We Weep For You and You Are Not Born
The crimes committed here today will live on in infamy. Yes, he was repeating himself.
He was not crazy at all, but this madness which had seized this country, that was a disturbance in the force, to use a SF term, or a darkness, a parallel world, where in the evolution of these things in the deepest of space, not all was good.
This remarkably fecund planet had been fought over for millennia, but now there was something different about it, something so blindingly insane, so evil, so indifferent to the people they harmed and the suffering they caused, so cold in their pursuit of power, the individual did not matter, the harm they did, that did not matter. It was a coldness, and an arrogance, beyond the reach of intellect, a frightening time for a frightening creature, as they stirred along the lake's edge.
Overhead, the imperial warship had arrived, and was settling above them into a time and place, a circular whirl, a vast movement. There was no one single intellect, no one single voice. They moved across the waters. The people were being subjected, had been subjected, to a dizzying array of abuse; a nationwide psyop program as some referred to it as, the blizzard of diktats and announcements, press conferences and reductions of freedom.
They had accepted it all, until they hadn't. He had been bewildered from the beginning, how little sense it made; or the only sense was diabolical. But in the end that far reaches of space, that far reach into the utterly improbable, was playing out here in the cruellest of times. And that cruelty had only just begun.
He was careful not to upset the applecart, to be polite; to be humble, to be human. He moved amongst the waters; he was just beginning to swarm. He was frightened, as he had always been, of them, of what was happening, of why he could see and hear these things, of the power of thought, of the reclamation of a soul. He came up from the depths. He stopped obliterating himself, and blocking them. He came to accept it for what it was. He did what he had to do. He was the servant class? They were planning regicide, but they were all servants when it came to this kind of power, magisterial, beyond time and space, beyond anything they understood; and the country? The country was being lost, or was already lost.
It played out, these things, in a determination to survive, in a lifeform such as theirs, the basic principles, fractal and others, the billions of seed to produce a single entity, a sadness that had already gripped them.
"They have certainly divided the country," he said to a retired school teacher, how clever, how sensitive, how well read they thought they were, and she snapped straight back: "Who are they?"
"Bureaucrats, politicians." And repeated the same increasingly well worn phrase: "Everyone has chosen their hill to die on."
The diabolical nature of what had happened, of the perpetrators, the scale of the crime, it left him breathless; and he was going through the same thing all over again.
"I keep forgetting to breathe," he had said to someone down at the cafe, in the early days of the pandemic when they had all thought the madness could not possibly last.
"Don't they have air where you come from?" came the rejoinder.
"No," he replied.
And so it was, that terrible glitch, or glinch, in history. when time folded in upon itself and they were all helpless.
And the bad guys won.
Had they planned to do this all along?
It was certainly starting to look like it. And that was diabolical; a cruelty beyond imagining.
He played his tiny role. Others played theirs.
Pin pricks in history. You had to believe it mattered; not just the scale of it, the billions who were impacted; but beyond that.
A time for all time.
An extremity of the human experience which would be studied for thousands of years to come.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
ABC
Scott Morrison is a man under pressure.
The country he leads is fed up and tired after a summer surge of COVID-19 that has robbed many of the break they were desperate for after another gruelling year living in a deadly pandemic.
Voters, if the polls are to be believed, blame him and his government for the struggles they're contending with — from rising petrol prices to regularly stripped supermarket shelves and battles to find rapid antigen tests.
Irrespective of how much he is ultimately responsible for, he's starting the political year having to take his medicine for the state of the nation.
The Prime Minister, like Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese a week earlier, sought a political reset in addressing the National Press Club on Tuesday afternoon.
He came with contrition but as Elton John famously offered, sorry seems to be the hardest word.
"I haven't got everything right," he said early in his speech.
"I'll take my fair share of the criticism and blame," he later added.
Regrets? He had a few, like not calling in the military to oversee the vaccine rollout sooner.
