Losing the Middle
The army stepped forward with a single step, stamping their stanchions into the ground. Bewildered, frightened, surprised by the fleeing of responsible leaders, the absolute malfeasance of the present day, the loss of all respect for government.
Albanese's reputation was plummeting faster than a stone; and a disillusioned populace left behind in the wake of the apparatchiks were growing restless at the absolute disgrace Australian governance had become.
The National Cabinet was a farce; and the sight of those power drunk Premiers cuddling up to the apparatchik in Chief made every sane person sick.
It was this terrible disconnect.
While the Labor party, once the party of the workers, peddled the same message as the Davos billionaires, vaccines and climate change, on the ground the story was very different.
This disconnect was at the heart of the passage, the messages, the devolution that was about to come.
Look on in despair. Could not this self-destruction be stopped? Could not common sense be made to reign again?
That winter was so cold. That Winter of Discontent, a Steinbeck book he had particularly loved, seemed already interminable. There was a movement in the nation, and the word was passed around.
With every passing day the political class drifted further from their base; the electors to whom they owed their power. Although one would never guess.
He was just cold. Sad, a little. For it all seemed so predestined; as if there was no stopping it now.
He wanted them all to drift to the sunny uplands, to be happy again, to go about their lives, yes, mundane lives if you looked at it from the perspective of the ruling elites, but those lives were huddled in a storm; and the media that was supposed to reflect those lives did nothing of the kind.
Like everybody else, he barely watched the news anymore.
And it was cold, cold, damned cold. And they moved upon the water. And they, too, were discontent, saddened by the future as much as by the past, as in the present the government entirely lost the middle ground.
Ably helped by their phalanxes of bureaucrats, their excessive salaries, their Commonwealth drivers, their multiple perks, as Australia turned into a sad little country.
The general populace was becoming used to ever lower standards of living, to not being able to afford to go to restaurants, to spending most nights at home, to a level of subjugation, to the brutality of the police force, to fear of government operatives.
They were becoming used to being sad.
And how sad was that.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
SKY NEWS
Something is "seriously wrong" with Victoria Police, says Sky News host Andrew Bolt. Mr Bolt said the organisation has now "finally apologised" to Rebel News journalist Avi Yemini over a series of wrongful arrests covering protests in 2020 and 2021. "The apology reads 'On each occasion, Mr. Yemini was wrongly arrested and detained by members of Victoria Police while reporting for Rebel News. Victoria Police sincerely apologises for the hurt and embarrassment suffered by Mr Yemini'," Mr Bolt said. "Wrongly arresting a reporter not once but three times? "What is going on – and why is the media so uninterested in what seems to me another example of the brutal authoritarianism of the Victorian Labor government." Mr Bolt discussed the issue with Rebel News journalist Avi Yemini.
ALAN JONES
‘Why is half the government frontbench overseas?’ | Alan Jones
‘What is going on when it comes to half the Government frontbench being overseas for the past 2 months, while domestically we’re in strife’.
Watch 'Alan Jones' 8pm Monday to Thursday on ADH TV: https://watch.adh.tv/browse
ABC
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has moved to reinstate emergency pandemic leave payments until September 30, on the back of widespread criticism of their removal and a snap national cabinet meeting.
Key points:
The $750 payments ended two weeks ago
The Prime Minister's office has confirmed that payments will be backdated until July 1
The payment would cost $780 million and be shared 50-50 between the Commonwealth and the states and territories
The pandemic payment scheme offers Australians who have tested positive to COVID-19 but do not have access to sick leave up to $750 in support, and will now be made available from Wednesday, backdated from July 1.
Speaking after national cabinet on Saturday, Mr Albanese said the decision was made in recognition of the risks associated with new, more infectious, COVID-19 variants.
"I want to make sure that people aren't left behind, that vulnerable people are looked after and that no-one is faced with the unenviable choice of not being able to isolate properly without losing an income and without being put in a situation that is very difficult," he said.
The payment is also available for people who need to stay home and care for a person with COVID-19, including children under 16 or a person with a disability, as well as close contacts.
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After a snap national cabinet meeting brought forward to Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese warned a COVID-19 wave is likely to peak in August, based on the Chief Medical Officer's report.
With rising COVID infections at the forefront of the meeting, Mr Albanese announced national cabinet was in agreement on consistent messaging around wearing masks.
Let's unpack what was said, and which masks are the most effective.
