The Penalty Is Death
When you lose all faith. When the country you thought was your country, as in something that you belonged to, is no longer recognisable, the rulers corrupt and corrupted, the bureaucracies infested with madness, when the Prime Minister's great mate, or Great Mate, wins what until recently were known as the Queens Birthday List, now the Kings.
When a man who many believe should be in jail, a man who did immense harm to his own city of Melbourne, his own state of Victoria, and by reflection, to millions of his fellow citizens. A man who was one of the most hated in the country.
They swirled, or the swirl began, these geo-spatial phenomenon. When one voice kept echoing: We are the ancients. We are the ancients.
When the penalty for turning a blind eye, for having been given the gift to see and yet turn a blind eye, when melancholia was allowed to seize the dominant forecourt, when nothing made sense and those strange voices kept circling and circling, because who could be proud of a country that awarded a man like Daniel Andrews its highest honour.
It simply defied belief.
And the penalty for him, for all humans, for those who could see but refused to see, for those who were gifted but refused to use that gift, that penalty was death.
And so it was, and so it will be.
As the fires burned across a seemingly inexhaustible battle field, where the soldiers set up camp, where there was no reason, where they waited for a return, as millions had waited for the last two millenia. When we were surrounded by spirits, and chose melancholia instead.
He had longed indeed prayed, to just be a normal person. And when it arrived, he was shocked by, well, the ordinariness of it all. And struggled to climb back out of the slime pit.
And so it was. And so it will be.
A hundred million years.
HEADLINES
THE NEW DAILY
The former Victorian premier was awarded an AC for his “eminent service to the people and Parliament of Victoria, to public health, to policy and regulatory reform, and to infrastructure development”.
Andrews stepped down as premier in September, voluntarily wrapping up nine years as premier and 13 years as leader of the Victorian Labor Party.
His term was largely defined by his actions during the height of the Covid pandemic, in which Victoria experienced 263 days of lockdowns in an effort to limit infections.
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The former premier of Western Australia has been awarded an AC for “eminent service to the people and Parliament of Western Australia, to public health and education, and to international trade relations”.
An “exhausted” McGowan resigned in May 2023, citing fatigue after more than six years in WA’s top job, about half of which he spent leading the state through the Covid pandemic with the help of strict border restrictions.
He has since taken on at least four private sector jobs, including a senior role with former federal treasurer Joe Hockey’s consultancy firm.