Wasn’t sure which flair to use. YSK that Swatch Watches come with ‘free batteries for life’. Which means when your swatch battery runs out you can go to the Swatch shop or Swatch counter and get them to replace the battery for free.
You can buy a Swatch for $120, so after 4 or 5 battery changes the watch has paid for itself.
They are also good quality and reliable.
My situation is vey minor compared to most people in this subreddit, but I am done.
I have spent months organising everything for my mother, including stocking her fridge with cooked food and writing on a whiteboard what to eat when. She doesn’t follow it. So she doesn’t eat properly, doesn’t follow her Webster pack medications properly and cannot live independently.
I am recovering from surgery and have my own health issues which I have neglected to look after her. She treats myself and my brother like chauffeurs, gardeners, secretaries, nurses.
We finally got her government referrals to aged care. She is in her second day of ‘respite’ care in a fantastic aged care facility and she is insisting on not staying.
If she doesn’t stay I will go no contact. I have had enough. I was a parentified child. I think she has had a lifelong cognitive impairment. She was a neglectful mother but a great grandmother.
I have done A LOT of work to even have the stomach to care for her the way I have, but I have reached the end.
She will die alone at home and that is her choice. I feel zero guilt, but I was awake all night.
I need someone confident and creative with natural wavy / curly hair who specialises in precision cutting.
My current person is great but availability is an issue.
No colouring, just cutting.
I am looking for the ‘chess.com’ of the sudoku world. Any recommendations? I am willing to pay.
I understand people aren’t allowed to recommend their own apps. If you want to let me know your app feel free to DM me.
TIA 🙏
I have just spent 2 hours phoning transport ‘providers’ given to me by My Aged Care and ACNA…none of them have any availability in Geelong. Or they don’t accept CSHR referrals, only ‘Support at Home’ funding.
Does anyone know of anyone who covers transport (either indirect (taxi vouchers) or direct transport)? Who accepts CSHR codes and had availability?
And yes, we are waiting for the State taxi vouchers to come through…
‘Renters for life’: Co-operative to boost Geelong affordable housing
Victoria’s largest housing co-operative is looking to increase its stock of homes in Geelong provided at rents affordable to low to moderate income earners, as the market stares at a future reality where home ownership is out of reach for a growing number of people.
Common Equity Housing Limited (CEHL) managing director Liz Thomas said the organisation was looking at how to capitalise on its existing stock of ageing inner-city housing, and increase the number of properties managed by local housing co-operatives in Geelong through developments.
CEHL is the overarching body for housing co-operatives in Victoria, which provide homes for renter-members at 25 per cent of a tenant’s income, traditionally below market rents.
Ms Thomas said CEHL has a billion-dollar portfolio of more than 2000 properties across Victoria, including more than 200 in the Geelong region.
As members, tenants are required to participate in maintaining their property and running their co-operative, which holds regular board meetings, has a chair, secretary or treasurer, and rent and tenancy selection officers.
Co-operative housing members who don’t meet that threshold become “direct tenants” with CEHL and pay a rent assessed at 30 per cent of their income.
Ms Thomas said profits on rental properties are reinvested to add to the stock of homes managed by housing co-operatives.
But even housing co-ops, which became widespread under the Hawke government in the 1980s, are being hit during the housing crisis, with a capped waiting list 1000 people waiting for housing.
Ms Thomas was in Geelong for a recent board meeting and to also check up on future housing developments that will bring more housing stock online for member co-ops, including one project the city’s eastern suburbs set to deliver 19 new dwellings.
Co-operative housing celebrated its 40th anniversary this year amid a growing realisation that government housing policies haven’t bought home ownership to many people, Ms Thomas said.
“As Australians, we are facing a new future where home ownership isn’t available to everybody and we have to envisage a future where people will be renters for life,” she said.
“No matter what 5 per cent deposit scheme, no matter what incentives the government can give by getting private investors out of the rental market, for people on limited income, when the average cost of a house is north of $500,000, and you’re earning the average wage of $85,000. Tell me a bank that’s going to lend you the other 95 per cent?” she added.
Co-operative housing tends to be single houses or small unit complexes, compared to the much larger community housing projects under development in suburbs such as Newtown, East Geelong and CBD.
“Some of the smaller developments we do ourselves, and we’ll engage builders and do those smaller development directly, and to be honest the majority of developments we do in Geelong are smaller,” Ms Thomas said.
Some older housing stock she characterised as inner city federation houses could be replaced with front-and-back units. But tenants would lose their homes in the process, Ms Thomas said.
“Together we need to work on what are we going to do with this ageing housing stock? What are the opportunities, and it’s not happening tomorrow, but it’ll happen over the next 5,10, 20 years. How do we keep people living in the centre of Geelong? We’ve got one of our development sites just near the footy ground there, a great site. So, how do we, rather than selling those back into the private market, how do we increase our capacity on great sites and keep people centrally located and in their communities?
