Step Into My Whrilwind

Lake Illawarra, April, 2019.

He heard one of the foreign operatives declare, in an indignant way, as if their authority had been questioned: "I am a species differentiation expert."
As if that explained everything.
"What the ... ", he thought. 
 But there was nothing to be done for it; except to act even more exaggeratedly normal than ever. 
Buried in their quagmire. Buried in their sleaze. 
A new government was coming in, and the operatives were all afraid of fresh oversight. 
But they were protected by incompetence, because the new lot would be just as incompetent as the old. 
Australia's robber barons,  having pillaged the country of billions, were retreating to their castles. 
They were going through the electoral motions, as if to protect some sleight of hand, as if to protect their own normality, to pretend the country was still a democracy. They showed up on the campaign trail. They made their pit stops. Their announcements. Another project here, another project there. A new class of the vulnerable they must in order protect. 
It was all a farce. 
The attack ads had launched on television. The scare campaigns were well underway. 
And at heart: the country had been betrayed. 

Lake Illawarra, April, 2019.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

Islamic State has formally claimed responsibility for the Easter bomb attacks in Sri Lanka that killed 321 people in what officials believe was retaliation for the Christchurch mosques massacre.
IS claimed responsibility Wednesday morning via its Amaq news agency, naming who it said were the seven attackers that carried out the attacks.
IS later released a video showing eight men, seven of whom were masked, pledging allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The footage purported to show an unmasked Mohammed Zahran, also known as Zahran Hashmi, who Sri Lanka says led the Easter attack.
It gave no further evidence to support its claim of responsibility.

Sri Lankan authorities have confirmed one of the suicide bombers responsible for the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks attended an Australian university.

Key points:
One of the suicide bombers completed his post-graduate education in Australia
The death toll from the deadly attacks was revised up to 359 on Wednesday
Investigators say the attacks were retaliation for the Christchurch shootings

Sri Lankan Junior Minister for Defence Ruwan Wijewardene said the bomber completed his post-graduate education in Australia.
It comes after the death toll was revised up to 359 earlier on Wednesday.
"What I can say is this group, some of the suicide bombers, most of them are well educated and come from maybe middle or upper-middle class," Mr Wijewardene said.
"Some of them have studied in various other countries, they hold degrees and they are quite well-educated people.
"We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the UK and then maybe later on did his post-graduate in Australia before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka."

THE AUSTRALIAN ELECTION

Australian taxpayers still don’t know who were the beneficiaries of the Cayman Islands–based trust that owns Eastern Australia Agriculture (EAA), which sold $79 million worth of water to the Commonwealth when Barnaby Joyce was water minister and deputy prime minister. Joyce knows, of course, but all he would say in last night’s insufferable interview with RN Drive host Patricia Karvelas was that it was not his remit to find out who was behind the trust, and that he didn’t care if an inquiry was held because he was following a precedent set by “Labor, Labor, Labor, Labor Labor”, who had previously bought water off the same company … As if that’s an adequate answer.

Current energy minister Angus Taylor, who was a director of EAA when it was set up, insists that he is no longer associated with the company and did not benefit from the transaction. The Cayman Islands is a secrecy jurisdiction, as investigative journalist Michael West told Hamish Macdonald on Friday, so how would we know? Labor’s shadow water minister, Tony Burke, has released a list of questions that the prime minister must answer about #Watergate; but after Helloworld, the suspect Adani approval earlier this month, #Reefgate, and the AWU raids in 2017, the real question is: how much more scandal can Australian politics take?