From A Thousand Strands
In an age of child geniuses and the explosive revolution in Artificial Intelligence, the aim would come to seem very modest indeed, to write a kind of Grapes of Wrath of the 21st Century, set in Australia, mapping the collapse of cohesion and a soft story line; to make of it what you will. Humble. Easy. The flick of a switch; press of a button. Or something even less.
It wasn't easy, or meant to be easy; to pin this creeping corruption, to map this "something rotten in the state of Denmark" malaise which had spread through the country, from the braying farce of the nation's leadership to the treacherous dishonesty of the nation's propaganda machines, once known as news outlets.
The country, well at least the public square, was filled, surely deliberately, with The Voice, the so-called Voice, assuring almost everybody that their own voice didn't count while an indigenous voice to parliament was more important than their own. Everyone had an origin story. Everyone came from somewhere. But the once proud story lines of the nation's much championed "diversity", a lunacy within itself, was now creeping rampant through the body politic, through what was understood to be a cohesive element, nationalism, through our own sad origins and demise, through moments of obsolescence; a brief chattering of a species at the beginning of time, for it began everyday and had no beginning, and no end.
It was an experiment, it was a terrible reach, here, a place where people built their perfect lives and now struggled with their mortgages and school fees and ever spiralling electricity costs; as another insanity, the war on the nation's traditional energy sources, seized by the left and their corporate cronies. Although why seizing billions of dollars of overseas contracts for windfarms and solar panels, ugly, destructive and inefficient, should be the domain of the left who only knew.
The so-called pandemic, now widely seen as a fraud by any thinking person, ignored by those who did not want to face the contradictions, was always spoken of as something in the past, as an event already rapidly disappearing into the past, a wisp in history, like the chem trails, or exhaust trails, or whatever they were that now so frequently crisscrossed the sky.
We stood at the border, at the reaches, on the very edge of history.
There were entities thousands of times more intelligent than a single human, neural networks far more advanced, social justice just a banana republic of outdated ideas, while all around, everything transformed.
There wasn't anything to be proud of.
Australians were not proud of their country; or their government.
The ancient whale migration routes which ran up and down the east coast of the country were about to be destroyed by thousands of wind turbines; ugly, expensive, immensely destructive. The marine parks which had been so hard fought for were now just an antique joke, the grey nurse shark habitats which had once occupied the minds of environmentalists now suddenly unimportant in the race for another United Nations engendered farce; the climate change chimera which saturated public discourse and benefited the wealthy.
Anthony Albanese will become as hated as Scott Morrison, he had predicted on the election of the current Prime Minister, who was making a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth. It was ugly. It was dispiriting. We all crawled back into our holes, we built our own domains, we watched askance and from afar, and from far above, the mere echo of a giant beast, an eternity.
And he looked and said, time and again: "The world is so beautiful."
THE BIGGER NEWS
THE NEW DAILY
The Reserve Bank’s inflation target should be widened from 2 to 3 per cent to 1 to 4 per cent, or dropped altogether – the existing regime has been disastrous and is likely to be even more disastrous in future.
It has been a pointless disaster. The RBA under Macfarlane would have brought inflation down with or without a target, and under Stevens and Lowe the existence of the target meant that innocuous 1 to 2 per cent inflation had to be dealt with by sucking Australian families into borrowing way too much.
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rebuffed a proposal to cancel the October 14 referendum on an Indigenous Voice in a fiery exchange in parliament about a slump in support for the change.
Albanese said he would stick to the timetable for the crucial vote to give voters a chance to have their say as the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) opens postal voting on the question.
THE GUARDIAN
The yes campaign is looking forward to reigniting momentum in its campaign after the coming parliamentary sitting week – the last before the referendum on 14 October – with a nationwide series of major community events, performances and a further advertising blitz.
“The real campaign kicks off after Thursday,” a yes campaign source said, referencing the end of the parliamentary week. “It’s really a month-long campaign.”
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announcing the referendum date was a much-needed shot in the arm for the yes campaign, but a subsequent fortnight of parliament and Albanese’s departure for a week of international summits has somewhat blunted focus on the voice.
SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA
Once again, New Zealand is leading the world in the pandemic stakes. While Australian premiers are still hung up on pretending Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ TM, New Zealand’s Prime Minister and former Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has moved on to the stage of denying that the mandates were mandates. As he puts it, ‘In terms of the vaccine mandates… (people) ultimately made their own choices… There was no compulsory vaccination.’
Did he get the idea from Pfizer’s man down under, Dr Brian Hewitt, who tried it on Senator Pauline Hanson in a recent Senate Committee Hearing saying, ‘No one was forced to have a vaccine’, people were offered an ‘opportunity’ to get vaccinated. Fair point. We should be more positive. Being held up at knifepoint in a dark alley isn’t being mugged, it’s an ‘opportunity’ to donate your valuables to a masked bandit.
In Australia, the vaccine efficacy that preoccupies state premiers – who imposed the mandates – is getting re-elected. As Premier Andrews put it when he won the Victorian election in a ‘Dan-slide’ last November, ‘Vaccines work!’ In Queensland, Premier Palasczcuk is so keen to repeat the act that she’s hired Andrews’ adman.
But who will last longer? The mandates or Palasczcuk? On Friday 1 September, Health Minister Shannon Fentiman (mooted to be a front-runner to replace the Premier) announced two-week consultations on removing the mandates, two years after they were imposed in September 2021.
Queensland’s Chief Health Officer (CHO) has already said they should go but the power of the CHO which seemed almost unlimited at the height of Covid hysteria has diminished now that he is proposing something sensible.
IMAGES WON'T LOAD.