Felis catus
I’ve been re-watching the West Wing. I don’t know how long it’s taken me: a year
at least, I guess, on and off. I’m only
half a season now from finishing it, and I’ve picked up the pace towards the
end: the sixth and seventh seasons, unpopular though they are, are my
favourites, with all their excitement of campaigning and bright hope and
optimism. The West Wing always did optimism much better than the real world.
Usually when I watch it I’m
sitting in bed, with the DVD in my laptop, and I’m trying not to fall asleep;
and inevitably as the small night-time cycle of my house winds down I hear a
bump and a shuffle and the soft tinkling of an old bell and before I know it my
cat has pushed her way into my room and up onto my bed, into the crook of my
arm. There she’ll lie, purring loudly,
kneading her claws into the flesh of my arm if she’s feeling particularly
affectionate, turning her enormous eyes up to me; more often than not blocking
the screen.
I’ve had her for about five years
now; she was eight or nine months old when I got her from a cat shelter in Melbourne’s northern
suburbs. She was skinny then, grown but
not yet filled out, and she was as shy as a mouse with everybody except
me. When I first got her she used to
hide behind the windowsill of my room and growl at people walking past on the
street outside. If I had friends over
she’d disappear under my bed and not come out for hours.
I got her only a few weeks after
my previous cat died. I’d had him for a
decade or more until he died of kidney failure – the fate of most cats. He’d once been bitten by a brown snake and
perhaps that had hastened his death several years later. I was perhaps too hasty in getting another
cat but I found that I needed the companionship: a pet’s affection is an
uncomplicated thing, constant and easily interpreted. Having an animal curl up peacefully on your
lap or at your side or at your feet grounds you, brings you into an ease with
the world. There have been times when a
head-bump from my cat has brought me out of a moment of introspection and into
a more immediate, more restful kind of living.
A pet is a balm.
Yet it’s a risk, too. A cat in particular is an animal liable to
get into trouble: in addition to the snake bite, my previous cat was hit by a
car; he became caught on a fence and was left dangling and immobilised for the
best part of a day in midwinter Canberra; he was stung by a bee to such an
extent that his face puffed up like a balloon; he went missing for two weeks
and was found in somebody’s back garden, starving and hysterical and stinking
of a kind of panic-musk that cats exude when they’re in dire straits. The day after he was bitten by the snake he
returned home from the vet, dopey and enfeebled, and had a vertebra dislocated
by our family’s new and energetic ten-week-old puppy. At a certain point it became apparent that my
family was spending far more on the cat’s health than we were on our own.
My current cat hasn’t had any
such calamities, fortunately; but I live in fear of such events. Of course, it would be disastrous for her if
such misfortune should befall her; but I’d be lying if I said that a large
reason for my concern was not also what impact such a calamity might have on
me.
I don’t have a lot of money. I work full time in a white-collar job in a
workplace I like but it doesn’t pay very much.
I’ve lived in Melbourne for exactly ten years now and in that time I’ve
gone through two periods of uncertain employment which have put me on the back
foot financially; money trouble escalates exponentially such that a month of
difficulty may take six months to recoup, and a difficult year may make its
effects felt for many years to come. Australia is an
expensive place to live, and it doesn’t take much to slip behind. One trip to the vet, one surgical procedure
or overnight stay for my cat, could be catastrophic. I live on the edge, month to month, and there
is absolutely nothing remarkable about my predicament – it’s so common as to be
banal.
On Tuesday last week here in Australia the
conservative government led by Tony Abbott presented its first budget since it
was elected to office in September 2013.
A budget, particularly a first one, is an opportunity for a government
to put forth its vision both for and of the country: where it thinks we
should be going; where it wants to take us; where it thinks we’ve gone
wrong. Prior to the budget being
delivered the government took the unusual step of creating a Commission of
Audit to identify where and how Australia’s
money could be saved. Australia has a
AAA-rated economy; its handling of the Global Financial Crisis (under the
previous Labor government) was widely hailed overseas as a model example of how
to steer a country away from the rocks of economic disaster. We’ve been helped considerably by a resources
boom that has seen China
in particular buy huge quantities of Australian iron and coal. Anybody who has been to Europe or to America in the last few years will have a sharp
appreciation for how lightly Australia
was touched by the GFC.
Nonetheless, despite all evidence
to the contrary the political narrative persists that Labor governments are bad
at handling the economy. This narrative
has in recent years been driven particularly strongly by the conservative Liberal
party, now in government; it’s a narrative that persists to this day against
any logic or common sense. It’s a
narrative that was at the heart of last week’s budget.
The most common epithet used to
describe the budget has been “brutal”.
Health, education, the arts, and welfare have all been brutalised, their
funding cut severely. Even as the
government wrings its hands about Australia’s supposedly ruined
economy it pledges to spend 58 billion
dollars on fighter jets that are widely regarded as lemons. The government lies and its own actions put
the lie to every pronouncement it makes; yet the government doesn’t care. More than any Australian government I can
recall, this government transparently just doesn’t care. It doesn’t care about the sick; it doesn’t
care about the elderly; most especially it doesn’t care about the young.
Under the Abbott government’s
budget if you are under thirty, and become unemployed, you will be ineligible
for welfare payments for the first six months of your unemployment. After that your unemployment benefits will
come and go in a six-monthly cycle: six months on, and six months off. Six months on, and six months off. And what does the government expect you to do
in those six months when you’re receiving no government assistance? In the words of the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, interviewed
shortly after he gave the budget speech: “I would expect you’d be in a job.”
I’ve been in my current job for
one-and-a-half years: I began it in August 2012. Prior to that I was working part time for a
year: my previous job, a public service contract (and, incidentally, under the
budget 16,500 federal public servants are to be sacked), was in mid-2011
reduced due to (Labor) government cutbacks from full time to only two days –
fifteen hours – a week. I scraped and
saved where I could; I borrowed heavily from my credit card so that I could pay
rent every month; I took short-term or occasional work where I could find
it. I worked as a scribe, taking minutes
of meetings once every month or two. A
friend’s mother gave me a few months data-entry and research work. An acquaintance of mine who owns a bar gave
me work hosting beer tastings once a week, even though I’d never worked in
hospitality before. I checked the job
ads every day, put in more job applications than I can recall; I struggled to
sleep and became short-tempered with my family.
I depended on the kindness of friends just to have a night out. There are jobs in Australia
but – particularly in Melbourne,
a city whose population is booming – there are many, many more people seeking
jobs. It’s an employer’s market and with
so many people looking for work very, very few employers are willing to do
on-the-job training: without experience you have almost no chance of finding
work. The era of the foot-in-the-door is
gone. Every job you apply for requires
its own cover letter; many prospective employers require that you complete a
lengthy questionnaire or address in writing numerous selection criteria; all
this is time-consuming and if you manage to find a part-time job it leaves you
with almost no time in which to adequately complete your application for a
full-time role, the window for which is often vanishingly small.
In the second episode of the
fourth season of the West Wing Toby
Ziegler, the White House Director of Communications, is engaged at a bar by a
man whose daughter is about to go to college.
“I like that it’s hard, it should be hard”, the man says of the struggle
to fund his daughter’s education, “but it should be a little easier”. Listening to this homespun wisdom Toby is
inspired to craft the administration’s new education policy – but like
everything else in the West Wing,
this is a fantasy. High-level government
staffers don’t create policy based on chance encounters with strangers in
bars. Politicians in government don’t
give any heed to their constituents more than once every election cycle. And politicians lie egregiously and
shamelessly to get into power.
Image by the author.
