Comments on: Guest Post by dk.au

By: dk.au

dk.au — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 04:47:38 +0000

cmon observa - show us your google cache hunting skills…

By: observa

observa — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 04:37:45 +0000

Well Saint, they’re all very watered down versions of the comprehensive quoting of Kennett I read in the ninemsn news link originally. It also said Kennett withdrew and apologised after Latham rang him up angrily, etc. Seems to me the legal eagles got involved and it was pulled.

By: laura

laura — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:23 +0000

I worked in a sandwich shop in Fitzroy for three years, and got to know many of the local down and outs. The poor and insane and weak preyed upon each other with terrible regularity. A woman who lived in the same street as the shop and had lived there since 1962 told me how she had been twice raped by another deinstitutionalised local fixture, the same man who had been banned from our shop because he would come in and announce that he could smell cunt juice. This man was later hit by a car on Brunswick St and killed.

By: saint

saint — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:11:48 +0000

I wonder too if some commentators and bloggers (eg Slatts) should perhaps apologize for suggesting that Latham’s pancreatitis was due to alcoholism.

By: saint

saint — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:08:18 +0000

Who knows observa. Sounds plausible. Or they could have a really strange site policy. I did read (hear?) another report in the last couple of days where Kennett wondered if Latham was sufferring from some sort of depression. And yeah, I was expecting, and heard the questions on programs like 7.30 Report as to whether Latham was unstable or 'mad'. Ah yes, here we go, o: here, here, here, here....take your pick.

By: observa

observa — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:02:20 +0000

Hmmm? Found this very watered down article here http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15778643-2,00.html

By: observa

observa — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:33:40 +0000

What the hell goes on with the news/ninemsm links sometimes? My above link was to an article where Jeff Kennett, who had initially said Mark Latham was bipolar and gave his reasons for saying so, had to retract that and apologise after Latham rang him up rather angrily. The link is now to Beasley on IR reforms and a search can’t find the original article now. I have experienced this before. Do the news networks pull some stories, perhaps after legal advice?

By: dk.au

dk.au — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:59:39 +0000

When these guys sell out, you know you’re pretty unlikely to find one anywhere. But that’s for another time…

By: Russell Allen

Russell Allen — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:57:14 +0000

I used to visit friends who lived opposite that kitsch shop on Brunswick (absolutely something or other - I think its called) and from their balcony we’d get a slab of beers and sit and watch the hookers ply their trade.

Not the slimy part but the whole car stops, windows open, car parks around the corner, woman gets in and 3 minutes later gets out, car drives away part. Used to beat Channel 7, I tell you that much.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:53:23 +0000

ps - it’s been a long, long time since there was any Gemeinschaft in Oz.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:48:11 +0000

ps - Mark lives on the nice fig tree lined side of the street… which is one of the reasons why I go visit…

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:47:06 +0000

Ok, my point was… ??? that what has gone from being a very heterogenous area… bifurcated from the 1860s onwards with narrow streets and workers’ cottages on the left of Brunswick St and very wide streets, beautifully fig lined and with big blocks on the right (river) side of Brunswick St, has increasingly become homogenous… to the detriment of genuine life (ie colourful street life in the real estate brochures…) but it still has a nice urban feel, and benefits greatly from being queer central of Brissy… but the new SUV driving massive mortgage paying Liberal voting yoof who want to buy into the area really put pressure on the Council to clear crazy mad folks off the street… not to mention Murris. Sad!

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:39:49 +0000

I think what I was trying to say was that the average house price in Bris is less than 300k.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:39:06 +0000

Yikes my comment died, and can’t be retrieved!

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:37:46 +0000

Two things, dk.au

Average house price in Brissie is

By: dk.au

dk.au — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:30:40 +0000

It’d probably be much quicker for me to list the suburbs within 5kms of the GPO here which don’t have an average house price of $800k, high crime rates and some homeless population.

But bugger it. Long live Gesellschaft. Gemeinschafts don’t have iPods.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:16:33 +0000

dk.au, I can’t comment on Sydney because when I visit I only inhabit Glebe and/or Newtown, but Brisvegas is full of cases of direct displacement… our host Mark lives in New Farm which was heroin addict/corruption/prostitution central in the late 80s/early 90s. Now it has the second highest house prices in Brissie (ave = 800k) behind the old money citadels on Hamilton Hill. A few years ago, there was a protest in NF Park where they erected 60 crosses to symbolise the number of boarding houses demolished in the interest of land value.

So you get heaps of crazy, dirty folk on the streets.

And sometimes - and it’s happened twice since I’ve been living in Bris again after I moved back from the states, you come across cops in NF Park putting a blanket over dead people.

I live over the river in Bulimba which used to be a mega dockies/wharfies area, but is now gentrified central - where our local member Kevin Rudd MP goes to the very beautiful weatherboard High Anglican church on Oxford St on Sundays. It’s also a big dyke area (YAY!). But the inner city Brissie suburbs are object lessons in the degree to which there is no longer any “community” in which eccentric and a bit odd ppl can live (I’m with Foucault and Szasz on this one)…

By: dk.au

dk.au — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:05:53 +0000

I’m not sure the least restrictive principle has been ‘a disaster’ though. The science, ethics and administration of institutions weren’t sound. That’s pretty clear. I think evaluations need to separate the ‘pure thinking’ behind deinstitutionalisation, as Richmond articulated it, from how various Governments have funded the recommendations.

As for this ‘invisible stratification’, well perhaps there would be more breadth for outrage if Kim was spot on and it was direct displacement like that (and there may be cases where that has happened). But my point is more that rush to cut expenditure downplayed the necessity for integration and ongoing support services and infrastructure. Less handicapped/ill are better off, but at what cost?

A significant part of the problem is that we don’t really know enough about it eg. reliable data on the number and characteristics of homeless, the number of mentally ill who need ongoing treatment but end up in prison/Baxter etc.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:48:40 +0000

I suspect the dagginess or otherwise of Ryde is moot. The key thing is that ppl are entrusted to the care of the “community”. What that really means is that in inner city suburbs, real estate agents put out glossy brochures about the “colouful street life”. What they don’t mention is that you have to give $5 per block (if yr a nice person) to the deinstituionalised folk whose boarding houses have been sacrificed on the altar of development. Some community…

ps - excellent post, dk.au.

By: observa

observa — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 08:35:01 +0000

We shouldn’t be too hard on DIMIA, Qld Police, Baxter officials, etc for not recognising the odd mental health problem, when 47.3% of the community couldn’t and still can’t it seems http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=20125
OTOH perhaps it’s all a bit taboo and just best to be sorry.