It's quiet, unnerving

It's quiet, unnerving in the heat. We round in hope, the skin prickly. The boy is due back from the country today. The dog is still moping around the Redfern backyard waiting for him. In the back lane, I can hear aboriginal voices; leftovers from the night before. The area is much quieter now, since the major drug busts earlier in the year, when the police linked chains to front doors and pulled them down; when 225 of them coated the small block and nobody got away. When police with gloves held down suspects in apartheid-like scenes. We are one of the most left wing precincts in the country. I don't think the Liberals even bothered to run; if they did they didn't bother to advertise. Our local member is Tanya Plibersek. Terminally politically correct. As a separated bloke I can't imagine she cares whether I live or die. She's always on about refugees and women; but the men who pay her wages, forget it. And Labor has made her opposition spokeswoman on women, family and children's issues; showing that Labor hasn't realised that many of the blokes in this country, the blokes who's sweat built the party in the first place, will never forgive them for creating those most sexist and abusive of all organisations, the Family Court and the Child Support Agency; for discriminating against separated fathers in the most brutal and savage way possible, and pretending that it's all in the "best interests of the child". They are heading the way of the Democrats, into political obscurity, not realising that the rest of us who have to get up and go to work and pay the outlandish levels of tax in this country are sick to death of being treated with such routine contempt. Sydney is clothed in heat; and apart from the odd decent neighbour, nobody seems to care at all.