Dear Peter Costello,

I am writing in response to your allegation that the mining industry has been ‘treated shabbily’ by Australia. Apparently you don’t think they’ve had a fair deal, what with the billions of dollars of profit they’ve sucked out of the earth, from the dirt owned by Australian citizens. What would you like? For us all to give the mining executives a big hug, or a pat on the back, to say ‘thanks for royally screwing us over?’ Perhaps you would like us to cook them each a cake? A mud cake perhaps? Sorry. It never occurred to me to do this.

But hang on. You’ve said what you want. You want there to be a section in the Australian curriculum where school students are taught to bow down to the rich miners and kiss their toes, begging them to hire them to drive trucks for big bucks, and to spend weeks away from their family at a time, to live the Australian dream of helping mining executives get rich? What should this part of the curriculum be called, Peter? Perhaps it could be a whole subject? Kissing Gina’s arse? How about, how-to-rip-off-battlers-to-line-the-pockets-of-shareholders? How about a practical-lesson-in-sending-Australia’s-wealth-overseas so none of us get any benefit from it unless we’re wealthy enough to have huge superannuation accounts? Wealth inequality for dummies perhaps?

But you really do have a point, in your funny old way of being wrong while still somehow managing to make sense. A bit like how you claim to be a really great ex-Treasurer, and to be oh so worried about debt and deficit, while also conveniently ignoring that little problem of your actual legacy which, low and behold, screwed all of us. I see a pattern of incompetence forming here. Richard Denniss puts your yearly cost to Australia at $56 billion dollars per year. Ouch Peter! What is it you like to say about inter-generational theft? Maybe everyone should learn all about your incompetence at school? Maybe we should have a Royal Commission into Peter Costello’s Incompetence to get to the bottom of how you managed to leave such economic destruction in your wake?

But really Peter, you’ve got a point about the mining industry deserving a place in the school curriculum. In fact, I applaud your call to give our children a chance to learn how they missed out on a once in a generation mining boom because the mining industry, with the help of your Liberals, crushed Labor’s super-profit tax in order to protect their unfair rort of taking all the wealth for themselves. I definitely think it’s a great idea to educate children about the ills of wealth inequality, so that they understand that life doesn’t have to be this way. They have a right to be told by their teachers that people like you shouldn’t be making decisions on their behalf. Because you don’t have their best interests at heart. And nor do the mining executives who you like to exalt as the mythical heroes of the Australian economy. I’m sure Australian children will be very interested to learn how your Liberals cancelled their chance to get their fair share of mining’s benefits, from the soil they all collectively own. They’ll no doubt be howling about this when they find out how much superannuation they’ve missed out on, money they needed in retirement. They’ll be pissed when they find out you preferred to let the mining executives live it up on their dime, stealing from their bank accounts so they’ll have to retire the day before they die. Good on you Peter. It’s definitely a good idea to tell all the kiddies about this con. Education is, after all, the key to a better future.

Speaking of education, I wonder if you have the figures at hand of how much education funding we could have enjoyed had your government, the one where you controlled the money, thought about taxing the mining industry properly and putting that revenue somewhere useful, such as into the education budget? Actually, let’s not get you to do the sums because we know how hopeless you are with accounting. Remember the time you sold all the gold at rock bottom price? When I say ‘the gold’, just to be clear, it wasn’t your gold, Peter, it was ours. Remember when you lost billions of dollars of Australian money, money that belonged to those school children who never heard anything about it?

Now I come to think of it, you really should be ashamed of yourself, Peter. You’ve screwed over the Australian people time and time again. I have no idea why anyone thinks it would be a good idea to listen to your opinion about anything. What are you doing these days anyway? When you retired you said it was to spend more time with your family. But then I recall, you’ve been appointed to, hang on, what the actual… Australia’s independent sovereign wealth fund? That’s really taking the piss, Peter. You’re the last person I would let even think about walking anywhere near Australia’s Future Fund, let alone giving you the keys and letting you drain it all away, sell the farm and watch the proceeds melt to nothing, until the future is free of any funds. But of course you still get paid. What a joke, Peter. What an absolute joke. Who on earth would give you such a responsible position, when you’re so clearly ideologically inappropriate and incompetently reckless with money to boot? I think I can guess.

I think it’s time you did the whole country a favour and just go away. And in particular, stay away from the young people, Peter. You’ve done enough damage. You’ve treated us all very shabbily. It’s time we had a chance to fix your mistakes for the benefit of all our futures.

Yours Sincerely
Victoria Rollison

Dear Malcolm Turnbull

On the day you took the job of Prime Minister of Australia, you laid your flag in the ideological-dirt by proclaiming your intention to run a ‘thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market’. I’ll cut to the chase. This letter calls bullshit on your misrepresentation of the word ‘freedom’. I think it’s time we all saw through this smug cover for what you are really running: a market that benefits the privileged over everyone else.

Let’s have a look at what the word freedom actually means. Here are two useful definitions: ‘The state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint’. ‘Exemption from external control, interference, regulation’. Comparing these descriptions to the rules that you prefer to run the Australian economy by, it’s obvious that your idea of a ‘free market’ makes us all, collectively, not-free.

The muddying of the water starts with your notion that government regulation constrains freedom. The only thing government regulation does, which is why, coincidentally, you don’t like it, is to constrain the greed of you and your rich mates so you can’t monopolise resources in order to keep getting richer. The fact is, your ‘rich get richer’ rules are constraining our economy and in turn, our collective wealth. Government policies which level the playing field are actually making us all freer, and richer. All of us.

Let’s look at your job as an example. If there existed a free market for the job of Prime Minister, the only thing I would need to get this job is to be the most merited candidate. Tony Abbott disproves the freedom of the Prime Minister market by showing that any moron, born with a silver spoon, with a private school education, who lives in a blue-ribbon Liberal seat full of voters who would vote for the Liberal candidate even if that candidate was a misogynist bucket of cement, who can box his way to Oxford, is eligible for the top job. No merit required.

You also disprove the idea of meritocracy in the market for Prime Minister yourself, through your waffling-weak-incompetence, which so far in a year has made you a bigger disappointment than the Australian swimming team at Rio. In your world, freedom might mean the availability of means in which to donate $2 million dollars to your own campaign, without even noticing it gone, to ensure you win government by a one seat majority. But that’s not merit Malcolm. That’s buying your way out of trouble.

What this really comes down to is that you say freedom fries and I say potato. Where you see freedom in mining markets, I see big miners paying their way out of a fair rate of tax for selling resources that belong to Australians. Where you see freedom in healthcare, where the rich have access to better lifesaving services, I see those who can’t afford the services locked into health problems that limit their freedom to do what they want with their lives. Where you see freedom when your government stops taking responsibility for a social safety net, and hollowing out services for the disadvantaged, I see a small square box that locks poor people into prison-like poverty, where they don’t have any freedom to live their lives in dignity. Where you see freedom in education, where the rich can buy their way to test scores that privilege their futures over those who weren’t born into wealth, I see the poor chained at the bottom rung of the ladder, which they have no hope of climbing because your rules have removed the rungs. This is not freedom Malcolm. This is entrenched privilege. This is stacking the deck in favour of the people who already own the deck and all the deck chairs on it.

You have famously said, over and over again, that there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian. I beg to differ. Australia was better off without you and your greedy ideological crusade to lock us all away from a free Australia. A truly free market promoting government, under the real definition of the word free, would provide all the necessary regulatory requirements to ensure there is nothing constraining the freedom of all citizens to live a fulfilling life; to have the healthcare, the education, the job and career opportunities, the quality of life that should be afforded equally no matter the circumstances they are born into, to anyone who has the motivation and strive to achieve it.

Australia will never be the best version of itself until we strip away the limits to our freedom, which stop us meeting our full potential. When the rules you want us to play by mean that all the resources for wealth are unequally cloistered away by the upper-echelons of the wealthiest in society, and sometimes diverted into Panama tax havens, in order to privilege only the already rich and their offspring, to buy their way to success, to remove freedom for everyone else to compete, you do the whole country a disservice. When our collective talents aren’t given every opportunity to contribute – the freedom to contribute – our country is stifled by your rules of the game, where, low and behold, only people like you, the undeserving, can win.

You need to get out of the way of real freedom Malcolm. You need to stop being a roadblock in the way of meritocracy and embrace the true meaning of the word ‘free’. Only then will it really be an exciting time to be an Australian.

