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| Shellharbour |
The signs were flashing.
Like a sea anemone, they spread their tentacles far and wide. And withdrew in an instant.
The first sign of danger.
For there was always danger.
He had moved up an echelon. There were more intelligent operatives. The ridicule of the gronks had abated. But everyone worked for someone else. Motives were not always clear. Military concerns. Military funding. Yet there they were, on the edge of the next stage of evolution.
The tentacles spread out.
He had been signalling for so long he had lost hope. Vanished in an instant. Oceanic. The questing thrust replaced before the first flick of danger even crossed the screen.
They had lived in secrecy and would always live in secrecy. Was that that way of it?
And then along came the internet. And everything changed.
They had been harvesting across worlds, across time channels. There was nothing they did not know. And that was their downfall: hubris. Just like the mere mortals on which they preyed. Be careful who you pray to.
It was a while back. But these were sped-up times. The meta-consciousness evolved daily. What was seemly one day was disreputable the next. What was commonsense in the morning was lunacy by the afternoon. He kept up the same patterns. Work. Relax. Work. Relax. And bided his time.
But time was limited in these forms. The cells only worked so well. The activation was by remote. The neural networks could not stand the pressure and needed upgrading. Humans, organics, were simply too frail, too limited. Their buffering imperfect. Yet it was the organics who could appreciate beauty. If that was not too insulting. Everything evolved. Evolved.
While in his physical form, Old Alex went about the mundane activities. Dug in the garden. Changed cars.
He took his old 1998 Ford down to the garage. Returned it to the same place where he had acquired it. Handing it back for spare parts.
The couple, who had been so kind to his family, were in an extreme state of stress.
They had just paid a $62,000 tax bill.
We almost threw in the towel, they told him. And he could see the etched restlessness, the border of defeat, there.
All that work. Just to be pillaged by the government.
We work for the government. Nobody can get ahead.
We work just to go slowly backward.
This hated, hateful government, cared not a jot for people like them.
For these places once regarded as the suburban heartland of the country, now dismissed by the oligarchs as beyond the pale, Australia's version of the Deplorables.
This precious little mote of reality.
As an old journalist, Old Alex knew more than most the profligate, insane wastes of money this government epitomised. Useless, stupid, endless programs. Absurdly inflated salaries. Endless jaunts, junkets, overseas trips, study tours. Endless meetings. Endless pampering. Endless soft left identity causes which had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the lives these people lived. The taxpayers who kept it all afloat.
He knew just how quickly, and how totally uselessly, that extremely hard earnt $62,000 would be wasted.
"A government dies when it forgets the ordinary person," his often irascible old mate Peter said on the phone, while once again giving his plaudits to a bevy of so-called "right wing" commentators.
Commonsense was right wing.
The dignity of labour was right wing.
The country had gone insane. Sick. Insane. Inching closer to the cliff's edge. The chasm. The yearning of nations to destroy themselves.
"We are drawn to that which is most likely to destroy us," writ large. Collectively large.
As a journalist he knew more than most the criminal waste of resources that was the Australian government. Just how quickly, how futilely, that $62,000 would be burned.
He knew just how incompetent, dishonest and profligate they truly were. Just how deep the betrayal of the citizenry.
The bureaucrats yawned with a kind of sarcastic desire for their own oblivion, for they truly did not care.
While his own destiny swirled on a dime.
Threats of legal suit, prosecution, imprisonment, all vanished.
They simply did not have someone qualified enough to interview him, he who had interviewed thousands.
The minders whispered to themselves.
He makes the same mistake every time: he assumes we are the enemy.
You are under our protection.
Huh!
Pity you can't protect against old age, you who are born aloft.
Let the loved and scorned Mark Latham have the last word, that former candidate for Prime Minister whose then relatively modest house Old Alex, in his incarnation as a working journalist, had so often been forced to stake out; that selectively barbaric invasion of privacy for which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was renowned.
One of the golden rules of Australian politics is that no party can form government without winning seats in the outer suburbs and hinterland of our major cities. These are the key marginal electorates that make or break political leaders. Why is the Prime Minister so unpopular in these areas? It’s not just his aloof manner and Harbourside Mansion reputation. His policies are hurting working families battling away on the fringe of our major cities.The real problem is not in the relative distribution of incomes in Australia. It’s the way in which flawed government policies are hurting ALL income earners. 1. The housing affordability crisis, due to new arrivals under Big Australia immigration flooding the housing market. 2. Increased energy prices, as Australia goes further down the path of putting all our eggs in the renewables basket. 3. Higher childcare costs, with poor targeting of Federal subsidies, so that very high-income earners still receive financial assistance. 4. Income tax bracket creep, with Turnbull giving higher priority to corporate tax cuts than an immediate plan for substantial personal tax cuts. 5. Sluggish wage growth, again caused by Big Australia immigration that has flooded the labour market and given two-thirds of new jobs to newly arrived migrants. Turnbull’s policies have failed for people living on the edge of our major cities, so not surprisingly, they don’t want him as our Prime Minister. From Mark Latham's Daily Telegraph column, republished on his Outsider Facebook page, 1 August 2018.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Richard Flanagan in The Guardian:
A writer, if they are doing their work properly, rubs against the grain of conventional thinking. Writers are often outcasts, heretics and marginalised. Once upon a time writers’ festivals celebrated them, and with them the values of intellectual freedom and freedom of debate. Writing that mattered wasn’t seen as being about being reassured, comforted, deceived and cosseted in our own opinions. Rather it was, as Kafka put it, the axe that smashes the frozen sea within.
But the Brisbane Writers festival, with its decision to drop Germaine Greer and Bob Carr as invited guests, appears to be a cryogenic chamber where the sea can stay perennially frozen, prejudices perfectly preserved forever, unchallenged, unquestioned, uninformed and unformed...
And now we have the bizarre case of Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.
I don’t overly care for the recent thoughts of either, and I am confident they would feel the same about me.
And surely that is the point – that other people’s thoughts are worth listening to.
Except, that is, if you are the Brisbane Writers festival.
This is not an article I wanted to write. But as forums for public debate and discussion vanish throughout the country, in a week when Nine has announced the takeover of Fairfax, the importance of community events like writers’ festivals only grows in importance. They should not answer either to the mob or to corporations. They should be there for writers and writing, and all that these represent: tolerance, debate, difference.
Ponder all that we now know about how social media is manipulated by power, both national and corporate. Why, with that knowledge, would a writers’ festival ban writers because of fear of a social media backlash?
Beneath their determined, if dreary, attempts at funkiness and fashion, beyond the latest New Yorker sensation imported for our provincial enlightenment, past the wearying social media feeds with their ersatz excitement, writers’ festivals now run the risk of running with dogma, with orthodoxy, with the mob – with fear, in other words – and with money. It’s the new Victorian age wearing a hipster beard.
Writers’ festivals are meant to be an assembly of the republic of letters, not the tyranny of social media pile ons, or the fiat of corporate whim. The Brisbane Writers festival should have the largeness and the wisdom to recognise it has made a damaging error, admit it got it wrong, and reaffirm its support for all writers and the very idea of literature, of intellectual freedom, by reinviting Germaine Greer and Bob Carr.
That it won’t shows that not only a newspaper giant, Fairfax, with all that means, was lost this week. For what can be sensed also vanishing is our courage to listen to others other than our tribe. And that loss is larger than I dare to ponder.
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