Quick Sketch: Haven't You Heard There's A Cost of Living Crisis Going On

 My gym plays channel 9. Telstra. Channel 9. Bert Newton. Somewhere, in someone's dictionary, those three things describe quintessential Australia. Real Australia. A colonial Aboriginal Songline. Embodied in Country. That is what Australia became, and that Australia still exists even if it is hard to perceive.

And there's curious phenomena to be observed through the prism of Channel 9, at least if you are a chronic student of marketing. The ads are diverse, in terms of the demographic casting choices. Be it ads for mattresses or malteasers, even the ubiquitous betting on sports that typically target loser "blokes" and now have a regulatory equinox of messaging that must be peak schizophrenic were the ad exists to encourage us to "bet with our mates" before transitioning seamfully into a stark graphic telling us "you'll win some and lose more call 1800 858 858 or visit gamblinghelponline.org.au" encouraging us not to gamble with our mates or anyone, ever.

But the programming, Channel 9's actual content has demographics that, if they do not reflect the nation, reflect their market. It is at a guess 95% white australia, with more recent immigrant ethnicities probably making up the remainder. Channel 9 still looks like it looked in the early 2000s, and like the ABC looked in the early 2000s, whereas ABC being the only channel I was exposed to before joining a gym, now looks like an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job! but without being funny or particularly informative.

So that's interesting, that Channel 9 itself without sound, and AI generated captions just on an eye-test serves as a datapoint to reject many hypothesis that I feel younger people akin to me have elevated to the status of theory without bothering to do a replication.

Anyhow, yeah, I've joined a gym in a neighbourhood that seems to know that it's customer base want channel 9 all the time. 

My first gym in Mexico, a unisex gym round the corner of my old apartment with a mostly young and possibly un/underemployed client base played movies on their TV screens or the World Cup which was happening concurrent to my membership of the gym, or old Dragonball episodes. Like, dragonball is the body beautiful ideal in a young country like Mexico (that didn't get old, despite being three times as old as the nation of Australia). Until I moved accomodations and found a new gym downtown, one of the cities oldest gyms, a delightful men only gym.

The ground floor had a fairly modernish space with a boxing ring and punching bags and mats where both men and women could take boxing lessons. Beyond that was a screen leading to the locker rooms that once passed one could anticipate an eyeful of old dick stripping down and towling off or about to head downstairs to the sauna. I don't mind saunas, they are not my favorite thing, particularly, and I emphasise particularly in a climate like Mexico, as opposed to wintering in Japan or Turkey. It's why I never quite accepted why my Mexican pals from the Indigenismo scene could never accept that I just wasn't into a three fucking hour Temescal experience, like how can anyone be incredulous that a sweatlodge isn't everyones favorite fucking thing to do on a Sunday afternoon after 5 continous months with no rainfal, lows of 16 at 5am in the morning and highs of 28~35 reached by 11am and persisting until 7 or 8pm. Of course there will be people who are like "you know what I don't feel like? I don't feel like having a fucking sauna." Pinche temescals.

Where was I? Old dick. That's right. Ignoring as much as politely possible, fat old men's wrinkled old ballsacks, you take a left and head up a flight of stairs where this gym, of course, has a bar for fat old men to sit around and eat and drink and be merry in. If you keep heading up the stairs you get to a concentrated extract of true masculinity in all it's glory and shame. A really wonderful space that can never be experienced by women, where there's just wall to wall weights and resistance machines and cardio machines, many of which are not in working order but hey, with a membership base nowhere near capacity, let alone the oversold capacity of most gyms knowing new years resolutions rarely pan out, what were they going to do?

In that gym, the TV screens played rock, or if feeling a little young and particularly vigorous - horrible techno music like most gyms play. The thing was most gyms play horrible techno music over the top of muted television screens. This gym matched it's horrible techno music of horrible jersey shore type dj's attempting to impress teenagers, the easiest to impress demographic of morons, that with enough techno and XTC and pussyass tattoos and metrosexual haircuts they too could pay bikini clad video vixens to hang out with them for a music video shoot one afternoon before they are back dealing with airline staff as they fly to their next awful EDM music festival.

But that was only maybe tuesday's or thursdays. Most of the time it was Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, a fair bit of Nancy Sinatra you might be surprised, Tom Petty, an hourlong supercut of Arnold Schwarzenegger's inspiration from Pumping Iron which would draw old dudes to stop their weight lifting and admire 80s Arnie's body. Then George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Santana etc. 

Despite being on remote controlled flatscreen TVs, this gym had preserved the 80s tradition of body building on Venice Beach, when people knew so little about martial arts a generation would come to believe that karate could solve every problem, but the older generation hadn't even got that far, they knew Stalone and Arnie and Van Damme and had broadly concluded that you just plain needed to be strong. More strong than people used to bother getting and that would solve your problems. 

That mindset I can tell you, is alive and well in Mexico, and Mexico has a future, unlike Australia.

Okay, young people, I'm figuring mostly rich people's kids, given my gym has a sign banning all school insignia from the gym and I live in private school central (the elite schools everywhere but the UK, where for some reason "public school" is the expensive exclusive one and I don't know what they call poor people's schools, probably just "schools") so the clientele leans old, old enough that I in the dead-bang middle of my statistical life expectancy, would be among the young crowd of this gym. 

The old crowd of my gym, we could also consider the young whippersnappers of my suburb, that has graduated since the pandemic from open-air retirement village, to open-air palliative care ward. The old people in my gym are in the district wide minority of people whose knees still bend at all, and whose spines still straighten at all.

So yeah, my gym is going to play the Channel 9 news. It reflects where my gym is at in this place and time, and I should point out that place in time is one of the few places that voted 60% "Yes" on that last year's referendum. 

Anyway, "A Current Affair" was playing the other night while I was climbing stairs. ACA is a long standing trash tv show under the guise of "investigative journalism" but instead of like Watergate or Spotlight it mostly is like "the neighbour from hell" and "we went undercover to expose this dodgy car mechanic" and "we did an experiment to determine no-brand lamingtons taste just as good as brand lamingtons!" that sort of trash.

They were doing a story on the impact of the "cost of living crisis" on a mum and dad with 10 children. Now, usually it's easy to predict Channel 9's editorial stance, so easy it contributed to the success of 90s satirical programming like "Frontline" which being Australian was probably a cheap but successful knockoff of Brass Eye. 

This one was tricky, usually Channel 9 would beat up on the working class - dolebludgers, welfare queens etc. And it would have an anti-government stance in general, but especially on a government that makes any concessions to the working class.

Inflation though is something piece of shit journalism usually lays at the feet of the government of the day, and the government of the day ostensibly represents the working class more so than the other party in Australia whose constituents are largely working class but pretty much exclusively represent the interests of the asset owning class.

So tonally it had problems, I didn't know whether Channel 9 wanted me to root for this family, or despise them, because it's fucking Channel 9 lauder of diggers and battlers, despisers of leaners and whingers. They love a good whinge about some battlers, it's the stuff Channel 9 leans on to stay somewhat upright.

This seemed to just be explaining pretty basic maths to me though. It was interesting because I hadn't really thought about it. The most successful people I know, my age, in terms of material success can afford two whole children. More than two children often predicts some kind of mental health issue, even a folie a deux mechanic at play, that or good old fashioned Catholicism, not to be mistaken with endearing superstitiously sexy Mexican Catholocism.

Ten kids seemed like the makings of a very short story about the cost of living crisis: "You realize almost nobody has ten kids, because like, that's fucking insane in the 21st century?" "Oh no, we didn't realize. I mean we kind of just kept having them. You think having kids has something to do with having unprotected sex while fertile?" "Yeah. It does." "Oh. Well where was this news two decades ago?" "We didn't think it was newsworthy, I mean, it is very unusual in Australia for a couple to just keep having kids. Didn't you notice all the non ten-bedroom houses for sale? That a family pack and a family pizza weren't enough." "No. It's pretty expensive." "Yeah, and we understand that now it is more expensive?" "Yeah, it's really expensive now."

Right? Right? Am I fucking insane, or is this not a news story. If you have 10 children, as opposed to none, then the cost of living increases are going to hit you harder. It's kind of like interviewing a family that had a variable-rate mortgage when the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) had an official cash rate of 0.1%pa and sticking a microphone in their face now that it's at a relatively modest 4.25% to document them saying "yeah, it's pretty hard. We didn't realize that things can change and risk is proportional to exposure. We just thought things would be good forever and we'd never have to deal with hardship."

At the same time, I am sympathetic to the economic illiteracy of the general public. This family of twelve seem like perfectly nice people. On average, much nicer than most of Australia. I don't know, maybe their eldest son pushed his girlfriends head down to pressure her into a blowjob, it's the sort of stone investigative journalism tends to leave unturned. The family however, are somewhat anachronistic, like four generations ago anachronistic for Australia. Like "the pill hadn't been invented yet" anachronistic. 

They aren't exactly representative, is what I'm saying, and I feel the "Cost of Living Crisis" wouldn't be such an issue if it was only hitting hard all 14 Australian households with 8 children or more. I'm given to the impression that it is impeding the pursuit of happiness for millions of households with 1.8 children. It is an issue for for households with no kids, university students that wait tables 5 nights a week and share an ever dwindling supply of multi-bedroom sharehouses for $200 or half if not most of their wages a week. 

And yet...

We haven't reached the stage of a cost of living crisis where a solitary occupant doesn't drive an SUV to their local supermarket. I mean, yes I live amongst affluent Australia, "yes" voting Australia, but I've been to Ballarat, I've been to Geelong since I returned. Those people drink coffees and they don't order the Big-Breakfast/Full-English/Fry Up at a cafe for Brunch. Those people have avocado toast too. They have Crust, they have Road Bike events that are televised. They see physiotherapists for tennis elbow, they have waterfronts and their supermarkets probably have sushi-bars.

Don't people know there's a cost of living crisis? I'm not sure you can have a cost of living crisis when there is so much superfluity to obviously give up. 

I am reminded of Tobias Funke's charity for Graft vs Host, where doctors informed him if he just got rid of his hair plugs he would make a full recovery.

Poor Australia exists, I know it does. Poor Australia who are likely really, genuinely suffering, not fretting over how to pay the increased water rates for the sprinkler system that waters the garden of their beach house, but like how to feed and clothe themselves and their children. 

The economy is fucking confusing, I can totally believe that in Australia a parent that just bought their shitfucked kids a nintendo switch for xmas could also get into a fistfight with a stranger at a community co-op over tomatoes. 

It is hard to discern what is goin on, and I am inclined to not rule out the possibility that Australia isn't so much experiencing a Cost of Living "Crisis" as a dead end social contract. We just need to backtrack a bit. Not everybody gets hoverboards.