Yours Sincerely
Victoria Rollison

Dear Peter

On Monday you asked this question on Twitter and seemed quite flabbergasted about the situation, so I thought I’d do you the favour of writing to you with some answers so you don’t do what you threaten and completely give up. Because we need you!

‘How in the name of God is it sustainable that half the working population don’t pay any income tax… I completely give up.’

Firstly, as you were told in response to this tweet, in fact the figure isn’t half, but more like a third, outlined by Greg Jericho on Thursday. So why don’t a third of the working population pay any income tax? If you think hard enough about this question, the answer might come to you but I’ll just tell you to save you the mental energy: it’s because a third of our working population don’t earn very much money.

In your career, I’m going to assume you’ve never earned so little that your annual income was below the tax-free threshold, except maybe when you were a teenager or perhaps a university student. At this point, I just want to clarify that you’re upset about the people who don’t pay income tax because they earn little, and not the millionaires who pay no income tax? Am I right? You’re worried about the people like Duncan Storrar who don’t pay income tax, but as Duncan cleverly pointed out, do pay GST and petrol tax, which has a much larger impact on his overall income because this tax is such a large chunk of his income since he earns so little? Glad we cleared that up.

If you read the comments on Jericho’s article, you might think people are upset with you, but I think they all misunderstood. Really, you should be applauded for being so concerned about the sustainability of this situation, because you’re right! It’s not sustainable to have such a large portion of the population earning so little and the government really should do something to fix this problem! I can see now you’re campaigning to raise the minimum wage, and you’re saying we most definitely should not be paying young people $4 an hour as that’s just going to entrench them in a cycle of poverty of which they may never get out. You’re also obviously saying that workers deserve a greater share of profits, since they’re the ones doing the work, instead of all the spoils going to the shareholders and over-paid executives which is entrenching wealth inequality. I agree Peter! Good on you. Good on you for making this point and don’t you ever give up making it.

You should, Peter, however, be very careful to make yourself more clear in your standing up for the little guys, because it’s understandable that your concern was taken out of context. This context is the world of your right-wing-buddies (where you are apparently a moderate?!?) who are busy using stats like you’ve used to argue that half the population, who pay income tax, are supporting the other half of the population who don’t pay income tax. This rhetoric leads to the narrative of the haves supporting the have nots, the lifters supporting the leaners, the hard-workers supporting the bludgers.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re used to being outright told by the likes of you and your political bed-fellows that the unemployed are a drain on the up-standing-tax-paying members of society, but it’s coming as quite a shock, I must admit, that the ‘drain’ narrative is now being applied to poor workers as well. It doesn’t make much sense to me that people who go to work and earn very little for that work should somehow be framed as the problem in our society. Apart from the fact that this vilification ignores the valuable contribution many low-income workers make to our society, contribution which you, no doubt, place no value on, but for which the country wouldn’t survive without such as looking after people too young, old or sick to look after themselves, or volunteering in their local community. Two year olds are too young to go to work, you are no doubt disappointed to hear, and they’re not very good at looking after themselves either. You were two years old once Peter, and I’m sure you weren’t left to fend for yourself.

But I digress. Apart from this un-paid and under-appreciated contribution, which by the way is mostly made by women, as any credible economists will tell you, the economy is 100% reliant on its consumer base, which is made up of both people who do pay income tax and people who don’t. Low and middle-income workers have to eat, have to feed their families, have to buy clothes, petrol, pay rent or mortgages, have to exist somehow and existence costs money. This is the very same money, out of the pockets of the poor, out of the wallets of the minimum wage earners, which flows into cash registers, into the economy, into the tax system, and eventually a chunk of that money flows into your wallet, into your pocket, into your privileged world where you can’t even imagine not being able to afford to go out to dinner with friends, to own your own home, to buy a car, to wear expensive suits, to take your children to the movies, to have an iPhone, and probably an iPad where you send snarky tweets, where you voice your outrage at the unsustainability of a system stacked against low-income earners. I could also note that none of the spending of these people, who have so little that they spend everything they earn, none of this spending leaks out of the economy into unproductive activities like speculation on the stock-market and tax-avoidance in Panama. Just saying.

