The branch of Government I’m working in is fairly irrelevant in the present crisis and given that the Western Australian Government is pretty overstretched, I applied for a secondment to the refugee accommodation and welfare service that the Premier launched a week ago. I’m pretty much logging hours on the front-line, talking to people, finding out where they’ve come from and trying to allocate them with a place to stay. In the start we were able to house them in Government housing and in some of the charitable housing projects around the state, but it’s so stretched now that we’ve been forced to set up refugee camps. There are now massive marquee tents filled with camp beds and outdoor kitchens dotted around areas of public open space in Perth and its something I never thought I’d see. Sanitation is a real concern, the State Government has pretty much hired every single portable toilet in the state but that increasingly seems like too little.

 

So yeah, its all pretty stressful and disconcerting. At the same time, LPG prices have finally taken a real hit from the Feds blockade of shipments. Even if the blockade wasn’t in place, I’d think supplies would be pretty low given that the entire workforce on the rigs and at the refineries has now joined the strikes after the Prime Minister announced that mining companies would be given free reign to set their wages at what ever level they needed to in order to make their operations sustainable. Reports from my union friend seem to be that the small number of Fed policemen holding the rigs and refineries for the government have called for reinforcements. I don’t know how the Federal Government could possibly get them there anyway! Shipping is prohibitively expensive right now and jet fuel is getting that way too. And forget about overland transport, that would cost almost more than the drilling operations are worth! Western Australia’s geographic isolation might just be a blessing for once. My unionist friend also indicated that there was the likelihood that workers on several drilling platforms would simply restart work but refuse to take instructions from supervisors.

 

Finally – collective news. We’ve also been really fortunate to have some positive developments for Tiny Lights and what we can now call the Perth Council of Democratic Collectives. We had the first mass meeting at the University of Western Australia with about 5 different collectives from across the city attending. We swapped some pretty good ideas on a small-scale level that I’ll update on later. On a larger scale however, we have resolved to do something about the farming crisis by sending some collective members out to one or two farms to see what they can do about salvaging some crops or livestock and making them sustainable as micro-farms. The Tiny Lights’ deal with the market gardener is also going well, even though LPG is getting pricey, we managed to get his goods to market pretty cheaply and his stall was easily the largest there. We gladly took our share of food (food is now about 3 or 4 times is ‘normal’ price) and the surplus was distributed to elderly pensioners who signed up to our scheme. We decided that we would try to expand our operations to other people for whom food is becoming dangerously expensive.

 

I’m sorry if this all sounds a bit rushed. I’m writing it all in a break from work. I took half an hour… there’s only so many dads sobbing in their wives’ arms and terrified looking children one can see before it starts to be too much.

 

Oh well, once more into the breach I guess…

 

Hope still waits in the wings.