HEALTH Minister Nicola Roxon has rejected a plea from a coalition of 60 health groups to expand the government’s list of subsidised medicines, leaving thousands of seriously ill Australians without affordable access to new treatments.

Huh?

The health groups will today release a letter to be sent to all MPs calling on the government to reverse its decision to defer subsidies for eight new drugs.

The groups, which include MS Australia, Diabetes Australia and SANE Australia, say the decision has left thousands of people either without access to the new treatments or facing a major cost burden.

”Affordable medicines and vaccines that save and prolong lives are being denied to some of the most vulnerable, chronically ill Australians by a short-sighted decision by the government,” the letter says. ”Australia can afford these new medicines now.”

That’s a pretty compelling argument. The government using its resources to help its most in need citizens. So why aren’t we?

But in February the government announced it would override the advice of the committee and indefinitely defer inclusion on the PBS of eight drugs – including for chronic pain, schizophrenia and lung disease – due to budgetary constraints. It says the deferred listing would save more than $100 million.

Oh…

Putting the abstract “economy” before human life. Classy.

This “report” informs me that “healthy choice” food options in fast food chains are moving slower than a eunuch’s dick in a whorehouse and that this is a shame.

And I am moved to wonder.

I feel that my mind is slowly being clusterfucked into a piss-streaked gloopy puddle of dead, gelatinous jism by a persistently noisy gaggle of gibbering dickheads, all of whom regularly feel that their mere existence in this world upon which I stagger entitles them to poke their fingers into the slowly diminishing spongy spillage that is my brain and waggle them about some before scooping it up in a tissue and flushing it into the sea.

I imagine this scenario …

“Dad! Dad!”, shouts the excitable little boy in the ever-so-gorgeous Superman costume, “Can we go to McDonalds for dinner tonight?!”

“Why, of course we can, son!”, replies Dad, all Brylcreem and respectable gray slacks belted at the nipples, he’s Fred MacMurray on steroids, he has a maid who cooks and cleans every day, she has folksy homilies on tap, you wouldn’t fuck her with a bag over your head via remote control even if you could.

“But only as a special treat, you mind! This is not a regular thing!”, says Dad, hitching his pants up to his neck and pulling the belt tight as it will go, a little spontaneous auto-erotic asphyxiation while junior’s washing his hands and poking about his earholes with a fluffy stick before a nice meal out never hurt anyone, whoopsy-daisy, there she blows!.

And then they arrive, and our excitable tyke rushes up to the counter and gazes longingly at the vast array of tempting comestibles on offer, all oozing, juicy meats and cheeses and buns and salt and sugar and stuff that bears no known relationship to any existing foodstuff but it’s served in fucking buckets TEN FEET HIGH! and our adorably innocent little boy-scout supreme looks back at his Dad who’s now wandered up to the counter and joined him.

“Take your pick, son!”, says Dad, gazing adorably at the pride of his now empty old gray testicles.

And our cute as a button little fella, why you could almost take him home with you and chain him to a chair in a locked room that’s covered all over with dinosaur wallpaper and throw bloody big boxes of Lego at him until he cracks and agrees to be your son and help you hand out pamphlets at the abortion clinic for the rest of his life, he looks up at Dad, a little tentative, a little anxious, and then he blurts out the one true desire of his sweet young heart on this oh-so-special of nights …

“CAN I HAVE THE APPLE IN A BAG?!?!?”

“Why, of course you can, son!”, says our Father of the Year, “But only as a special treat, you mind! This is not a regular thing!”.

And a fine night was had by all.

Listen …

A person wants a fucking apple, they go to a fucking grocer.

Let’s all try living in the world, yes?

You have a friend, your best friend, a bullet-headed, nuggetty little scrapper named Fitz. They leave you alone when he’s around, but when he’s not, you’re a red rag.

The worst of them, once he picked you up and threw you from one end of the classroom to the other when the teacher was out of the room for a few minutes one day. You hit the floor with a thud and mostly just slid across the floor to the wall. It hurt.

It was like that.

Years later, someone tells you that this same guy wound up getting pinched for stealing cars and spent time inside for it. You think, “I hope he got the living shit beat out of him while he was there”.

You’d forgotten his name, and you’ll forget it again in an instant. You certainly can’t remember it now.

You wonder whatever became of Fitz.

You used to tell him stories that you made up during lunchtime. He liked that.

…..

Tumbleweeds, an imitation of life, everything recedes, fits and starts and flitting shadows and distant murmurs and this world does not seem real anymore and your mind turns on itself and you are a Sebastiao Salgado pixel of shadow, indistinguishable from any other, and all the bad things keep coming back and night’s black agents caress you on the brightest of days with cruel cloaks of roughly hewn and battered cloth, on every day, and you are walking to work, your head down, every step a slow-motion trudge through molasses, there’s barely anything but body memory to keep you moving, and you think to yourself, “This is not normal behaviour”.

If you are always looking at the ground, how can you see where it is you are supposed to be going?

…..

High school.

They’re kicking your chair again from behind. Every day, something.

Twenty minutes of it, if you had a gun, you’d turn around in your chair and shoot them both point blank in the face, thinking of nothing, no consequence other than “it would be quiet”.

You stand up and leave the room.

Yes, there is the teacher. You don’t care. You need to go and you do, and she begins, “What … ?”, but you’re out before she can finish.

Your refuge is the school library. You run. It’s oh so quiet there.

Last time you picked a book, “Welcome to the Monkeyhouse” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an author you’d not read or even heard of before. You liked the title. It seemed apt.

This time, you pick a book, “Advertisements for Myself” by Norman Mailer, another thing that is new to you, and you lose yourself.

You will be in this place for another three years. One thousand and ninety five days.

You do not want to be in this place.

You want to die.

It would be quiet there.

…..

They dangled you over a second storey school balcony once, about three of them, holding you by the wrists.

You looked down. That fear of heights thing you’ve had all these years, you think?

Afterwards, you wished they had let you go.

There would be the fall. Yes.

But then there would be the peace.

…..

Wandering through a bookshop, shelf upon shelf of “self-help” books, “Conquer This”, “Unlock Something”, “Embrace this Blah!”, they make you grimace, these stinking, stupid things.

“Because it’s all about you, isn’t it?”, you think, “Everything revolves around you, you’re the centre of the fucking universe, everyone is the centre of the fucking universe now, aren’t they? A world of potential reality television stars. Me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, I, I, I, I … Just FUCK OFF!”

Anything but that. That it be about you.

You’re not here anymore.

You haven’t been here for years. That thing in the mirror is not you. Your eyes dart around the edge of your reflection, not long enough to see who or what it is you have become, just long enough to shave, to maintain the appearance of a person living in the world, to carry on with the charade.

You turn your back on the mirror to brush your teeth.

“This is not normal behaviour”, you think.

But it’s all you have.

…..

Thirteen or fourteen years ago, in another galaxy far, far away, a young woman walks into my office and begins to tell me things.

She tells me about the way they speak to her. She tells me about the snide remarks, the comments, the subtle and not-so-subtle putdowns and slights. She tells me about the abuse, every day, something, the way she looks, the way she dresses, her life, her boyfriend, her taste in this thing and in that, it’s constant, it never lets up, and as she speaks, her face flushes and her lips tremble and her eyes dart about frantically, and then there is a sound, a hacking inhalation of a sob, and then it comes.

She crumples to the floor in a crouching position, tears pouring from her eyes, her arms hold herself and she cries out, “BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’VE DONE! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!”, and I sit, stunned into silence, not moving, not knowing what to do, clueless for what seems long, long minutes, but is surely only seconds.

She’s done nothing. I know that.

Another young woman passes the office. She’s had this, too. She comes in, puts her arm around the shoulder of this girl and says, “I know. I know. Shhh … Shhhhhhh … Come on, now”, and they both leave the office together, they leave the building, they go outside. Where there is quiet.

This other young woman, she has recently made the grievous misjudgement of telling one of her so-called “workmates” that she had been raped by her cousin some years back, a thing you would hope to tell a person in confidence, a thing that, were you to tell a person, you would think that they would listen and that they would care.

Not here.

They just laughed at her. Sniggers and whispers.

“I’ve really got to get out of this fucking place”, I think.

I do. Eventually. I had to wait about 18 months. I wanted the long service payout.

It wasn’t worth it.

…..

Let me tell you something …

These are not my words. I have paraphrased those of another man …

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HAVE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY ONE HUNDRED TRILLION CELLS THAT COMPRISE MY BODY. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH SINGLE NUCLEUS OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CELLS IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.”

Was that what you wanted?

FUCK. YOU.

That’s all you get.

…..

YOU.

Bully.

This is for you.

You are an emotionally underdeveloped, intellectually lightweight lump of barely human filth who should’ve been scraped, bagged and flushed into the toilet the moment the sperm met the egg in the womb of whatever five buck cum-soaked whore spat you out and dragged you up.

May your first born never draw a breath.

I no more want to understand why you are the person you are or how you became that person than I would want to know why a child pornographer does what it does.

FUCK. YOU.

I want nothing from you.

But to see you dead in a

FUCKING

DITCH.

Was that what you wanted?

That’s all you get.

…..

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the toxicity of the environment you found yourself in begins to seep into your psyche, gradually disappearing strips of self-worth and regard, and your sense of self begins to shatter like a burst water balloon in slow-motion. “What the fuck have I done?”, you ask yourself and there is no answer to that. This is how it works here.

