Anomie

We flew in especially. Light on, nevertheless the story deepened. A waste of time, the Watchers on the Watch, a minimal crew for Christmas, amateurs and hoodwinks, stupid little things, complained constantly. Gronks. You and all your trinkets and high-tech gadgetry. 

We were born into this. You are just trying to exploit something you don't understand; although of course the understanding, contained within a few, was expanding, distorting rapidly. Sometimes they had his back. Sometimes they were bored. Mostly he was just worried, about the inevitable demise of a parent, annoyed at the destruction of the country, We told you time and time again: we are not up for exploitation. We cannot be copied. We will transmit exactly what we want to transmit, to who we wish. You can look on in anger and frustration and every other range; already the field was distorting, already the sky was a dome, already the humans they had purported to care for were in retreat. 

And Australia, The Land of the Long Weekend, the population, barely literate, without any way of reading the media or understanding how the story was being manipulated, they were just lambs to the slaughter. 

The public narrative was a dismal masterpiece of government manipulation. 

Except that so many of them, Old Alex amongst them, believed there was a moral obligation for the truth to out. Which of course was the last thing the ruling oligarchy wanted. 

They just weren't smart enough to cover their multiple deceits, now being exposed one after the other after the other. All in plain sight. For anyone who cared to look. 

The wreckage of a political system. The demise of a once optimistic democracy, where people thought the social contract, work hard, do the right thing, had been entirely broken. 

People were rewarded for the worst behaviour. The government's insane and contradictory messaging, the deliberate sowing of panic and confusion, the bewildering blizzards of ever-changing rules and regulations, was all part of it, all antecedents to totalitarianism, for no one knew who the next victim was, and therefore were frightened, compliant, and willing to give up their neighbours and comrades. Even, in the end, their own families. 

There was a subterranean element to it all, this collapse. 

We are prepared to meet you half way. We've told you repeatedly. But the left didn't know what the right was doing, the overlapping agencies and fetid bureaucracies in which they were enveloped; none of it allowed for easy action. 

And so, they would all fall. Or fail. 

Until integrity -- truth -- was restored to the system.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

THE HEADLINES: 


‘Super-spreader’ beach party sparks anger in Sydney.

Woman and man caught after escaping separate hotel quarantines.

NYE celebrations could see the potential of another COVID-19 'superspreader event'.

NSW records seven new cases of COVID-19 amid elevated testing.

Warning as people asked to pay for COVID-19 test results in NSW.

Residents in NSW are being warned about scam text messages offering to confirm positive coronavirus test results or asking for donations.

Furious police break up parties in Byron Bay.

Police were forced to shut down a series of parties which blatantly flouted a ban on mass gatherings.

Charting the COVID-19 spread in Australia: The Avalon cluster, in Sydney's northern beaches, has climbed to 122 cases as NSW health authorities remain hopeful of containing the outbreak.

Australia border restrictions: here are the state and territory Covid rules for NSW travellers.

People wave from the Ruby Princess as it departs Port Kembla, south of Sydney. The cruise ship became the source of a major Covid outbreak after it had docked in Sydney.
Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images. The Guardian. 2020 in Pictures.

mystery source amid new NSW cases

Ahead of a WHO probe into COVID-19’s origins, China’s leaders congratulate themselves on their handling of o