The virus is out of control and it’s clear that patchwork responses and aggressive policing aren’t going to stop it. We learned in 2020 that generous, easily accessed income support works. Yet we are forced to watch on in despair as the Labor party and their technocratic gatekeepers continue to call for the return of JobKeeper, despite it evidently being nothing but a corporate bailout in disguise.

As antipoverty activists, we know we must unite all low-income workers by centring the relationship between poverty and wages, and the declining wage growth this country has experienced in the past ten years. It is vital that the broad left and our movements begin to see that the rights of waged and unwaged workers are intrinsically linked.

To have endometriosis is to lose your job, friends, partners, independence. To have endometriosis is debilitating – and can be just as severe as some of the illnesses already in the public consciousness (multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy). To have endometriosis is to lose hope in a future for yourself.

Increasing casualisation and precarious employment across many sectors of the economy mean that more and more women are being pushed into positions of vulnerability. Given that around one in three women experiences sexual harassment in the workplace, this is no small deal.

I live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), commonly referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Far more of a handicap than commonly thought, it is a devastating invisible burden we know very little about. ME is an umbrella term simplifying a host of smaller conditions and symptoms. Coming wave after wave, they adversely affect the body’s systems, severely cutting one’s ability to think, sleep, concentrate, work, exercise, filter toxins and fight infection.

Mark Davis could be writing the same book today. Despite the moniker ‘millenial’ and its association of entitlement and laziness, young people are suffering. Today, they are dealing with the worst youth unemployment in history. They are paying three to eleven times more for a home.

As a haver of autism myself, I felt kind of numb to it. I am, of course, morally repulsed by the concept of schooling run on social Darwinism. But when you consider what has been thrown at Australia’s minority of the intellectually disabled, and in many cases the greater disabled community as a whole, a proposal such as Hanson’s seems par for the course.

An autonomous project of this scale comes with its own particular politics and tensions, of course, as people attempt to build new systems and ways of living and being while opposing outside forces. Finding ways to manage these tensions, and not be overwhelmed by these forces, will be even more critical in the coming months, as the new Macron government sets its sights on resolving the issue of the airport, and by extension, the ZAD.

What these examples demonstrate is that, far from reflecting a politically neutral position, the accusation of politicising something is in itself political, a kind of ‘nothing to see here’ that obfuscates rather than clarifies the true nature of the issue at stake. Not unlike ‘political correctness’ – a term that took off at about the same time – its main utility as a pejorative lies in its virtual meaninglessness, giving its users a way of avoiding a problem they’d rather not confront.

Negative gearing and the economics of housing – a cartoon by Fury.

However, since the early 1990s, research has shown that rather than hitting a glass ceiling, men working in the ‘female professions’ take a ride on what sociologist Christine Williams famously termed ‘the glass escalator’. In 1992, she wrote, ‘men take their gender privilege with them when they enter predominantly female occupations; this translates into an advantage in spite of their numerical rarity’.

Indigenous peoples and women are two groups that have experienced increases at an alarming rate. Indigenous women, in particular, are the fastest growing group in Victorian prisons. Indigenous women are frequently denied bail due to perceived unmet ‘needs’ in the community, and then released without conviction.

Artist Tia Kass on Centrelink’s Operation Debt Recovery.

These cuts are usually defended by the cultural construction of the ‘bludger’: a largely mythological figure who prefers a life on welfare over working and who needs to be discouraged from their idleness by the formulation of harsh laws surrounding the eligibility of Centrelink recipients, already struggling, in financial and emotional distress, far below the poverty line.

Put the goggles on and you are in prison, caged in a cold white concrete 6 x 9 cell. The only signs of life are the dirty scuff marks ascending the walls and the steely toilet that drips ‘because it sweats and it hits the floor; chswip, tcshwip, tschip’. Francesca Panetta and Lindsay Poulton’s 6x9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement (2016), along with other VR work, promises an immersive experience, attempting to conjure a first-person experience of the traumatising conditions of solitary confinement.

But can the UBI give all that is promised? I no longer think so. Indeed, the model currently proposed has the potential to strengthen racist policies, increase exploitation of migrants, escalate the environmental impacts of our current economic system, and further wealth disparity both locally and globally.