“Can’t you see what this job is doing to you?”, a friend asks you one night as, yet again, you’ve managed to fly into another incoherent, half-drunk rant about some thing or another, and you just sit on the floor staring at nothing and saying nothing because yes, you know what it’s doing, you know full well, but it’s not long away now, just another short year before you can grab what money is owed to you and run.

They keep dishing it out and you begin dishing it back, every word a bullet, lashing out at everything and everyone in such a manner that you shock yourself with the ferocity of your own bile and how base you can become when pushed to it, but to no end as they appear to enjoy this, that you have finally buckled under and begun to play this game, this stupid, stupid game and you begin to loathe yourself for it.

“I am not this person”, you think. “This is not me.”

It took years. The persistent, constant stream of verbal abuse, intimidation, veiled threats and derogatory slights, all of it designed to break you down and tear you apart and keep you in a place from which you would never be allowed to escape. You recall how, when you finally got your ten years and you told them to shove their miserable job and their miserable selves and their miserable industry up their collective miserable arses, you were finished with it all, that the General Manager wandered into your office half-tanked after a liquid lunch and plopped himself into the chair opposite yours and said to you, “So you think you’re fucking leaving do you? I’ll tell you one thing, you bald-headed cunt, if you go through with this, you’ll never work again, I’ll make fucking sure of that mate, I’ll make fucking sure life will be difficult for you, mark my fucking words”, and you flew off the deep end, the top of your voice, using language that would melt the head of a sailor.

The hundreds and hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime over all those years, the work you took on that was never supposed to be your work in the first place that one person who knew about such things told you would’ve been worth about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and after all this and all this time, the best you get is a threat to fuck up the rest of your working life, and when you do get out, it’s with a long service payout and a two hundred and fifty dollar gift voucher.

You bought yourself a new clothes iron and a portable CD player.

One thing crowds in upon another, all of this and more, that thing you wanted so badly that slipped away, and that other thing you wanted so badly for so long and wound up getting, and then it all fell apart, and then you fell apart and then you simply stopped caring.

You lose yourself in drugs and alcohol.

Time passes.

And then the drugs and alcohol lose you.

And time passes.

You see your reflection in a mirror and it puzzles you, because this is not a person you recognise.

You’ve finally disappeared.

…..

You’re coughing, hacking and dry-retching into a towel on your lap because you drank yourself into a coma again and forgot to eat third night in a row. Sweat streams down your face, tears, you shake and sputter and sink back into the couch exhausted, bent so far out of shape you can barely lift a glass of water.

An hour passes. Two. There’ll be no work today.

You just sit, your mind a blank, struggling to find a thought to hang onto, and time just slips away.

“This is not normal behaviour,” you think.

You go to the bathroom to rinse your mouth and catch yourself in the mirror and think, “You worthless sack of stupid shit”, and you turn around and go back to the living room and another hour passes and you realise that this time must now come to an end.

You pick up your phone, select a number and press “call”.

“****** Medical Centre”, is the reply.

“Yes. My name is Ross Sharp. I need to sort some things. I need to make an appointment.”

This foodstuff was gifted to a grateful populace by the hard-workin’ and no doubt God-fearin’ folk of the K.F. of C, a fowl cookin’ establishment that was founded by a kindly old white-haired Colonel many years ago which went on to find fame and fortune throughout the entire world on account of a secret cookin’ recipe that involved a bunch of fancy spices and herbs and stuff, and this new foodstuff was called a “Double Down”.

This new foodstuff has now been introduced to the peckish populace that is Australia, all of whom are currently hotfootin’ their way to the nearest K.F. of C. to partake of its pickin’s.

It is known here as a “Double” and comprises two chicken fillets that have been dipped in some shit and deep fried and then used to sandwich a few strips of bacon and some cheese and an ejaculation of sauce.

It’s served in a cardboard holder, so you can keep your fingers from gettin’ greasy so as to keep your shirt and pants clean.

Now, I’d no sooner eat one of these unappetising looking things than I’d chew on my left testicle, but Lord Almighty, the arrival of this breadless assemblage of fowl, pig and cheddar has certainly upset some folk.

Why, you make a meal out of just one of these things it seems, your arteries will go harder than a porn star’s favourite tool of trade after forty tabs of Viagra, your heart will clog up like a sub-continental hostel toilet, and great big glistening globules of undigested fat will coagulate into an oily, rancid mass of greasy evil that will slowly ooze its way through your intestine into your bowel and make your farts smell like dead people and the next time you shit, your buttocks will be propelled from the seat with such a  force that you’ll hit your head on the bathroom ceiling, crack your skull and fall to the floor dead, and the sewers of a city will be stuffed for months ever after.

