On the wellness racket and the lie of “resilience”.
- A note before we begin. What follows is written in homage to the late John Clarke and his offsider Bryan Dawe, whose weekly interviews, first on A Current Affair, then for years on the ABC’s 7.30, were the finest political satire this country has produced. Clarke never bothered with wigs or impersonation. He’d sit there, entirely himself, calmly explaining why the catastrophe was actually going splendidly, while Dawe played the only sane man in the room, asking the questions we were all shouting at the telly. Their “The Front Fell Off” is a national treasure. Clarke died in 2017, walking in the bush he loved. We are poorer for it, and this is offered with gratitude and apologies to both men.
Dawe: Thanks for joining us. You’re the Chief Wellbeing Officer at Bastards Incorporated, one of the country’s largest employers.
Clarke: Good to be with you, Bryan. Proud to represent Bastards. We have branches everywhere. Great energy in the studio tonight. Really grounded. I’m sensing a lot of presence.
Dawe: Now, your company announced six hundred redundancies on Tuesday.
Clarke: Six hundred and one, Bryan. We had to let go the person who did the press release. Sydney. Sydney Melbourne. Been with us since Noah was in short pants. Part of the furniture. The bits you sit on. Exciting times for everyone in the whole shebang. Did you know that we started out as a family business? Door-to-door candle-snuffers.
Dawe: Exciting.
Clarke: It’s a journey, Bryan. Six hundred and one members of the Bastards family are being released into new opportunities they didn’t previously have, such as not being employed.
Dawe: And on the same Tuesday you launched a wellbeing initiative.
Clarke: Wellness Wednesday, technically, but we soft-launched on the Tuesday so the messaging didn’t clash with the other announcement.
Dawe: The sacking announcement.
Clarke: The realignment, yes. We didn’t want people reading the two emails back to back and getting confused about which was the good news.
Dawe: What does Wellness Wednesday involve?
Clarke: A range of things. We’ve put a fruit bowl in the breakout space. Bananas, mostly. We’ve introduced a mindfulness colouring-in station. And every employee now gets free access to an app.
Dawe: An app.
Clarke: A meditation app. It buzzes you when it’s time to breathe.
Dawe: People need to be reminded to breathe?
Clarke: Well, that’s where the resilience piece comes in, Bryan.
Dawe: Resilience.
Clarke: It’s our number one value this quarter. We’re really leaning into resilience.
Dawe: What does it mean?
Clarke: It means our people are able to absorb whatever the business sends their way and keep performing at a high level without, you know.
Dawe: Without what?
Clarke: Without it becoming a thing.
Dawe: A thing.
Clarke: An HR thing. A complaint. A union thing. We find resilient employees rarely escalate.
Dawe: So resilience means putting up with it.
Clarke: Resilience means thriving despite it, Bryan. There’s a difference. One’s passive. Ours has a logo.
Dawe: Let me give you a specific case. A bloke in your warehouse. Fifty-eight. Three shifts in a row, his hours cut, told on Tuesday he’s one of the six hundred. He’s got a crook heart and a mortgage.
Clarke: Six hundred and one.
Dawe: What does Wellness Wednesday offer him?
Clarke: The app, Bryan. It’s a clinically informed breathing programme.
Dawe: He’s just lost his job.
Clarke: And what a perfect moment to focus on the breath. A lot of our people report that during periods of acute financial terror, the breath is really all they’ve got. We’ve leaned into that.
Dawe: The breath is all he’s got.
Clarke: I’d reframe that, Bryan. We didn’t take anything. We released. And we released him with the app. He keeps the app.
Dawe: He keeps the meditation app.
Clarke: For thirty days. Then it reverts to the paid tier. But for thirty days, that man can sleep in his car outside the house he may shortly lose, and a small device on his wrist will gently remind him that it’s time to breathe. That’s not nothing, Bryan.
Dawe: It is fairly close to nothing.
Clarke: It tests very well in the engagement surveys.
Dawe: Who fills in the engagement surveys?
Clarke: The remaining staff. The resilient ones. The ones who didn’t escalate.
Dawe: Because the others have gone.
Clarke: Self-selecting, really. Beautiful, when you think about it. Over time, Bastards becomes entirely resilient. We’re very proud of that. It’s almost evolutionary.
Dawe: You’ve described natural selection.
Clarke: We call it Culture, Bryan. But yes.
Dawe: One last thing. There’s a poster in your foyer. “It’s okay not to be okay. Reach out.”
Clarke: I love that poster. That poster does a lot of work.
Dawe: Reach out to whom?
Clarke: Sorry?
Dawe: If a worker reaches out, who’s on the other end?
Clarke: The app, primarily.
Dawe: The buzzing one.
Clarke: We did have an Employee Assistance line, but it was a cost centre, so during the realignment we, ah.
Dawe: You released it.
Clarke: It’s thriving elsewhere now, I’m sure. Resilient little service. Look, Bryan, the message is the thing. Reach out. It’s printed on recycled stock. It’s at eye level. We’ve done everything possible short of being reachable.
Dawe: Chief Wellbeing Officer of Bastards Incorporated, thanks for your time.
Clarke: Thanks Bryan. Remember to breathe. There’s an app for it if you forget.
Dawe: I’ll cope.
Clarke: Resiliently, I hope. You’ve got termination insurance yourself, of course. You don’t want to lose the plot. Even your job at the ABC could be gone in a text from management tomorrow. Everybody’s using texts these days. Personalises all sorts of things. If you don’t mind, I can do a voice memo to get my people to text your people to text you.
Clarke: Bryan?
