CANCER ON THE BEACH

Cancer on the beach, he heard strange imagery which could not find a place. 
And then came the message, an old friend, who had bought a house in Ballina on the North Coast, had passed away. 
Old Alex had little to do with him in recent years.
He was under government surveillance, and so was his old friend, if that is what he was. He could not afford and did not want to be associated with the sins of others. 
They met when Old Alex was 15, literally half a century before. He was 19. As far as Alex was concerned, he was going out with someone really old.
Not to put too fine a point on it, everything was illegal back then. By the time he was getting to 16, he was getting a bit old for Paul. 
But it was Paul who had introduced him to the subterranean world of the Cross, to the all-night cafes and gay clubs, the prostitution, the bars, the infinite supply of drugs, the ever-ready queens ever-ready to buy you a drink, and as much else as their greedy, slimy little hands could purchase.
One course obviates another.
"It's a chance to put the record straight," one of the Watchers on the Watch observed, but there was nothing to put straight but the terrible record, the ridiculous performance and outlandish harassment of the agencies, the Clarion Cows of ASIO, the ruthless perfidy of operatives and politicians high and low.
A threat to power, it could not be.
A truthsayer. Could not be.
A patchy past. Could not be. 
Not in the era of The New Puritanism.
They would find something, a vulnerability, something they could use to destroy him and to protect the institutions by which they had been enslaved.
Alex hadn't realised Old Paul, who monickered himself the Pariah Queen, was dying.
Didn't know the cancer had come back.
Didn't know there had been cancer in the first place.
He had seen him one day on the cliffs of Ballina, a couple of years before, taking photographs, but he had been in his father's car and it hadn't been appropriate to get out and say hello.
Fifty years before his father had put a private detective on this very same man, and would quite possibly still recognise him.
So he didn't say hello.
Across a chasm of years. 
He just watched the world slide by. Noticed with irritation the likes or affirmations on Facebook. As if one of Paul's "boys" had worked out well and he was proud of it.
But there it was. He had seen it before. The great affection they sometimes held for the people who were supposed to have been their monsters. 
For nothing was black and white, in this terrible imprinted world. 
He didn't know what to say.
I will light an effigy for me and you. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

DAVID WROE IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Ducan Lewis, head of ASIO with AG George Brandis

The intelligence watchdog's staff of just 17 people has "not kept pace" with its growing workload in keeping a check on the nation's thousands of spies, a major intelligence review has found.

The review, released this week, has urged the Turnbull government to triple the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to 50 staff, in particular to allow it to carry out more random spot checks on the agencies.

The review by Michael L'Estrange and Stephen Merchant also recommends greater parliamentary oversight with an MPs' committee able to ask the watchdog to investigate particular spy operations.

"One advantage of increasing the number of staff would be to enable random and ad hoc inspections to be undertaken. They have access to everything but their capacity to even randomly sample that material is constrained by their numbers."

SHERIDAN IN THE AUSTRALIAN

Malcolm Turnbull & Peter Dutton

One obvious indication of the mess that is the government’s decision to create a department of homeland security is the absolute lack of coherent process behind it.

There was no report suggesting it, no systematic consideration by any consultant, bureaucrat, agency chiefs, interdepartmental community, no green paper, no white paper, no cabinet submission. Nothing.

Indeed, every time the proposal to shoehorn all the domestic security agencies into one department has been evaluated over the past decade it has been decisively rejected. Peter Dutton, who will be the new minister, is a good minister and rightly regarded as a standout within the government. But even his advocacy for this bad move has frequently taken flight from reality.

Thus the Turnbull government has announced what it describes as the biggest change in the organisation of national security in 40 years in the face of the opposition of every serious, systematic and even semi-official inquiry that has ever looked at the matter.

Of course over the next few weeks the government will drag out various agency chiefs to utter through clenched teeth some level of support for government policy.

They are all honourable, conscientious public servants and, in national security above any other field, they would never publicly undermine faith in government policy, whatever that policy is. Should these changes ever go ahead, and a future government reverse them, the agency chiefs will support that too.

The disadvantages of the new arrangements are obvious. Among many others, it will create a vast, sprawling ministry with too many agencies for one minister to lead effectively. Most importantly it will greatly diminish the critical contestability of advice, both at the National Security Committee of cabinet and at full cabinets. That contestability is central to good cabinet government.

PAUL MALEY IN THE AUSTRALIAN

Malcolm Turnbull

The decision to proceed with Malcolm Turnbull’s home affairs super-ministry was never formally evaluated by the national security­ committee of cabinet, the government’s highest national security­ body, despite the NSC having met the morning the announcem­ent was made.

Less than a week after the Prime Minister announced the changes, a picture is emerging of a rushed, shambolic process that critics across the government believe­ was driven by political expediency rather than good policy.

The Weekend Australian has been told some of the key ministers affected by the changes were not told of the Prime Minister’s decision to go with the idea, which had been under consideration for some time, until just a few days ­before Tuesday’s announcement.

The Weekend Australian also understands that at the time of the announcement there was not one operative document circulated among ministers explaining how the arrangements would work.

Mosul, Iraq. So much for intelligence.