Bugger your wars, your droughts, your famines, floods, your natural and unnatural disasters, your man-made horrors, rape, pillage, bugger all that.

Because it’s two slabs of fried chicken will kill us all.

You have been warned.

How is it legal? My young family lives in an inner-city area in an apartment with a balcony. We recently celebrated the birth of our daughter who was welcomed home by our one-year-old son.

Not long after we got home, our upstairs neighbours lit up a cigarette on their balcony and the smoke from their cigarette drifted in through all of our bedroom windows and open balcony doors.

It frustrates me that smoking, a known health hazard is allowed in high density areas. This is particularly so when the smoker exits their apartment because they don’t want the toxic smoke to damage their property and smoke on their balcony only to have their smoke enter ours.

Over these hot summer days I’ve been opening all the windows in the hope that a cool breeze will blow through – instead every 1.5 hours we all passively smoke a cigarette, including my daughter who isn’t yet one month old.

With young children, passive smoking is linked to childhood illnesses including leukaemia and cot death. How is it possible that blowing toxic smoke in through a neighbour’s apartment is legal?

Lara Adams Chippendale

A most touching tale of family, an inspiring celebration of newborn life, and a heartfelt request for consideration and civility amidst the crowded chaos of contemporary urban life.

But, unless Ms. Adams’ upstairs neighbour is hanging upside-down over their balcony railing whilst having a puff, it behoves me to point out to the dear lady that their smoke will drift UP.

You silly, twitching little thrushbucket.

For what seems to me to be about an hour, one of these sadists will scrape, prod, push, scrape, scrape, prod, push and scrape about in my cakehole with their David Cronenberg inspired instruments of oral torture until my toes threaten to dislocate themselves from my feet and my spine contorts and arches in a fashion that would be quite impressive if I were a trapeze artist with Circus Oz.

And when this treatment is ended, I stagger, sweat soaked, from Ms. Mengele’s horizontal chair of terror to the front desk of this little shop of horrors to pay my debt, to pay what I owe for the privilege of having suffered so.

“That will be $200.00 today, Mr. Sharp”.

“Eftpos out of cheque, thanks”, I reply as I hand over my card, and then I glance at the time and realise that I have not been there for much longer than twenty minutes.

That’s ten bucks a minute.

Fuck me dead, he thinks to himself in quiet awe and dazed amazement.

A couple years ago, I went to a dentist who informed me that he needed to do a little work on a tooth.

“When did you have the root canal work on this done?” he inquired.

“Four, five years ago”, I replied.

“They didn’t do a particularly good job”, he said, “We’ll need to fix this up”.

“That ‘not particularly good job’ cost me a thousand bucks” I said.

“Yes, root canal isn’t cheap”, he replied with a nice smile, whilst I fought back the impulse to slap him upside his grinning head for stating the very fucking obvious.

And then he stuck me with some anaesthetic and proceeded to drill and file, drill and file, stuff some shit in the tooth and drill and file some more, after which I staggered from his very tastefully decorated little chamber of pain to the front desk to pay my debt, to pay the debt I owed for having been drilled and filed so.

“That will be $853.00 today, Mr. Sharp”.

“I see. I guess that will have to be credit today, thanks”, I replied, as I handed over my Mastercard, bidding farewell for now to my desire for a few new sticks of furniture for the flat.

“And did everything go well today, Mr. Sharp?”

“One fucking tooth has just cost me in the vicinity of two fucking grand, you braindead fucking bint, and the mood I’m in right now, I could stab you through the fucking forehead with a pair of fucking scissors, understand?” I replied.

…

…

No, I didn’t. I didn’t say that.

Instead, I said something like, “Yes. Fine, thank you”, and wobbled off into the street to make my way back to work.

I had a toothache just recently that put me in the mood to kill a blind man’s guide dog.

I wouldn’t kill a blind man’s guide dog, but you know what I mean.

It’s gone away for now, but I suspect it will return, and, once more, I shall have to toddle off to have Mr. Olivier have a poke at it and make me scream. And then I shall pay for it, and scream some more.

I’ve never quite been able to understand why those ailments that afflict us above our shoulders are deemed to be things that our national health care system should exclude.

Yes, yes, I do know that the Australian Dental Association lobbied vigorously for dental care to be excluded upon the initial introduction of Medicare, lest they be robbed of their inalienable birthright to fourteen Volvos and a Mediterranean-styled manse nestled midst the sweet, perfumed greenery of Baulkham Hills, complete with spas in all four bathrooms and a dedicated home theatre room where their private school educated kiddies, Chip and Donna-May, can retreat after a hard day’s backgammon tournament to relax with some gourmet cornchips and dip to watch the very latest in torture porn horror, I do realise this.

