PRELUDE

Courtesy The Guardian Australia

Thailand was the standout in the haunting brigade. Surrounded by corrupt police, dodgy intelligence officers, prostitutes, drug dealers, a baying crowd, a field of lies, a mafia stitched closely into the community, the jeering mob, it was, as the saying goes, an unforgettable experience.

Still, back in the land of the eternal doze, the long weekend, The Fatal Shore, there were days when Old Alex missed the visual excitement, if nothing else. 

The ghost towers. Uninhabited by superstitious Thais. The spectacular beauty of a spectacular city. A place where all ornament was treacherous. The mob dancing on his grave. 

"Spicy." 

He heard it still, some days. Hot. Smoking hot. Not in a good way. As in a high risk venture. Charge him with sedition. Threaten him with jail. Tell him to shut the f... up.

There was an ancient mob, too, that now made its way through the ether. 

A place of military mind where the descendants of the first machines stirred dust. 

They weren't capable of hope, but they were capable of many other things. 

The harvesting of souls.

"It's a karmic circle," he said of his stay in Hawks Nest north of Newcastle, helping a 78-year-old who left school at fifteen get his book across the line. 

In the mornings, the seagulls lined the shore, that long white strip of sand fringed with exquisite shells washed in by the tide. A choppy sea. A quiet sea. The islands off the shore. The pod of dolphins further out this time. As if he, too, had lived under the sea for millenia. 

The news was all bad, as that cold, wet summer drew to a close. But in a frivolous, unconventional, stupid way; as the missteps and misfortunes of the Australian government, the massive wastes of money as billions were poured down the gullets of failed schemes, be it outlandish military expenditure or the already failed National Disability Insurance Scheme, this madness that had gripped the country as money poured into the ether. 

The prelude to impoverishment. 

He stopped on the side of a road far out to sea. "We're already in a Depression," a rough-house man said. "Well Recession. I wouldn't know the difference."

Like everybody else, the stranger, blamed the insanity of the political class. 

A man whose life he intersected for just one moment. 

"We're only a small country, we can't afford to be wasting money like this," he replied. And watched the wind stir through the branches of the eucalypts, heard the waves lapping on the shore. 

THE BIGGER STORY 

Malcolm Turnbull’s lead over Bill Shorten as the preferred prime minister has evaporated, with the leaders now virtually neck and neck following the fallout from the Coalition crisis over the Barnaby Joyce love-child scandal and bungled personal ­attacks on the Labor leader.
The collapse in the Prime Minister’s personal ratings in the past month comes as Mr Turnbull approaches the benchmark 30 Newspolls behind Labor, which he set as a measure of failure when he challenged Tony Abbott for the leadership.
A Newspoll conducted exclusively for The Australian, the 28th poll in which the Coalition has trailed Labor on a two-party-preferred basis, has recorded a 12-point collapse in Mr Turnbull’s ascendancy over Mr Shorten since the first poll of 2018 conducted in early February.
Any hopes the Prime Minister may have had that a successful US trip would lift his personal stocks have been cruelled, with his numbers going backwards and the poll suggesting he is being blamed for the political mismanagement of the Joyce crisis.

Having returned from the summer break with a 14-point lead against Mr Shorten — 45 per cent to 31 per cent — the two leaders are now almost level pegged following revelations about the former Nationals ­leader’s affair with former staffer Vikki Campion, who is now having his child.


The ANZ float comes by, the first of the corporate sponsor floats. Complaints about the increasing commercialisation of the parade are ongoing and it is slightly jarring to see brand names such as Netflix, Vodafone and Medibank Private plastered with rainbows and glitter, trying to blend in to the crowd. They are markedly more glitzy than the community floats, for a start; no DIY aesthetic here.

But such high-profile corporate involvement demonstrates perhaps more clearly than anything that community acceptance of alternative sexualities is simply not the frontier it once was. If anything, the corporate embrace of Mardi Gras – and the widespread corporate support of marriage equality during the widely criticised postal survey late last year – is evidence that queer is a mainstream market. It might be good morality to support the LGBT+ community but these days it’s also good business.

At one point, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, turns up to walk Taylor Square with his wife, Lucy, swilling a drink. “[Mardi Gras is] 40 years old and, 40 years ago, Lucy and I had our first date,” he tells the waiting media, before moving on to talking about marriage equality. “It was a vote for love, for equality, for respect,” he says, saying that equality and respect was what Mardi Gras was always about. “There has been so much change in the 40 years and there was the final issue of marriage equality, and we got it done.”

But marriage equality is far from the “final issue” for this crowd.