Ghouta, Syria
They remade Australia in their own image. Confused. Unfocused. Rapid demographic transformation. If you believe in everything you believe in nothing. As the Hizb say. Old Alex was stranded on the perimeter. At the back of the newsroom.
They are so ugly, so old, so overweight, he thought, caught in some terrible conundrum. Three was no one to meet. Or greet.
Day off, he said. The Lord's Day. Harking to some ancient tradition.
We're backing off.
We've been warned.
That was Dutton's doing.
The punitive insanities of ASIO, the insane religious fervour of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the outlandish collusion, the revenge of various psychopaths in high places, all of it had gone.
Exposed, their reliance on rumour and innuendo and the words of mafia linked prostitutes, and police.
Quiet, too quiet.
The Stockholm Syndrome.
He had become used to his captors. He even imagined, sometimes, that some of them sympathised with him.
That he could hear them whispering through the slipstreams.
We're here to protect you. We are on your side. You have nothing to worry about.
Not from a modern day inquisition.
They're just not brave enough to go there.
In a medieval Plaza de Mayor, where the prisoners were tortured in the Inquisition, where a God, the worst God, harvested the souls of the screaming and the dying.
He could feel the agony to this terrible day. In those dark dungeons where he never saw daylight, thick stone walls, moss, cruelty as if ingrained into the walls.
How could one person do this to another?
And he screamed again.
In another century, in this remote island pond they called a home, a retirement home without walls, they raised their glasses and drank.
And talked of nothing.
So ugly, he thought, again. They're just so damn ugly.
Bryce Courtenay would have had a field day.
Old Alex didn't adhere to the 12 Gospels, as did Bryce.
Two months ago, our Bureau of Statistics warned Australia's population was growing faster than any rich country it could think of. We've added 388,100 people in just one year — the equivalent of another Canberra. Most were immigrants, ramping our population growth to 1.6 per cent.This is plainly nuts — as the Turnbull ministers busy smashing Tony Abbott this week tried so dishonestly to deny. Think: at this rate, every city, town and bush camp in Australia will be twice their size in just 44 years. And you think the traffic is already bad enough? The house prices too high? Think of this, too: most of that doubling of population will be new arrivals with no deep cultural ties to this place. Isn't our social cohesion fraying already. It's frightening. The United States, an immigrant nation like us, kept its own growth to 0.7 per cent — less than half ours. Canada was 0.9 and New Zealand 1.0.The contrast with Europe is even more startling. Australia is now growing three times faster than Britain and four times faster than France. Italy's population actually fell 0.1 per cent. Bolt, Andrew, Immigration is Nuts, The Daily Telegraph, 26 February, 2018.
The left is not always right. The right is not always wrong.
These insane ideologues had destroyed the country.
The rich got richer from high rates of immigration.
Everyone else suffered.
The myth was over.
I went to this lovely Lebanese restaurant, Nepalese, Korean, Somali. Well bully.
Trampled by foreign hordes. Rise Without Fear. The chant was already there.
Blair Cottrell was back on Facebook addressing his followers.
Rise Without Fear.
The official lie was uncovered.
The United Patriots Front.
The group, badly harassed by that secret parallel police force, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. Members arrested. Everyone under surveillance.
And what happened then?
The situation got worse.
And worse. And worse.
As the country went to the dogs.
Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life. Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants. Without exception, one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo), the People's Police. In turn, the police officer was the Stasi's man. If a relative or friend came to stay overnight, it was reported. Schools, universities, and hospitals were infiltrated from top to bottom. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers, actors, and sports figures were co-opted by Stasi officers, as were waiters and hotel personnel. Tapping about 100,000 telephone lines in West Germany and West Berlin around the clock was the job of 2,000 officers.
Stasi officers knew no limits and had no shame when it came to "protecting the party and the state." Churchmen, including high officials of both Protestant and Catholic denominations, were recruited en masse as secret informers. Their offices and confessionals were infested with eavesdropping devices.
Absolutely nothing was sacred to the secret police. Tiny holes were bored in apartment and hotel room walls through which Stasi agents filmed their "suspects" with special video cameras. Even bathrooms were penetrated by the communist voyeurs.
Koehler, John, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, Basic Books, 2008.
The dream of a participatory democracy thrown on the scrapheap.
And old soldiers died. Or retreated to places like this. Where everyone was old. Where there was no conflict. Where rednecks survived and thrived. And the rest of Australia, the Australia made by the liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats and the social engineers, could go suck eggs.
All these missteps, all these government run mistakes, all this remaking of the country and rapid demographic transformation, was the prelude to very dark times.
As the gangs took to the streets and chanted: Rise Without Fear.
For this country was not their country. It had been sold down the river.
Rise Without Fear.
The dream of a participatory democracy was over.
THE BIGGER STORY:
With a federal election due next year, the Liberal Party machine is grappling with a root-and-branch overhaul of stagnant systems and a way back from the perilous financial cuts that almost crippled the last campaign.
The poll may be as far away as Malcolm Turnbull chooses; or as close as poor health or scandal claiming an MP. But the party’s lack of readiness to fight on the front foot was exposed in a scalding post-mortem carried out last year on the 2016 campaign.
The Weekend Australian can reveal that the internal report on the 2016 election by former trade minister Andrew Robb and a small team including former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell made it clear that savage reductions in the funds budgeted for campaign research had led to such a misdirection of resources that policies, messages, strategies and tactics across the board were all deficient.
Among the worst criticisms in the report, the authors revealed that the party had slashed its budgetary commitment for nightly phone tracking of voter sentiment by two-thirds when compared with elections going back 20 years — rendering the results out of kilter with reality.
The document was never publicly released. It was buried almost immediately after it was seen by a small coterie of the party hierarchy — aside from the circulation of key points, damaging enough in themselves, to MPs and media.
Even the party’s federal executive was not given copies of the report for fear of leaking.
From the comments section, David: Labor didn't do too good a job during the last election campaign, The Turnbull government did a pathetic job during their entire election campaign. While Turnbull did a stupid thing in rolling Tony Abbott, he has also alienated all of the conservative Liberal base who are the bread and butter of the party. We are sick of being ignored we are sick of him spending Australia's money like a drunk sailor. That is what Labor does.
Turnbull is an elitist and has absolutely no idea what it is like to be a regular Australian who lives in the suburbs.