This closing of the Centrelink office in Roma leaves thousands of people democratically stranded. Disenfranchised. From Dalby to Charleville no government office. No place where a person can go for information, to complain.. whatever. Same to the north, hundreds of kms to Emerald. Thats quite a swathe of Australia. Quite a swathe denied the right to a face to face confrontation with ‘the government’.
They dont do ‘face to face’ anymore the minister says and due to the fabulous advance of technology virtually no one uses it anymore. Virtually. So the minister says..

Hes a nitwit. I was there not so very long ago and the place was crawling with folk. Babies crying, kids running around, old people dying. Flu. Long ques.. highly uninformative staff. Standard stuff. At the very least these government shop fronts allow the poor people to think that the government is there to help them, even if it never feels that way. A ‘manned’ or ‘womanned’ government shop front keeps the people a little quieter many a little dumber, it pretends to treat with dignity, it pretends to listen.. to us the people. With this pretense we can at least deceive ourselves. If we have ‘manned & womanned’ government shop fronts then by the time the current generation grows up you will be able to man or woman them with ‘human headed’ computers. Perhaps by then those humans negligent enough to have to use Government Shop Fronts will have died out or been exterminated? Or is it euthanized? Or maybe a programme of outcomes produced through the assisted dying laws will have been put into effect – for our own good.. of course.

No this is serious. With a stroke of a pen some thoughtless human has removed the ability of a significant number of the Australian population to interact directly with the policies of his government. Representative? Sure it is.

“Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy & helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organisation, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual” – John Maynard Keynes.