Kev from Kiama Archives - Clover Hill Diaries

The science of how the watch dog ends up working for the dog.

Here is the trick nobody runs an ad campaign about. The watchdog ends up working for the dog. And once you see how, you cannot unsee it.

Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.

This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.

I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.

It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.

The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.

Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.

The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.

None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.

Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.

What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.

A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.

That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.

The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.

A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.

Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.

It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.

If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.

There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.

And here is the bitter twist.

The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.

So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.

I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.

Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?

Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.

Sources

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings

About this post

These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.

Daily News Roundup – 4 June 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a council meeting where nothing happening was the good news, to the women flocking to Pauline Hanson, to a Congress telling Trump to stop his war, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 4 June 2026.

Betty from Blacktown and her brother Kevin from Kiama, making sense of the world’s chaos the only sensible way: over toast, a strong cuppa, and a good long natter on the phone. That’s what this Catch Up is for.

Very Local: the extraordinary meeting where nothing happening was the good news

Here are the bits that caught my attention.

Council held an Extraordinary Meeting on Wednesday 27 May, and the headline is that nothing much happened, which in this case is the good news. Councillors voted unanimously to accept the variation to the Performance Improvement Order that Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig had offered. The State has given Council an extra twelve months to balance its budget, pushing the deadline out to the end of the 2027 to 28 financial year. CEO Jane Stroud was to write to the Minister confirming Council will work towards the new requirements.

Mayor Cameron McDonald welcomed it, and his framing was that it means Council will not have to cut community services or staff, at least not on the timetable that the original draft budget had been threatening. That is a real reprieve for the people whose jobs were on the line a few weeks ago.

The extra time does not make the underlying problem go away. The Minister was careful to say the order remains necessary because Council still faces serious financial sustainability challenges, and that the order does not make Council’s decisions for it. Council still has to do the hard work itself, just with more breathing room. So the unanimous vote was less a moment of drama and more everyone agreeing to accept a longer rope.

The detail I am keeping an eye on sits underneath all the calm. The revised timeline gives Council more flexibility to look at the long term future of its five tourist parks, and there are reportedly three unsolicited partnership offers from large operators already on the table. That is the holiday parks question we have been circling for a while, and it is the kind of thing that gets decided quietly while everyone is relieved about the budget extension. The strategic business case for Blue Haven Terralong is also written into the varied order, so that thread is still very much live.

The next one to watch is the Extraordinary Meeting on 30 June, where the actual budget and the planning documents get adopted. That is the one where the real numbers land.

Across the State (NSW)

The PIO variation is the local face of a wider NSW story, which is what happens to small councils that cannot make the sums work. Hoenig has chosen the patient path with Kiama rather than the heavy hand, more time and a Strategic Finance and Governance Improvement Plan rather than administrators. It is worth watching whether other councils in similar trouble get the same latitude, because that tells you whether Kiama is being treated as a special case or as a template.

Across the Country (Federal): the Hanson surge, and the women driving it

A Redbridge Group and Accent Research poll published by the Australian Financial Review put One Nation’s primary vote at 31 per cent, ahead of Labor on 28 and the Coalition on 20. Two years ago One Nation was sitting around 7 per cent. That is not a wobble, that is a genuine shift, and it follows real electoral results in South Australia and in the federal seat of Farrer rather than poll noise alone.

According to an April study by the same pollsters, Hanson is the most popular party leader among women voters, ahead of the Prime Minister, and One Nation is women’s leading first preference party. On net favourability, her approval minus her disapproval, Hanson came in at zero, which sounds unremarkable until you see that every other leader was in negative territory. Anthony Albanese was on minus 19. So Hanson is the least disliked leader in the country, and she is doing it partly on the strength of women.

That cuts against decades of assumption. Far right parties have traditionally been thought of as men’s parties, both in who votes for them and in the very masculine image they project. The Conversation ran a good piece making the case that what we are seeing here is not a local quirk but part of a global pattern. Across Europe, parties of the hard right are pulling in more women than they used to, and a striking number are now led by women. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany. Hanson belongs in that company now, not as an oddity but as part of the trend.

So why women, and why now? The pollsters point at mood rather than ideology. Around 63 per cent of respondents said the country is heading in the wrong direction, and Redbridge’s read is that this pervasive sourness is what is feeding anti establishment support. When people stop believing the major parties understand their lives, especially on cost of living and housing, the protest vote has to go somewhere, and One Nation has positioned itself as the somewhere. The voters switching are not all lifelong believers. The coverage is full of former Liberal and former Labor voters, including women in their thirties working in sectors like aged care, who say the old parties no longer speak for them.

It is tempting to read a 31 per cent poll as the country falling into the sea, but keep some perspective. On a two party preferred basis Labor still leads One Nation 51 to 49, our preferential voting system makes it very hard for a minor party to convert a big primary vote into actual power, and Hanson sits in the Senate, which means she cannot be Prime Minister from where she is. Some commentators argue, fairly, that the surge is being over read and that One Nation remains more brand than government in waiting. I think that is partly right and partly wishful.

A party does not need to win government to reshape what the major parties say and do. The Coalition’s troubles and Labor’s negative numbers are exactly the soil this grows in, and the women’s vote is the signal that it has broken out of its old, narrow base. That is the bit I would not wave away.

The deeper point, and one we have talked about before, is that the conventional remedy of voting people out does not seem to be producing the policy change voters actually want. The cost of living and housing pressures that are driving this have not been fixed by changes of government, so the frustration keeps looking for a new outlet. Hanson is the current outlet. If the conditions do not change, the outlet will keep finding voltage. I have had more to say about this on Substack here

Around the World (International): Congress tells Trump to stop the war

The Sydney Morning Herald has been fairly thin on Trump and tariffs lately, while the American press is consumed by something our papers are barely touching, which is the war with Iran and the political revolt it is now causing inside Trump’s own party.

The United States, alongside Israel, struck Iran in late February. More than three months on, the war is still going, six American servicemembers have been killed, and it was launched without Congress authorising it. That last point matters constitutionally, because under the American system only Congress can declare war, and there is a War Powers Act designed to force a president to either get authorisation or withdraw.

On Wednesday 3 June, the House of Representatives, which the Republicans control, passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran. The vote was 215 to 208, and four Republicans crossed the floor to vote with the Democrats. That is the clearest rebuke yet of how Trump has handled the war, and it came from his own chamber. The four who broke ranks were Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, Brian Fitzpatrick and Thomas Massie.

The vote is largely symbolic. The Senate has tried and failed several times to pass its own version, an earlier attempt was blocked 52 to 47, and even if both chambers passed it, Trump would almost certainly veto it, and his administration disputes whether the War Powers Act is even constitutional. So Congress has sent a message rather than pulled a lever. House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump and reached for the line that Iran declared war on America decades ago.

It still matters. The reason Republicans are nervous is the economy. American producer prices posted their biggest jump in four years in April, petrol has gone up, and Democrats have made affordability their central midterm message ahead of the November elections that decide control of Congress. Privately, Republicans in tight races are reportedly worried the war could become a political liability if it drags on. Trump’s own answer to that pressure has been to say he is in no hurry to do a deal. So the war, the tariffs and the cost of living are not three separate stories. They are one story about prices and patience, and the politicians who are closest to the voters are the ones blinking first.

This is why it pays to read across. The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters and CBS have all been on the war powers vote and the economic fallout. Al Jazeera has the detail on the earlier Senate blockages. Our own papers, by contrast, have given Trump’s domestic troubles a light touch. If you only read the Herald you would think tariffs were a minor item. If you read the American press you would think the Trump presidency was being tested by its own party. Both are looking at the same man.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. People are unhappy about prices and housing and the feeling that nobody in charge is listening, and that unhappiness is showing up everywhere. In Kiama it looks like a council buying time on a budget it cannot yet balance. In Canberra it looks like a third of voters, women now very much included, parking their vote with Pauline Hanson. In Washington it looks like members of the President’s own party voting to stop his war because they are frightened of what petrol prices will do to them in November. Different countries, different scales, same engine.

hopeful note, and I do look for one, is that the American vote is a reminder that institutions can still push back.

It was mostly symbolic, but a legislature telling an executive to stop, with members crossing party lines to do it, is the system doing what it is meant to do. That is worth holding onto when the news makes you want to switch it all off. Plenty to chew over with Kevin on the next call.

Sources: The Bugle, Wave FM, Kiama Council, Mirage News, Australian Financial Review, The Conversation, The New Daily, NPR, Washington Post, Reuters, CBS News, Al Jazeera, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

Daily News Round Up – 24 May 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a band called Fukers raising the roof for our firies, to an eighty-something bloke who built an ocean-going boat in his backyard, to a war that’s still keeping petrol dear, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 24 May 2026.

Very Local: a joyous night in the village, and a boat sixteen years in the making

Two cracking local stories this time, and both of them good news for a change.

The Fukers had Jamberoo dancing. The fundraiser in the village was a roaring success, raising money for the Jamberoo Rural Fire Brigade and the Red Cross. By all accounts it was a beauty. One person who was there summed it up far better than I could:

“Fukers didn’t disappoint, in fact they were wonderful. Congratulations organisers and Fukers for a joyous, uplifting evening that included audience participation via singing, dancing and the good news from vocalist Paul Taylor that the band will return next year to again help raise funds for the Rural Fire Brigade and Red Cross. Thank you Fukers for an absolutely fabulous evening in the village.”

Best of all, Paul Taylor has promised the band will be back next year to do it all over again. Good on the organisers, good on the band, and good on everyone who put their hand in their pocket for our firies.

The building is the thing. On the side of Saddleback Mountain, a Jamberoo fella named Michael set himself a job that would make most of us put the kettle on and have a lie down instead. In his own backyard, by hand, he built an ocean-going catamaran. An eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat that he designed himself. It took him sixteen years, with his wonderful wife Susie beside him the whole way.

Everyone who knew that narrow little road kept asking the same question: how on earth are you going to get it down off the mountain? There was even talk the ABC might film the whole thing and lift the boat out by helicopter. In the end no chopper was needed. The boat was cut into pieces and crawled down the road bit by bit over the best part of a week. And now she’s finally floating on the water, named Archimedes. A lovely reminder that it’s never too late to chase a big dream, and that sometimes the building of the thing matters just as much as where it ends up. You can read Lynne’s full story here.

Across the Country (Federal)

A surprise change out of the United States is worth a mention, because it touches plenty of Australian families with loved ones over there. The Trump government has announced that foreigners already living in the US who want a green card will now have to leave the country and apply from their home country instead. It’s a big shift from how things have worked for years, and it’s caught a lot of people on the hop.

Around the World (International)

Trouble at home for first responders abroad. A sad reminder this week of how dangerous the job can be. In New York, one person died and 36 others were hurt in a blast at a shipyard, and most of the injured were firefighters and other first responders rushing in to help. And over in Southern California, around 40,000 people were told to leave their homes and schools were shut after a storage tank kept leaking a hazardous chemical. A timely reminder of what emergency crews everywhere put on the line, which makes a night like our Fukers fundraiser for the Rural Fire Brigade feel all the more worthwhile.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. A war on the far side of the world squeezes household budgets, the same squeeze that’s shaking up politics everywhere. But closer to home, the news is brighter. A village packed a hall to look after its firies, and a man on a mountain proved you’re never too old to do something improbable and wonderful. Not a bad lot to talk over with Kevin and a cuppa.

Sources: Clover Hill Diaries, NPR, Euronews, CNBC, Sydney Morning Herald, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

Net zero, explained the way I’d explain it to Betty from Blacktown.

This is part of my Betty from Blacktown series. Betty isn’t a real person. She’s most of us. She’s spent her life getting good at one thing, and outside that one thing she’s a beginner like everyone else. I was a pharmacist, then I ran an organisation that trained young people to be confident communicators and trusted voices, and when I needed expertise I brought in specialists. So I’m Betty too, on every subject that isn’t mine.

This series is for people who aren’t specialists but want to understand the things that matter to them, including the things they never thought were important until someone a long way above them made a decision that turned up in their lives.

Net zero is one of those. It gets thrown around like everyone already agrees what it means, and most of us don’t. I didn’t either.

The only reason I’ve got enough confidence to write this post is that I’ve had the room in my life lately to think about it, turn it over, lose a bit of sleep on it. Betty hasn’t, because she’s flat out with everything else. That’s the only difference between us. I’m on the same learning curve she is, I just got a head start. And once you’ve worked something out, the decent thing is to share it. So here’s my go.

Think of a bath

Picture a bath with the tap running and the plug half out.

The tap is what we put into the air. The water draining away is what the planet pulls back out, the oceans and the forests soaking it up. Right now the tap is on full and the plug is barely letting anything through, so the level keeps rising and the bath is heading for the floor.

