million years deliberately align myself  with a brand like Nestle. The evidence of poor corporate practice is far too overwhelming for me to ignore and the thought of supporting a brand like Nestle is anathema to me. I lump Nestle in with my other least favourite brand Monsanto and I try to avoid any purchase of their products. It can be quite tricky trying to work out exactly where their corporate tentacles are tangled. So you might find this post  an interesting starting point.

I am an adult living in a first world country and as such I have the advantage of being able to pick and choose my lifestyle choices.

I am standing on my soapbox today, NOT to make anyone feel bad, but to ask questions that bother me.

I am baffled by the silence from a large number of bloggers that attended the bloggers brunch yesterday. I  know that there were bloggers at this brunch who I respect and I am interested in their thoughts. Why the silence on twitter yesterday? Did you miss the conversation about Nestle on twitter? Are you still working out how you feel? Or did you respond and I missed it?

The bloggers brunch is now a familiar event in blogland. Bloggers get invited to a brunch. An air of exclusivity is maintained which make the invites to these events highly sought after. Brands representatives  turn up and throw buckets of freebies at the lucky bloggers and the blogger in turn goes home and tells their  friends and readers how wonderful said brands are.

Everyone is happy happy joy joy.

Except me.

Watching from the wings and tweeting my displeasure about the fact that Nestle was one of the brands at the most recent bloggers brunch held in Sydney yesterday, my thoughts were Nestle? Really? Then I thought that maybe people didn’t know about Nestle’s atrocious corporate record, so as the #bloggers_brunch tweetstream started to flow I tweeted this tweet using the #bloggers_brunch  hashtag.

Just to make things easy for the bloggers attending the brunch I tweeted a link to the Nestle Wikipedia page. The controversy and criticism section makes an interesting starting point.

By this time other people had tweeted their displeasure at Nestle being involved.

I was at work at the time so I wasn’t following the twitter stream too closely, but I was very surprised by the absolute silence from the bloggers at the brunch.

So I started to poke at the organiser a bit by responding to her Nestle tweets with rather provocative replies of my own.

Deathly silence.

poke poke poke

I am sure there are bloggers out there who don’t want to ripple the bloggy gravy train by saying anything negative about the wonderful brands who were at the bloggers brunch. And from some of the instagram photos the brands were very, very generous. But I do wonder, is a bootload full of plastic product and free samples of  milo and tim tams really worth that much? Is it that easy to become so caught up in the hype and power of  brand events that it doesn’t matter what companies are giving away the free stuff as long as it keeps on being free?

I would like to finish up by stating very clearly that it is not my intention to start throwing stones, or to make people feel bad. I am trying to start a conversation about how we consume, not just the products but the message from our corporate masters.

The message I get from all these brand events is one of  rampant consumerism an any cost and honestly people the planet cant really take much more punishment, but that is a post for another day.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I drove past the local tip the other day and noticed that the flock of roosters foraging in the paddock below it had grown. I had just assumed that some of  the nearby farmer’s chooks had decided that there was better forage at the tip and that last season his girls had hatched out lots of roosters.

I was appalled to discover that people have been dumping the roosters there. I knew that people dumped kittens at the tip but the thought of going to all the trouble of catching a rooster and then just throwing it away shocked me.

There have been a lot of new people move here in the past ten years or so, city people looking for a treechange, mainlanders mostly, attracted to the cheap land and easy commute to the city.

I can wholly appreciate the excitement of finally having a bit of land with space for a few chickens, mmm think of all the lovely fresh eggs. And it seems to be all fine and dandy until the novelty wears off and the bloody chickens scratch your garden to pieces or a hen goes broody and hatches out a clutch of roosters. What do you do then?

Apparently you just throw the fucking roosters away. Aaargh!

It is the waste of all that good meat that does my head in, as well as the casual cruelty.

There are a number of tangents that I could spin off into here, I could pull out my soapbox and have a little rant about ethical treatment of animals and our responsibilities to our livestock.

I could blather on about the environmental damage that wild chickens do to the fragile landscape.

Or I could lead into a discussion about throw away roosters being the least of our problems in this 21st century, when we already have a well established tradition of throwing away the  most vulnerable of all in this society of ours. Our elderly and our disabled, our mentally ill and our useless are all thrown away.

Not to the tip, like the roosters but our broken ones are marginalised and pushed to the very edges of society. Our elderly are packed off to sub standard and under funded nursing homes. Our indigenous are demonised and our leaders shame themselves and us as a nation, by loudly trying to “Stop the Boats”, when that tiny percentage of desperate people is the least of our problems.

Now I have run out of steam and the early morning daylight is filling the sky with interesting colours. I will gather up the camera and see if the play of light through the gum trees chases away these dark thoughts of mine.

