Providence

Black clad police firing into unarmed crowds. 

Somehow we're all fine with it.

Two police standing over an unarmed 70-yhear-old grandmother pepper spraying her in the face.  

Somehow we're all fine with it.

Genuine protest, an unfamiliar sight in Australia after the orchestrated public displays around climate change and anti-racism, Black Lives Matter protests and for almost two years of recent history, gay marriage, all of them narratives backed by bucket loads of public money, brutally crushed.

We're fine with that.

We're fine with the mainstream media blatantly lying about the vivid, violent, there's that word again, "unprecedented" displays of authoritarian abuse seen on the streets of Melbourne. 

The blind, lustful, violent, abusive, deranged abuses, police punching protestors, slamming their heads into the grounds, never before seen, never before witnessed in the Great Southern Land, tax payer funded military style police literally assaulting the citizenry; and somehow we're all fine with that, too. 

It was a terrible thing.

It was a terrible moment.

Yes, the country had been birthed in blood and oppression, the colonial brutality of the English and their callous, cruel indifference not just to their own prisoners but to the natives they regarded as non-humans, or lower humans, but this, two centuries on, was something else.

There's that time span again: 200 years.

A developmental time span in a civilisation's length. 

It recurred constantly now in understanding the shifting time frames that enveloped this place. 

He did not understand it any better than those who Watched. Perhaps they understood it better than he did. Certainly there were some of those, a surprising number because it was surprising there was even one, who had predicted the current, malaise wasn't it, debacle didn't do it justice, words, English words, couldn't describe this descent into a Dante's hell in the suburbs of the south.

And yet, they had. 

Almost no one, well certainly not Old Alex, trained as he had been in the detection of signs, had predicted the rapid collapse into totalitarianism. 

But others did.

And thereby lay a mystery amongst the many mysteries, as we all struggled to grasp an understanding of this point in time, its significance, its vast cruelty, its signal derangement, how could any of this be?

Incense of long ago. A creature without form, of supreme intelligence. A cruelty which lay beyond the human realm.

A Telegram from a different time.

But few could hear.

NEWS

Beer in hand, ‘very cool’ Morrison holds court on the global stage

ADAM CREIGHTONFollow @Adam_Creighton


THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU3:12

AUKUS has taken Australia, US alliance to 'whole other level'

Prime Minister Scott Morrison holds a working breakfast and One-On-One with the Prime Minister Suga of Japan on September 24, 2021. Picture: Adam Taylor via PMO

2:52PM SEPTEMBER 25, 2021
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A beaming Scott Morrison, beer in hand, held court at the Australian ambassador’s residence on Thursday night in Washington, confident his US trip would leave Australia stronger militarily and diplomatically, and reassured French pique over its lost submarine deal will prove to be water off a duck’s back.

From the US President to the Austrian Chancellor and the Swedish, Japanese and Indian prime ministers, leaders from across the political spectrum, Australia’s supercharged role in underpinning security in the Pacific was welcomed and appreciated.

The press pack struggled to think of any Australian prime minister who had had so many high-level meetings with world leaders in such a short space of time.



One European leader, according to a senior European embassy staffer, had even described the PM as “very cool”.

The EU-Australia free trade negotiations look safe from French sabotage, at least as far as Austria is concerned.

The praise for Morrison has been bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans feted the Prime Minister on Capitol Hill. Picture: Adam Taylor via PMO

For all the ever-accreting bureaucracy tying European nations together, old European enmities appear to loom larger, the ancient feud between France and Austria among the oldest.
READ MORE:Morrison, Biden throw down the gauntlet to China|PM claims seat at top table of diplomacy|Xi is the real creator of AUKUS and Quad unity

The series of meetings between the PM and leaders in New York and Washington elicited the usual deluge of platitudes, but one thing was clear: the idea the Biden administration had cooled on Australia had proved quite wrong.

The AUKUS pact that will see Australia acquire nuclear powered submarines, announced last week, thrust Australia into the US media cycle like never before, revealing our privileged position in American orbit.

Scott Morrison addresses via prerecorded video the General Debate of the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters on September 24 in New York. Picture: AFP

The President himself, far from the doddery caricature taking hold in the American public’s mind, was involved all the way. And he was methodical, alert and interested throughout discussions with the Prime Minister in New York and Washington, officials at the highest level insist.

Indeed, the UK and Australia were awaiting the President’s personal sign off on the submarine deal for weeks before the announcement on 16th September, which took even the best-informed talking heads in Washington by surprise.

Mr Morrison insisted he be in Australia for it, which the White House even accommodated by delaying the Washington announcement to 5pm, so the PM could be beamed into the press conference live at a civilised 7am.

The praise was bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans feted the Prime Minister on Capitol Hill, even if 79 year old House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s praise for Mr Morrison’s “leadership on climate change” — and inquiry as to what ANZUS stood for — left some wondering if she’d been fully briefed.

Congressional leaders appreciated the PM’s recognition that Congress too ultimately had to sign off on the subs deal, which still remains vague in its particulars.

Will Australia’s submarines come from the UK or the US? Fierce competition between the UK and US defence industries looks set to kick off.

Mr Morrison holds a working breakfast with Prime Minister Suga of Japan. Picture: Adam Taylor via PMO

Wherever the designs ultimately emerge, more UK or US nuclear submarines will be coming to Australia, manned by Australian navy personnel, far sooner than the first Australian-made sub emerges years down the track.

China, whose belligerence prompted AUKUS, already has the world’s largest navy. The aim of Aukus is not to lease or rebadge existing nuclear power submarines among the three Anglo powers but build more.

Mr Morrison’s seat in the opulent East room of the White House on Friday, knights of the round table-style alongside Joe Biden and Japanese and Indian prime minister, reflected Australia’s growing strategic importance. First the G20, now the Quad, and in the future perhaps an expanded G7. While France’s diplomatic clout appears diminished, Australia’s has been in the ascendant for years, a mix of savvy diplomacy and the reality being a resource rich nation in a key part of the world.

Morrison in the Eisenhower Executive Building in Washington DC with US Vice President Kamala Harris and Japanese Prime Minister Suga on Friday. Picture: Adam Taylor via PMO

In a break from submarine chat, Mr Morrison visited the Federal Reserve, shocking chairman Jerome Powell with the fact the US was losing more people from Covid-19 every day than Australia had lost in the whole pandemic. More than 2,000 Americans died yesterday from Covid-19, up almost 30 per cent from a week ago.

It’s not through lack of effort in Washington at least, the most Covid-obsessed of all American cities. Australian journalists, all fully vaccinated, endured five separate Covid-19 test on their five day trip, including two to go anywhere near the President, and a bewildering array of masking requirements.

If some in the US have been shocked by Australia’s increasingly tough Covid response, in DC it’s nothing but admiration.

ADAM CREIGHTON

WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
Adam Creighton is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in tax and financial policy. He was a Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2019. He’s written ... Read more