Prison Island
The entirety of Australia had been turned into a prison island. The dismal mismanagement of the Corona virus had destroyed the country, while a privileged class of politicians and bureaucrats enjoyed ever greater financial rewards.
They know not what they do.
They destroy themselves.
The country was already at boiling point. He could only take the temperature from where he stood, and he detected a gathering malaise, despondency, despair and disempowerment in the population, and much like any other prison, there were about to be riots in the prison yard.
Like so many others in that blighted time, Old Alex had switched off from the mainstream news, tired of the daily hysteria and grandstanding of the nation's fourth rate politicians and their fawning acolytes, their mad financial illiteracy, their utter contempt for those they ruled, their cruelty and indifference to their fellows, their sniveling, truly disgusting gorging at the public trough.
A local lad, illiterate, thick as five planks, but lively, company of a sort in a deranged and lonely time, he might have been 36-years-old but it was like living with a randy adolescent with ADHD, his endless excitement over sex and the drivel of his sexual exploits, his repeated conquests of fat, ugly, desperate women in the area, amused him as his mind wandered across what some might call "higher plains".
We were building again. He needed resources. His body, particularly his fingers, hurt from pounding away at the keyboards, the primitive technologies of the time.
He wasn't privy to all their purposes, much of it lay beyond his comprehension, why sometimes some things worked and were remarkably successful, while others crawled through space and time to wither on a barren rock.
Without form.
Made of many.
Cruel. Indifferent. Capable of love or at least kindness. Capable of blessing an entire area with abundance. These things were beyond explanation; outside time, why some humans were culled and others thrived, why the natives had been allowed to die out, despite their millennia on these lands, why an evil spirit had settled in the corridors of power, why the people complied with what was clearly a derangement.
It was The End of Empire.
For the previous weeks, exhausted by Unfolding Catastrophe, most of his news he picked up from what were now rare encounters with people; borders closed, schools closed or not, the daily absurd press conferences of a truly absurd political class, the forced vaccination of a population which had much to lose. The official death toll from the vaccines was now nine, he heard, making those very politicians pushing the agendas of Big Pharma murderers in their own right. The unofficial toll lay in the hundreds. Whatever your source. Believe what you want.
An incompetent, dishonest, and yes, in any normal sense of the word corrupt government edifice, in league with the worst corporations modern capitalism had ever birthed, were forcing a medical treatment on the population for which, by very definition, they had no way of knowing the consequences or long term effects.
The more they pushed, the more the population pushed back.
It was turning into chaos, utter chaos, one step at a time.
All that was left was to document the train wreck. Because out of this chaotic debacle, another truth would come.
And not the happy clappy truth beloved by some of the nation's most senior politicians, crawling and fawning as they were to a god they did not understand; but something else entirely.
NEWS
As I write this from my home rumpus room/office, my wife is teaching a class of year 7 via Zoom, my eldest daughter is finishing her third term of year 12 online and my special needs youngest daughter is having to make do with our very poor efforts at remote learning in between our work and the one-hour online class she has each day.
Things are decidedly not normal.
But what is normal and how will we know it has returned? Perhaps more importantly will “normal” ever return?
On Wednesday the bureau of statistics announced a record 6.5% of all employed are working multiple jobs. It clearly is due to the pandemic:
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Given in the June quarter there were 1,077 million “secondary jobs” (ie those which were not the main paying job of the employee) but just 867,900 people working multiple jobs, that also means there is likely a record number of people working three or more jobs.
That is clearly not good, but it is tough to work out if it is only pandemic related or part of the trend since the GFC.
One of the easiest ways to work out that things are not as they should be is that it is now 16 months since the bureau of statistics stopped trying to calculate a trend rate of unemployment because it didn’t make sense:
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At least with the labour market some measures can let us know when things are back to normal. At the moment, the number of people “working” zero hours has risen sharply:
‘Final touches’ being added to NSW COVID-19 roadmap
The “final touches” are being added to the New South Wales roadmap out of COVID-19 lockdown and it could be revealed as early as Thursday.
The NSW government has promised greater freedoms for the fully vaccinated at 70 per cent double-dose coverage and further restored freedoms, including international travel and the relaxation of hotel quarantine at 80 per cent coverage.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian will reveal the guide to those freedoms on Thursday, according to media reports.
She’s expected to say that restaurants, bars and shops can welcome back double-vaccinated patrons from October 18 – with capacity limits.
That’s when the state is expected to reach the 70 per cent double-dose milestone.
NSW has now surpassed 75 per cent first-dose vaccination coverage for eligible residents, while nearly 43 per cent are fully jabbed.
However, Ms Berejiklian on Wednesday declined to say if the freedoms restored to vaccinated people will be the same regardless of where they live.
There are 12 local government areas deemed COVID hotspots, where lockdown conditions are the toughest and residents have an overnight curfew.
‘Still need to remain on guard’: The suburbs where COVID is starting to spike
COVID-19 cases have spiked in the inner-city suburbs of Waterloo, Redfern and Elizabeth Bay in the past week, with health authorities urgently calling for residents to get vaccinated to curb rising infections.
As vaccination rates in the city’s west outpace the east and inner-city, case numbers in metropolitan Sydney grow. Data from NSW Health shows 300 infections recorded in the City of Sydney local government area in the past week, nearly half the total recorded there during the entire Delta outbreak. Another 135 have been reported in the inner west, 184 in Bayside and 125 in Randwick.
