On the wellness racket and the lie of “resilience”.

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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.

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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.