It is October now.

Daylight savings have just kicked in, and we’ve just enjoyed a few nice sunny days where the temperature hasn’t gone any higher than 28 degrees Centigrade. All very pleasant.

I even went back to the Office for a day to help a colleague return after a substantial time off. Hardly anyone around which was nice. But since COVID’s tentacles are lessening in NSW next week my team all resume working, partially at work and partially at home. We’ve been working out of home for the last 6 months. And for the most part is has worked out well.

For me it’s been a case of waking up, putting on enough clothes not to freeze to death in my outside office, visit the heads, take medication, walk less than 15 meters and then just get stuck in. A 45km each way commute kind of slows that whole process down a bit. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted. It kinda was. The only impact COVID had on my family and I was we bought masks, I worked from home (and got far more done than ever before) and two events we were booked to attend didn’t run. A massive metalheads concert in Sydney my son was really looking forward to and a writing workshop my wife was going to attend in Mildura. Oh yeah, bog paper was harder to buy than usual and I had to go to three different supermarkets to buy the milk I usually buy for us for a week. I am not driving 90km a day to do daily shopping and since I could only buy two bottles of milk I had to get two at Woolies, two at Aldi and one at Coles to get our usual supply. And delayed haircuts too. That’s it. Basically bugger all impact on us at all. Absolutely nothing to complain about at all.

Lockdowns? No difference, we don’t get out much anyway. Working for a Government department doing a job I could do from anywhere that had a power point and internet made it pretty easy to keep working. My little town, village really, doesn’t have restaurants and cafes. We have a cafe now though. Does a roaring trade too somehow. But our Pub burned down years ago and won’t be getting replaced. How unAustralian is that!

But the question on many minds is will COVID be back? And the answer is “of course it will you damned idiot and what did they teach you at school anyway?” Australia like many countries relies on tourism. And a lot of our tourism comes from outside Australia. And when the tourists return in large numbers so will our little buddy COVID. “By then we’ll have a vaccine” exclaim many people. Don’t you just love their faith in science that will blindly hope for a vaccine but when a scientist talks to them about real stuff like climate change they turn their back and ignore them. People really are shits. Prepare for the New Normal. No hang on, people were shits before, let me make that clear. Also the New Normal is a great album, gotta plug it somehow, love your work lads. Things like COVID are here to stay – get used to it people. Adapt. Or not.

So today is the day after the Federal Government have released the new Budget. If you have read any of my previous musings you’ll see I love taking the piss out of a Budget. Not this time. I don’t need to. It is self sufficient in that regard. With our gas led recovery and our cutting back of relief for the unemployed this Budget needs no assistance to be tragic. It’s not funny. It is rather pathetic. It’s to be expected of conservative government though and for some reason my fellow Australians keep voting those governments in against their own interests. I don’t get it. I’m sure I never will. At a time when millions of people globally have COVID, when hundreds of thousands have died from COVID and when an absolute shitload of people have been unluckier than I and have lost their jobs due to the impacts of COVID wouldn’t this be an ideal time to change the dynamic? To make people the centre of the political argument? To invest in people instead of big business? To wean us off coal fired electricity and have more local power generation using renewable technologies? To use what we have learned about remote working and remote services. To fund their improvement, to make them part of the New Normal. To give people a bit of dignity through a minimum living wage? To invest in the lower paid if you want to boost the economy since those people traditionally save less? I’m not an economist. And can I add thank fuck for that – no offence meant to Greg Jericho – probably the only economist I’ve ever seen I didn’t want to yell at. But even I can see how these things would change our paradigm. And to those thinking how do I fund this – jesus, just give me the books, I’ll find it inside a day out of the waste, the subsidies to those who don’t need it, the handouts to Murdoch press, etc. No problem there buddy.

2020 will be remembered as the Year of the Pandemic. Nothing I can do about that. It would have been nice if it could also have been remembered as the Year Things Started to Change. The Year We Acted From Our Consciences. The Year That Black Lives Matter Actually Mattered. I don’t see it. I don’t see that change coming. I don’t even see the mood for change around. So many want it to ‘go back to normal’. Do they even see what normal was? Do they see how they can improve on the old normal? They (the royal ‘they’ meaning the general population) don’t. And that saddens me greatly. This is a generational opportunity. And I believe we are wasting it. Instead we get Brexit, Trump, Bolsanaro, Putin, China vs USA tantrum throwing contests, ongoing climate change, serious delineation of the population based on how they vote (Dem vs Rep, Labor vs Tories, Liberal/National vs Labor, etc) and a fracturing of any type of civil conversation on frankly any and every topic. The economy is now more important than the population that create it. Well, fuck normal. Normal sucks. It’s time for a new idea. For politicians to represent their constituents. And it’s time for those constituents to be informed enough to know when they are being fed bullshit. Instead of being happy to get patted on the head and a $5 tax cut. I’m old and I’m tired and I see the deadshits in my age bracket hanging onto every scrap of power they can, milking every last benefit they can for them and their mates. And making sure whatever is left is an absolute shitstorm so whoever gets the power from them eventually gets the blame for everything after they are gone. It sickens me. When do we wake up and see it? I don’t think we do. I think it’s hear to stay.

And it all became utterly blindingly obvious in 2020, the Year of well, um, Shit.