INSIDE A SMOKING CAULDRON

They came out of the swamp.
Sentient beings. 
Go home. Go home. 
They tried to give him a heart attack. 
They tried to kill him.
"He was a trial with the new legislation targeting journalists."
"How's it going?"
"Oh, terribly."
The surveillance made for their own trials, their own stories. Their own futile marches. 
"He annoys the government."
"Well that's his job," Old Alex thought, always displaced, at one remove. 
Click. click. click. He's had a camera on him for years. What can we charge him with? Sedition? 
He heard all their worse trails, down manufactured evidence and black arts. 
They brought with them their own futile compromises, these barely sentient foot soldiers.
He was dealing with a new generation of military trained ultra-conformists the like of which the country had never seen. Engineered. Manufactured. Massaged into acquiescence. Led by boofheads of low morals and low intelligence, doing in turn their masters' biddings.
Most of their targets surrendered to their own limited horizons.
For them, disillusioned, it was not worth the fight. 
Old Alex flicked through the free-to-air television finding only a 50-year-old sitcom Hogan's Heroes. Decades of broadcast policy, millions raked in from television licences and $1.2 billion dollars to the national broadcaster, and the result: nothing to watch.
On the news there was constant, constant talk of gay marriage. In the company of an elderly relative clutching her Bible, he shifted uncomfortably. 
Like much of the rest of the nation. 
People just didn't want to think about these things, the agendas of social justice warriors.
"I know why those politicians want gay marriage," said one of the locals at the Men's Shed. "They're all poofters and they want to fuck each other." 
"You know what's good about this plebiscite, we can finally stop talking about gay marriage," said an old contact from his journalist days.
"What are we going to talk about then? Falling standards of living across the country? The world's most expensive electricity? The world's most expensive internet? Their own spectacular incompetence? It suits the government to fill up all the public space with gay marriage."
"I can tell you, I'm not a proud Australian anymore."
"Nor am I. Nobody is."
The world had been inverted. 
If you said you were a proud Australian, that meant you were a racist, ignorant redneck. The chattering classes had destroyed the world on which they thrived. 
The politicians had surrendered to the succubus which had attached to them.    
"Every word he says is a lie, including a and the," Old Alex kept thinking, in a paraphrase of the famous Mary McCarthy Lillian Hellman clash. 
He was humming like a pitch fork as the wind battered the metal cladding at the local, unglamorous pool. He was the only one there, except, it being council run, for the staff. Always plenty of staff; as privately owned businesses continued to die in their thousands across the country and the nation slipped rapidly towards the greatest depression in its history. 
The queue lines and the social discontent continued to brood in the immediate foreground, while a government, a beast driven mad by its own fat waste contradictions and hopeless policy, lashed out at the very populace on which it fed. 
New restrictions came in every day. The latest round, drug testing of welfare recipients, including for marijuana. More than 50 years after the sixties and after more than half a century of failed policy which had fueled a secret state within a state, an authoritarian nightmare extending its power any way it could, everywhere it could. 
Thrashing to survive, before it too collapsed. 
Insane social policy.
Insane bureaucratic excess.
Insane policing policy. 
"The country's gone mad," Old Alex kept repeating, shuffling around, an old habit designed to make himself an invisible target. An amusing old codger, nothing more.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over Islamic State militants in Tal Afar and the entire province of Nineveh on Thursday.
Tal Afar became the next target of the US-backed war against IS following the recapture of Mosul, where it had declared its "caliphate" over parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province.
Tal Afar was the last major population centre in northern Iraq still under IS control and its loss deprives the group of what was once a key supply hub between its territory in Syria and Iraq.
"Tal Afar has been liberated," Abadi said in a statement. "We say to the Islamic State fighters: wherever you are, we are coming for you and you have no choice but to surrender or die."
Iraqi forces had been waiting to clear the small town of al-'Ayadiya, 11 km (7 miles) northwest of Tal Afar, before declaring complete victory in the offensive. Islamic State militants had retreated to the town.
We say to the Islamic State fighters: wherever you are, we are coming for you and you have no choice but to surrender or die.
- Haider al-Abadi, Iraqi PM

A new clash looms over the postal vote on same-sex marriage as the Turnbull government holds ­urgent talks to set new rules on the claims that can be made on either side of the eight-week debate, triggering fears the strict campaign laws would shut down free speech.
Hours after the government secured a High Court victory to go ahead with the ballot, Labor and the Greens launched demands for tough new sanctions against “misleading and deceptive” conduct in the public campaign.
A separate dispute is growing over religious freedom as opponents of same-sex marriage warn Australians against giving a “blank cheque” to parliament without knowing whether religious groups would be “bullied”.
The debate on religious freedom is one of the most contentious in the campaign, as religious leaders warn of the impact on activities from welfare to education.
“If the law is changed, will Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals and welfare agencies still be free to employ lay people who ­profess our values?” asked the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher.