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| Flinders Power Boilers being blown up |
A government that treats its citizens with the complete contempt that this one does, does not deserve to govern.
The oligarchs were destroying the country.
The bureaucrats were destroying the country.
Ruinous rates of immigration were destroying the country.
In September 2015 the NSW Premier, Mike Baird, urged the Federal Government to accept a “generous number” of Syrian refugees, pledging to settle the bulk of them in his state. Ultimately, Australia took 12,000, with the Baird Government accepting 7,000 for NSW. Big promises were made about their positive economic impact on country towns.
Two-and-a-half years later, where did the Syrians end up? More than 6,000 settled in just one local government area, Fairfield in Western Sydney. There was no dispersal to NSW country towns. Nor is there any evidence of significant job placement.
Fairfield has become Australia’s refugee capital. As Mayor Frank Carbone said, “They stopped the boats and put them on buses instead”. The local impact has been devastating, with housing rents rising by 35 percent and Fairfield High School facing new enrolments four times higher than previously planned.
The district already had the highest unemployment rate in Sydney, at over 9 percent. Less than one in five of the new arrivals have found paid-work, adding to problems of welfare dependency and ethnic enclaves. Twice last year I tried to interview people in the Fairfield town centre for Mark Latham’s Outsiders, but only 10 percent could speak English. The local State Labor MP, Guy Zangari, told me to learn Assyrian instead. Mark Latham, column, Daily Telegraph, 10 April, 2018.
And still they blundered into a dystopian future.
When the bombing starts.
Dystopia: a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.They cried with laughter.
Soon enough they would cry with grief.
There were offers of help. I'm going to go out on a limb here. They demanded an answer.
"You don't understand what he's doing."
There they were, out of phase, passing through the lattice.
At the centre of it all, the Gobble Turkey in chief, mired into the front page, as if the entire country was about only one person. One grievous preening idiot with a smack on grin, caught, pleasingly as far as he was concerned, in a mirror maze, his image front and centre on a thousand screens, in every newspaper. It was grievous assault, a terrible waste of money. And it was happening here. And happening now.
I did fight it.
But they kept their distance.
The days were growing shorter.
The locals more familiar.
Divorced from their own country.
Imperiled, although they did not realise it, in a tiny place.
And the politics remained putrid:
The party is turning on itself in a spectacular and public fashion. The leadership issue will keep running not just because Turnbull rejects the conservative mantra. Ultimately, this is not about what Turnbull says or does — it is about what he represents.
Understand what the 30th Newspoll represents. It shows the Liberals cannot liberate themselves from the events of September 2015. They are obsessed about themselves. Sure, the symbolism is powerful: Turnbull should be held to account because he now fails the test on which he judged Abbott. Turnbull now says he made a mistake at the time in invoking Newspoll. Of course he must say this, but it doesn’t matter. The real point is that the Liberals cannot get over it.
And they have persuaded much of the media the biggest story in politics is Liberal strife. It is a frustrating and convenient story because it is all headlines though nothing ever happens — it is a story in permanent anticipation of an event. Liberals will struggle for however long they remain the issue, Paul Kelly, The Australian, 11 April, 2018.
Local news dwindled to nothing.
It was easier and cheaper to write about Trump.
Meanwhile the politicians, captive to armadas of bureaucrats, continued to rewrite the country, drowning it in people who had no allegiance either to the country or to its history.
Black people, now, were the Sudanese. Not the indigenous, who shrank, at least in suburban imagination, to ever more remote and dysfunctional reservations.
All they knew was their taxes paid for all of it.
And the democratic contract was broken.
Broken.
Someone turning 30 in Australia had never in their voting life known decent, honourable, honest politics.
All the heir apparent Peter Dutton had to do to win the next election was to promise a return to pre-Howard levels of immigration, 70,000 a year, when, even then, there had been no public support and cries it was too high. And a line by line audit of government spending, which was entirely out of control. Every single bureaucrat, every single idiot project, should have to answer one simple question: why should someone have to go to work in a factory to support this?
At the centre of mounting tensions and rising dysfunction was history.
Former Prime Minister John Howard, always mates to the big end of town, particularly the Chamber of Commerce, quadrupled the rate of intake and transformed the country quicker than the left could possibly have dreamed.
A typical blind by Howard.
You never paid any attention to what he said.
You watched what he did.
This contempt for, and manipulation of, public sentiment continued to be a defining feature of the Liberals aka the conservatives to this day.
Fundamental dishonesty.
Ironically, the public blamed the left, the Labor Party, thanks to their ceaseless promotion of identity politics and, equally, contempt for ordinary working people who paid their salaries.
The contract was broken.
It didn't matter where you looked, nothing worked. The pathological contempt for males that characterised its social policies, including family law, child support, and child protection. The massive incompetence of communication policy, where millions of people were being forced by law onto an inferior broadband network. The massive mismanagement of immigration. Of power, with the most expensive electricity in the world. Shocking mismanagement, top to bottom.
And their, mired in the middle of it, transfixed into every front page, a grinning corpse, Malcolm Turnbull.
THE BIGGER STORY:
The prime minister emphatically denied a report in the Australian Dutton had suggested reducing Australian’s immigration intake by 20,000 last year, a proposal which was reportedly shut down by Turnbull and Scott Morrison before it made it to cabinet.“It is completely untrue, it is completely untrue, it is completely untrue,” Turnbull said on Tuesday. “The article, the claim in the article, is false. Full stop. OK? Full stop.”
But asked about the report on Wednesday, Dutton, confirmed that discussions canvassing different options had taken place, while maintaining he was not contradicting his leader.
“I’m not going to going into comments or discussions and who said what and who was in the meetings and the rest of it, others can speculate on that,” he said. “I don’t, as a policy and I never have, commented on what’s been discussed in cabinet or subcommittees or whatever it might be, or gatherings of cabinet colleagues.
“But as I say, as immigration minister, as Scott Morrison did, as Chris Bowen did, Philip Ruddock, whoever you like to nominate … of course there are discussions of what the figures should be, the benefits of different aspects of migration, there is obviously a debate about congestion and about housing affordability and the government is alive to all of those concerns, about geographic placement of people out to the regions, they are all issues that we considered.
Peter Dutton contradicts Turnbull on immigration, Amy Remeikis, The Guardian, 11 April, 2018.
Peter Dutton has confirmed reports he discussed cutting Australia’s immigration rate, contradicting Malcolm Turnbull’s repeated denials that the conversations took place.
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