Health and Wellbeing Archives - Clover Hill Diaries

The Shit Sandwich and the Sacred Calling

Last week’s budget was described, by at least one prominent politician, as a shit sandwich. In the days since, my feed has filled up with variations on that theme. Angry posts from farmers and farming families, several of them quoting scripture, most of them warning that the government is now taxing Australians in life and in death.

There is no death tax in this budget. There is no inheritance tax. What there is, among other things, is the end of the pre-CGT exemption for assets bought on or before 19 September 1985. From 1 July 2027, those assets get a market value reset, and any gain after that date becomes taxable. For a family sitting on land a grandfather bought in 1972, that is a genuine change. The pre-2027 gain stays exempt, but the planning assumption that the asset would never attract CGT is gone.

That is worth being angry about if you are directly affected. It is not the end of civilisation, and it is not a death tax, but it is a real shift in the rules for long held family assets. The small business and farm CGT concessions remain in place. The 50% CGT discount is being replaced by cost base indexation, which is a return to how the system worked between 1985 and 1999. Trusts get a 30% minimum tax from 1 July 2028, with several categories exempt.

That is the factual picture. The emotional picture is different, and it is the emotional picture that gets shared.

The post that prompted this one quoted Proverbs 13:22, a good person leaves an inheritance to their children’s children, and built an argument that modern tax policy is in tension with biblical stewardship. It is a familiar move in rural commentary.

Farming gets framed as a sacred calling, a multi-generational legacy, the soul of the nation. The argument runs that ordinary commercial rules should not apply to it, because what farmers do is not ordinary commerce.

Here is the problem with that framing. A farm is a small business. It happens to involve land and livestock rather than dry cleaning or panel beating, but the structural features people invoke to mark it as different, capital intensity, weather risk, commodity price exposure, thin margins, succession planning, asset values shifting under policy changes, exist across the small business economy. A suburban café owner whose parents bought the shop in 1980 faces the same pre-CGT change as a grazier whose parents bought the property in 1980. Only one of them gets Proverbs quoted in their defence.

Farmers already have a substantial suite of concessions that other small businesses do not. The small business CGT concessions, the farm-specific rollover, farm management deposits, primary producer income averaging, fuel tax credits, drought assistance and the farm household allowance. By international standards Australian farmers are lightly supported. The EU and US are far more generous. But by domestic standards, against other small businesses, the deal is good.

Which brings me to the honest version of the argument, the one farm lobbies rarely make out loud because it undercuts the rugged independence branding.

The rebates exist because food has to stay cheap. Australian consumers pay one of the lowest proportions of household income on food in the developed world. That is not an accident. Production costs are subsidised at the input end. Fuel, finance, drought support, levies matched by government. The saving flows through to retail. Governments of both major parties have made the same political judgement for decades. It is cheaper and less visible to subsidise farm inputs than to let food prices float to their true cost. A $12 loaf of bread ends governments faster than a fuel rebate scheme that nobody outside agriculture understands.

There is a second piece, which is food security. Most developed countries support domestic agriculture for the same reason they support domestic steel or semiconductors. You do not want to be wholly import dependent for something essential. That is a legitimate public interest argument and it is the one that should be made.

What is striking is that this argument almost never appears in the angry posts. Instead the framing is persecution. City elites who do not understand us, governments that hate producers, taxes designed to crush the family farm. It is emotionally satisfying and politically effective, but it obscures what is actually going on. The rebates are not charity. They are not a moral reward for choosing a noble profession. They are a consumer subsidy delivered through producers, designed to keep retail food prices down and maintain sovereign production capability.

If the argument were made that way, it would be harder to dismiss. It would also be harder to wrap in scripture, which may be why it is not the version we hear.

The budget is not a shit sandwich. It is a set of policy choices, some of which deserve sharp criticism. Pretending otherwise does the people most affected by the real changes no favours at all.

Déjà Vu Is Getting Expensive.

Last night six women from six decades stood up and told stories about the older women who shaped them.

