the killing fields

8:00. First call: the blood bank, the home of all sorts of Aussies. No Australians of foreign extraction—no Asians, no blackfellers—donate blood. I’m sure the Red Cross would welcome them. But giving blood is a peculiarly white Caucasian behaviour. I’m giving 902mgs of plasma.

9:40. Second call: Centrelink. They remove blood by other means. Their clientele are not exclusively white. The Asians in the waiting area with me are neat and clean, the Africans braided and colourful. The white Australians are something to behold.

Call me elitist, arrogant, whatever. I’m out of place here among the shaved heads, both male and female, bellies sagging over belts, tattoos, baseball caps, blonde tips, girls in tattered jeans, and squealing babies from dubious gene pools. Seated to my right this morning are two overweight mute lesbians with a squalling boy child. No doubt he has no other language.

Since my last resort to Centrelink’s support in 1999, they’ve tried to make their service customer-friendly. But every stratagem backfires because their heart isn’t really in it. And the heart is absent because governments make it impossible for Centrelink to have one. An icy undertone flows through the veins of every Centrelink document. Each is bloated with reminders to do certain things, or else. No uncertainties are possible.

Centrelink gets everything wrong. A customer liaison officer greets every person to add ‘a personal touch’ and direct customers to appropriate counters or waiting areas. But all this person does is slow the process. Queues back up and extend out the door. Better to take a number and a seat than shuffle along for 20 minutes to be directed to a chair one might have sat in from the off.

Centrelink offers online services—log in, fill out the requisite forms and all’s well. Nice theory, but they don’t quite trust you, so I still have to front in person each fortnight so they can verify my online form. The online service is just one more dehumanising process in the process.

And that’s Centrelink—process, process, process, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No real help is offered. Whether I sit opposite Angus, Lorae or Christine, they’re going through the motions. The job seeker process is a joke for professionals. It’s designed for pregnant 19 year-olds and obsolete boilermakers.

For all its efforts to present itself as something else, Centrelink remains the last refuge of the desperate, the dispirited, the downtrodden and depressed.

I don’t need them any more. 

Rock on.