We couldn't be caught. They were driving off. The Deep State had stepped in. There were things behind the daily security theatre, before the onrush of collapse, before the impending Depression. Soldiers were on the doorstep, but they could not breach. If it was not drifts of amnesia, it was clouds of calm. The strong shape of banana leaves. The bulbous shapes of flowering palms. The neatness, that was what frightened him the most, neatness.
Don't look at him, they said to each other as they drove past. We've been told not to look at him.
Because then he will know, as he reads your skulls, you mishaps.
A significant change had come about.
The orchestrated voices had died off.
He began to see the world as they saw it. Distant. The trouble far away. Not angry at the hypocrisy and compromise, because that would always be. The daily bubble of the news, it wasn't here. Because nobody listened to the news. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared.
Elsewhere there was trouble aplenty.
Online they were ballooning, the Facebook sites, with images such as that to the right.
ASIO and the AFP had shut down Blair Cottrell and the United Patriots Front. He and his followers had been dragged before court and charged for vilification for beheading a dummy as part of a demonstration about a mosque. Meanwhile, in taxpayer funded halls across the country, Islamists preached the overthrow of the government and condemned non-believers, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, communists, capitalists, those who would dress scantily on the beaches.
Suppression never worked. It only empowered the oppressors.
In their wake were a thousand others.
Just as Marx had found all those years ago, the proletariat did not want to rise up against their own country. They did not want to see their country overrun by foreigners. They wanted to protect the culture they had, not see it destroyed by ideologues preaching diversity, while holding workers in contempt.
The Infidel Brotherhood. The Voice of Australia. Stand up for Australia. Love Australia or Leave Political Party. They were all springing up.
While in the reaches the Deep State told him another story. At every level profound collapse. Misguided policies. Out of control bureaucracies. Unfended. Unsupervised. There was no commonsense in any of it.
And so the politicians strutted as the country died. And here on the north coast nobody listened to any of them. Local, state and federal. They were all as nothing. People made their lives in the underbrush. Out of sight out of mind. And let the bastards destroy the country once held so dear.
Old Alex rang an old contact, a Machiavellian political operative with whom he occasionally shared a laugh, and the opening words: "I've been talking to people all day. We just want to leave the country."
"Join the queue," Alex said.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Claims of stolen same-sex marriage ballots, weather-damaged postal survey envelopes and other anomalies have prompted a stern warning from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and calls for the entire process to be scrapped.
The survey has been marred by anecdotal complaints since the ABS began mailing out ballot papers, including that some had been sent to residents’ former addresses, sparking concerns that they could be filled out illegally.
At the weekend, survey envelopes at seven Canberra apartment blocks were reportedly found left out in the rain rather than delivered to individual letter boxes, while a Senate committee on Friday heard claims that some people had received postal packs without reply paid envelopes. The ABS has also asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate instances of postal surveys being sold on eBay, with one seller advertising theirs for up for $1500. The bureau told a Senate committee on Friday it had asked for online marketplaces to remove up to 20 ads so far.
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Let me demonstrate how our politicians are spending billions to give you more expensive and unreliable electricity just to pretend to stop global warming that they pretend is catastrophic.
We are paying a Saudi billionaire $300 million to pretend to make a difference to the climate by ruining our electricity supply:
Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.
AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030, as the government vows to ease the pressure on prices.
In recent years, the renewable energy target has delivered subsidies of about $9 billion to renewable projects. And over the next 13 years, renewable projects will receive another $36bn…
More than any other policy action before or since, the RET [renewable energy target] is responsible for today’s energy mess. Force-feeding high-cost, unreliable energy into the National Electricity Market killed off any investment in baseload energy and made the grid more expensive and more unstable…
One of many comments:
Lily1
15 hours ago
Trump said he would drain the swamp.
I don't know how he's going but I do know we need to empty ours.
This is a treasonous mob in Canberra and unfortunately the few, very few, decent pollies are so tainted by the stench that they will have to go too.
In my opinion anyone who believes our leaders care for anything other than feathering their own nests is living in lahlah land. They will sell us out to anyone for a few dollars.
Time for a new start.