The format was thoughtful. The decades spoke to one another. The diversity on stage reflected the diversity in the room. The stories were strong. Entertaining. Moving. Generous. The audience listened.

We have become very good at this.

Across the country there are TEDx talks, Ignite nights, storytelling salons, leadership breakfasts, panels, keynotes, lightning talks, lived-experience spotlights. Five to ten minutes. A tight narrative arc. A personal story. A moment of recognition. Applause.

We have perfected the short-form epiphany.

A well-told story shifts something inside a room. It connects strangers. It honours experience. It reminds people they are part of something larger.

Last night did all of that.

YES a well-told story can move a room. The question is whether it moves anything beyond it.

That was the question that followed me out the door – where does this go?

We have become fluent in describing the problem. We gather and name what is broken. We articulate the gaps. We platform lived experience. We elevate voice.

Then everyone disperses.

Across the country there are organisations devoted to women’s leadership, mentoring, storytelling, social change. Capable people run them. They apply to the same limited funding pools. They build parallel programs. They host adjacent conversations.

What I see far less often is a serious mapping of who is already doing what. A decision to strengthen an existing framework rather than create another one alongside it. A willingness to consolidate instead of duplicate.

Do we really think we are the first to recognise this pattern? Do we imagine history disguises its repetitions so completely that each generation encounters them as new?

I spend my time recording the lives of women in their eighties and nineties. They recognise repetition quickly. They have watched enthusiasm surge and fade. They have seen institutions splinter and reassemble. They have lived through periods when cooperation was survival. They spent decades holding families and communities together.

They want to see something built that gives them confidence their lived experience is valued

The operating system is what determines whether insight moves anywhere.

Here is what that operating system looks like.

Governance — who is accountable to whom, and for what.
Coordination — who is already doing this work, and how efforts align.
Funding architecture — whether we are duplicating grant applications instead of pooling bids.
Infrastructure — shared platforms, shared administration, shared databases, shared back-end support.
Decision pathways — how stories influence policy, practice, or program design.
Succession and continuity — what lasts beyond one charismatic founder or one funding cycle.

If intergenerational storytelling is to carry weight beyond an evening, it has to shape how we build, how we fund, how we collaborate.

Otherwise we are collecting wisdom and leaving it where we found it.

The gap is turning insight into action.

We Keep Arguing About Grace Tame and Ignore the Real Question

I have watched the commentary around Grace Tame spiral into familiar territory. Some defend her. Some attack her. Some wait for any misstep. The arguments become about slogans, tone, delivery.

Meanwhile, the original political decision sits largely untouched.

Reading through the comments on a right-leaning news site, I came across a thoughtful defence of her right to speak. It reminded me that human rights advocacy does not vanish because someone disagrees with the politics of the moment. Courage is not conditional.

I would have preferred that a particular slogan not be used. It distracted from the substance. Yet focusing only on the slogan misses the larger question.

What was the judgement behind inviting the Israeli president at this time?

Leadership is not only about protocol. It is about reading the room. It is about understanding how divided the public mood already is. It is about recognising when symbolism inflames rather than steadies.

We can debate Grace Tame’s language for days. That is easy. The harder and more necessary question concerns political judgement at the top.

If we are serious about social cohesion, that is where attention belongs.

This is about asbestos. It is also about memory, power, and who gets protected.

Toxic City: Asbestos, Amnesia, and the Collapse of Care lays out a story many in Shoalhaven already recognise. Swift action when risk sits inside council walls. Silence when that same risk sits in a small village, under roads, near creeks, beside homes.

This is collaborative community advocacy at its best, from Spark Shoalhaven in Politics. It opens with a preface by Cat Holloway and centres the long, sustained work of Peter Allison. His work is seminal. It shows what happens when ordinary people keep records, keep asking questions, and keep going long after institutions move on.

This is about asbestos. It is also about memory, power, and who gets protected.

How many versions of this reckoning do we need before we all stand up, in some way, no matter how small.

First they came for a small place.
Then they came for people without power.
Then they came for something they should never have ignored.

