For You, For You My Darling One
Then there was the circling, and the maladroit. They fell down centuries and felt down centuries. All their tales, they coagulated in his blood. Their stories lingered, confused and indistinct. Doped to the eyeballs on gold standard psychotropics for weeks on end, the calculations of justice, the indistinct. They came roaring out of place. They sent their sentinels. They terraformed everything. They were, then, as one with their darling creations. He could feel them humming, although they did not hum. The mind played tricks to adjust. A priest bent down to touch black water. They didn't all come from the same place. They didn't all come as custodians.
A trailing hum as they circled for attack. Prey on the weak. Plunder the poor. Rid the planet, as so many were now saying, of evil. Everyone knew now. Whether it was the great reset or something else, he was hard put to know in these crumbling, turbulent times. Cryo freeze the bastards and blast them into space, he had advised long ago. They shatter into a million pieces. They can't be put back together. That was his blunt Assassin's Creed. Slit their throat, grab them from behind. But those creatures that possessed them, they required a different kind of extermination.
There was music then, and sun on skin, and he was not just powerful but handsome, a prince amongst men, the divine right of kings. That they spoke to us here showed that others were in play. That some giant network was lighting up across the globe. That this amount of data could not be distributed through a single organism. He could feel them wavering in the air already. The advance guards had come and made their arrangements. There was no all wise one, and they threatened to kill him if he compared them to a swarm. These were the wild days, when our kingdom came through into the flesh, when the quiet suburban yards and the sleeping towns, the quiet relics, the original humans, watered their lawns, tidied their houses, made their small lives smaller as the country shrank and the population retreated, caring even less about grand matters of state.
While the overlords prepared them for a life of abject poverty; transformed them into a mass readily exploited. Superfluous men. Those intelligent plants bordering the lake, as they had bordered the edge of water and land for millenia, so that when he looked, it was as if the whole scene had been bathed in a primordial light. We were trying to embrace you; beneath the glass pond where no one could see. But the deflection, the brittle broken heart, it all made for the love of man more difficult; so he let instead the trees talk to him, as they swirled in hot air and the coming summer; and he knew destiny was on the wing.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg billed taxpayers almost $5,000 to take the prime minister’s private jet on a whirlwind trip to Sydney on the night of Lachlan Murdoch’s Christmas party, leaving Canberra after 6pm, attending the Bellevue Hill soiree and then returning to the capital before 9am the next morning.
On 5 December last year, as bushfires blanketed Sydney in smoke haze, both the prime minister and treasurer attended the media heir’s mansion, Le Manoir, in the harbourside suburb.
The party was filled with celebrities, rich-listers and politicians, including Australia’s richest man, Anthony Pratt, the former NSW premier Mike Baird and the Crown casino boss, John Alexander.
The party, according to media reports, began about 5pm. Morrison and Frydenberg were in parliament until at least 6pm for the last day of the sitting year.
RAAF jet is protecting Mathias Cormann from Covid-19, Morrison says
Flight logs published by the Department of Defence show the pair, along with ministers Peter Dutton and Stuart Robert, took the jet to Sydney at a cost of $2,153. Dutton did not respond to questions about whether he attended the party. Robert was in Sydney for official parliamentary business and did not attend the party.
Media reports show that both Morrison and Frydenberg did attend. While in Sydney, Frydenberg charged taxpayers for the use of Comcars, but not any additional expenses for accommodation.
Early the next morning, records show Morrison, Frydenberg and Dutton flew back to Canberra, again on the jet, this time at a cost of $2,583.
Morrison and Dutton arrived back in time to hold a media event at 9am at Canberra airport to discuss new anti-terrorism measures.
Frydenberg then billed taxpayers $486 to fly home to Melbourne from Canberra, while Dutton flew home to Brisbane, again via Sydney, at a cost of $831.
The use of the prime minister’s jet alone cost about $4,736. The trip to Sydney cannot have lasted more than 14 hours.
The Boeing 737 Business Jet is one of six RAAF “special purpose” planes used by senior ministers and dignitaries when commercial flights are either unavailable or deemed unsuitable for the journey.
The former finance minister Mathias Cormann has been given the use of a Dassault Falcon 7X aircraft from the same fleet to travel around Europe as part of his bid for the top job at the OECD, costing taxpayers a reported $4,300 per hour. The final bill for Cormann’s use of the aircraft won’t be known until next year when the Department of Defence publishes flight logs for 2020.
The rules on using the special purpose aircraft require that it be done for the dominant purpose of parliamentary business and the expense must represent value for money.
Morrison lives in Sydney and was travelling with his family from Canberra, giving him at least some explanation for the trip.
But Frydenberg, despite repeated questions from the Guardian, has failed to explain how his trip to Sydney constituted parliamentary business or answer whether the Murdoch party was his primary purpose for travel.