You should more careful about what you say Peter, and careful what you wish for. I agree that it’s completely unsustainable to have so many people in society earning so little and the rich taking all the spoils and the investment properties for themselves. Wealth inequality is bad for all of us. I look forward to you using your television show to campaign about this issue in the future.

In solidarity comrade.
Victoria Rollison

By Mike Cullen

Dear Prime Minister,

I wasn’t sure how to address your government’s latest announcement yesterday. The age old belief that announcing unpopular moves late on Friday no longer has the same power it did in the years before social media. Social media now means an unpopular announcement now trends on Twitter within minutes of the announcement and, if it’s on a Friday, that announcement has the weekend to fester and build momentum.

When I read about your government’s decision to not only make substantial changes to the Safe Schools programme, but to cease its funding I was initially enraged. I wasn’t very coherent, but then again neither were a lot of people who took to social media in shock at the Government’s decision.

I know you have a social media team, frankly I felt sorry for them yesterday, who manage your Twitter account. They would have been first hand witnesses to your mentions exploding as people attempted to reach out and express their distress. I have to give them credit where it’s due, unlike most of your front bench they don’t block people who disagree with you. You might want to have one of your social media team explain to the social media teams of your Ministers that blocking dissenting voices doesn’t mean the people themselves are silenced, but I digress.

In September 2015 the Liberal Party voted to remove then Prime Minister Tony Abbott from a position he was obviously never capable of fulfilling. They chose to replace him with yourself. The popular, man of the people with a penchant for leather jackets and taking selfies while using public transport.

For a moment there was a collective sigh of relief. No longer would Australia have to endure a man determined to make himself a wartime leader. No longer would every media conference be a series of three word slogans. No longer would people watching the media conferences have to count the number of Australian flags before Tony Abbott appeared, to ascertain whether this particular media conference was about stopping the boats, axing the tax, or an imminent invasion of ISIS on our shores.

The man, who had regularly led the preferred Prime Minister polls since the time of the Julia Gillard Government, was finally in place. The man who was a fierce supporter of Climate Change, who publicly spoke against his own party when it came to Marriage Equality and the wastefulness of the Plebiscite. The man who publicly supported a referendum on Australia’s independence from having the Queen of England as our Head of State.

This man, the one who regularly took selfies of himself with “the people”, who took the train or ferry at every given media opportunity, the one with principals that both Liberal and Labor supporters alike supported, had rolled the government on it’s head. In your press conference after securing the Prime Ministership the country thought “well, there’s that done. The darkest period in Australian political history is done and dusted“.

Dyed-in-the-wool Labor voters threw a collective fit as they saw their best chance at winning the next election relegated to the back bench. All but the far right wing nut jobs of the Liberal voters cheered, as they saw a return to the golden days of Menzies and Howard with an intelligent and successful Liberal Leader back in power, one the Labor party wasn’t going to be able to beat.

That was in September 2015. It wasn’t long before those who don’t vote Liberal simply because their families have for generations, began to wonder what you’d promised your party for votes. The Government Minister who publicly declared the Marriage Equality plebiscite to be a ridiculous idea, as Parliament had the power to make the change themselves, suddenly was all for supporting the costly and divisive public poll. No date, just some time in the future.

The Prime Minister who, when ousted as Opposition Leader, wrote a scathing attack on Tony Abbott’s climate change blindness suddenly reversing his position. It even appears that public letter you posted on your blog was removed.

It became obvious very quickly, you were not the man you had led us to believe. Your government is stuck in inertia. It hasn’t moved on from the policies that brought about the end of Tony Abbott. It’s still pushing ahead with policies that will, ultimately, split the country down the middle.

You talk a good game of innovation and exciting times, but you’re not showing any innovation through your actions.

Senate Voting Reform, initially a Labor idea that was met with howls of “stacking the deck”, has just passed under your watch. I fail to see how it is now considered innovative reform, designed to put the power back in the voters hands when it was stacking the deck when suggested by Labor.

You do realise without the Liberal Party preference deals, your own Minister for Employment and Minister for Women wouldn’t have won her Senate place, scoring a smaller number of votes than Ricky Muir did.