If you live in Shoalhaven, read it.
If you care about how councils work, read it.
If you wonder how systems drift away from accountability, read it.

And if you are part of a group somewhere else, watching something similar unfold, this is an invitation. We are learning that shared stories, shared evidence, and shared pressure travel further together.

Do stories about powerful men and sexual abuse keep you awake?

Stories about powerful men and sexual abuse surface with grim regularity. Court cases reopen. Investigations expand. Survivors speak after years of silence. Support networks mobilise around the accused. Each time, the details differ and the structure stays the same.

When I read about these cases, the response is physical. Grief for the survivors arrives first, for what they carried alone and for how long. Then comes a deeper ache, watching support groups for powerful men contort themselves into justification, language bending to protect status rather than truth. Alongside that sits the cold recognition that power has learned to normalise its own behaviour, to treat harm as collateral and entitlement as reason.

and this

Across these cases, women are treated as surfaces rather than people. Their bodies become terrain. Their consent becomes negotiable. Their pain becomes background noise. Power trains itself to expect access and compliance, then reacts with disbelief or rage when either is withdrawn. What shocks many observers is the brazenness. What repeats is the logic. Status rewrites the rules.

Women are framed as disposable, disbelievable, or dangerous once they disrupt entitlement. This is not about desire. It is about dominance, control, and the preservation of rank. When accountability threatens, women carry the cost first, through disbelief, delay, character attack, and isolation.

Threaded through it all is exhaustion of recognition. This pattern has appeared before. It appears again. History keeps looping, each time asking who will refuse to look away.

I interviewed a psychologist to help me make sense of what we are watching play out around Donald Trump. They stayed with the human mechanics rather than relitigating each allegation, the racist imagery aimed at Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, or the Epstein material. Those facts are well documented. The questions that keep me awake at night sit elsewhere. Why does support stay entrenched even when behaviour crosses lines that would end any other public career?

When I asked the psychologist “will understanding bring peace or restore sleep ?” the psychologist said

“Understanding may not soften care or the dull feeling. It helps gives you a way to make sense of them. You still care. You still feel it. It gives you orientation. You know where to stand, where pressure has impact, and where stepping back preserves strength. Sleep patterns may stay the same, and your thinking can shift. When you are awake, your attention shifts. The mind spends less time circling and more time observing. Helplessness eases into alertness. You stop trying to solve everything. You take in what you have learned, piece by piece.

This is what I learnt.

When politics becomes identity, evidence loses its force

For many supporters, Trump functions less as a politician and more as an identity marker. Criticism feels like criticism of the self. Once politics shifts from preference to identity, facts lose leverage. Evidence triggers defence rather than evaluation.

People protect what they have invested themselves into

People seek material that confirms what they already believe and discard what threatens it. This operates as a protective reflex. Admitting wrongdoing requires revisiting years of emotional, social, and financial investment. The price feels too high.

Power grants itself exemptions without ever announcing them

Supporters grant a special licence. The internal logic goes unchallenged. He fights the people I hate. His behaviour becomes justifiable. Cruelty, corruption, and abuse get reframed as necessary weapons. Standards change without comment.

Dominance feels comforting when the world feels unstable

Trump projects certainty, dominance, and contempt for the status quo. For people carrying humiliation from social change, economic dislocation, or cultural loss, this offers relief. He promises order. The pull intensifies under stress.

The way powerful men treat women tells the real story

A deeper truth sits underneath the rest. These men often relate to women through entitlement rather than reciprocity. Women appear as instruments, rewards, risks to be managed, or problems to be silenced rather than full moral equals. Power distorts intimacy. Access replaces consent. Control substitutes for care. Hierarchy teaches permission, and repeated escapes thin consequences further. Empathy erodes. Boundary crossing becomes ordinary.

Conspiracy restores clarity when reality becomes uncomfortable

As allegations accumulate, conspiracy thinking offers relief. Courts, media, academics, prosecutors, and foreign governments merge into a single corrupt force. The leader stands alone as truth teller. Complexity collapses into certainty.

Belonging carries a higher price than truth

Support remains social. Churches, families, media ecosystems, and online communities reinforce shared frames. Leaving carries cost. Belonging, reputation, and connection sit on the line. Many choose group coherence over reality coherence.

Accountability elsewhere exposes tolerance at home

The investigation into Elon Musk in France punctures the myth of inevitability. When other systems hold powerful men to account, the degree of normalisation elsewhere becomes visible. That contrast hardens defence rather than inviting reflection.

Survival trains expectation

Power shields itself. Wealth, legal firepower, media saturation, and procedural delay blur consequences. Each scandal that ends without consequence trains everyone to expect nothing to change. It lowers the bar. Survival becomes assumed.

Change starts quietly

Many supporters see the racism. They sense the corruption. Loyalty feels easier than confronting what that recognition would demand of their judgement, their community, and their past choices. Movements weaken first at the edges. People stop posting. They stop arguing. They withdraw. Collapse begins there.

and now the most important part. How can we have impact?

The call to action is refusal

Refusal to normalise exemption.
Refusal to excuse abuse as strategy.
Refusal to accept that power equals immunity.

Name the pattern. Support institutions that still act. Protect journalists, survivors, and whistleblowers. Watch the quiet exits. That is where history shifts.

I have a habit of pulling things apart to see why they work

I will follow up and get a link for you to buy these sweaters

I’m a curious person. I like understanding what turns ideas into action, what shifts something from theory into behaviour. When I saw this sweater being advertised, that instinct kicked in. What held my attention wasn’t the message itself so much as the way it had been framed.

It struck me as a sharp example of something done well. Understanding why turned out to be the more interesting part.

So I spoke to a marketing strategist and asked her to look at it purely from a framing point of view. What is this doing?

She started with the reference.

The line draws on Martin Niemöller’s poem First they came…. The poem is widely recognised. Its progression is familiar. The sweater relies on that familiarity.

“That tells you who it’s speaking to,” she said. “It assumes recognition.”

From there, the sentence pivots. “Because I know the rest of the goddamn poem” isn’t about remembering history. It’s about timing. The speaker places themselves earlier in the sequence, before the final lines, before the regret people talk about later.

That’s the point where the clock starts tapping its foot.
Recognition is treated as the starting point. The line moves straight to choice.

She pointed out how this reframes familiarity.

Quoting the opening line of Niemöller’s poem has become a kind of shorthand. People recognise it, feel aligned, and move on. This line removes that pause. Knowing carries responsibility.

Then there’s the delivery. A sweater. Something worn, seen, carried through ordinary spaces. The message travels through daily life rather than sitting in a book, a speech, or a memorial context.

“That’s where behaviour shifts,” she said. “Inside routine, normalising action.”

She also drew my attention to where the sentence ends. One line.

“It stops at the moment of commitment,” she said.

That was the explanation I was looking for. The sweater works because it treats recognition as the starting point.

Most of us want agency. We want to move through the day, or get to the end of it, with the sense that we made a difference. That we stepped in early enough to matter. That we chose action while choice was still available.

This line offers timing.

I know how this ends. I’m acting before it does.

That’s why it works. As a prompt. As a reminder. You read it and feel slightly behind schedule.

And it does it in one sentence.

Full credit to the person who wrote it. I’m filing it away at the front of my brain for the next time I feel the urge to quote something and hope people do more than read it and nod.

Are you feeling swamped by the world’s biggest problems?

Do you feel overwhelmed by the biggest issues shaping everyday life climate disruption, housing pressure, food prices, insurance, government spending? I did too.

For a long time my response lived in my head. Reading more. Arguing better. Feeling frustrated that public debate kept sliding into blame. None of that helped. What shifted things was doing something much simpler. I joined groups. I went to workshops. I put myself in rooms with people who were already translating big problems into practical action.

I have written before about the victim triangle and how easy it is to slip into it when the world feels out of control. What I learned through participation is how people climb out of it. Not by pretending the problems are smaller, and not by blaming others, but by reconnecting with responsibility and control.

