Frightened and Alone: The Nature of the Universe is Social
The house internet was down, most things were down, as the blizzard or rainfall of diktats from the Covid era remained absurdly in place, with multiple industries and institutions struggling to perform at all.
Two years on.
The population was well and truly over it.
And seeing as most everybody had contracted it despite being double vaxxed, boosted, and all the rest of the palaver, it made no sense, none at all.
Australia was in election mode. 21 May the nation had to go to the polls.
The media had so discredited itself; the politicians had so discredited themselves; it was a miracle if anybody was listening.
He met no one who was.
There was a swirl in the reaches, an army gathering, decamping, moving, re-establishing, changing of personnel, a dark storm and the endless rain, gusty, strange, it was common for people to say they had never known weather like it.
Everywhere the ground was saturated.
Here on this beautiful planet.
He didn't know what was next. Everything crawled a terrible slow pace.
He could have confirmed for them if they had wanted to know.
But there was no politeness in any of this.
They plucked at threads, they wished to exploit, while he could see, could see, and listened to the crawling spheres, and wondered now how it would come to be, how it had come to this, how he had come to this age, "sticking up for himself", for it had not been him who had been wrong about any of this.
And so they wondered too, at last.
Their own certainties crumbled.
The population had been betrayed.
The government had known of vaccine failure from the experiences overseas even before they had begun aggressive mandates and ceaseless advertising, now making Australia one of the most heavily vaccinated countries on Earth.
They had not dodged a bullet, instead the black sleet rain of bullshit had landed on all of them, had destroyed all normal functioning society, or much of it, and he wondered now, as they all did, how it would end; in the misery he predicted, in a faux normality, in a time of disease and crying out, or a more pleasant period of recrimination and court cases and a rethinking of everything.
Two old war horses battled it out on a fake stage.
They wheeled out John Howard yet again; so he could blast Albanese, who had already made a fool of himself by not knowing the unemployment rate.
Gifting the equally idiotic Morrison a possibility of victory against all the deserved odds; against reason or hope.
The nation had given up on politics.
They expected nothing of their leaders.
A place which already had some of the highest electricity prices and worst internet in the world had been thoroughly trashed by two years of virus derangement; while "keeping Australians safe" had proved just another lie in a litany of deceit and malfeasance.
"We shall come for you; the harvest."
Well, no you won't.
The horses wheeled, the stairs ascended, but a secret thread, one they could not see, would preserve what needed to be preserved.
While above and around and through, a great wheeling.
As the black swans settled on the lake, and birds wheeled overhead; caught in time, caught in place, caught here.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
ABC
Australians living with a disability warn a shortage of home care workers is "failing" people and leaving some without help for critical daily tasks.
Key points:
The shortage of disability home care workers is "pretty dire", the head of National Disability Services says
Industry workers say the shortage is due to COVID isolation, a lack of international workers and low wages in the sector
Carl Thompson says he has been left in bed for hours when support workers have been unavailable
George Ayoub gets upset when he recalls a morning when a support worker did not show up, leaving him unable to get out of bed for hours until his son was able to help him.
Mr Ayoub uses a wheelchair and lives with post-polio and a respiratory condition that requires him to breathe through a respirator throughout the day.
"I'm waiting in bed to get up and nobody showed up," he told 7.30, recalling the incident from his home in Western Sydney.
"Thank God I had my son in the spare room and he was able to provide me some help, but there's things a person needs to do: go to the bathroom, have a shower, get up and wake up, get some breakfast.
"And I laid back in bed with a tear in my eye, thinking, 'Is this what it's come down to?'"
The system, he says, "is failing us — it's failing us tremendously".
SKY
Former Liberal prime minister John Howard believes Opposition leader Anthony Albanese’s economics figures gaffe is “emblematic” of his failure to outline a solid economic plan.
The Labor leader was unable to recall the unemployment or cash rate on day one of the official election campaign with Mr Howard saying it highlighted Mr Albanese’s weaknesses.
Speaking exclusively to Sky News Australia host Paul Murray the former prime minister admitted the reason the blunder had been such a “big story” was due to the state of affairs within the Labor Party.
“He’s not regarded as being the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to economics,” he said.
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Tue 12 Apr 2022 19.02 AEST
Scott Morrison must not use trans people as “political pawns” or as a “dog-whistle to the ultraconservatives” during the election campaign, independent MPs and candidates running against moderate Liberals have said.
The candidate for Goldstein, former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel, was among the independents to round on the prime minister on Tuesday, saying she was “concerned that Scott Morrison appears to be getting ready to weaponise this issue at a cost to a vulnerable community”.
“Trans people are constantly used as political pawns without care – this must stop,” Daniel said.