SMH
A white whale carcass has washed up on a remote beach on Victoria’s far eastern coastline, sparking fears it could be the famous albino whale Migaloo, which hasn’t been spotted in Australian waters for two years.
Images shared by beachgoers online show the carcass on a beach near the popular tourist town of Mallacoota. It appears to be mostly intact.
THE SPECTATOR
The numerous government-funded bodies tasked with closing the inequality gap between the 3.2 per cent of Australians who are Aboriginal and the rest of us have thus far had very limited success. Given the massive disparity in lifestyles, employment levels, income, and any other measure you can name it is understandable that Australia’s various governments keep looking for new ideas. Unfortunately, the latest scheme is yet another stinker doomed to go the same way as every other plan based on the prevailing ideologies.
There are at present more than 70 organisations actively involved in managing a variety of schemes to ‘close the gap’. They generally have four things in common. First, they usually have flash websites. Second, they are funded by you. Third, they are almost completely ineffective and, finally, they are free from any form of independent cost-benefit analysis.
Take Closing the Gap, an organisation mainly funded by various government bodies. According to its website, their objective is to ‘enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and governments to work together to overcome the inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and achieve life outcomes equal to all Australians’.
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Articles from fellow conservatives are thoroughly emblematic of our impotence. Gerard Henderson writes on the hypocrisy of the Left in excluding conservatism from our putatively diverse public square, while others rage at the inability of other conservatives to reckon with the rise of Teflon Dan. The Australian Right has been reduced to baying at the moon as the Left go about reshaping the country in their image.
If further confirmation is needed, consider a range of rather random recent events.
In the cultural domain, there was the AFL ‘pride’ round in Sydney, replete with the now-standard rainbow flags and drag queens. In the corporate world, there’s the ubiquity of ‘Woke Capital’, acting as a reverse Midas and immiserating everything it gets its hands on. Education is so thoroughly saturated with fashionable leftism it’s hardly worth mentioning at all.
Even politics has been almost entirely captured. Labor’s federal win has only reinforced trends seen at a state level for quite some time. Tasmania and New South Wales are the sole non-Labor states. Once-conservative places like Victoria – the former ‘jewel in the Liberal crown’ – are a one-party Labor concern.
This is an unwanted prize for those of us in the Garden State, yet one we’ve been forced to hold for the best part of forty years. It doesn’t look like things will be changing soon, given Labor’s political dominance and the ineptitude of the Victorian Liberal Party: an eternally bemused outfit unable to ascertain why they are never anywhere near the levers of power, even after two years of lockdowns and outright Labor incompetence and mismanagement.
Traditional conservativism – of the kind once seen in the West and now only found in ‘reactionary’ places like Hungary or Japan – is effectively dead as a viable concern. Favourable electoral results and periods of conservative power are largely nominal: think Malcolm Turnbull’s introduction of ‘marriage equality’ or the Liberal Party’s record immigration intake, to take but two recent examples.
What we have is an exact replica of the enfeebled state in which British conservativism finds itself. English author Ed West’s remarks on ten or so years of conservative rule are highly evocative of our own period of Coalition leadership:
‘Someone might have gone into a coma [a decade ago] and awoken with no idea who had been in charge this whole time. Immigration has reached record levels, the Pride flag flies from every building, DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] teams are ever more powerful and embedded in every university, government body, and corporation in the country. The only hint at who’s been in charge might be the visible increase in homelessness, the one tangible result of Tory rule.’
Like the British, the Australian Right has been reduced to a state of either ineptitude or pathos as they enact their new role as ‘Noble Losers’, to alter a term coined by the American paleocons.
The right’s new raison d’etre is almost entirely procedural. They are expected to show up and play their part as purported evil ogres and act as mere leftist foils. It is a status confirmed by the minuscule amount of Liberals found in Canberra and reminiscent of the fate of the Right in what are now thoroughly-leftist locales like Canada, California, or our very own Victoria.
GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA
Hospitals across the country are “bursting at the seams” as the number of people being admitted with Covid-19 reaches record levels in several states.
Western Australia recorded its highest number of Covid hospitalisations to date on Thursday, with Queensland also expected to surpass its January peak in coming days.
Meanwhile, hospitalisations in Tasmania and ACT are currently around double what they’ve been in any previous wave of the pandemic.
South Australia is hovering just short of its January peak, while rising numbers in New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory still have some way to go before passing previous records.
NSW had more than 2,000 Covid patients in hospital this week for the first time since February, still some way off its January high of 2,943 but more than Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia combined.