When Leaders Don’t Lead, We Must Dismantle Things From Our Insides Out

We have a NSW Premier who thinks priests shouldn’t be mandatory reporters of sexual assault, and drops signing interpreters from health briefings on the double.

We have a PM who treats climate change as a joke, spend billions (trillions?) on nuclear submarines while making countless diplomatic bungles.

We are stopping manufacturing AZ well before the world’s poorer nations get their share, and have a government that finds allies in One Nation to block further investigations into donations made to a minister while he sues the ABC.

We have had the Minister for Education suggest that our kids need to learn whitewashed history rather than critical thinking skills so they’ll be willing to go to war, and Tasmanian teachers calling year 8 girls’ skirt length as “distracting”.

Unfortunately this list is not exhaustive. I feel utterly let down by our policy makers and “leaders” on so many fronts.

I see systems failing people left, right and centre and have the urge to sidestep as many of them as possible (homebirth, homestead, homeschool) but know that as we with privilege depart from certain spaces, we also leave the most vulnerable people with the dregs rather than actually fixing the root problems.

Yesterday I reached a critical point of “What to say, what to do, where to next?”

I refuse to see the end of lockdown as a return to “business as usual” when “as usual” was screwing the vast majority of people on this planet every single day.

I do not believe that this version of “freedom” is one we should shut up and be grateful for.

I reject the notion of “just the way things are”.

And I’m almost certain you feel the same.

Change is afoot, because it has to be.

Let’s disrupt, dismantle, from the inside out.

I know you’ve started - please, keep going.

There is no time to lose.

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[ID:  image of a turtle (ok, technically a terrapin) pulled into its shell. I spotted it on a walk a couple of days ago and felt it encapsulated how I was feeling perfectly.]