Introducing 'A bit better'

A newsletter about trying to improve the world a bit, while distracting ourselves from the garbage fire on an as-needs basis.

In this edish:

— Introducing this newsletter experiment

— Praising The Pitt

— My never-ending quest to get people to understand why foreign aid is important

— Smart things — links and shares on important issues

— Distractions — recipes, comfy pants, online shopping, podcasts

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Welcome

Hi, I’m Ashlee.

As a chronically online Old Millennial with a journalism degree, I’ve done it all when it comes to oversharing at this point.

Teaching myself HTML as a teen to build the most heinous Geocities websites, using my precious school holiday dial up internet quota to tell the world banal personal information through the medium of flashing GIFs.

Multiple iterations of blogs — some anonymous, most not. Community radio. The 2000s trend of baring deeply personal traumas in essays published in the mainstream media for a paltry freelance fee, all to be yelled at by anonymous strangers in the comments.

And all of the social media. All of it.

So why not give Substack a crack?

The strategic communications professional within me has hesitated. Surely the best chance of success for an endeavour such as this is to have a clear angle, a point of differentiation, a strong target audience, a value proposition. Some of my favourite Substacks very clearly do this. (See Erin Cook’s insights on Southeast Asia, Kate Walton’s round up of feminist news in the region, Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study or Virginia Sole Smith’s anti-diet Burnt Toast.)

The human being in me just wants to write about the random jumble of things I am interested in. International development is my professional focus, and I care about it deeply. As an Australian, I am fascinated by our beautiful, complex region and our place within it. I’m an intersectional feminist. I can’t look away from politics even when I want to. I live in a fat hyper-politicised body and I want people to better understand that fatphobia hurts us all. I love to cook. I travel. I sew my own clothes. I’m a very talented online shopper. I watch the most unapologetically garbage TV shows to have ever existed, as well as some of the good ones. I anthropomorphise my little dog.

The one thread that ties all of this together (except the TV perhaps…): I want make things a bit better than they already are.

This year, it feels like many things have gotten much, much worse. I’m writing this in the aftermath of the economically idiotic Trump tariff announcements and their partial backflip. I’ve seen colleagues across the region impacted by the devastating USAID freezes and cuts, and I know that people will die and suffer. In my line of work, I’m constantly aware of which countries are facing crushing humanitarian crises, and the acute levels of deprivation on the ground. The genocide in Gaza rages on, and the climate emergency is sounding louder and louder sirens that we somehow continue to block out.

Even though I am cynical, and even though — like most Old Millennials — I’m always a little bit burnt out, I do still believe we can do a bit better.

So that’s what this newsletter will be about.

Trying to figure out the ways we can make things a little bit better, whether that is international affairs or designing humane plane seats. And offering some little boosts and distractions along the way to help all of us working on these hard slogs.

There will also be memes.

Welcome!

Substack is a paid newsletter platform that allows you to support the writers you love. The plan is to keep this newsletter free for a while to get the word out, but if you can, your support would mean a lot — I am committed to sending at least ten newsletters per year for paid subscribers. Sharing with friends also helps, and is free!

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I’m obsessed with The Pitt

If you need a show to binge, I just raced through The Pitt, a medical drama set in a single shift in an emergency room in real time (yes, like 24).

It touches on some heavy issues, like gun violence, drug use, the mental health of young men, housing crises, health systems crumbling under mounting pressure. It even has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment on medical fatphobia, one of my favourite things to rant about. It shows how the mammoth efforts of individuals are sometimes the only thing keeping essential systems or institutions remotely functional. It suggests that we are all maybe a little bit traumatised from the pandemic, especially health workers. On a brighter note, is also getting praise for its representation of neurodiversity.

It is a stressful watch at times, but it is addictive, and quite relatable for anyone in any line of work where there are never enough resources to go round.

A content warning for lots of blood and some crunching of bones. I may have had to cover my eyes a few times.

Streaming on Foxtel/Binge in Australia.

Every person nodding along in health, international development, education, the community sector, academia, NGOs, small business, government…

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Doing a better job of talking about foreign aid

A note: when I talk about aid and development in this newsletter, I am trying to not get too jargony or sectoral, so it can potentially be understood by normal humans. Would appreciate feedback on whether I have succeeded. It is hard when you are in so deep, but I really want to practice what I preach.

Since the Trump 2.0 administration announced the ‘funding pause’ of USAID in February and then started blowing things up, my overall feeling has been ‘Ugh’. And I know I am not alone.

But besides ‘ugh’, the next big feeling is ‘what do we do?’

Others have suggested that it is an opportunity to further reform the aid sector. I must admit, I am not super optimistic that a resource-scarce environment where increasingly conservative Western governments are spouting conspiracy theories about aid funding is fruitful ground for positive change, but I do hope I am wrong.

Besides leaving us with fewer resources to address growing humanitarian and developmental need, one of my fears is that disinformation is going to push back the localisation and decolonisation agendas [approaches to international development that put power in the hands of local organisations and individuals], reduce rights-based programming [i.e. initiatives to improve gender equality, disability inclusion and human rights] and fuel an even more arduous approach to risk from donors [the governments of countries that give aid are often very worried about things going wrong — too much of this worrying can reduce the impact of development programs and place all kinds of administrative burdens on local organisations and NGOs].

There’s no shortage of ‘rethinking development’ happening out there. Others have proposed changing the terms we use to describe our work, big paradigm shifts and more — I agree with many of these arguments. But I think we need to do something right now to try to stop further cuts to funding for the world’s poorest.