And they have lobbied vigorously for its exclusion ever since, and whenever such a concept like a national dental health care scheme is raised, up they pop to clatter their shiny white and perfect little choppers at the rest of us, telling us all how very, very ghastly such an idea is, and how “people who could now access dental care would continue to do so, and those who could not access care previously will be given second-class care”.

Which makes fuck all sense to me, to be perfectly frank.

I’ve had second-class dental health care from at least three dentists I can think of over the course of my life, but I’ve always paid first-class rates for it. One guy, I had to take out a loan to pay for the work he did, and then another guy looked at the work that guy had done, and said, “That work could’ve been done a whole lot better, would you like to have me do it again?” and, as sure as there’s shit on the sheets in a nursing home, up came that whole wanting to kill a blind man’s guide dog thing again.

The Australian Greens have a policy for dental health care to be bought under the umbrella of Medicare, but they don’t seem to talk about it much. Or if they do, the media don’t pay much attention to it. Which wouldn’t be terribly surprising, I suppose, given that most of the Australian mainstream media think the Greens are a bunch of evil, human-hating Nazis who’d like us all to live under environmentally friendly lean-to’s in a paddock somewhere and send our old folks off to death camps the minute they forget where they put the keys to the car.

Most of the mainstream Australian media is controlled by this old bloke who lives in the United States and goes by the name of Rupert, did you know that?

Rupert would like to own some more of it, too. Poor old Rupert, he was desperate for his media empire to penetrate the Chinese market some time back and he put a lot of effort into it too, but all he seemed to get out of it for his troubles was a wife.

Silly old bugger.

…

I’m sorry, I do digress.

I’d like The Greens to talk up their policy on dental health care a little more, make it more of a priority, put a bit of work into it, get it out there and into people’s minds as something that needs to be done, something that makes a whole lot of very good sense. It seems to me it’s a good idea for a government to attend to the healthcare requirements of the populace over which they govern, whether it’s general healthcare, mental health or dental.

You see, the healthier a person is, the more able they are to work, and these days, our governments keep saying that they would like us to work for as long as we possibly can, up to about the time we’re ready to pop our clogs so they don’t have to pay anyone an aged pension, say to about 96 years old.

…

I’m not working until I’m 96 years old.

Get fucked.

But I’d much rather pay a little extra tax for something like a really good, really comprehensive healthcare scheme that covers all the necessities, the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle (what the fuck is a kaboodle?), than pay tax to a government who then go and pay some boofhead a wad of cash simply because they had a root and made a baby or they want to buy a fucking house.

Because that just shits me, that type of thing. It shits me to fucking tears.

That’s the type of stupid shit that’s almost enough to make a man want to go out and kill a blind man’s guide dog.

‘specially if he’s got a toothache.

A young woman (20’s/30’s) sits on a sofa looking more than a little irritably “meh”. Her partner walks into view behind the sofa, gives her a quick kiss, and exits the living room saying to the woman, “Won’t be long” …

A supermarket at night.

The man enters the supermarket, walks through a couple of aisles and picks up some milk, some bread and some cheese, and a small packet of tampons. He goes up to the cash register at the counter and the female attendant throws him a look of sympathy, as if to say, “Oh, poor man. With a packet of tampons. How embarrassment.”

To which the man responds, “What? It’s a packet of tampons. I have a girlfriend. I’m not an idiot”, finalises the transaction, leaves the store and returns home, putting the milk, bread and cheese in the refrigerator and handing the pack of tampons to his girlfriend who says, simply, “Thanks.”

Flash brand of product, complete with legend “It’s just a tampon. We’re all a bit over it.”

It is, to put it simply, an idiotic position, and a ridiculous decision to subject these two young folk to, but then, if the past is another country, that country is most definitely Queensland on this day.

Before Groupthink began, I posted the following on my own blog in September 2009, and I can think of nothing further to add on this matter, so I’m reposting it here …

NO REGRETS

I could’ve been a father.

I was 20, the girl was 22, she had a two and a half year old kid from a previous relationship, was on the pill, but I still managed to knock her up regardless.

I didn’t smoke back then, didn’t drink much, no drugs, so I must’ve been a potent little fucker. Turned out she needed a higher dosage of baby blockers to squash my tadpoles so she got those and terminated the pregnancy about a week after she found out.

And that was that.

I got no regrets. I had nothing to say in the matter. Not a word. Decision was the girl’s.

We’d only been going out a few months and I reckon both us felt that what we had was not one of those goo-eyed romances that would span the ages leaving a legend of love in its wake to inspire future generations and give rise to multi-volume memoirs and a series of film adaptations. I don’t think she felt that. This girl knew a few things about life that I didn’t.

And she did not to want to have another baby.

Okay.

“I’ll go with you. To the clinic.”

