GRIEVOUS ASSAULT

A martyr to the cause. But the cause changed every night.
Nobody cared anymore. That was perhaps the most frightening thing. The fate of the country left in the hands of those who, having feathered their own nests, were happy to crumble into comfortable old age. 
Once senior public servants with power over staff and their ministers, they still met for lunch and recalled old bureaucratic battles, compared recent travels and satiated themselves with comparisons of airlines. Most of all, Australians compared their property holdings. 
Humans were creatures driven by status and hierarchy, and in the crudest of terms knew already what each other's property holdings were worth. 
They clung to their own kind. 
He wandered on a limb far far out. 
Nothing in the country made sense.
The head of the disastrous fiasco called the NBN, the National Broadband Network, was retiring early after having raked $13 million off the back of the taxpayer in personal income. 
Every day Australians were faced with the consequences of this disaster, watching rotating blue circles on their computer screens, unable even to make simple phone calls in many areas. Their place in the world collapsing.
The country was being driven backwards by a pack of incompetents, and they swanned off with multi-million dollar packages while the country itself swan dived backwards off a misty cliff. 

NBN Co boss Bill Morrow has engineered a near seamless exit from the National Broadband Network two years before the network is fully rolled out, while pocketing more than $13 million during the course of his five-year tenure.
With an annual salary of $2.36m, plus more than $1 million in performance bonuses, Mr Morrow is the highest paid public servant in the country, earning more than Australia Post chief Christine Holgate, whose pay is capped at $2.75m.
NBN Co boss Bill Morrow has engineered a near seamless exit from the National Broadband Network two years before the network is fully rolled out, while pocketing more than $13 million during the course of his five-year tenure.
With an annual salary of $2.36m, plus more than $1 million in performance bonuses, Mr Morrow is the highest paid public servant in the country, earning more than Australia Post chief Christine Holgate, whose pay is capped at $2.75m. Bill Morrow to step down early from NBN Co, The Australian, 5 April, 2018.

On every metric, the dying fall. 
He listened to them dying with their every last breath. 
Subterfuge was everywhere. 
There were no straight points to marry into. The government funding made it all the more pointless, more desperate, their games, their surveillance, their pressurisation. 
"I don't see the point."
All the metrics bad.

Australia’s students generally are slipping behind their international counterparts, but PEF researcher David Hetherington found students already in the bottom cohort because of factors outside of their control were falling further behind, and faster.“We recognise the limitations of standardised testing, but one advantage is that it does provide comparable time-series data for evaluation across a host of countries,” Hetherington found.“From 2009 to 2015, where the data is consistently comparable, the average performance across all subjects of students at the 10th percentile (10% from the bottom) fell by 21.3 points, while the performance of those at the 90th percentile fell by only 14.4 points.“While all cohorts have fared worse, the performance of those at the bottom has fallen by almost 50% more than those at the top, exacerbating inequality between the two ends.” Educational inequality widening, Amie Remeikis, The Guardian, 3 April, 2018.

We did this. We were cruel and indifferent. We harassed, bullied, threatened, intimidated, used surveillance as a blunt, bludgeoning tool, came within metres of arrest, tried every old PsyOp trick in the book, befriended, dismissed, placed false information. We threatened him with everything from hospital to prison. We played games where we should have been kind. We placed groups of homophobic thugs on the watch. We used machines to avoid detection. We used Muslims we knew would be incensed. We relegated the few intelligent empaths we had at our disposal to the far reaches. We let the bureaucrats run wild. 

We abused our position. Short and simple.

And yes, we were guilty of this grievous assault. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The Australian defence force says allegations that an air force bomb in Mosul, Iraq, killed civilians are “credible”.The Australian Super Hornet airstrike last year is said to have killed two civilian adults and injured two children when it bombed a terrace house in west Mosul.
Amnesty International says the strike “may have violated the rules of war”, and has renewed calls for an independent commission to investigate other potentially unlawful Coalition airstrikes.
Benjamin Walsby, who authored Amnesty’s report on civilian deaths in Mosul, welcomed Australia’s willingness to investigate the deaths and called on its Coalition partners to follow suit.
“At the time and to this day, we call on Coalition members to investigate all incidents of strikes that may have violated the rules of war, and this is one of them,” Walsby said.
“Even if we were unable to corroborate that it violated [international humanitarian law], it nonetheless fits within the wider pattern that we documented of unlawful strikes carried out during the Mosul operation.”