Bizarre, Profound

 

A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.

Maria Popova

Down in the steep valley beneath him were nooks and crannies which hadn't altered, or which had barely altered, in thousands of years, cold, wet, dark, full of ferns and settled spirits of place guarding and being. And here in this house, this stone pile almost semi-derelict, with a plant growing through the kitchen floor beside him, all of it, well, he did not know. 

The Watchers on the Watch were the same and different, and he was older now, and the sense of urgency which had propelled him was quieter now, partly because the course of action, or the nation's course of action, its destiny, had settled into a doom laden role, and there was nothing he could do about it. 

Not even, or barely even, to watch, for who wanted to watch the destruction of their own country through left wing lunacy and absurd biases, through bloated bureaucrats and gormless, gutless, kowtowing politicians. It was all so pointless.

If one could be happy now, or secure now, but there were bigger stories to tell. Through the fate of this country, through an enveloping storm, through a vast array of apostates and apostles, through a connected and interconnected world. 

The planes of history. 

As for Australia, there was a week to go before the election, and a choice between a communist style left where the truth and the fates of ordinary people were irrelevant, or a faux conservative party with more or less identical policies, and an equal, or even greater, contempt for the welfare and the concerns of those same so-called ordinary people. That is, people, the citizens, who were often heroes in their own lives. And whose biggest adversary, the creator of their greatest day to day problems, was the government itself. The one they were expected to vote for. The one they paid for. The one which had betrayed them all.

MAINSTREAM HEADLINES

SKY NEWS

Funeral toll bell echoes over Rome as Pope Francis laid to rest

Sombre bells rang out across Rome on Saturday as Pope Francis, the 266th head of the Catholic Church, was carried to his final resting place, following an emotional funeral mass attended by more than 200,000 people.    

‘I’m so confident’: PM delivers bold declaration whilst revving up Labor faithful

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been caught singing his own praises whilst cooking democracy sausages at a Labor campaign event in Tasmania, as the election campaign enters its last week. 

GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA

Pope Francis buried after funeral attended by world leaders, royals and 400,000 mourners – live

ABC

Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy meet at Pope's funeral in first meeting since Oval Office argument

SBS

Dial M for Medicare: Labor’s $200 million telehealth salvo as Coalition plans 28-seat dash

On Sunday, the prime minister will announce a plan to give Australians free after-hours access to government-funded telehealth services.

A re-elected Labor government would launch a 24 hour '1800MEDICARE’ service, allowing patients to access free after-hours general practice telehealth consultations, as the Coalition signals its aim to visit 28 seats during a frantic final week of campaigning.

At the government’s final campaign rally ahead of the 3 May poll, the prime minister will pledge $204.5 million over four years, to revamp the existing Healthdirect service, operated in conjunction with the states and territories.

NEWS

Tens of thousands of Aussies have made their opinion clear on Welcome to Country ceremonies, with two thirds saying they want them to stop altogether.

As controversy continues to swirl around the booing of Bunurong elder Uncle Mark Brown during Friday’s Anzac Day Dawn Service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, both sides of politics have condemned the actions of neo-Nazis who led the heckling.

But the Liberal Party has previously vowed to scale back the ceremonies, with frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price warning people are “sick if it”.

A news.com.au poll on Saturday with nearly 50,000 responses found readers overwhelmingly agree.

Asked, “How do you feel about Welcome to Country ceremonies?”, 65 per cent said “they should stop completely”.

Twenty-three per cent said “there should be less” and 8 per cent said “there is the right amount”.

Just 4 per cent said “there should be more”.

THE NEW DAILY

Anzac hecklers should face ‘full force of the law’: Albanese

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said that hecklers who booed during Anzac Day ceremonies should face the “full face of the law”.

A small group, reportedly including neo-Nazis, interrupted the Welcome to Country at Melbourne’s Dawn Service on Friday, yelling during the ceremony.