“No, it’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll pick you up then. After.”

“No. I’ll see you at home tonight.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Not something she was looking forward to. Obviously. Not really something she wanted to talk about, either. After it was done, she came home, hurt, vulnerable, shaken up.

Invaded.

Not a thing that had been done with the callous, carefree attitude of some thick, unfeeling bint, like the removal of a wart or a mole. At least, according to some.

She did not want to have another baby.

She’d been raped by her stepfather when she was twelve years old, and not long after, she told her mum about it who promptly slapped her over the face, called her a lying slut and threw her and her sister out of the house, don’t come back, cunts. Her sister had been raped too. By the same. She was older by a few years.

They went down southern New South Wales, made friends with a few people, shared a big old house, and she wound up hooking into smack for a couple of years, and at 19 she had a boyfriend and a baby on the way. When she found out she was pregnant, she swung off the drugs and told the boyfriend to take a long hike in the woods when he began beating on her, culminating in him pushing her out of a moving car at 40 miles per hour when she was seven months pregnant.

Nice guy.

She did not want to have another baby.

I guess some of that, maybe, some of that, might be down to a person not wanting to have her entire life up to that point and for God only knows how much longer to be solely defined by the fucks she’d been subject to and their consequences.

You think?

We broke up a few months later. And not because of that. As one of her friends told me at the time, this girl was no waltzing-down-the-aisle, white frock and confetti type looking for some Prince Sappy Charming to settle her down and whisk her off to White Picket Fenceland. She weren’t no common idiot slut either, not one of those gravel-voiced, inarticulate, barely literate lard-lumps with faces like a punnet of pummeled strawberries from Ipswich or similar that screech their way through items on those jokes that pass for “current affairs” television on free-to-air.

She read books, liked movies, listened to good music (none of this Cold Chisel & Angels crap that was around at the time), spoke well, was attractive and she loved the son she already had. Loved him a lot.

But, at only 22 years of age, one was enough.

She did not want to have another baby.

After so much shit, what she’d been through up to that point, maybe she wanted to own her life some, not have it owned by anyone else. Own her life, and get down to living it well while she still could. To her own rules, to her own priorities, to set some goals and reach them instead of being smacked down time and time again to some banal life of zombie domesticity in service to a brood of young ones swinging off her teats forever and a day, screeching and howling and asking for stuff she couldn’t afford to provide, and some so-called “man of the house” yelling for his fucking dinner and some clean socks for work tomorrow.

Fair enough, too.

But up here in Brisbane? Up here in Beantown, Queensland Australia, it’s 1959 all over again, one-tooth crotch-fiddlin’ yokels and fuckwit hayseeds hollering at a young woman and a young man because they too want to own a little of their lives first and figure a few things out about them before they settle down to making those “big” decisions, those big decisions that may go right, that may go wrong, but they’d like to make them for themselves and that’s what they did.

Girl took a pill, that’s all. Just fine her some money for bringing it in if you’re so fucking desperate to satisfy the requirements of your shitty “law” and leave it alone.

But, no. Instead, take a chunk of their young lives, take quite a chunk of it away from them, lock ‘em up and teach ‘em a thing or two about the so-called “sanctity of life”, so say the Peanuts and Pimps of Power and Press.

Put ‘em on show, put on ‘em display, make an example of ‘em, here be the self-anointed judges and juries of the great unwashed from this city of flyblown halfwits blowing anonymous brainfarts on lame-arse blogs about how this young couple shoulda done this and should not have done that, should’ve done what they were told by people they didn’t even know existed ‘til now. Sanctimonious, self-serving, self-righteous cheese-faced fuckers preaching high and mighty sermons from their over-stuffed sofas about the fucking “sanctity of life”?

Sanctity of life, my hairy arse. That “Thou shalt not kill” thing’s been working well the last few centuries, you think?

Fuck your stinkin’ law and shove your stinkin’ badges.

Listen to this cockhead, some “who the fuck?” politician from South Australia …

“A quick flick through some of the side effects of RU-486 makes for sober reading. These range from stomach cramps, through nausea, vomiting to ectopic pregnancies and severe internal bleeding.” 

Uh-huh …

… Now, this other girl I knew, years later, she wasn’t too keen on the contraceptive pill (or rubbers either, said they felt all wrong, and I was very much in agreement with that point of view, let me tell you ) so we went about it another way. Rhythms and such.

We knew it was a risk. We took it.

This girl was raised a Catholic, and even though she didn’t practice except for Christmas Mass, she told me when we started going out that she didn’t think she could ever go through an abortion if she got pregnant.

Okay.

There’s no tattoo on your arse saying “Property of” and there’s none on mine either. So we went on like that for a time, but after a while she got sick of the way we were going about things, and thought the pill might simplify the business.

