No Turning Back: Recent Episodes
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This pandemic is going to change our society forever. The question we need to answer is how. Will we let big business grab even more power, or will we stand together and demand something better for ourselves and our communities?
The Melbourne community has done its bit, patiently sitting under house arrest for months on end watching and waiting for freedom. Everyone’s at breaking point but if you dare express the sentiment you had best be prepared for a bunch of dan stans to scald you online. Didn’t you know people had it worse during the London Blitz!?
Joining us for a Daniel Andrews performance review and to talk about the sentiment in Melbourne is wellbeing, freedom and democracy researcher Dr Jerry Brown.
Regional businesses are being instructed to treat their customers with suspicion, police are doing mounted patrols of our parks and surveilling us from helicopters, but that 14 day average just refuses to offer relief.
You just can’t police people out of systemic failures.
Check it out:
- Imo’s thread last weekend about the sentiment in Melbourne (RIP her menchies)
- Oz Faruqi continues to do some of the best reporting on the systemic failures prolonging the outbreaks in Victoria
- Victoria Police have issued over 23,000 fines since March
- Regional businesses are being told to take ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure they aren’t serving Melbournians
- The cops casually dropped the address of left wing community radio station 3CR while announcing their new surveillance-copters, totally not a threat
- NSW cops were violently shoving people to the ground at a protest against funding cuts at University of Sydney this week
- Take a moment to pause the pod and check out this utterly deranged vid from a Woodside Energy corporate retreat. You can read their ‘compass’ for yourselves here
We’ll be on a new recording schedule as we deal with our fun new East/West coast 3 hour time delay. Thanks for sticking with us!
Welcome to the No Turning Back budget spectacular! You’ll find no winners here, only losers.
Frydenberg’s announcement was basically what we expected – an effort to shift things out of the public sector and into the private, with a few surprises like Jobmaker and some insulting platitudes for women and the environment. Join James and Cass as they pull it apart and try to predict how Albo will respond.
Check it out:
- The New Daily’s budget roundup with quotes from Alison Pennington of the Centre for Future Work
- Frydo’s budget speech, if you’re into reading transcripts for some reason
- Read about the environmental & fossil fuel spending here
Would a job guarantee be ‘work for the dole 2.0’? short answer – no.
This week we’re joined by Connor Jolley, one of the co-authors of the Australian Unemployed Workers Union’s Green Jobs Guarantee, to talk about David Sligar’s prescriptive, unimaginative, and narrow criticisms of a job guarantee.
Don’t you just love to be told your big plans will fail before you’ve even had a chance to try? Even better, when the person saying you’ll fail has no alternative solutions! We wanna get out there and start winning material improvements to people’s lives and that’s going to take bold, imaginative plans that can inspire everyday people to join the fight.
Check it out:
- This episode dives into Sligar’s Inside Story article published on 8 September, ‘Would a job guarantee be work for the dole 2.0?’ I’m sure we are a delight to listen to regardless, but reading this will provide a lot more context for your listening experience this week!
- Connor is reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polayni
- We once again urge you to support the Australian Unemployed Workers Union, there’s a donation form at the bottom of their home page!
- Tomorrow Movement is about to launch it’s next campaign, sign up for updates and if you’re under 35 – join us!
So you ran a national day of action, what next? Seems like a bit of momentum is building for a society that isn’t completely determined by the interests of old mate big business.
Is it possible to make Labor stand up and become the champions of the working class again? How would you even start? Cass has a lot of questions for the boys this week as we explore what it would take to improve the Labor party. Look, it won’t be easy but it’s worth a shot.
Check it out:
- Tomorrow Movement had it’s first national day ofaction! It went pretty damn well if we don’t say so ourselves
- The School Strikes 4 Climate are happening today, it’s shaping up to be pretty incredible
- The Australian Unemployed Workers Union have been mobilising for Poverty Day as millions of people have their income support payments cut, and have been holding a Mutual Obligation Strike to protest the punitive and demeaning welfare system Jobseekers have to deal with to receive their payments
- The United Workers Union have been holding incredible strikes throughout the pandemic to keep workers safe and prevent the spread of COVID, we’d be doing a lot worse without their wonderful efforts. Solidarity!
- Labor receives as many, and sometimes more donations from fossil fuel companies than the libs do
- Village Roadshow donated a scattershot $6.7m in donations across political parties in 2018 to curry favour for increased piracy laws
- What the hell is ‘environmentally sustainable gas‘ Albo???