MACRO BUSINESS

Australian economy to fall back into recession

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Q4 2024 national accounts revealed that the economy finally emerged from a per capita recession following 21 consecutive quarters of decline.

Australia’s per capita recession was driven by the household sector, where consumption fell for a record eighth consecutive quarter.

SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA

Listen… Senator Matt Canavan might not be as traditionally dishy as Alex Antic, but he made himself an incredibly attractive political prospect when he stood his ground against Sky News Australia’s Andrew Bolt.

The short interview has since become infamous on social media.

Andrew Bolt queried why conservative politicians are too afraid to criticise Donald Trump, asking if people had a case of ‘hero worship’.

(He must have missed Peter Dutton’s comments about being disgusted with the White House and then referred to Zelenskyy as a modern-day Churchill.)

Contrast this exchange with the media disaster in which popular figure Jacinta Price alluded to MAGA in a speech while standing beside Peter Dutton and then spent the next few days backtracking so hard she stumbled over Christmas photos of herself in a MAGA hat. The entire mess is still damaging the Coalition simply because they allowed themselves to be bullied into denials they evidently don’t believe.

CRIKEY

Albanese and Dutton’s love-fest for the teen social media ban is a craven embarrassment

Both leaders say they want to be tough on big tech and to help kids. From what we know about the teen social media ban, it might accomplish neither aim.

THE NIGHTLY

For all his planning for his funeral to be as simple as possible and true to how he lived, his Requiem Mass in the Vatican City appeared a stunning spectacle against the historic backdrop of the Eternal City, bathed in glorious spring sunshine.

World leaders and royalty sat shoulder-to-shoulder to the side of an altar in St Peter’s Square to witness the solemn celebration of the life and work of one of the most loved and reformist religious leaders.

THE DAILY SCEPTIC

White Men Blocked From Applying for Jobs at Premier League Clubs

Australia’s Conservatives Are Paying the Price of Kowtowing to the Left

The partyroom is hopelessly divided between Black Hand Gang wets and what I would call ‘actual conservatives’. The former want to park the Liberal Party an inch to the Right of Labour and then move Leftwards as soon as Labour does. They revel in focus groups and shun value-based campaigning. Truth be told, many were quietly for ‘Yes’ as regards the Voice, at least until the writing was on the wall. Very little concern for free speech. And as with the British Tories, we had myriad supposed ‘liberal’ MPs who disgracefully embraced lockdown thuggery at least as enthusiastically as their British cousins.

All of which brings me to the current Coalition election campaign. It has been pretty woeful. But why? My guess here is that it boils down to trying to drive down the middle between moderates and conservatives in the partyroom. If Team Dutton had come out bravely and run an election on pulling us out of Net Zero, with all the massive economic advantages that would entail, I think the Coalition would have romped home – despite the vitriol the ABC and Fairfax Press would have thrown at them. If it’d come out way earlier and harder on immigration cuts (because 100,000 isn’t that big a cut and anyway, do you believe they would follow through?), taking on the big business and university lobbies that disgracefully funded and full-on supported the ‘Yes’ Voice campaign, it would have romped home.

The incoherent half-matching of Labour spending pledges and refusal to fight the culture wars that so desperately need fighting all seems to stem from trying to keep both camps in the partyroom if not happy, then not incandescently angry.

So, Dutton’s campaign launch praising of the Morrison government approach to lockdowns won not a single vote but sure got an awful lot of Right-of-centre voters like me thinking we might preference a minor party before the thuggish Libs. Ditto for Dutton evading the ‘what’s a woman?’ question, as though there wasn’t loads of political capital in being honest and not cowardly and afraid of people and groups who’d never vote for you. Ditto for Dutton’s support of the eSafety Commissioner and for Kevin Rudd as ambassador? 

It beggars belief that a Government like this Albo one has the Liberal Party so afraid of its own shadow. Actually, make that afraid of the shadow of the Tony Abbott wing of the party, the one that Mr Dutton was supposed to represent.