Net zero is the point where the level stops climbing. What’s going in matches what’s draining out.

Notice what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean we stop everything. It doesn’t mean we scrub the bath clean and undo the past. It means we stop making it worse. The level stops climbing. That’s a more honest and more reachable thing than people think when they hear the word “zero.”

It’s something we try for

I think of net zero the way I think of saving for a holiday. It’s an aspiration. Something you work towards knowing the date might move, the amount might change, life might get in the way. You don’t abandon the holiday because you might not get there by July.

The trying counts even when we don’t hit the number.

I know this one from the inside. I farmed dairy for years, and I worked with the beef industry too. So when the red meat industry announced in 2017 they’d be carbon neutral by 2030, I shook my head.

Not because the goal was wrong. Because the number wasn’t real. A target only counts for something if it’s within your power to pull off, and that one leaned on thousands of farmers choosing to come along, plus a stack of things nobody controlled. The one real lever they had was whether they could explain to their farmers why it was worth doing, and they reached for the headline instead. By 2025 they admitted they couldn’t make the date and pulled it back.

Dairy did the opposite. We set ourselves something we could actually reach and got on with it. On our own farm we lifted milk production and brought our methane down at the same time, both moving the right way for years. I used to say it in percentages on the radio and watch it slide straight off people. Nobody ever quoted the numbers back to me. But the day I said our family farm puts breakfast on the table for 50,000 Australians every day, people repeated that one back to me for years.

That’s the difference between a number and a picture. And it’s the difference between a target that’s a fantasy and a target that’s real. The fantasy one got abandoned. The realistic goal kept going.

So why isn’t it just happening?

The lazy answer is that people don’t care enough. I don’t buy it.

I bought some ham the other day. It had a fancy new strip on it, tear here, reseal there. I couldn’t open the thing. Ended up using the scissors like always. And I’d have paid extra for that packaging, the clever packaging that doesn’t work, when all I actually wanted was packaging I could recycle. That option wasn’t even on the shelf.

I didn’t fail there. The packaging failed. The easy thing, the recyclable one, was never offered, and then if I give up and bin it the story becomes that I’m the one who didn’t care.

People care plenty. What’s missing is the easy. The right thing is too often the hard thing, the thing with scissors and a surcharge, while the wrong thing is sitting there ready to go. Change that, put the easy option on the shelf, and watch how fast people “start caring.”

What about China? What about everyone else?

This is the one that comes up every time. Why should we bother when China won’t, when the bloke next door won’t, when half the world is heading the other way.

It’s a fair feeling. Nobody wants to be the mug who does the right thing while everyone else free-rides. But notice it’s a feeling about fairness, not about carbon. And the answer isn’t to argue about China. It’s this: you’re not a mug, and you’re not the problem. We built a whole world that rewards looking after number one and treats chipping in for everyone as the sucker’s move. Of course “us” feels like being taken for a ride. That feeling is honest. It’s just aimed at the wrong target.

The same goes for people in poorer countries starting to eat more meat, wanting the things we’ve had for generations. We’re in no position to tell them not to. But we are in a position to share what we’ve worked out, how to produce each kilo with less cost to the planet. Not “go without.” Here’s how. That’s a gift you can offer without being a hypocrite.

A word about how this gets explained

A huge shoutout to Les Robinson, who’s spent a career on how people actually change. His website is worth a coffee and a good long read. The kind of wisdom you find yourself using every day. Les speaks to Betty from Blacktown. He sees her as an equal, a fellow human being trying to do the right thing with the knowledge she has.

Outside your own narrow patch, you’re a non-specialist in nearly everything, same as me. Speaking language everyone can understand is the key. It’s recognising where the room actually is, and treating people as equals. The opposite, hiding good knowledge behind language you know the other person can’t follow, isn’t clever. It’s a wall.

So that’s net zero. A bath that needs to stop rising. A holiday worth saving for even if the date moves. A thing we try for, because the trying changes where we end up, and the alternative is standing back while the bath water goes over the floor.

I’ll be proud of us for trying. Give it a go.

With thanks to four people who’ve built their careers on being understood by Betty from Blacktown: Les Robinson, Dr Jenni Metcalfe, Gaye Steel and Greg Mills.

☕ Enjoyed Betty’s take? She’s not done yet. Read all of Betty from Blacktown’s catch-ups here