Few days later, she complained of feeling lethargic, bloated, fuzzy-headed and generally fucked up, so I sat down and looked at that sheet of paper in the packet of pills that list the contra-indications and possible side-effects …

“Jesus Christ!”, I said, “I wouldn’t take this shit, why should you?” 

And that was the end of that.

She never got pregnant. Even though we were at it like bloody rabbits most of the time.

And if things had come to pass (so to speak) that she had?

I would’ve shat myself and spent the next nine months in a state of frenzied anxiety, but there’s no way I would’ve even dared suggest she do something with her body that she did not want to do.

Like I said, no “Property of” tattoo.

Here’s whatshisname again …

“I am not trying to tell women what to do with their bodies. I am asking women not to kill another human being and I am asking you as a reader to think about when human life actually starts.”

Yeah … and I’m not a racist, but them foreign niggers and towelheads are gettin’ to be a fuckin’ worry, you think?

Fuck off.

Starts out, seems he wants to talk about the side-effects of this drug, ends up just another in a long line of predictable anti-choice bollocks about the evil, murderin’ ways of loose and wicked women.

(Man was once a “rouseabout”. The fuck is a “rouseabout”? What you rousin’ there, boy? You best leave that thing alone yo, lest it haul up and bite you on the ass, you feel me?)

No body is property.

Not yours. No one else’s.

Tegan Leach’s body belongs to her.

Get the fuck away from it and leave the girl be, goddammit.

UPDATE: Please add your name to the GetUp campaign.

Mabs: “Oh, the poor child …”

Gwen: “Yeesssss, oh, and I’ve tried to tell her …”

Mabs: “Oh, yes.”

Gwen: “Yes, I have, I’ve tried, but they don’t listen today, do they, the young ones?”

Mabs: “Nooooooo, they’re all with their computers, and the headphones …”

Gwen: “Yes, their computers, those websites and things …”

Mabs: “I don’t know what they see in all that, really, it’s all a waste of time, you ask me …”

Gwen: ” … full of child stenography, I’ve heard, who’d want that? What’s wrong with a good book? … But I told her, I said, I fed you that way, and if I could do – I mean, there’s nothing wrong with …”

Mabs: “Yes, I know, and you can see it in him already, can’t you?”

Gwen: “You don’t know what’s in it, the formula, do you? It could be from China, and you know what they’re like”.

Mabs: “Oh, yes“.

Gwen: “He could grow up to be a serial killer, I’ve heard it can make them go a bit batty.”

Mabs: “And you can see it in him, can’t you?”

Gwen: “Oh, yes, yes, I certainly can.”

Mabs: “Yes, you can.”

Gwen: “ …”

Mabs: “ …”

Gwen: “We’ll all be murdered in our beds …”

Mabs: “I wouldn’t be the least surprised.”

Gwen: “Mark my words.”

When God came back to work on Monday, He had a squizz at how Adam was getting on and He realised that Adam was a bit out of sorts, so He thought, “I will make Adam a friend”.

So He gave Adam some pills to put him to sleep and then He ripped out one of Adam’s ribs and made a woman out of it, which is a really neat trick when you think on it.

I tried to make a woman out of a rib once and all I wound up with was Calista Flockhart.

Anyway, when Adam woke up, He looked at this woman God had made whose name was Eve and Adam got a stiffy. Adam stuck his stiffy into Eve’s front hole and wiggled it about some and that felt really good and Eve thought it felt really good too and made some moaning sounds, but God got pissed about that and yelled out to Eve, “Oi you, ya dumb bint, you’re not supposed to enjoy this y’know, you’re a fucking rib, just lay there and shut the fuck up”.

So that’s what she learnt to do, just shut the fuck up and let Adam poke her in whatever hole he wanted to and whenever he wanted to, a dozen times a day if he felt like it, and that was a fine and dandy tradition simply because it was the natural order of things as God had intended it.

You see, if you’re a woman, that means you’re a bloke’s rib, so you belong to the bloke you came from, understand?

And if a bloke wants to spray his jism up your pink bit and give you a baby, that’s his natural right because you belong to him and you should do what you’re fucking told and give him a baby because that’s the way God figured it should be.

But about 50 years ago, a bunch of mad scientists got together and, because they all hated babies, they thought it’d be a hoot if they could figure out a way to brainwash women into hating babies too, and that’s because scientists hate God and they hate the natural order of things.

That’s because science is so gay. And gay is really bad, because gay jism goes into the wrong hole and just sort of sits there and dribbles back out in a manky puddle on the floor and makes the carpet go all crusty instead of making a baby which is what jism is supposed to do.