Cut to Dawe, who is staring at his mobile phone.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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Wellness? Ah, memory.., now in ageing and health decline, it is think, drink, sink, and we do not mention stink. The old Clarke and Dawe times were precious, more in reflection, as a laugh at our grubby gremlinisation gets bitter, fools irritate, times seem worse than ever. I’ve just been reading of a P Thiel telling the pope off, correcting truth by highly erroneous pseudointellectuality based on quite sick ego. In an age of Trumpery, Hansonian hartlotry of recruiting and exploitative takerbludger behaviour, a birthday for the USA ay??, who can be at peace? A I. threatens jobs, environment, sanity. society. Sackings will require more than some App., government or corporate. And so, we await better, as have every generation in some futility.
Reaching out — a stretch too far, corporatease talk for saying a lot and doing too little; RUOK we ask, while many suffer, unwilling to admit that the burdens of life are beyond their capacity to manage; NDIS, now slashed, buggered by grifters and shonks taking advantage of the Swiss cheese holes in the system, thousands of valid clients now on the trash heap, RUOK, people?; drug and alcohol programs feather-dusting while fatal overdoses now outnumber deaths from motor vehicle accidents and domestic violence at epidemic proportions making a mockery of the notion of a civilised society… RUOK everybody?
What the hell happened? I just wanna scream. I thought this was the lucky country… but all I find are angry people, unemployed people, people freaking out, people living in cars and camping on public land and getting their tents and belongings trashed by local councils and being told to fuck off, go away, disappear. RUOK mates?
Where’s the promised housing? Where’s the promised jobs? Where’s our future? What’s the point of getting out of bed if today’s the same as yesterday, last week, last month, last year?
Reaching out… yeh, give me a break, mate. No-one’s reached out to me yet, offered me even the basics for living a civilised life. What happened to the fair go? Weren’t the Labor Party supposed to be for the little people, the party that gave a hand up, that helped, that cared?
Am I OK? Not bloody likely.
@ Canguro: This article may explain the PHONeys cult currently dominating the unhappiness media, and expressing your concerns.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/06/why-pauline-hansons-biggest-weakness-is-her-newest-voters/
@ David Tyler: thank goodness somebody remembers the sanity of Clarke & Dawe in the present world political turmoil.
Canguro – more power to your pen. Love your work. The wellness industry is a worry in itself but the glib and patently insincere resilience business has infected politics and society here for generations. Resilience. The boss class found a word that does the sacking for them. Since 1990 it has meant one thing: whatever we do to you is your problem. Close the plant, gut the award, casualise the shift, then send in a consultant to teach breathing exercises. The worker who breaks is not exploited. He lacks grit. She needs a webinar. It is contempt dressed as compassion, a doctrine that converts injury into character flaw. Power inflicts the wound and marks the victim’s homework. Resilience asks nothing of the strong. It bills the weak for their own bruises. Expect an article soon.
Canguro, I grew up in NZ so I got to hear a lot of John Clarke whom many of my former compatriots confused with Fred Dagg. I was astonished by his brilliance even then and I won’t cripple the great man’s style which is “sui generis” – but I loved his ear for the vernacular and his capacity to riff with a glint in his eye – and his ability to extemporise biting satire which could appropriate contemporary idiom and get you to hear its surreal foundation and its self-deluding pomposity, whilst being attracted like a bower-bird to its musicality. All with a mischievous glint, that look in his eye that went well beyond satire, even on radio. “you don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t know how propitious are the circumstances.”
Here are the lyrics, if the editor hasn’t had to impose a limit on flatulent garrulity and barbed Kiwiana.
At the dawn of the day, in the great Southern Ocean
When the world’s greatest fish was being landed
And the boat they were pulling it into was sinking
And the sea was quite lumpy, and the weather was foul
And the bloke with the map was as pissed as an owl
And the boys called out “Maui, ya clown, let it go”
In the noise, he reached down for his grandmother’s jawbone
And he winked at his mates and he said
“Boys, we don’t know how lucky we are,”
“I have a feeling I have stumbled on something substantial.”
[Chorus]
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are
[Verse 2]
I was speaking to a mate of mine, just the other day
A guy called Bruce Bayliss
Who lives up our way
He’s been round the world on an 8th army do, for a year, more or less
I said “Describe the global position, Bruce”
He said “Fred, it’s a mess
[Chorus]
We don’t know how lucky we are in this country
We don’t know how lucky we are”
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are
[Verse 3]
There’s a guy I know who lives in town
I see him about once a year I suppose
He’s had a coronary since Easter
He’s got a haemorrhage in his ear
He went bankrupt a couple of weeks back
And now his wife’s left him too
I said “You’re looking odd mate
You’re looking queer, what are ya gonna do?”
[Chorus]
He said “We don’t know how lucky we are
To live in this joint Fred”
We don’t know how lucky we are, he repeated
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are
[Verse 4]
So when things are looking really bad
And you’re thinking of giving it a way
Remember, New Zealand’s a cracker
And I reckon come what may
If things get appallingly bad
And we’re all under constant attack
Remember, we want to see good clean ball
And for god’s sakes, feed your backs
[Chorus]
We don’t how fortunate we are to have that place
We don’t know how propitious are the circumstances, Frederick
We don’t know how lucky we are, mate
We don’t know how lucky we are
We don’t know how lucky we are, (get it right)
We just don’t realise how fortunate we are
We have no idea of the luck we possess, collectively
We just don’t know how lucky we all are. Full stop
@ David Tyler: Your above post expresses my thoughts so delicately. Politics at present is all promise and no production, ”commonwealth” has become an unknown concept replaced by self-serving corporate & political greed, conveniently forgetting ”community”.