Chapter Two: Reignition

The Israeli Hamas War had begun more than sixty days before, and he had fallen silent. He didn't have to have an opinion about everything, and suddenly he didn't have an opinion about anything. 

There was a strange silence that gathered in the cloisters.

Well, that's how he had begun in one false start weeks before. Now it was 2024. And Chapter Two was about to begin. 

Everything had to start somewhere; every journey begins with a single step, cliches pile on in a distorted, crowded brain, after weeks, months of silence. He justified it as exhaustion after the last book, Australia Breaks Apart. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the Universe was telling him that silence was golden. 

It was almost vegetative, that silence, with stray thoughts from the past, odd swirls from the future, beyond words, or outside words, nothing but its own existence, the silence that surrounded them all, the fleeing wings that helped cover, or encompass, all the suburbs that surrounded him. 

It had to begin. It had to renew. 

He made his own quiet resolutions. 2024. Happy. Healthy. Productive. 

He was in Queensland, on the face of it a much more prosperous state than New South Wales. Cross the border and the municipal infrastructure is simply better, the roads, the libraries, the pools. But the people were just as insular as they were further south. He longed for a village when there was no village. He wanted to belong but to what he did not know 

The invitations had been there, but confused by the multiple strands of multiple liars, by the deceit of those who wanted to shut him down, he simply receded into some false realm, drank and smoked too much, knew they watched and dismissed him, which is what he wanted, wondered how, in the end, as future anthropologists clucked to themselves about the nature of "primitive humans"; and we rose up, rose up, and called for the ether, and wondered at the state of everything. 

Australia returned in many ways to its former self. The roads were busy, and at this time of the year full of holiday makers. He visited an old friend whose husband had passed away, had ended in a wheelchair, and had made it clear she would appreciate the company over Christmas.

He had crossed the threshold. Autumn they said. Life's autumn. More likely autistic. Well, anyway, the vegetative response. "Gas the Jews", "Gas the Jews", supporters of Palestine had chanted on the steps of the Opera House, a signal moment in the evolution of Australian social history. 

Millions of Australian children had been vaccinated with a poorly tested, unsafe and ineffective vaccine which had cost the taxpayer billions, and which the politicians, if they had bothered to read the contracts, knew perfectly well were neither safe nor effective, and that there was zero evidence to suggest that they were. 

But there was no anger; well there was, but just not in the mainstream media, which relied on Big Pharma advertising. None of the institutions meant to protect Australians had worked. 

And yet here we were, in summer, and there was no scent of tragedy around. 

The blighted, read appalling, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, was flooding the country with record numbers of migrants, a policy he most certainly had not taken to the election. 

Corrupt. Corruption. Blind arrogance. Hostage to bureaucrats. A bureaucratic agenda. A nastiness in the body corporate, the threshing, thrashing dishonesty of the public debate. 

Polarised. Discontented. Storms lashed the east coast; in what had been predicted as a bush fire and drought season by the Bureau of Metereology, but had turned out to be nothing of the kind. 

Rewriting the past to suit the agendas of the climate warming scammers, who took hostage of the narrative through extensive funding of academics and institutions. 

Nobody believed it anymore; and as Zee Media reported, one of the best things about 2023 was that the minute the proponents overstepped the mark and started raving about "global burning" the proverbial light bulb went off, and everyone realised it was a scam.

A nasty, sick, dishonesty scam backed by the world's billionaires; who were making huge profits off the back of governments pouring billions into this fantasy, in order to provide the illusion of doing something, in order to promote external fear, to create an external threat which only governments could solve.

It was all bullshit. And at the heart of it all, a sadness.

But then again, everywhere, renewal, young families, rain, washed clean air, the details of everything picked out in high light. 

"Be gone from this place. Just Do Your Job", the gods had ordered in that forest cathedral. 

And that he hadn't done. He just took the target off his back, and descended into a terrible blankness. Unseen. Unheard. Unfractured. As sentient as a tree, well less so. Just watching the world pass by. 

Rise up, rise up, they said, and so it was, and so it will be, the great flowering. 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

NEWS

From August

Anthony Albanese and his deputy Richard Marles have scored a big pay pump which will increase their pay to $586,768 and $432,860 respectively.

The pay rise for all politicians is worth 4 per cent and is the largest single increase in nearly a decade, taking the base salary of a backbencher from $217,000 to $225,680.

Under the changes Mr Albanese will score a $22,568 a year pay rise. His deputy Richard Marles will score a $16,000 pay rise from September 1.

NINE

Federal politicians will receive their biggest pay rise in nearly a decade with all public offices to receive a 4 per cent increase.

The decision was made after The Remuneration Tribunal, the body in charge of the parliamentary pay reviews, said they had made "conservative" increases in the past, which were not up to date with Australia's "economic conditions".

It means the base salary of an MP will rise from $217,000 to $225,680. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's salary will go from $564,200 to $586,768 while opposition leader Peter Dutton's salary will increase from $401,450 to $417,508.

Two bombs have exploded minutes apart at a commemoration for a prominent Iranian general slain in a United States drone strike in 2020, killing at least 188 people and wounding more than 140 others, as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip

No one immediately claimed responsibility for what appeared to be the deadliest militant attack to target Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran's leaders vowed to punish those responsible for Wednesday's blasts, which wounded at least 211 people.

SKY NEWS

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/anthony-albanese-scores-pay-rise-as-pollies-get-huge-bump/news-story/c949f7349520608d15821a5defd42a91#

 From weeks ago. 

Sky News host Danica De Giorgio has slammed outgoing Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for the decisions she made during the COVID pandemic. Ms De Giorgio sat with Sky News host James Macpherson to discuss the outgoing premier retiring and her history of decisions since entering the role in 2015. “Talking about the way she handled COVID – was appalling, the ideal quote ‘Queensland hospitals are for Queenslanders’, that is her legacy,” she said. “That is what she leaves behind, ridiculous commentary like that. “She politicised COVID, she made a mockery of families whose loved ones were on the other side of the border, she trundled herself off to Tokyo, got an exemption for herself in the middle of the pandemic while everyone else was locked down, then let NRL families in during the NRL Grand Final.”