Anyway, the mad scientists started putting fluoride into the drinking water which changes the chemical balance in women’s brains because women are weaker in the head than blokes are and easily susceptible to thought and mind control. And once all the women were under their control and the women had convinced themselves they hated babies too, the mad scientists gave them all a really evil pill which would kill the babies and they said to them, “Now you don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to, no matter how many times a bloke shoots you full of jism”.

Now, because their brains were being remote-controlled by the mad scientists, the women thought this was a great idea and they all went out into the streets to celebrate and kick decent God fearing men in the testicles with steel-toed boots and bang them over the head with saucepans and then the crazy women took off their bras and burnt them and said, “Now we can fuck whoever we want and enjoy it without having to have a baby” and they wound up hanging around rock ‘n’ roll musicians and dancing and wearing skimpy clothes and causing earthquakes.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, back in 1973, the United States Supreme Court (which had been infiltrated by mad scientists by that time, mad scientists were everywhere like a plague, the cunts) decided that, if a woman got knocked up, it was a woman’s right to rip her baby from her womb and kill it and stomp on it and tear its head off and flush it down the toilet into the sewer where mutant albino alligators would eat the pieces.

That’s why society’s so fucked up today and why crazy people wearing towels on their heads fly planes into buildings.

It’s because all these women forgot they were just ribs and started thinking that the part was bigger than the whole, when it’s the whole that’s bigger than the part and the whole is the man and the part is the woman and the part is the property of the man it came from.

I MEAN, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN SEE THAT?!!!!!? ISN’T IT BLINDINGLY BLOODY OBVIOUS?!!!!!?

Anyway, these murdering bitches spent years and years and years and years ripping their kids from their wombs and using the skin from the bodies to make shoes and the little wispy hairs to make change purses and the bones to make necklaces and they kept tearing the heads off the bodies and using the guts to string tennis racquets and they kept flushing the pieces into the sewers and the mutant albino alligators got so big they couldn’t fit in the sewers anymore so they all died of asphyxiation and the sewers got so blocked up everybody’s toilets overflowed which was what really caused the floods in New Orleans, it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina, that was just a really heavy breeze, it’s just that the US Federal Government lied to everyone because they thought panic would break out if people thought there were mutant albino alligators who ate babies in the plumbing.

Now when all this womb murdering evil shit started becoming the norm, some namby-pamby leftist baby killers invented this myth about “rape” when there’s really no such thing as rape and never has been, it’s just that a whole bunch of men are, out of the goodness of their hearts and in the name of righteous Christian charity, simply trying to help women fulfill their natural potential, their true worth, by having babies and finding their place back into the natural order of things as God intended it to be and back onto the path of salvation.

AND A-FUCKING-MEN FOR THAT, I SAY!

Because it’s about time that the true masters of this dominion reclaimed the day and reclaimed the night and reclaimed the right to rule over all those creatures who dwell upon this earth and assert their rightful place upon this earth just as God had intended.

So listen up, you murdering whores, because the tide is turning, the tide has turned, it turned today and it turned in that great state of Oklahoma in the United States when finally, good men, honest men, men of decency and compassion, men of humanity and humility before God finally stood up and said, “I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddammit, my life has VALUE!” and they stood up, they got out of their chairs and they stood up and they yelled, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE, THINGS HAVE GOT TO CHANGE!”

And change it did because men like Senator Todd Lamb and Senator Charles Palantine, righteous men like them looked into their hearts and into their souls and said “This has got to STOP! This has got to stop RIGHT NOW!” and if ever these men need a little help in their campaigns I’d be more than happy to go over there and volunteer to do whatever I thought I could do to help them in their noble cause!

So listen up, you fuckers, you screwheads, you whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal, here are men who stood up, here are men just like me who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, here are MEN who STOOD UP!

You’re gonna be fucked, ladies, you’re gonna be fucked to buggery from here on in because that’s what you were put upon this earth for, that’s your purpose on this planet, to be fucked and to make babies, and I don’t care if it’s your daddy or your grandpa or your brothers or a whole goddamn baseball team that does the fucking, you’re gonna be fucked just like God intended and you’re gonna make with the babies, don’t make no difference to me how it starts, does to some, but it don’t make no difference to me, because suddenly, now, there is a change.

‘Cause it’s just like the good Senator Lamb said, “This is a statement for the sanctity of human life”, that statement they made today over there in Oklahoma, and those babies you would’ve killed, those babies you would have flushed down those sewers without so much as a second thought, those babies you would have otherwise ripped out as if they were nothing more than a wart or a mole, those babies are gonna “grow up to be police officers and arrest bad people” or discover a cure for cancer someday, can’t you see that?

Your cunts belong to us, bitches.

We’re taking back ownership of our ribs and they ain’t a damn thing you can do about it, you sluts.

…

…

Have you ever seen what a 44 Magnum will do to a woman’s pussy? Now that you should see.