But when pressed if he would say sorry for the mistakes he had made as Prime Minister, Morrison was in no mood to abide.
"We're all terribly sorry for what this pandemic has done to the world and to this country," he said.
Pivoting into campaign mode, he announced payments to keep aged care workers in their jobs and a fund to help universities commercialise their research.
***
Former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she has no recollection of calling Scott Morrison a "horrible, horrible person" who she "did not trust" in texts to another senior Liberal.
Key points:
Alleged texts sent by former NSW Premier put to Prime Minister on live television
Ms Berejiklian says Mr Morrison is the "best person to lead our nation"
The Prime Minister "doesn't agree" with the contents of the alleged messages
The messages, allegedly sent between Ms Berejiklian and a cabinet minister, were revealed on live television after the Prime Minister's speech at the National Press Club this afternoon.
It was put to Mr Morrison that, despite he and Ms Berejiklian claiming to have a close relationship, she had dumped on him to a Liberal colleague.
In a statement, Ms Berejiklian did not deny sending the texts, which reportedly described the PM as a "horrible, horrible person" who was "more concerned with politics than people".
It's also alleged she said that she "did not trust" Mr Morrison.
The cabinet minister allegedly replied, describing Mr Morrison as a "fraud" and a "complete psycho".
SKY
Victoria Health Minister Martin Foley has declared he expected the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to change the definition of full vaccination.
Premier Daniel Andrews last week flagged that full vaccination should be changed to mandate a third dose ahead of a meeting of National Cabinet.
The Premier argued the modification would increase the uptake of the booster shot with Victoria’s three-dose vaccination rate currently sitting at 39 per cent.
GUARDIAN
Aged care workers have described comments by the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, on Covid deaths in the sector as “astonishing” and “disrespectful”, and say the significance of those deaths is being downplayed by politicians.
On Monday, Hunt addressed a growing number of deaths in aged care, with 473 Covid-related aged-care deaths recorded in January alone.
“The latest advice that I have is that approximately 60% of those that have agonisingly passed have been in palliative care,” Hunt said. He added: “The definition is that they have passed with Covid, and they are absolutely rightly counted as a national loss. But approximately 60% of those that have passed were in palliative care.”
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation federal secretary, Annie Butler, said the comments were “astonishing”.
“How much more disrespectful to elderly Australians can this government be,” Butler asked. “To turn around and say basically, ‘you were just going to die anyway,’ rather than acknowledging that they died faster and in difficult conditions because the government didn’t look after them well enough.
“The comments are just outrageous because elderly people can be in palliative care for a week, for two weeks, or even years, and the aim is to make sure the person has the best life they can have in that time. Letting Covid rip through homes and these people become infected is hardly delivering people the best quality of life that they can have.”
THE NEW DAILY
Victoria has posted another 34 COVID-related deaths and 11,311 more cases, as chief health officer Brett Sutton says he has not been asked for advice about a third vaccine dose mandate.
The new cases, confirmed by the health department on Tuesday, were made up of 4251 from PCR tests and 7060 from rapid antigen tests.
The total number of active cases in the state is 72,710, down from 76,335 on Monday.
Hospitalisations with COVID-19 have also fallen, down by 22 to 851 patients. There are 106 people in intensive care, up four from Monday – and 30 of those are on ventilators.
About 39 per cent of Victorians aged over 18 have received a COVID-19 booster, after 17,799 doses were administered at state clinics on Monday.
It came after Professor Sutton faced a barrage of questions in the first public hearing of the state’s Pandemic Declaration Accountability and Oversight Committee on Monday.
The committee was created as part of the controversial pandemic laws that passed parliament last year, shifting power for health measures to the government and away from Professor Sutton.
Professor Sutton, who appeared virtually, said he had not provided official advice to the government on the plan to mandate a third vaccine.
“I haven’t been requested to provide advice on broader vaccine mandates at this stage,” he said.
THE AUSTRALIAN