- Here’s his inspiring tweet regarding renewable energy only being about job creation zzzzzzz
- James wrote an article for Jacobin late last year about the tension in Labor between appealing to their QLD working class supporters and VIC white-collar supporters
- LOOK AT THIS VIDEO the QLD &NT branch of the ETU released a video explicitly stating that social issues are union issues and they won’t tolerate racism and it absolutely rules
As we continue hurtling towards climate disaster, Morrison has decided the path towards a prosperous future is…..gas? Yeah cool thanks dude. Thanks so much.
Meanwhile, the ALP has leaked a bunch of vague feels to The Australian in lieu of bold policies that could invigorate their base and inspire voters. Does Labor actually want to govern? Maybe it’s time to find some new political champions outside of the game of politics…
Check it out:
- Tom Tanuki has released part 2 of his Aussie Qanon series, he knows far more about this stuff than we do
- Facebook doesn’t seem very interested in the proliferation of fake accounts that are undermining elections and politics around the world, one whistleblower feels as though she has “blood on [her] hands”
- The west coast of the United States is on fire, and five hurricanes have built up over the Atlantic ocean
- Scott Morrison is handing $50m to his fossil fuel executive mates with a proposed “gas-recovery”
- Oh yeah this recovery option was determined by a commission stacked with fossil fuel CEO’s who were instructed to only look into gas
- The ALP’s new ‘policy’ document was ‘leaked’ to the Australian (the graphic they made up also makes it look like he’s on the toilet for some reason?)
- Osman Faruqi wrote an incredible piece in The Saturday Paper about Vic Labor’s outsourcing problem
- This is what peak performance looks like
- Shane Warne’s glorious painting
- Maybe Paul Keating could just shut up from now on and not suggest things like HECS-style payments for aged care
- Australian Unions is scalding you with a post-it note for withdrawing your super
We are all a part of Tomorrow Movement and have been working like crazy building towards No Turning Back on September 18. Check out the website and follow them at @tomorrowmvmt to see all the action from the day.
Dozens of little Bravehearts took to the streets of Melbourne to rail against Dictator Dan last weekend. What’s the connection to Qanon and is this actually something we should take seriously? Probably, yeah.
Friends, did you know landlords aren’t evil, unyielding monsters? I know right!? They’re being left behind during this pandemic somehow while they manage to get their grubby hands on all our money and enjoy billions of dollars in tax breaks. Don’t you just feel so sorry for them? We also have a chat about public housing and how it could be a truly wonderful way to take back our cities from property developers.
Check it out:
- ~dozens~ of anti-lockdown protesters gather in Melbourne and wander around being mad
- Watch one of the protesters swim for freedom into, uh, the middle of Albert Park Lake
- Check out Tom Tanuki’s (@tom_tanuki) great video on Qanon in Australia
- There’s gonna be less pen and paper involved in Victorian contact tracing (!!??) now that they’re using the Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager
- Greens candidate for Lord Mayor of Melbourne Aspara Sabaratnam is running with a policy of halving rates for arts & hospitality venues while doubling them for gambling venues, No Turning Back strongly endorses this policy
- Landlords, the ‘forgotten people’ of the pandemic :'(
- The Real Estate Institute of Victoria are instructing their members to refuse rent reductions in order to force every request into the dispute system. Totally not evil unyielding monsters btw
- You can read more here about the crappy behaviour of landlords and the REIV during the pandemic
- Chris Kenny does not fuck dogs it was proven in court. For no reason whatsoever, here is his son, Liam Kenny, defending The Chaser’s sketch
- Landlords receive $14.5bn in tax breaks every year, keeping the rate of income support payments where they are would cost $8bn
- Property journalist and great guy Jim Malo (@thejimmalo) dug up some great commentary from a landlord convinced the Victorian Government & Morrison are being racist against landlords
- Hear James tell his nightmare landlord story on his old pod Generation Anxiety
- House prices are outperforming wages in Australia. That’s not great
- We can have beautiful public housing!
I don’t know about you but we’ve all got the lockdown blues. Feel like you’re also starting to lose your mind? You’ve come to the right place.
Morrison’s government has used this week in Parliament to push through a heap of really awful motions with little to no opposition from Labor. Things are gonna get pretty bad unless the ALP gets their shit together and start advocating for their constituents.
Check it out:
- Victorian lockdown rumours are messing with our heads. How long are we gonna be living like this?
- 2.2 million people were lifted out of poverty with the increases to income support payments. Turns out you can end poverty by giving people more money!