I don’t say all of this to offend you. I say it as someone who refused to vote for Tony Abbott in 2013 but, publicly stated he would have voted for you had you been the opposition leader at the 2013 election. I say it as someone who made the mistake of trusting that you were the man of principles you claimed to be, despite knowing people who have known you most of their lives who told me you were nothing like the public image, that you were ruthless, power hungry and would sell your soul to win another election.

I didn’t believe them then. I still believe that somewhere beneath the veneer of charm there is a real man, who sits back at night and sees the damage he is doing to our country and its people, and worries that he gave away too much to get a job he could be so much better at if he did what he believed, not what he promised backroom power brokers.

I say this to express, in the only way I know how, my utter disappointment and the disappointment of many other Australians.

But, back to the changes your government have announced in regards to the Safe Schools program. I struggled last night to think how I could put this in words. I wanted to be clear, but not rude. I decided to sleep on it. It seems to have been a good idea. Last night I was choking with rage, about all I was good for was inventing new swear words and that wouldn’t have done anyone any good.

An open letter filled with vitriol and abuse would have been ignored. No one who reads this would have gotten beyond the first paragraph, let alone if by some miracle, this link arrives on your iPhone one morning on your commute to your Sydney office.

This morning I thought about addressing this issue with you again and decided I’d tell you a story. For readers of my blog, it’s not a new story. But it is a story about young boy who was different and the pain he experienced growing up. A pain that even today manifests itself in ways he didn’t expect, even though he’s now a 42 year old man.

I was told when I was younger that bullies will never win. That ultimately people see them for what they are; scared, lonely little people who need to tear others down to feel any form of their own power. Yesterday, your government handed the bullies – both in your Government and outside of it – the win they’ve been craving and the public recognition that hate is something to be nurtured.

The story I want to tell you begins in late January 1979. I was five years old and just starting Kindergarten. I can still remember my family telling me how exciting it was to be a big boy, that going to school was going to be a great adventure. It was also the year I learned my family tells lies. School was not a great adventure. It began as it ended, a tortuous place where a small boy was victimised and bullied, daily!

As an only child, I was very lucky I had family and cousins by the truckload. But in my family I was the only child my parents could have. The years before school were filled with fun and games, and lots of love. Going to school I was told, would be the same. It would be where I would learn new things, meet new friends. There’d be friends and games, parties and a whole new world.

The first time I was called a fairy was the second day of Kindergarten. I didn’t know what it meant. The older brother of a classmate and his friends called me that. He told his brother – my classmate – it meant I wanted to have sex with boys, and boys didn’t do that, only evil boys did who wanted to go to hell. And so it began.

Fairy, became pansy. Pansy, became poofter. Poofter became Faggot. Faggot become AIDS carrier (by then it was the early 80’s and HIV was all over the news). AIDS carrier became Dirty Faggot. Dirty Faggot became, well it became a lot of things but I’m sure you get my point by now.

School – remember Prime Minister,  we’re still in Primary School here – became a daily war. I was sick all the time. Every single day I tried to stay home. It must have been hell for my parents. The crying, the battles to get me on the bus, to make sure I stayed on the bus and didn’t get off at the next stop and walk home. The vomiting as the bus came around the corner.

We didn’t know it then, and it would take many years for me to find out what it was, but dealing with a child terrorised and filled with anxiety attacks before his age hit double digits must have been hell to deal with for my parents. I know it was for me.

I learned early not to go to the bathroom at school if I could avoid it. The first time I was ever hit, I was washing my hands in the boys room. Two of the school bullies saw me at the sink and hit me because obviously I was there to have sex with people. I was told I wasn’t allowed to use the toilets and if they caught me in there again, they’d beat me up.

For a seven year old boy surrounded by bigger and older kids, who’d already endured two years of psychological abuse, I believed them. So I taught myself to hold on. To endure the pain, and to try and sneak out of class if I could.

By the time I reached high school I was six feet tall and fat as a barn. I ate, because it was all that gave me any form of pleasure. When I got older food was replaced with alcohol, but that’s a story for another day. You would think at that size, I would have been able to defend myself, but you’re wrong.

By the time I reached high school I was broken. Seven years of daily torture, teachers turning a blind eye, physical and emotional attacks if I so much as looked up at someone left me broken. The best a teacher in primary school ever did was tell my parents I needed to toughen up. At the time I was five.

High school was a whole new level of torture. I went to an all boys catholic high school. All the catholic schools in the area funnelled their teenage boys into that place. Hundreds of fresh faces, and a hundred or so that I’d been stuck with for seven years. It didn’t take long for me to realise that while there were fresh faces, there was also fresh tormentors.

As the boys all amalgamated into new groups, expanding their social networks word spread.

“See that fat bloke, with the freckles. He’s a f*cking poofter. Don’t go near him or he’ll try and have sex with you.”

Suddenly from a hundred or so tormentors and torturers, it felt like there were thousands of them. Not only in my year, but in every year there were people who hit me, pushed me out of the way, locked me in rooms. I found solace in the library for a time.

Until they found me there, and the librarian told me that I needed to get more sun and exercise and I was banned from the library unless it was Thursday.

Being a teenager is hard enough and by then I knew the torturers were right. I was gay. I realised that the minute my hormones kicked in. I knew by the end of primary school these boys were correct. I was a poofter. I was going to burn in hell. I was going to get AIDS and die, alone, hated by everyone. I knew I deserved the beatings, the abuse. I never raised a hand in my own defence. Why would I? They were right. I was a disgusting, perverted faggot. They’d known all along, thanks to the older brother of a kid I was in Kindergarten with.

When I was in Year 10, I was called to the Principals office. We had a new principal that year. He was younger – by about 50 years – than the old one. He had curly brown hair and thick rimmed black glasses. He told me to sit down in a leather chair that faced his desk, and then he sat on the other side of the desk in his own brown leather chair.

I had no idea what I’d done wrong. I had never been in trouble. I’d never spoken if I could avoid it. Brother Dean looked at me, he rested his chin on steepled fingers.

“Mike,” he began. “It’s been brought to my attention by your teachers that your life here is hell. The teachers have told me about the abuse you receive, and have said you never complain, you never go to them for help. They’re powerless to step in, if they do it will only make it worse.”

I looked at this man, the first teacher in my entire education experience who addressed the issue head on. I’m going to expelled for being gay, I thought to myself. I mean seriously, where else could this be heading?

“Mike, I need for you to defend yourself. You’ve not got much longer here at the school before you leave us and go to another school for your final two years of education. You’re a bright boy, smarter than you let on. I want you to know, that if you need to defend yourself physically there’ll be no punishment. The teachers and I are in agreement. The only way to get out of this alive is to fight back. Pick the loudest voice and knock him flat on his back.”

Can you imagine that Prime Minister? A high school Principal who had the backing of the entire teaching staff, telling me to fight. Telling me he’d stood as witness to the abuse I was receiving and decided I had to be given this power, that no other student ever had. I remember thanking him for his concern and leaving.

I was relieved I wasn’t to be expelled for being a pervert. I never once thought of using the permission I was given in that office that day.

About a week later, the physical abuse ramped up a notch, and I can still feel the brick wall slamming into my back as he student pushed me into it when I think about it. I can still feel his hand as it grabbed hold of my crotch, squeezing until pain and tears came into my eyes. I can still hear him, as he used his own body weight to hold me to the wall while he told me if I wanted to be a girl so much he’d show me how it felt. I can still feel him grabbing my wrist and shoving my hand into his shorts, while he told me I’d enjoy it because I was poof and a dick was a dick.

Funny story, that was the first time I felt another penis, but I digress.

The only reason it stopped was another guy walked around the corner. He never picked on me, but never spoke to me either. I was invisible to all but the ones who made it their mission to torture me. He simply grabbed the other guy by the neck and threw him into a garden bed and told him to f*ck off.

He never looked at me, never even acknowledged I was standing there still pushed against the wall but this time by own weight as I waited in fear of his attack.

The first guy simply snarled at me as he pulled himself from the garden bed and told me he’d kill me. Several years later, he moved into my suburb. I didn’t realise it. I was trying to lose weight at the time and had gone for a late night walk. I heard a foot step scrape on the gravel road, and when I turned around there he was, a whipper snipper chord in his hands. His friends had followed him, and they made sure nothing happened.

I heard a couple of weeks later he’d committed suicide. I couldn’t feel sad about that.

The straw that broke my back completely happened when I was in Year Eleven. I went to the bathroom, it was just on the end of lunch and the quadrangle had been deserted. I assumed I was safe. I wasn’t.

