ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The night manager at the Lake Betoota Country Club thought he’d give himself a laugh this morning and check his super balance.
He’s worked flat out for pretty much a decade but due to the traditional hospitality super theft by employers and lack of full-time contracts with benefits like sick days, Dennis Walter says he doesn’t much much super to his name.
Compounded with his HECS/HELP debt, which is due to be indexed yet again in a few weeks, the 32-year-old has already made peace with the fact he’ll be sharing a dunny with some random bloke until he’s moved, probably against his will, into a shared room in a nursing home.
“I thought I’d be working for DFAT or some university but yeah, here I am in the Simpson Desert pulling beers for these fat old boomers in polo shirts. With all this property chat, though, I was just curious,” he said.
“To see how much super I had. The last time I looked, which was during the pandemic, I had, uh, actually I can’t remember but I took a fair chunk of it out to pay the rent. Because in hospitality, we, uh, got shafted pretty hard when the government was like, ‘Nobody is allowed to leave their home, so no pub,’ and so on,”
“But I was pretty lucky, it’s a country club so the big boss here put all the hospo staff on landscaping duty so we moved dirt around the course for the superintendent, Gary, who isn’t a bad bloke. He said we didn’t have much work for us so we did three days a week working for Gary and the rest, well, I didn’t really play golf before the pandemic and Gary reckons it’s a cunt of a game, makes you wonder why he’s a superintendent of a golf club, but anyway. So I started playing golf with the boss on our days off and he taught me how to. It’s grim because I got into it and so did every other cunt in this miserable fucking town, so now it’s impossible to get a tee time because every barge arse fat doctor’s cunt son is out pinballing their way up the fairway while cunts like me who can hit the fucking thing have to wait,”
“Anyway, back to what I was saying, these new housing policies that the parties have. They’re nice but they’re not for me. The only way I’ll get a house is if I get run over by a bus and the bus company has to pay me a huge settlement. Or, I could just wait until the Betoota Cup day and hold this place up. I know where I can get a pistol. One stolen off an armed guard during a heist or something. I’d hold this pub up and when the day manager tried to be a hero, I’d shoot him through the belly button. Enough to stop him and enough to let him know that night shift rules, baby. Yeah,”
“Sorry mate, I’ve been rambling a bit. I just spend a lot of time inside my own head.”
More to come.