When former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd apologised to the Aboriginal people of Australia, I cried. I was, in that moment so very proud to be Australian and I felt that there was hope for the future of this country.

During the recent election campaign, Tony Abbots sloganism and simplistic chanting of “Stop the Boats” and “No Big New Taxes” brought me back to earth with a thud.

Scratch the surface of white Australia and you will find  racism in all walks of life. From the milkman who mutters,”bloody Abos,” to the white school boy at Cronulla with the crude slogan on his t-shirt, We grew here, You flew here to a Prime Ministerial wannabe with his appalling catch cry of, “Stop the Boats.”

And it makes me tired.

Here in Tasmania, the Aboriginal people are a marginalised people trying to save their shattered culture. The enduring myth in Tasmanian society is that there aren’t any Tasmanian Aboriginals left at all, that the line stopped when Truganini died. The differences in our society are highlighted very clearly by the treatment of two groups of protesters at the hands of the Police here in Tasmania.

Aboriginal protester Sara Maynard was arrested for trespass while  protesting at the Brighton bypass construction site last year,

Ms Maynard said it took her a long time to recover from the trauma of being strip-searched before facing the Hobart Magistrates Court.

“I was told that if I refused they would hold me down and take my clothes off for me,” Ms Maynard said yesterday.

“When you’ve got five men standing around and I’m the only female there … it was quite terrifying.”

She refused to be strip-searched in a cell with cameras, so was forced to undergo the procedure in a toilet by a female officer.

Gardening guru Peter Cundall was also arrested last year for protesting on the steps of Parliament house in Hobart. Mr Cundall  is quoted as saying he was appalled by the treatment meted out to Ms Maynard. Mr Cundall also said that he and his fellow protesters were treated like royalty, with the police making it very clear that they didn’t want to arrest the 58 anti pulp mill protesters and treating them with the utmost courtesy.

Sigh, and there you have it in a nutshell.

Until we the ordinary people of Australia stand up and say this is wrong, this sort of appalling behaviour will continue on through the generations.

My friend has started a blog and I would highly recommend that you read this post, A day in the life of an Aborigine.

This is a press release by Mick Dodson, former Australian of the year, this comes courtesy of the Tasmanian Times Website.

It beggars belief that this is even legal in Australia. Aboriginal land in one of our most fragile ecosystems has just been earmarked for compulsory acquisition by the Western Australian Government.

The reason? Energy giants including BP, Woodside, Chevron and Shell want to build a gas pipeline, and they don’t want to wait for Indigenous consultation. Some traditional owners are in favour of the pipeline, others disagree. But one thing is clear: compulsory acquisition means no genuine consultation, and far less compensation if the project goes ahead.

We need to respond quickly and make sure Premier Barnett’s announcement is met with national outrage. Locals are delivering a petition to the Premier’s office next week. Can you back them up by adding your name today, and asking your friends to do the same? Go to link http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/nocompulsoryacquisition

The nation is talking about hung parliament negotiations in the marble halls of Parliament House. But far away, in the red dirt of James Price Point, 400km from Broome on the Dampier Peninsula, there is another power struggle going on; pitting the profits of BP, Shell, Woodside and Chevron against the rights of Indigenous Australians. You can help shift the balance.

There are numerous registered Aboriginal heritage sites in the vicinity of James Price Point (Walmadan). Locals tell of Indigenous burial sites and ancient rock art; in some areas you can actually see the footprints of prehistoric birds, long extinct. But the Western Australian Premier wants to bypass Aboriginal elders in what’s been called “colonialism all over again” by Wayne Bergmann, Kimberly Land Council CEO. And what’s more, the project hasn’t even received environmental approvals required by State or Federal law.

This is about more than one site, or one gas pipeline. Compulsory acquisition in WA would put the profits of multinationals above the rights of traditional owners—and threatens decades of progress on land rights. Can you stand with traditional owners behind a campaign to stop compulsory acquisition? Colin Barnett’s decision could set back the Indigenous Rights movement by 30 years or more. Together we have the opportunity to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Though the words stunned, amazed, horrified and saddened would have worked equally as well.

What am I babbling on about?

I was watching the telly the other night when up popped Jamie Oliver and I found myself being sucked in to the vortex that was, Jamie Oliver’s food revolution. I was totally horrified to see that a whole classroom full of six or seven year old American children couldn’t identify a potato, a tomato, a cauliflower or any other fresh vegetable you cared to mention.

I was sitting there with my mouth wide open, totally gobsmacked.

Now I knew that some children thought that eggs came from the carton and milk came from the supermarket but to be faced with this scale of food ignorance just blew my mind. It is easy as an Australian to dismiss this as just an American thing but as we all know, where America goes the rest of the world follows.

What are we doing to our children?