“I spent some time walking around Geelong, looking at some of our sites. We’ve got a lot of older housing stock in Geelong – 85 per cent of our properties are in good or very good condition, which we’re very proud of, and that’s again because the people living in there are maintaining them.”
My mum is declining fast. She’ll need to go into care this year. Are there any places people recommend? We hear a lot of horror stories 😞
Not Bravo Related…but OMG!!!! I am speechless! I NEED Ronnie and Ben to recap this soooo much. It’s on Netflix, run, don’t walk.
It’s set amongst the Indian expats in Dubai.
From Jacqueline O'Reilly on LinkedIn
"I’ve been reading the submissions to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee regarding the proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. The submissions already published online reflect very real insights about the consequences this legislation could have if passed in its current form.
Minister Mark Butler stated at the National Press Club in April that removing 160,000 people from the scheme and reducing expenditure is “the right thing to do.” But the powers contained within this Bill raise serious questions about his moral assertion, and even more serious questions about how that will occur, who will be impacted, and what safeguards will actually exist for people with disability.
Many submissions clearly state that broad ministerial powers, standardised assessments, narrowing definitions of disability and functional capacity, automated decision-making and increasing administrative burdens on participants and their families who are already struggling to maintain stability and participation, is not the right thing to do at all, nor representative of anything like what the scheme's original intention was.
But one submission in particular highlighted how Labor is harming the disability sector through omission of the full story. Sub 51 (name withheld) highlighted among other things, information obtained through FOI showing that government departments themselves are among the largest recipients of NDIS payments:
• Department of Health, Disability and Ageing — $190.7 million
• Department of Human Services — $123.4 million
• Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety — $74.1 million
• Department of Families, Fairness and Housing — $37.7 million
Combined with other agencies listed, this amounted to almost half a billion dollars in a single year. These may well be legitimate service costs. But this context has been almost entirely absent from the public narrative about “unsustainable participants” and “budget repair.”
Meanwhile, people with disability are being asked to carry the burden of proving their eligibility for support over and over again while living through cost of living crisis, insecurity about required supports and increasing uncertainty about the future.
The submissions themselves are evidence Minister Butler has got it wrong. Evidence through lived experience. Evidence of systemic complexity. Evidence that disability cannot be reduced to abstract fiscal targets or political messaging.
THANK YOU to the many individuals, advocates and organisations who have taken the time to prepare submissions under immense pressure, time and exhaustion. This participation is labour, and people with disability continue carrying far more of it than should be required.
This Bill deserves far greater scrutiny than it has received so far.
While the media and politicians are justifying kicking 1000s of people off their supports, people who live with psychosocial disability are calling for an integrity overhaul.
Heya
Now that I think I have finally cracked my wardrobe moth problems (dry clean woollens, raw calico storage bags for all woollens) AND my post menopausal body can finally tolerate wooly warmth again, what are your favourite quality/ edgy / funky knitwear brands? I wear a lot of Alpha60 but looking to broaden my choices. Size 12 fighting menopause / medication belly 😞
Nothing says ‘safe seat, don’t care’ like a member running for State Legislature who can’t even be bothered having an up to date website.
Covid 19 updates anyone?
Seriously
We need to preference Labor last. They just do not care. Same with Marles. Both don’t need to do anything for Geelong.
Our only hope to get attention from any politician is to make Geelong marginal.
See the Instagram ads and positive comments. Has anyone here tried these products? Castor oil based.
For service providers who are interested you can add numbers of kids losing coverage and being forced onto “Thriving Kids” and track the numbers on this site.
Sorry to be late posting but fraud messaging has been spruiked by government in order to drive cuts (they did this with Redbridge before the 2024 amendment). Albo has 11 Media advisors do no surprise that Fraud has been the splash to drive these savage cuts.
It’s no surprise that people have been duped into thinking NDIS should be scrapped.
if fraud is the reasoning we might as well scrap Medicare, Child Care, Defence, Education, Veterans Affairs, Aged Care etc etc.
https://power-in-numbers.pages.dev/
We are a group of data and policy professionals who have family or kids on NDIS. We have been waiting on the media or someone in parliament to call out the incorrectly reported stats for months but nothing has happened. So now we put it all in one place, screenshot-friendly.
We're anonymous because we have participants close to us and we genuinely think it’s not safe to be named while plan reviews are happening.
If you think this will help, please help get these numbers out there by emailing screenshots and the url to your MP, anyone in media. (social or news it doesn’t matter) or politics , or anyone that you know.
Every number has a calc-box showing the tables, filter, and arithmetic.
Reproducible from dataresearch.ndis.gov.au and other official government documents
edit: hoping this edit actually saves. We have been banned by Reddit within 1 day of posting and we honestly don’t know why. No warnings or messages. We’re aren’t ignoring your comments. We physically cannot respond back. We have appealed and hope they reverse the ban. In the meantime, please share if you can. We will update with more reports based on the feedback here