It is time now to leave the world of sensible, reasonable politicians with pleasing policies, and wade cautiously into the ENTIRELY CAPITALISED world of Glenn Floyd, who bills himself as “THE-UNTOUCHABLE”, and starts his website with the following words of wisdom in large, friendly letters:

DER! – IT’S HOMELESSNESS STUPID!
IT’S HOMELESSNESS!
IT’S HOMELESSNESS!
IT’S HOMELESSNESS!

INDEPENDENT-VICTORIA, I REFUSE ALL DONATIONS, YOUR SENATE ‘CANNOT BE BOUGHT’ WITH THESE BRIBES!

Righty-ho then.  I think he might be equating homelessness with being untouchable, but I’m not sure whether he himself is homeless.  Or, actually, of what he means.  But he is obviously anti-corruption, and pro-transparency.  And also pro-capital letters.  Never have I seen a candidate who was so fond of his caps lock key.

Mr Floyd wants to ‘BEAT THE BLOODY BRIBERY’, which can only be stopped by non-party independents, apparently.  And if you are wondering how he will stop it…

HOW WILL I STOP IT? – ‘THE AUSTRALIANA PROMISE’ – DAILY YOUTUBE ‘ALL’ MY MEETINGS!

AND YOU’LL ALSO SEE EVERY EMAIL I SEND & RECEIVE EACH DAY

YOU WANT ‘CLEAN-GOVERNMENT’, SO DO I!

Mr Floyd thinks that all three major parties are hopelessly corrupt, and that Australia has been bought by politicians much as Louisiana was bought from France by the USA.  OK then.  He also wants to introduce the Clean Government Bill to enforce oversight by the people and thus moral democracy.

NOT SIXTY SECONDS OF MY HIGH-OFFICE TENURE WILL BE CONFIDENTIAL

YOU WILL SEE IT ALL – THE ONLY WAY TO STOP POLITICAL CORRUPTION!

I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY DONATIONS WHATSOEVER!
FROM ANYONE! – NOT ONE DOLLAR – NOT EVER!

THESE BRIBES FULLY CORRUPT YOUR HIGH OFFICE IF I DO.

THIS IS NOY MY HIGH OFFICE, IT’S YOURS, AND I WILL KEEP IT CLEAN!

OK, turning to his policies, which are, by and large, rather good, if rather excessively endowed with exclamation marks.  I’m not sure if I’m looking at someone who is intelligent and a bit over enthusiastic who doesn’t know how to use a computer very well but is otherwise fine, or someone with a few mental health issues.  He does seem a bit manic.  But then, who is the person sitting in a plane somewhere over the Baltic writing analyses of sixteen Independents?  Not Glenn Floyd, that’s for sure.  So I’m probably not in a position to cast aspersions here.

Mr Floyd’s first policy, as I had rather expected, is around homlessness and rental affordability.

HOW DARE ANY GOVERNMENT ALLOW ANY HOMELESSNESS AND RENTAL UNAFFORDABILITY
EVER HAPPEN, HOW DARE THEY! WE WILL LEAVE ‘NOBODY’ BEHIND!

Mr Floyd wants to cut a combined total of $10 Billion from the Defence Budget, the Federal Infrastructure Investment Program and the Federal Consolidated Welfare Program and put this into homelessness and rent relief.  I’m not in a position to look up what the latter two programs are, but both of them sound like things we might need, so I’m raising a mild eyebrow at this one.

Edit: I am now home and have looked these up.  The first one mostly funds roads, bridges, transport research and road safety.  The second one doesn’t appear to exist, so I’m not sure exactly what he has decided can be cut for these purposes.  Sorry.

Mr Floyd wants a $5 Billion Zero Violence Against Women  Act (‘WHY DON”T YOU GET IT PARLIAMENT? WOMEN ARE OUR FUTURE!), with money also being taken from the three programs above, and he’s also looting these programs for Affordable Childcare Centre Construction (BOTH PARENTS MUST WORK, AFFORDABLE CHILDCARE MUST BE PROVIDED!  HOW DARE ANY GOVERNMENT etc…).

So Mr Floyd has some good policy ideas, and to give him credit, he has even thought about how to fund them.  But I’m not sure his funding model is sound in the long term.

Mr Floyd is apparently pro-indigenous rights of some sort, as he bows to his waist ‘in sincerest respect to all our deeply honoured first Nations sisters and brothers.’, and supports a ‘Women-Led Australian First Nations Treaty Negotiations Initiation Act Honouring All Women’s Contributions to Historic Noble Dialogue’.

Women Are Deliberately Denied Their Great Place And Most Honoured Dialogue In Male Written History – No More!

The Time Has Come To Stop Males Writing Women Completely Out Of History! Enough Is Enough!

I feel like I should be cheering, but I’m still not entirely sure what that policy title means.

He talks about the need for a treaty, and the fact that indigenous women are more victimised than any other group in Australian society, and that thus this treaty should be women-led.  

This egregious deliberate male behaviour shall never again happen in my country as long as I draw breath.

And here’s a bit about it that is quite interesting and isn’t even in capitals.  I’m going to quote it in full, because I rather like it, and because I want us all to have this in our minds when we get a little further down the page and find out what Mr Floyd thinks about psychiatrists.

I am deeply inspired by the remarkable initiative of First Nations most revered woman Arrernte Elder Rosalie Kunoth-Monks AOM, 2015 Australian of the Year leading her peoples’ first historic step to Treaty dialogue.

Rosalie wishes to take this initial historic first step in conjunction with a ‘Private Senator’s Australian First Nations Treaty Negotiations Initiation Bill to formally commence our first step on this most honourable women-led initiative to heal our destructive past and become a truly great nation of world standing.

The purpose of the Bill will to commence the first opening dialogue discussions for establishing a solid parliamentary and constitutional process to commence the journey to lay out the path towards an honoured Treaty

 This will be in a form and timeframe that honours all our people’s aspirations for Treaty and the full parliamentary and constitutional framework required for such a profoundly epic essential step in our national maturity.

 This will be honoured by first treaty initiation discussions being opened at Kurnell Peninsula Botany Bay, between First Nations peoples and Australian non-First Nations peoples chosen representatives.

 Kurnell Peninsula Botany Bay has been chosen by Rosalie as the initial discussion place to open our first dialogue for its deepest historical importance.

 For it was at Kurnell Peninsula Botany Bay, where 246 years ago in 1770, Lieutenant James Cook was instructed by King George 3rd of Great Britain to enter formal treaty, QUOTE: “with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country”.

 No such treaty negotiation was initiated as lawfully instructed by the Sovereign government of Great Britain and the Crown.

 There could be no greater honour to fully respect Rosalie and First Nations women’s great leadership than by taking my ‘Private Senator’s Bill’ for all Australians into our parliament.

 And there could be no greater honour for any man than to serve womanhood in this most inspiring and respectful way that recognises the remarkable leadership of Rosalie and all women.

I’m mildly perturbed by his tendency to place women on a pedestal here – I’m as feminist as the next person, but I find this sort of idea that women are somehow superior angels to be worshiped a little disturbing.  But this treaty does sound like a good idea.

Mr Floyd wants to protect home owners from banks when property values fall, so that if your property value drops by half, you only have to pay half the mortgage amount.  I know nothing about economics, but I have a feeling nonetheless that this is economically untenable – quite often, it’s everyone’s properties dropping in value at the same time, and if the banks have to forgive half of their debts, wouldn’t this potentially lead to the banks running out of money?

So far, I have been pleasantly surprised by Mr Floyd’s policies, but now, oh now, my dear friends, we come to the meat of this, which is the Criminal Psychiatric Practices Abolition Act.

AUSTRALIAN PSYCHIATRISTS NOW KILL MORE THAN CANCER, HEART-DEATHS & ROAD-DEATHS!

Psychiatrists in Australia have now directly caused a runaway pandemic of killing now out of control of their own evil making.

The vilest tragedy is they have caused a massive youth suicide rate unknown in human evolution.

The young of ANY species DO NOT just kill themselves in horrific pandemic numbers,
 this is against the beauty of nature and this is caused solely by psychiatrists

Dear Lord.

He has apparently done research, and CONFIRMED that ‘psychiatrists alone solely directly kill on pandemic levels’.  He says that ‘Australian lethal psychiatrists’ lead a global trend.  He feels that people are being forced to ‘accept horrific psychotropic drugs that they CANNOT even request not to take because of draconian Victorian laws’, that this violates autonomy, and the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities.

Psychiatrists now kill more Australians than Cancer, Heart-Disease, Road-Deaths, Terrorism and commit mass-scale killing worldwide in pandemic compounding numbers that now exceeds the great Bubonic Black-Death-Plagues and the Nazis.

While I have no direct experience of taking medication for psychiatric illness, I do have a number of friends with mental health issues who have at times been on medication for these, and I used to volunteer as a counsellor on a suicide helpline.  So I am very aware of the problems with many psychiatric drugs.  It can often take months or years and multiple different drug schedules to find something that works and does not have intolerable side-effects.  The classic example is a particular class of anti-depressants that actually induces suicidal ideation when it doesn’t work, which is about as unhelpful as you can get, but the anti-schizophrenia drugs can also be quite hard core, and leave some people feeling unlike themselves (and thus less likely to continue taking them, which leads to other issues).

Sometimes, it really does feel as though we know very little about how psychiatric drugs work, and my gut feeling is that this is going to be an area which won’t resolve until we get better at personalised medicine – I think brains are very diverse, and very complicated, and definitely difficult to rebalance when they get out of balance.

So I do get the concern here.

But having said that, I don’t think the issue is evil homicidal psychiatrists who are lying to us about the chemicals in our brains.  And I really don’t think these drugs are responsible for all the modern lifestyle diseases that Mr Floyd ascribes to them.

I also have a pretty fair idea of how hard it can be to get put on any kind of involuntary psychiatric schedule for long.  I do know people who have been hospitalised with mental illness, including one person who had been making credible enough death threats that the police were involved, and he was taken to hospital involuntarily.  But guess what?  He checked himself out less than a week later.  His partner was horrified by this, because the man in question was still sick and refusing to take medication, but since he was no longer threatening to hurt anyone, his right to autonomy, once he was considered stable enough to speak for himself, trumped everything else.  Which is as it should be, I think. Though I’m a little conflicted about it, to be honest.

So I can’t read this lengthy rant about how these drugs are lethal toxins that are killing you without feeling quite concerned about Mr Floyd’s welfare and previous interactions with psychiatrists, because I feel rather certain that he has had some.

I do think patient autonomy is important, I really do, but I don’t think that psychiatrists are actually drugging people willy-nilly, and are thus in need of criminal prosecution if they don’t help everyone detox right now.  Because I also have friends for whom psychiatric drugs have been positively magical in their effects, and whose lives have been improved immeasurably by them.  Chemical imbalances in the brain are real, and while we are not really very good at treating them yet, we do need to keep trying.

Mr Floyd now moves back to concerns about corruption and the need for moral democracy and less bribery.  He avoids my drinking game by failing to call for a Royal Commission into this, however.

And that is the end of the page.

Honestly, Mr Floyd makes me feel rather sad.  He clearly does have some good ideas, and areas which he has really put thought into, but for him the question of genocidal psychiatrists is the issue before which all other issues must bow.

I hope he will be OK.  I hope that some of these policies really do become reality.  But I can’t vote for him.