One of the bully packs in the new school – and there were so many to chose from really – was waiting for me just inside the door. I’m nothing if not a creature of habit.

He was holding a dildo, I’m sure you know what they are. He and his friends held me against a wall and told me if they saw me in school again, they’d use it on me. Once they’d delivered their ultimatum I walked out of the school, not just the bathroom but the school. I put my locker key on the desk at reception, and walked out.

I never went back. I walked to the station, got on the train and came home. That day, 18 months from officially finishing my high school career, my school education ended.

Still, for all the abuse I was lucky. You see,  I was raised in the time before social media Mr Prime Minister.

I was raised so when I walked into the house, and closed the door behind me I was safe. Today’s kids, be they LGBT or just different to the pack, don’t have that luxury. They walk in the front door and there’s social media: Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter. The victimisation and the bullying continues even when they’re supposedly safe in their homes.

Had I not had that respite I wouldn’t be sitting here, telling you things I’ve never told anyone, writing to you to implore you to do something other than tell your rabid backbench to “behave nicely”.

Even with that respite I almost wasn’t here. The darkness of those days followed me and to a degree they still do.

I read last night on Twitter that children need bullies because it makes them tougher. It was a tweet sent out by someone supporting your government’s Safe Schools decision.

To that, I call bullshit. Children don’t need bullies. It doesn’t make them tougher, it runs the risk of breaking them altogether.

I’m now 42. I’ve been out of school for more than 25 years. In the dark of night I still hear them, the children I went to school with. In the dark of night I still hate myself for my weakness. In the dark of night I still feel the pain I endured. Abuse does not make a child stronger, it takes from them their innocence and worse of all, it takes from their hope and trust.

I hear people talk about their school years with nostalgia, for me even the thought of school still fills me with fear.

Prime Minister, your government made a monstrous decision on Friday. By announcing not only substantial changes to the Safe Schools programme, but also the end of funding in 2017, you have told the most vulnerable students in our country their lives don’t matter.

You have told those children they deserve no respect from their peers. You have taken a program originally released to combat the rising number of teen suicides and thrown it away, all to appease back benchers who will never support you.

Do you believe that Cory Bernardi or George Christensen will now throw rose petals on the ground as you walk past? Do you think they will now be on your side, supporting you in your role as Prime Minister? Of course they won’t.

You effectively gave the bullies your lunch money. They know now they only need to start a campaign for you and your Government to cave in.

I may have been bullied a lot as a child. I may have not spoken much and I may not have had friends. But I never gave the bullies my lunch money even if it could have bought me a week of peace and quiet.

I may have been next to useless in standing up to the bullies around me – something it appears we may have in common – but I never sold anyone else down the river to appease them.

In September 2015, you and Julie Bishop stood beaming at the podium heralding a new age in Australian politics. You made promises to the people of this country to rule in our interests. Since then you have done nothing to turn the growing tide of hate that has infected us since September 2013.

You have ensured your place in Australian history. You are the Prime Minister. No one will ever be able to take that away from you. But whether or not you are good, useless, or the shortest termed Prime Minister in our history is still for you, and the electorate, to decide.

In closing Prime Minister, I hope to impress upon you the importance and consequences of your government’s decision yesterday. It is of no value for you to step forward and blame an independent review when this all goes to hell.

You can not wash the stink of this decision off your hands, no matter how many bottles of expensive after shave you may bathe in. Your government’s announcement yesterday will have two certain effects.

Firstly, vulnerable children will be the ones effected the most, and that will cause more long term damage than you can possibly imagine. Secondly, you have damaged your reputation among LGBT people and their families. No one with an LGBT relative, child, niece, nephew or grandchild can look to you and say “With Malcolm Turnbull in power, my child will be safe“.

All they can say with any assurance is that the man who takes selfies, is interested only in himself.

This letter was originally published on Mike’s blog Writing in Shadows.

About Mike Cullen: 41 year old Australian writer currently working on the first of a planned three book Epic Fantasy series. Mike currently works as the Director of Corporate Events and Policy discussions for a boutique conference and events company in Sydney, Australia. When he’s not writing policy discussions, or tales of swords, Gods, and magic, he can be found making a mess in the kitchen, and turning perfectly good ingredients into crimes against humanity.