Looking Outside of Everything

Well it had to begin somewhere. The giant circles and flapping wings and ceaseless demands and expressions of disappointment. Militaire. Entirely untrustworthy. I'd back him any time. All of that confusion and neglect. All of the blocking of pathways. All the attempts to disappear. To dodge a bullet. To sink into the ether and disappear. To avoid conflict.

While all the time they demanded he be clad in brightly coloured armour, display strength, courage, determination, rise above the mere empaths and the empathy of humans, to adopt a different role. None of it made sense, or much sense. 

And so in 2025 Australia wheeled into an election year. Albanese, the pong, you could smell it through the diffracted lens of the country's distracted, degraded, diffracted media. It was a long way home. He had just finished a major project, well the proofing of, and here, we await, and here, we wait, and here the world turns on a orbit so far from the centre of action.

Like much of the population, Old Alex had been paying almost zero attention to Australian politics, preferring to watch the high drama, the everyday soap opera of American politics. Australian politics just annoyed him because it was so grimy, so small town, and because, although he did not know them personally, he knew them, knew how bad they were, how compromised, how  truly hopeless. And so paid them no heed. Just like almost every body else except those making a living from this small town circus in the legacy media.

He had to write a weekly column for the local paper on the elections, and as always, he wondered where it led, why he couldn't just go to the pub and abandon himself and grow old and wrinkled and smoke ridden, sick and bitter, like others who abandoned all hope.

For the magic kingdom always waved a gay abandon. It had the advantage of blocking all the spirits who wished to lift him up. But there it was, destiny seized a reluctant soldier. Why he was reluctant he would never know. Perhaps because he was frightened of the great unknown, of the power, if not of God in the traditional sense, at least of the spirit realm that swirled all around them.

In the beginning was the Word. These days they might have said in the Beginning was the Podcast. And the most unlikely specimens blathered about God. And we joined the unlikely march. Only to be manipulated, was that it? The election had to be held by May 17. So the torrent began.

MAINSTREAM NEWS

MACROBUSINESS

Anthony Albanese drowns in wage lies

Last month’s Guardian’s Essential Poll said the Albanese government was doing a poor job “increasing wages and workers’ rights”.

This decline in purchasing power, the flipside of the cost-of-living crisis, is a key reason why Labor is trailing the Coalition in the polls ahead of the upcoming federal election.

SKY

Sky News host Chris Kenny says a “horrible wave” of antisemitism has been “unleashed” around the world.

“Our Prime Minister eventually appointed a special envoy on antisemitism, but then, astoundingly, has rejected her major recommendation for a national cabinet meeting on how to tackle the scourge,” Mr Kenny said.

“Why appoint her, if you won’t listen to her?”

SPECTATOR

Australians traditionally consider the country to be on holiday until Australia Day, even if they have to work, but this year, the federal election is already well and truly underway.

Labor has got off to a miserable start engaging in personal attacks on Opposition leader Peter Dutton that even some of its MPs have condemned. As Andrew Blyth points out in his article this week, Labor seems to have taken a leaf out of former prime minister Paul Keating’s playbook who went into the 1996 federal election hurling insults at then Opposition leader John Howard.  As history shows, it didn’t work. Australians weren’t interested in Keating’s caustic abuse – he called Howard ‘a desiccated coconut’ – they were focussed on policies and the cost of living.