As a professional communicator, the one great hope I have is that we could start to protect aid and development work from disinformation through proactive and strategic messaging. There is an urgent need for those working on development issues in Australia and elsewhere to recognise that the risk of not communicating is far greater than that of communicating. We all need to consider how we tell stories of impact and need, and whether we could tell those stories a little more loudly and clearly.

This is not a unique problem for foreign aid and development policy. I think it is an issue that persists across a range of policy areas that have, at their core, some kind of moral imperative and a degree of distance from most people’s everyday lives. See some of the debates around immigration, or Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme, for example.

I’m starting to wonder: are we assuming a baseline of morality that has been eroded? How do we get publics in developed countries to even understand what extreme poverty or humanitarian crisis means when they are in bad news overload and tuned out? And why isn’t self interest (i.e. not being on fire all the time, for those of us in many parts of Australia) enough of a motivator on climate action, for example? Doesn’t this bode poorly for any national interest argument on aid funding?

I don’t have these answers. But I think on the whole we probably need to explain more and assume less.

It is hard, but aid and development policy can make it into the mainstream media. Earlier this year, Australia released its International Gender Equality Strategy, something that we should feel some degree of pride about, especially considering global trends. It achieved more media coverage than usual for a government strategy launch (in part due to world events, such as Trump directives on removing the word gender in Federal policies and government documents).

The Foreign Minister’s speech delivered clear and strong message, with a single take-away talking point: gender equality is fundamental to our national interest.

We need more of this! Clarity is good!

But we also need to take the next step and really explain why. Not just in the launch speech, which had some strong messaging, but over and over again, through different channels and platforms that reach diverse audiences. It is not obvious to most Australians why supporting gender equality overseas would fundamentally benefit them, and it needs to be explained if it is to be supported. Same goes for many other areas that we work on.

Strong, consistent messaging. Taking a clear and vocal stance on rights issues. Telling interesting stories of impact and results, and actually disseminating them broadly. Sharing the stories of real humans. Not leaving space for ambiguity (but also not minimising complexity). Explaining how development assistance helps local leaders and changemakers to improve things in their own countries. Reminding everyone we are all connected and seemingly far away problems cannot actually be ignored. And above all else, remembering that the work we do can actually be interesting. (Well, some of it…)

This alone is probably not going to turn things around. We are always fighting for space in an information-saturated world. I am fully prepared that people will still think I build skyscrapers in Shanghai or something when I say I work in international development for many decades to come. But surely it could help a bit?

(… at least more than Blue Origin did for feminism and climate advocacy. I enjoyed all the jokes about it though… this op ed in The Guardian was funny and brutal)

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Smart stuff

camizeadotcom

A post shared by @camizeadotcom

• An interesting Search Engine podcast episode on virus transmission, featuring journo Carl Zimmer on his book ‘Airborne’.

• A SOAS take on Season 3 of The White Lotus, on whether it actually steers clear of Hollywood’s long-running stereotyping of Southeast Asia. (If anyone has read anything written by a Thai person about the show, which I was just as obsessed with as most of the world, please share it with me…)

• The earthquake in Myanmar has really turned an already terrible situation into an even more terrible situation. If you are in a position to donate, I’d recommend the Emergency Action Alliance appeal.

• As we head toward the Australian election (inconveniently scheduled on a milestone birthday for a certain newsletter writer), there is speculation that the Coalition will cut foreign aid if elected, except in the Pacific.

• Australia had a national reckoning over domestic violence, but where’s the focus this election?

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Little distractions

andrecaceresg

A post shared by @andrecaceresg

• I love this illustration account on Instagram. It perfectly encapsulates what it is like to live with a funny little dog.

• I recently returned from Japan. I won’t bore you with my stereotypical tales of konbini food, fast trains that we definitely should have built here decades ago, and high tech loos. It was a good time. But I will give you a simple recipe for okonomiyaki, one of the wonderful foods of Japan that is easily replicable at home (though never quite as good as on the teppan grill in Osaka or Hiroshima, of course). To make this recipe with nearly no chopping, buy a bag of finely sliced coleslaw from the salad baggies at the supermarket, use frozen or canned corn and skip the soaking/boiling steps. If you don’t have dashi (I’m currently in regional NSW so I don’t…) a splash of fish sauce, soy sauce or a pinch of stock powder with 200ml water does the job. If you don’t have rice flour you can use plain flour or GF flour — you might need to add a bit more water. You can throw some cheese in. You can throw some bacon bits in. You can use BBQ sauce instead of making okonomiyaki sauce, or you can just buy the pre-made sauce at an Asian grocer. You can sprinkle with furikake, and kewpie mayo is always a good idea. Make them as big as a dinner plate or make them small like fritters. I’ve found all my okonomiyaki experiments super forgiving. Have fun! (Adam Liaw’s recipe another reliable option.)

• My go-to tomato sambal recipe, just because. It is especially good on eggs (if you can afford them at the moment…)

• I’m not sure about their ethical provenance (there’s this but I haven’t investigated) but these size inclusive cotton lounge pants from the Lullaby Club (AU) are super comfortable (up to AU size 26) and seem durable.

• For sewing and craft folks, check out Circular Sourcing, an Australian-based site I recently discovered that sells designer deadstock and surplus fabric from fashion businesses.

• I’m way behind on Normal Gossip podcast episodes, but this one was a funny and endearing story about long-lasting female friendships.

• Awesome disability representation on this season of Alone Australia on SBS. ‘Muzza’ is also quite the character.