A friend found this online, at http://queerjoe.blogspot.com/…

I have just realised why nobody has been calling or SMS-ing me in the last week or so. It’s not because nobody loves me. It’s because I haven’t paid my phone bill. The last three bills, to be precise. Serves me right for relying on Telstra’s email notification… I don’t remember getting any emails! And the paper bills go home and get ignored anyway, cos I pay my bills online when I get the emails… (or not, as the case may be)

So I called Telstra. Surprisingly, there was almost no hold time, considering that I was calling to ask Telstra to do something for me, rather than the other way around. Turns out that although I paid up in full yesterday, Telstra still haven’t gotten any money cos BPay sits on the cash for a while before handing it on. Dodgy schmucks. In any case, they’ve put in a “reconnection request” for my phone, which can take anywhere between 10 minutes and 24 hours to process. Woohoo.

I’ll try ringing myself in 10 minutes time. If it works, then I’ll have to accept that the reason people still aren’t calling me is that I don’t have any friends…

Martin got lazy. This always happens. Well, Martin got busy and other things took over time, but I guess there’s always a point in the evening where I can’t be bothered doing any more work, and I could have written something in that time. But I didn’t.

What I did do is vote below the line in the senate. Of 65 candidates, Family First got votes number 62 and 63 (64 and 65 were reserved for One Nation). Didn’t stop a Victorian FF senator getting the balance of power… what with 38 of the 76 Senate seats in Liberal hands, I guess Labour won’t bother trying to pass any legislation in the next 3 years; and any Coalition legislation that comes with a “Family Impact Statement” will pass. Woohoo. Welcome to no-gay-rights, no-industrial-relations, xenophobic, censored, Australia.

It seems a bit odd that a party called “Family First” advocates taking many of the key attributes of what they themselves see as the prime function of a family, vis bringing up kids, away from parents and into central govt control. For example, the whole ISP-level Internet censorship bullshit. I find it difficult at the best of times to swallow the “We don’t trust families to do what’s right by their kids, so Government needs to step in and censor TV/Radio/Newspapers/Books/Internet/etc”. It’s worse when it’s coming from a so-called pro-”family values” party (that goes for you too, Johnny). If you’re really pro-”family values”, let’s see more freedom for families to exercise their values and less regulation of what a family is and what it is allowed to do…

A truly pro-”family values” stance would be to widen the range of options available to families. Allow gay marriage. Allow gay adoption, and access to IVF for same-sex couples. Grant same-sex-couple families the same rights as “traditional” (yuck) families. Encourage Australian-made children’s TV, children’s movies, children’s books. Values can’t be enforced, they have to be taught by example… and if we prevent children from ever making their own value judgements by always legislating to keep contentious issues out of the control of families, they’ll grow up to be value-less people who need new-age “christians” to tell them what is right and wrong.

I lament the impending death of morality discussions around the family dinner table. I lament the impending death of choice. I lament the fact that we are determined to produce a generation of uneducated (don’t get me started on Nelson reforms), valueless xenophobes who need a good traditional conservative cricket-loving government like John Howard’s to tell them what to do.

Bah.