The Arrow Of Time: The Arrow Of Destiny

Primordial. That's how it felt, one sunny day. As if far from being a marionette with strings pulled across star systems, what they were really looking at was their own pasts; and they didn't believe what they were seeing, as they sat here amongst us. The insanity of Australian politics and the rampant destruction of the country was continuing apace. The staggeringly incompetent mismanagement of the Covid Scare Campaign had left an uneducated population bemused and confused. While the left embraced authoritarian action as if it had always been, their rights to protest and social justice rhetoric thrown straight out the window in favour of the edicts of dysfunctional health bureaucrats and conscience free politicians.

How had it come to this? 

A lone photographer with a television tripod was filming people coming out of Circular Quay, catching, he hoped, the solitude. The solitude of another insanity; as the Australian government ignored experts from around the world and imprisoned their own population, destroyed the natural productivity and independence of people, and moved ever closer to a choppy totalitarian world, to a frothing insanity where all humanity dissolved. Many of the elements were already there. Massive overlapping bureaucratic edifices which achieved basically nothing but which could be swung into vehicles of action if required. Power shifting from the army to the secret police. Overlapping, compromised intelligence agencies which were entirely opaque, and held their power by promoting fear and mystery. 

Isolation, the isolation of the individual, the atomisation of humans, all of this with the 1.5 metre distancing and the brutal, cruel and insane lockdowns, essentially the introduction of martial law. Why would they go back. The rich get richer. Famous songs came back. We were looking at our own past. You had no idea. He understood these things were being used for a greater purpose. That isolating the time shifts, the potentialities, the unique capacities of this DNA would ultimately be automated, weaponised and cast into a future without doubt. No one thought the dust from internet searches would turn into a multi-billion dollar enterprise enabling control over the world's information flows. 

No one knew that inside DNA lay the key to the future of the species. Well, few knew. 

These were gathering now. Trucks and traces. Half caught phrases. Curiosity. The geo-spatial aspect; so that he could feel them crawling through him in certain locations; often locations he had been to frequently. That he didn't understand; not yet. None of it much mattered because the course was set. There wasn't going to be any back down. He was never going to go back into hiding. The secrecy lay in the complexity; because no single individual could ever lay claim to understanding it all; just the theoretical possibly, that was all. 

We raced back in time to save you. 

We came to you with purpose. Even, to some extent, with love. 

We knew the desiccated coconuts, the old warriors who wouldn't lie down. The sheer, shocking stupidity of the organisms around them. The mundane lives of those who would never feel trapped, because they had no idea there was an outside world. For them it wasn't a jail cell; it was their life. And they were happy with it. As they talked about what they were going to have for "tea"; swapped recipes, ran each other down, or at least ran down those who weren't at the table. He walked. He talked. He sang amongst them a broken song. He stayed silent; for safety and acceptance.

"He's a local," a local doyen declared, the final act of acceptance in a tough part of the world. 

All around the world was changing. And nobody could see. 

Beware. Please, please beware.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The final report from the inquiry into Victoria’s botched hotel quarantine program has been unable to determine who commissioned the use of private security and has slammed the Andrews Government for failing to do “proper analysis” of the plan.

The COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry report, which was tabled to Parliament on Monday, found Victoria’s second wave was triggered by transmission of the virus from hotel quarantine into the community through poorly trained private security guards.

Hotels also had poor cleaning products and training and guards made poor use of personal protective equipment.

Former judge Jennifer Coate said in the report that none of the more than 70,000 documents provided to the inquiry demonstrated a “contemporaneous rationale” for the decision to use private security or an approval of that decision from the upper levels of government.

“Such a finding is likely to shock the public,” Ms Coate said.

“The decision as to the enforcement model for people detained in quarantine was a substantial part of an important public health initiative and it cost the Victorian community many millions of dollars.

“But it remained, as multiple submissions to the Inquiry noted, an orphan, with no person or department claiming responsibility.”

The police chief commissioner at the time, Graham Ashton, had been consulted about police providing security and enforcement in the quarantine program.

“While no request was made to Victoria Police to provide the ‘first tier’ of the enforcement model for hotel quarantine, the then Chief Commissioner of Police was consulted and expressed a preference that private security perform that role and Victoria Police provide the ‘back up’ for that model,” Ms Coate said.

The report notes a failure of the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions (DJPR) to conduct a proper and rigorous procurement process for hiring security firms.

In particular the engagement of Unified Security, who were not an approved firm, was concerning.

There was also a lack of oversight by the department of security guards and their subcontractors.

“Consideration was not given to the appropriateness or implications of using a largely casualised workforce in an environment where staff had a high likelihood of being exposed to the highly infectious COVID-19,” Ms Coate said in the report.

“This, of course, had flow on impacts in terms of the spread of the virus.”

Ms Coate released the inquiry’s interim report into the hotel quarantine scheme in November, with 69 recommendations about how to improve the system.

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