THE ART OF THE SELFIE

By Serene Escape

There's been a security breach.
There was a story they did not want told. It would be told.
These were the days of antennas, preludes and fermenting trouble, of ridden, compromised agencies and security agendas which had nothing to do with security. 
But the impending violence had not broken. Not yet. 
And that, after all, was the primary objective. Get through the day and put the explosions off till the morrow.
Sydney had been in lock down for an ASEAN conference. 

The biggest threat was from within, but they already knew that.

Sydney had imported the world's problems.

But Sydney, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the smart cars and the security at every angle, that was a world too far for Australian jihadists.

The infidels were closer to home.

And they were winning, in any case.

As always the public paid for their own propaganda. 

They met on a weekly basis, the Watcher on the Watch and his Overlord.

They were going to put a stop to it.

What, the ridiculous, offensive, invasive levels of surveillance and harassment perpetrated on the citizenry?

That'd be the day. 

Or the voices of discontent mirrored through the walls? The voices which he mirrored? 

You can't put a stop to everybody. To every insurrection. To every insubordinate thought. 

Much as you would like.
Democracy had become a criminal enterprise, robbing the poor to pay the rich.

It was everywhere to be seen. 
What was remarkable was the number of lackeys willing to perform the service.

Meanwhile the same issues were at play. 

The Prime Minister never let a single chance go by not to promote himself as being at the centre of everything, at his not-fit-for-purpose mansion at Point Piper to conferences of regional leaders, all of it at vast expense to the taxpayer as millions ran through their preening, self-important hands. 

ASEAN had been holding these summits for decades. 

It was unclear what they achieved.

And equally, for years, they had wound up by releasing regional security statements. 

Equally unclear if anything had ever been achieved. 

Sydney 2018 was no difference. 

Turnbull made sure he was at the centre of, well, everything. 

Taxpayers money was being used to fund the world's greatest self-promoter.

The conference, which was never designed to achieve anything, had been turned into a kind of orgy of self promotion for Our Blessed Leader.

Malcolm Turnbull’s excellent ASEAN adventure was a roaring success in the best traditions of ASEAN. That is to say, it more or less did nothing and made no serious contribution to solving any of the region’s pressing problems.
That is not a criticism, least of all of Turnbull. It is instead the true nature of ASEAN.
It doesn’t solve problems, it manages them. It de-escalates them. Sometimes it manages them so well for so long — on the basis that in the long run all our problems will die — that they just go away or become instead a frozen, static part of the landscape.
Earnest analysts and reporters will, like Western Kremlinologists of old, wring a drop of alleged meaning out of the group’s ­gnomic deliberations on the South China Sea. ASEAN Summit, Malcolm Turnbull embraces the Asian way of diplomacy, The Australian, 19 March, 2018.

Pretty much seen it all before.

They escaped serious scrutiny.

They escaped public scandal.

They escaped an explosion on the streets of Sydney. 

A nation wide cognitive dissonance settled upon them all. 

Lucky we didn't get too excited. Nobody died. 

The deeper problems, they're for somebody else to handle.

I just want to retire early.

On the balcony of his harbour side mansion, a dwelling about which there were known security concerns, Malcolm Turnbull took a selfie, yet another selfie, with the Indonesian leader. 

Surveillance cameras. Contracts, contracts. 

That was for the peasants. 

The peasants were under surveillance because they were a threat.
No one knew when the uprising would come.
No one could be trusted.
Certainly not the servant class.

We’ve always known Turnbull is a selfie-obsessed man. More than any PM before him, he’s constantly outstretching his right hand, clutching his smartphone and taking a snap.
But there’s something off about his selfies. Take his tweet from Mardi Gras last night.
Lovely. He met Cher, that’s pretty sweet. His wife is there, which is also quite wholesome — and there’s the Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, peeping out from behind Cher’s flowing locks.
All day I haven’t been able to stop looking at this photo. For some reason that I couldn’t quite figure out, it just looks so weird. So I went back and dug up some more Turnbull selfies, and slowly I realise...  

Malcolm Turnbull does not know how to take a selfie. Let me explain.

There’s a reason why other politicians haven’t run into the same selfie troubles as Turnbull.
They get other people to take their selfies instead. It’s a brilliant strategy. That way, you’re not forced to make awkward choices about whether to put your arm into the photo or whether to suffer from the tragic scrunched head problem.
And really, maybe this has been Turnbull’s problem all along — he’s put himself in a really difficult position with his selfie strategy. Now that it’s expected that he take the selfie, rather than the other participants in the photo, he might be stuck in this poor routine for the rest of his public life. Max Koslowski, Investigation: Why does Malcolm Turnbull take selfies so weirdly, Junkee, 4 March, 2018. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

For fifty years, since Australia entered the war in Vietnam in 1965, Australian foreign policy has been made increasingly subservient to a specific concept of Australia’s relationship with the United States. That concept, first enunciated by Prime Minister Menzies in 1955, was that for its survival, Australia needed ”a great and powerful friend”. All of our key decisions in foreign policy since then have been shaped by our own construct of what loyalty to the United States and the Alliance demanded. That construct has been to follow the US practice and to identify foreign policy with military and security policy.

By acting in this way we have substantially compromised our independence and, contrary to what this policy supposedly intends, we have exposed ourselves to increasing danger. The latter fact derives in good measure from: the disarray within the US polity, which is now endemic, the distortions and self-delusions which have shaped US policy, particularly the notion that the US is “the exceptional country”. We need to free ourselves from the habit of echoing the Americans.

This is a matter of maturity, self respect, national interest, and our security.