A crybully and an “independent” thinktank

You’ll have to excuse the following ramblings. With Twitter becoming an increasingly hostile place, I decided, aside from the other social platforms I use, it’d be a good time to actually utilise my domain for more longform poasts, and gosh I love to poast. This will be about what that damned site, and the people who’re on it, have done to me.

Let’s start at the earliest shall we, my Twitter presence wasn’t set, I wasn’t married to the platform, less than I was my gender identity at the time, but having been radicalised on the failures of the 2007-2013 Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments on climate, welfare justice and refugees, I was well positioned to be critical to anything of the right wing.

In talking about these failures of the so-called worker’s party of Australia, I picked up the ire of one Pascal Grosvenor, a father-of-two manchild who was angry about the Coalition government’s mauling of the National Broadband Network, and proceeded to use that support of the then Labor Party’s position to defend their worst policies, including the indefinite offshore detention of refugees.

Bearing in mind we’re years into this policy of dehumanisation, neglect and death of refugees at this time, we knew about the Nauru Files and the abuse of women and children on Nauru, we knew of Reza Berati’s murder on Manus Island, and as far as I was concerned, actively supporting the party that implemented the policies that led to this situation was implicit support of the acts themselves. The fact that these refugees were political prisoners, kept in horrid conditions, which led to several deaths; these were concentration camps, to the literal definition.

Pascal spent about a year inflicting this vicious type of rhetoric about my mental health, you would think someone profiled by the ABC as a target of cyberbullying would see the irony. Given I was already identifying as an anarchist, and at that point had already had an unpleasant experience with the police, I did the next best thing, I collected a bunch of his abuse and sent it to his partner for intervention with an explanatory letter.

Pascal had been identified on her practice’s website, and being a mental health professional, it should be well in her wheelhouse to tell her husband that what he was doing was not okay. It’s never acceptable to harass people over their mental health, much less if they’re marginalised.

He stopped, for a time. I stopped focusing on Pascal, and having come to know myself properly as a trans woman, and moved on with my life, commenting on politics and messing with my friends as was my wont. It was a pandemic, I finally was back on Centerlink, getting involved with the Australian Unemployed Workers Unions, and my life was stabilising.

I then became a target of someone pretending to be the AUWU’s Jeremy Poxon, given Pascal’s criticism of the union, and targeting of Jeremy in particular, I took it to be his doing. My name was in the account’s bio. My post on the matter was then fed to Ruby Hamad in some bizarre continuing attack on the AUWU, justifying her attack on myself because I had commented once on her trying to get in the way of a disabled, non-binary AUWU supporter and a free promotional Koala mattress. The white cis man making hay off our frustrations was supported and my comments defending my behaviour were deleted.

Through a mutual block, I later offered for the man to never utter another word about me, this obviously doesn’t hold, but peace was in progress for the time being. The welfare rate was slowly lowered back to normal, below-poverty levels, and mutual obligations were re-engaged, and I continued my medical and legal transition, only dealing with a completely different set of political misfits.

Then comes Per Capita.

Per Capita’s executive director is former Stephen Conroy staffer Emma Dawson. It had not escaped my notice that she often directed her ire at queer unemployment activists. She had definitely attacked notable bisexual Jeremy Poxon, as an AUWU official, how could she have not, as a target by others opposed to the AUWU, he was attractive, and his struggles with his mental health made him ideal to try grind down from a neoliberal and right wing perspective. Avery Howard also earned an attack, being trans non-binary, Avery was labelled by Emma Dawson as a “bong chugger,” a slur against those struggling on welfare akin to “dole bludger” in suggesting they would rather get high than be given a job. Avery worked at McDonalds at the time, and as a diabetic, required insulin, to my recollection.

As you can see, despite being the head of an “independent” thinktank, Emma Dawson was keen to attack her political enemies, whether they were unemployed activists struggling alone on the welfare system, or underemployed workers who had attached themselves to the AUWU and the Greens. The first screenshot two levels deep shows Emma Dawson specifically coming to the defence of the Labor Party, who was then in opposition and had shown some minor support for raising the rate, which they would later renege on almost completely (as of today, the JobSeeker rate is slated to increase by $2.85 a day from September, Labor have been in power for over a year now).

Per Capita’s position was well below the Henderson Poverty Line and largely mirrored the position of ACOSS, another group that also talks over and displaces the lived experiences of unemployed people in Australia.

As a queer person quite critical of Labor, Emma Dawson soon decided to set her sights on me. As there was a royal commission into the robodebt scandal, a an automated data matching system set up by Labor in 2011 to “claw back millions of dollars from welfare recipients”. I was a victim of robodebt, and the debt could not have come at a worse time for me, as my marriage was failing, I was stuck in the family court with my brothers against our own mother, our dad having passed in late 2016, and I had been pushed to the edge. I detailed my frustrations on ABC News 24 and later in a Radio National Drive segment.

Little did I know, Emma Dawson had taken notes on these pieces, and rather than using my experiences for advocacy, harvested them for hurtful attacks against me. I was not aware she had even paid attention until I called her on her disgusting classism while joking with a self-described “social democrat” about means testing people into dependency, with more slurs about drug use.

I have access to more or less the entire discussion, for lack of a better word, most of it was unnecessary sniping, her using her then disabled husband and myself using her past dismissive comments about cuts to the NDIS. It was not pretty, but to post them, I would actually have to work to piece this unglorified shitshow together, regardless, she played her biggest attacks against me early, and they really only exposed her own prejudices against me. A “highly qualified IT worker” who’s never worked a day in IT in her life, amazing. But I digress.

Following this, I made a complaint to Per Capita about her behaviour, not knowing of course, all emails to their email addresses go directly to Emma, and as if there was no policy and procedure manual at all, she very quickly mishandled the complaint, which was followed up by threats.

A statement from the Per Capita board soon followed, effectively endorsing her abuse of an unemployed, disabled, trans woman and that as her workplace, tweeting at her disagreement with her politics was harassment.

And then she falsely accused me of physically stalking her and making sexual threats against her child.

This culminated in Emma Dawson’s “social democrat” friend misgendering me, and Emma Dawson justifying it, literally confirming it, that she thinks it’s okay to dehumanise myself.

These claims were repeated by Per Capita board member Nareen Young. Now, Nareen has long been an enemy of anything more progressive than herself, regularly a critic of the Australian Greens and the AUWU.

One thing happening behind the scenes here, which I had no understanding of until it leaked, was that Emma Dawson was acting out while her husband was dying of sepsis, having already lost a leg, hence the one-off NDIS support they received. This brings us full circle, as Pascal makes another appearance. Which Nareen uses to abuse.

The chain of information as I understand it, comprises entirely of people who in fact not part of the AUWU, but are people actively hateful of the AUWU and its leadership. In fact, I believe Nareen to have been the blabber to begin with.

In any case, it was around this entire sequence of events Nareen Young began publicly soliciting a doxx of AUWU leadership (as she understood it, again I am not leadership, just a volunteer), posting scraps of it online as she received it.

I had posted my own largely non-private education history, and given it would not help spread their narrative that two current heads of the AUWU were rich, ruling class, private school boys, it was entirely ignored. Since the only thing close to a private school I attended was the Port Community School for troubled teens, which I was barely at a year before dropping out the moment I legally could.

Dee Madigan, who was briefly noted in the screenshot above, had of course contributed her own commentary about Dan Levy’s past.

Guess where this culminates? If you guessed a hit job against myself and several high level members of the AUWU in the right wing press, you guessed right!

It started with several Per Capita members twisting my response to news of a Centrelink staffer being stabbed by a known violent client. I explicitly blamed the Albanese Labor government for continuing the policy of setting Centrelink staff against unemployed people with punitive mutual obligations and an uncaring and exploitative Job Services model. Structurally, a public servant working for Centrelink has much more power to do violence against the unemployed, until a weapon was brought into the equation. Regardless, they had their way with my words, while I was blocked from responding thanks to “racist white trash” being considered something too violent for Elon Musk’s bird site.

Ironically, while this was all going on, I had actually progressed in a job opportunity, and finding out I had featured on Ben Fordham’s 2GB radio show and had my personal information strewn across the fascist du jour news site Daily Mail. Daily Mail would later do another article mentioning me, and I would eventually learn that News.com.au had also contributed to this hitjob. They would also use Nareen Young and Dee Madigan’s doxx of Dan Levy and Jeremy Poxon.

Articles archived:
https://archive.md/t3Hch Daily Mail 29/05/2023
https://archive.md/p6CvG News.com.au 26/05/2023
http://archive.today/dZHY2 Daily Mail 26/05/2023

So that’s where we are today, Per Capita board members (Tim Lyons is only a research fellow of Per Capita) actively feeding media hitjobs against vulnerable unemployed people and unemployed worker movements, all for valid criticisms of the Australian Labor Party, which has proven since its election that it is not interested in recognising the dignity of unemployed people, but still forces us to jump through hoops to access a below-poverty payment.

I’m unsure why they insist on trying to make me unemployable, but I assure them, every moment that could be spent idle, will happily be spent railing against the neoliberal Labor Party, which binds the hands of workers, and sells them out to corporate interests through scams like superannuation and the Fair Work Commission.

Update (14/05/2024): A lot has been happening in the Per Capita cinematic universe over the last few months. Ms Dawson, because I was posting her own tweets in Per Capita’s replies, sought out an intervention order against me. Not the other various legal and pseudo-legal threats like the Australian Signals Directorate mentioned in the emails quoted above. Suddenly, “not paying any attention to me at all” sometime whereabouts in late 2022 became that I was a full-on stalker, and that despite that in August 2023 Ms Dawson disclosed by way of further email threat to an email she should never had access to if not for intercepting my complaint to the Per Capita board, had completely vacated Twitter, after deleting her account defending the now Holocaust-denying J.K. Rowling. I had somehow been escalating my behaviours. As if we need a reason to post political critique in the form of embarrassingly neoliberal and personal attacks of someone in a position who should know better, having been working in the “inequality” space, filled with vulnerable and marginalised subjects.

How am I a stalker, you may ask? Why, because I ended up outside what I thought was Per Capita’s office near Southern Cross station one fateful day on October 6, 2022, took a photo, and joked about being hate-crimed by someone who is, openly, politically transphobic, and was already hostile towards me publicly previous to this date.

What didn’t actually occur to me until I was sitting on a Webex session in court, finally facing my accuser, was that this wasn’t even Per Capita’s office. Like another political entity who expresses transphobia, The Age doesn’t even occupy this office, something Twitter randoms were happy to remind me after I posted it.

That’s right, I didn’t even register that the fact the Per Capita logo colours had changed probably signalled that it was probably a change of direction for the neoliberal thinktank, as good friend Strewth noted, were founded by Will Marshall, founder of “Committee for Liberation of Iraq”, an org designed to build support for the 2003 invasion… In any case, I don’t know when they actually moved, I probably agreed not to check, but the fact Per Capita is actually based in North Melbourne and not just a stone’s throw from Southern Cross station, as is probably easily confirmable by a quick search on Google Maps would probably be a great counter as not even being a capable stalker, let alone a relentless one.

Speaking of that trip, when I arrived, I joked with a comrade about the intended length of my stay, which only turned out to be 2 weeks, but I packed it with meeting friends and looking after my charge.

Now, some free legal advice from my not-a-lawyer self. If someone apparently doesn’t know the name of your family members, probably not a good idea to serve a document on them disclosing that information. I will of course not be publishing it, it’s never had any bearing on this situation – even using her husband was only done to demonstrate Ms Dawson’s poor political judgement on the neoliberal National Disability Insurance Scheme, someone used as her own example. I do find it interesting though that the threat included wanting to raise people out of poverty. But then, if Per Capita was interested in that, they wouldn’t have spoken up recently, as of late 2023, about simply rebranding the forced servitude of welfare recipients in the Work for the Dole program to Work for the Community – at odds with a previous statement made by Dawson herself.

As far as this goes, this should be the last comment on the matter, we’ll see if the threat made when our case was settled that had the judge lash out is made good on, however, none of this is personal, it’s politics, baby. As silencing dissent from the peasants always happens to be.