- U.S. senator Ed Markey won his re-election campaign by leaning in to the momentum of Sunrise Movement and accepting the power of the youth vote
- The Herald Sun is baffled by an ‘oversupply of women in Northcote’ the replies to one tweet about it slightly break Cass
- Morrison is trying to palm off responsibility for environmental laws to state governments, it’s also an attempt to get faster approvals for offshore gas exploration. Cool.
- Oh yeah they’re also trying to raise HECS fees. This is exhausting.
You can help fight for a recovery that works for everyone by joining the No Turning Back day of action on September 18. There are actions happening in Melbourne, Sydney, Wollongong and Adelaide, and a Virtual March for Good Jobs and a Safe Climate is happening online.
Join your union and make them do better! Now is the time to put pressure on union leaders. And if you’re in the SDA leave it and join RAFFWU – they just won water and toilet breaks for McDonalds workers (yep, now in 2020).
Daniel Andrews wants to change the Public Health and Wellbeing Act to give it the power to extend Victoria’s state of emergency for up to another 12 months. If you try to criticise that decision, oohhhh you’re gonna get scalding from the DanStans. We love to think of ourselves as rule breaking larrikins but boy are we a nation of boot licking cop lovers and narcs.
Last week we started talking about a Climate Jobs Guarantee and why it would be so transformative, so how do we win? It’s gonna take a huge coalition of diverse people putting aside their differences to unite in the class struggle. If the right can have a successful coalition of contradictions, we can too.
Check it out:
- Andrews wants to extend the State of Emergency
- Michael O’Brien talks sense?
- VicPol have lost the plot, issuing almost 20,000 fines since Victorian restrictions first started
- Are we a nation of cops? An Essential Poll shows we’re totally fine with a surveillance state that throws ankle tracking bracelets on sick people
- Healthcare workers are picking up COIVD at work, is that at all surprising?
- Twitter user Grug Stan has some great insight into the media’s pandemic tunnel vision
- The Guardian releases analysis further proving that Melbourne’s more disadvantaged areas are being hardest hit by COVID
- Let’s all just chill out about farmers markets, yeah?
- Unions are great for overcoming racism, solidarity forever!
Tomorrow Movement just released it’s criteria for a Climate Jobs Guarantee – check it out!
This week we’re joined by Evie of Not Good Enough to return to the rich, infuriating vein of The Fight For Planet A – did you know the term ‘carbon footprint’ was invented by BP in 2004? Madness!
We swear we aren’t gonna turn into a F4PA response pod though – we also dive into the reasons why we have to fight tooth and nail to win a recovery that works for all of us, and what a Climate Jobs Guarantee is. This is revolutionary stuff, friends!
The masks are off!
We are members of Tomorrow Movement, a youth climate justice movement fighting for good jobs, great public services and a safe climate for all.
The No Turning Back day of action is coming up on September 18. If you’re under 35, join the fight for a recovery that works for all of us!
We also have a mass training on Saturday, come learn about the movement and how you can take action.
See for yourself:
- BP hired a PR firm to come up with the term ‘carbon footprint’ to push blame for the climate crisis on to individuals
- Blow your mind and read On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
- And get inspired by watching AOC’s Green New Deal video
- Oh look, very rich people are getting even richer during a recession!
- Check out the Australian Unemployed Workers union’s Mutual Obligations strike!
- AUWU’s Poverty Day action is on September 24, join the union or chuck them a donation
- The 2020 School Strike For Climate happening on September 25
CW: pornographic content
Yep, you read that right. Melt your brain with us as we read some Brett Sutton erotic fan fiction from twitter account @120sutton. Skip to 4:30 if you’re seeking some less sexually charged ranting and raving.
On this episode Cass runs us through the first episode of Craig Reucassel’s new documentary series The Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge, which is frustratingly stuck in the 2009 climate politics of ‘individual responsibility’. It’s 2020, Craig, LED lightbulbs haven’t solved the climate crisis, can we please just talk about how big business has captured our politics?
Get covid-saucy with 120 Days of Sutton
Get annoyed about ‘your’ climate challenge with The Fight For Planet A
Coke swindles us into thinking the enormous amount of waste they produce is our problem
Just 100 companies are responsible for SEVENTY-ONE PERCENT of our global carbon emissions! But please, have shorter showers sweetie, this is YOUR climate challenge OK?
Morrison’s government is up to more culture war austerity bullshit, this time they want to take HECS/HELP away from struggling university students
If you like our podcast you should also be listening to Not Good Enough. They rule.
Cass mentioned their deep-dive on Angus Taylor, listen to it here!