BLOWBACK

Harpies in the Woods of the Suicides, Gustave Dore, 1861.

Blowback. 
The nation needs him. 
He'd be better off dead, we'd all be better off. 
There was fowl circumstance. 
It was the coldest, wettest summer he could remember, and once again there were storm clouds overhead, scudding skies, drenching, sticky rain. 
He wanted to say goodbye to everybody, before they wandered off the planet surface. Leaving him to cope. 
They were spreading their worst diseases of consciousness.
The AIs chattered amongst themselves. 
Turnbull did his bit as Chief Mouth. 
Including  announcing the results of the Closing the Gap ritual, where bureaucrats set targets and then announced their failure to meet them as a reason to pour more billions down the gullet hole of failed indigenous policy. Fewer indigenous children were dying before school age, the government announced. Now there was an achievement. 

HOW TO SPEND $130 BILLION OVER THE PAST 8 YEARS AND GO BACKWARDS IN ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS
Closing the Gap failures highlight the need to start again with a whole new Indigenous policy approach. Instead, the insider's club is using things like the Uluru Statement to try to resurrect ATSIC, a corrupt, nepotistic, wasteful example of what not to do.
$130 billion has been spent on programs aimed at Closing the Gap between white and black Australia, and now Turnbull's Minister has declared it to be a "failure".
Apologies don't work, welfare doesn't work, "self-determination" doesn't work, dodgy Land Councils don't work. It's time governments started listening to people like Jacinta Price and Anthony Dillon to get results, to help Indigenous people in need and take this huge burden off the taxpayer.
UPDATE: Bill Shorten has announced today that a Labor Government will legislate "An Indigenous Voice to Parliament", a policy that repeats the mistakes of ATSIC (which had to be closed down in 2004). When will Labor ever learn? Mark Latham. 

Politics was local. Life lived was local. Micro-climates were local.  As the government continued to fail at everything, including the uber surveillance of its own citizens, the government sponsored harassment of journalists, the marshalling of patriots, those "right wing groups" who dared to protest the left wing lunacies which were now the orthodoxies of bureaucratic administration. 

We will meet in the place where there is no darkness.

That is, in the middle of the torture chamber. 

The themes recurred in these blessed days, those days of waiting. 

The government terrorised its own people, and had become their greatest enemy. At the morning Table of Knowledge Old Alex listened to Peter, the Italian papa, and his stories of parking sensors being installed in country towns, after he was booked for accidentally driving front end into a "reverse parking only" spot in Wagga Wagga. Before he had the chance to correct his mistake. Automatically fined if the second hand passed over 15 minutes in a short time parking area. A cruel waste of talent. Rapacious governments slugging and fining, monitoring and harassing the citizenry at every single turn. 

Old age is cruel, Winston Churchill's the painter told him, when he objected to his official portrait. Decay. Obstinacy. Before he burnt the offending painting.

They could feel each other, there in the fluid air. An old soldier dreamt of napalm. But there was not much else, there in the fronds. Not that season. 

So he heard them mutter in the reaches. 

As they all waited. 

I swear before God. I would like to apologise. 


THE BIGGER STORY:

The Australian government mismanages absolutely everything, including the country's vital inland rivers.
From an article Richard Kingston, who took me and a photographer to the truly remarkable Macquarie Marshes:

Finally, there was little acknowledgement on the impacts on the two principal drivers of the Water Act 2007 underpinning the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which allowed the Australian Government to ‘take over’ running the rivers – internationally important wetlands and migratory shorebirds. This is despite the Australian Government formally notifying the international community that human impacts were significantly changing two wetlands in the Darling, the Macquarie Marshes and the Gwydir wetlands, two of only three in Australia. And, there was good evidence for migratory shorebirds declining as a result of river development. Astoundingly, the Authority’s review even found that there was too much environmental water going to the Macquarie Marshes, contradicting the best available science. There is little evidence that the best available science and evidence informed the recommendation.

Billions of dollars have been wasted along the Murray-Darling Basin on irrigation projects that have failed to achieve their intended environmental outcomes, a group of 12 concerned Australian academics says.

The group, which includes economists and some of the nation's top water scientists, released a declaration in Adelaide this morning urging fundamental changes to the way the system is administered.
Those changes include halting subsidies and grants to irrigators that have been introduced under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.