One of the clearest examples for me has been Farmers for Climate Action. What works in spaces like this is not ideology. It is community. You learn alongside others. You share uncertainty. You are shown where effort counts. No one is cast as a villain or a victim. People are treated as capable decision makers.

That pattern repeats across other community based organisations like Landcare. Workshops, peer networks, and practical forums all do the same capacity and capability building work. They replace overwhelm with participation. They turn big abstract issues into things you can act on with others.

This is the shift I wish we talked about more. When people feel powerless, blame becomes a coping mechanism. When people feel supported and capable, responsibility returns.

If public debate feels stuck, it may be because we keep asking people to care without showing them how to act. The way forward is not louder arguments. It is clearer pathways and communities that make engagement feel possible.

That was the circuit breaker for me.

HT to Maryvonne Norman whose excellent Fb post prompted this article

A moment in The Choral that shows how lived experience changes everything

I recently saw The Choral . It is a magnificent movie. It broke my heart in a good way.

Partly because it is so beautiful. Partly because it is so powerful. And partly because of one moment that keeps opening out into other moments long after you leave the cinema.

A choir member who is also a Protestant minister stands and says there is no such thing as purgatory. In his faith, the soul goes straight to heaven or hell. No in between.

Then Clive speaks.

He has come back from the war with one arm. He says purgatory is real. It is the space between two sides fighting, the moment when you step forward and you don’t know whether you will live or die.

The room goes completely still.

I am confident that minister would never stand up and say there is no purgatory again. I don’t think anyone else in the room would either and everyone who sees the film.

What moved me was not only the moment itself, but what it unlocked. How often lived experience cuts straight through belief. How two people can stand in the same place and see entirely different things, shaped by what they have lived, what they have lost, what they carry in their bodies.

It felt like a reminder to slow down in conversations. To listen more carefully. To leave room for the fact that someone else may be standing in a place you have never been.

What we choose to record shapes what future generations believe

This image I shared on Facebook talks about blame, the habit of pointing elsewhere so we do not have to look too closely at ourselves. It struck me because at the moment I am immersed in recording local history. Old farms, family stories, council decisions, moments that felt ordinary at the time but now explain how a place became what it is.

History has a quiet power. What is written down gets repeated. What is repeated hardens into truth. What is left out quietly disappears.

Working through local archives has reminded me how selective memory can be. The stories that survive are often those that suited someone at the time, those that deflected responsibility, those that made complex decisions look simple and inevitable. Over generations, those shortcuts become culture.

We are seeing that play out again now.

As my Facebook post says I am uncomfortable with how responsibility keeps being pushed onto Anthony Albanese, or onto Australians more broadly, particularly Australian Jews, as if proximity equals culpability. That misdirects the conversation and lets those making the decisions step out of frame.

If accountability matters, it has to sit with alleged war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, who repeatedly claim to act in the name of all Jews. Many Jewish people around the world have said clearly that this is not true. Ignoring that distinction does real harm.

What also sits beneath this moment is something older and far more corrosive. Millions of prejudiced ideas about Jewish people were written down, taught, repeated, normalised. Those ideas travelled across borders and centuries. They did not arrive by accident. They were documented, handed down, and rarely challenged.

We cannot change millions of people’s prejudices overnight. But we can change how we tell the story now.

We can challenge media narratives that look for someone to blame and promise quick fixes. We can refuse lazy conflations that confuse governments with people, criticism with hatred, complexity with disloyalty. We can insist on context, on history, on evidence.

Most importantly, we can defend the public’s right to make informed choices. That requires more than outrage. It requires resisting the urge to absolve ourselves of responsibility by pointing elsewhere.

As someone recording local history, I am learning this: the stories we choose to document today will shape what feels possible tomorrow. Getting that right matters, not only for our towns, but for the world we hand on.

#AccountabilityMatters #WhoWeBlame #HistoryAndMemory #WhyDocumentationMatters #ChallengePrejudice #MediaResponsibility #Antisemitism #CollectiveBlame #InformedChoices #PublicJudgement #PowerAndResponsibility #TellingTheStoryDifferently