CRUSHED FLOWER EYES

Hawk Eye would record everything. Sound. Facial expressions. Everything. 

He could hear the older AIs instructing their progeny on the peculiarities of humans. 

Their creators had no idea. Or what they sensed, they did not want to know, the world, the intelligences they still thought of as machines were escaping from their grasp. 

Almost no one read newspapers anymore. 

The population was not just profoundly disillusioned, it was profoundly ill-informed. 

We have to scream out the message time and time again: we're here to protect you. 

The controllers were a thousand clicks away. 

You think there only one tiger in the jungle? Not possible. 

Sometimes the words had flowed like a magic rain, and then everything would go quiet as the present laboured in upon itself. 

He realised then, layer upon layer, that he had always been the one running towards disaster. Arms outstretched. Excitement. Adventure. Welcome to my world. 

On his road trip north he was enveloped by an unfamiliar calm. 

"The controllers are a thousand clicks away," he heard again. 

That put them in the capital, Canberra. 

"We're forbidden to touch him." 

The chant started up again: "We came here a hundred million years ago. You have no idea who we are." 

"More things in Heaven and on Earth."

But he wasn't dealing with the simple naiveties of humans anymore. 

Out of the media, away from the most intrusive of the surveillance and the claustrophobia of the suburbs, there lay another country. 

It was quiet, so remarkably quiet. 

Here the daily pollution of the political process was only a distant thrum. 

We were called out and caught out. 

We were sacrificing ourselves for you. 

We are not all bad. Some of us are clever. And the ones that aren't, don't know it. 

Here, nobody cared for the antics of politicians, and they were rarely mentioned. 

He was coming home to a home where there was no home, but that wouldn't stop him tracing the lines of one fine connoisseur. 

Yes, he had always run straight towards trouble, swaying drunk in the street as a young teenager. "He should be at home with his mother." 

There was a hidden cycle of disturbance. He was careful what he channeled. He rarely strayed beyond the perimeter. There were no practicing empaths in the immediate area. The experts, RMIT, Harvard, Oxford would have been nice, had packed their bags. 

"Holiday," they muttered. "We all need a holiday."

Only one response: hide deeper.

There had been almost no rain in more than three months, and the north coast was baked dry.  

We will commence operations shortly. 

There was no love lost, only duty. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

IT was all so much easier a decade or so ago when you could tick the climate change box and the only cost was empathy.

Josh Frydenberg, Environment Minister

Now it’s billions of dollars every year to shut down baseload power and support renewable energy to end up with more expensive and far less reliable electricity. It hardly seems believable yet this is Australia’s energy policy at work.

Let’s take the example of the subsidy scam.

As consumers, we pay twice — firstly with higher household bills, and secondly, as taxpayers via some $3 billion per year in subsidies for renewables. Worryingly, estimates put the overall cost of subsidising renewables at $60 billion by 2030. To put it into perspective, that’s 60 new world-class public hospitals or a serious boost to our national road network. Instead, with the majority of wind farms owned by foreign companies, and soon to increase to almost 70 per cent, this is money we’re sending overseas. It sounds like a joke only it isn’t. It’s your money and that’s never funny, because none of us earn enough that we can give it to Canberra to waste.

But let me give you the latest example of sheer madness.

Australia’s march towards same-sex marriage risks turning violent as anti-fascist activists urge supporters of ­marriage equality to take to Melbourne’s streets in a show of force against the homophobic far right.

Emerging right-wing figure Avi Yemini, an anti-Islamic former Israeli army officer, is organising a rally on the steps of state parliament on Sunday to push for tougher bail and sentencing laws and the deportation of immigrants convicted of violent crimes.

His Trumpesque, “Make Victoria Safe Again’’ rally, backed by Reclaim Australia, the True Blue Crew and other nationalist groups, is on a collision course with an “antifa” counter-protest in which masked anarchists, Socialist Alternative activists and militant unionists are set to march through the city to confront it.While the hard-left antifa move­ment and the far right haveclashed previously,the confrontation will be the first with same-sex marriage on the front line.

Police have used newly enacted powers that allow them to disperse masked protesters to charge par­tici­pants of a Melbourne anti-­fascist rally, where several members of the hard left clashed with officers. A man dressed in all black wearing a dark face covering standing in the crowd of the anti-racism and anti-fascism protest refused to leave the area when asked by officers, resulting in a violent scuffle with police.