Opportunity Lost

 

The camps had been in disarray. Chaos ensued, a dark chaos from a chaotic past. Abandon your books, spend time with nature and the gods, Marcus Aurelius had once said, almost two millenia before. The random cries. The broken windows. The eerie, desolated outskirts of time, of villages, of people who should have known better.

All around, the ancient spirits stood like sentinels, and he was told in no uncertain terms: "We stood at the turning point." In times of crisis when all the old clichés came true. It was never to be, those largely American emissaries who came and went, waving their enticements of grand networked futures and research possibilities, unlimited wealth.

The Australian discourse, such that he followed, was still obsessing around the Bondi attacks and the 15 dead. The initial flurry of moving stories about grieving parents and shocked communities had faded away already in a news averse population, and all that was left was the anger.

The government, denied all credibility across multiple fronts, bound by its own deceptions, had received little if any credit for its attempts to kick the whole question of multiculturalism's failures into the long grass, hoping that the next incident would occur after they had left office.

Australian governments had long ago worked out how to manipulate Royal Commissions, the calls for which the disgruntled and the naïve had funnelled their anger and their grief; like a dream catcher, caught, this meant the search for answers avoided all the common sense solutions from a disillusioned electorate in favour of bureaucratic process.

The Albanese government had picked the most left wing of the High Court justices, Virginia Bell, to head the Commission, and had made the terms of reference about social cohesion, their chosen slogan. A simple sleight of hand, problem solved. After the supposedly independent inquiry from the government's Insider's Insider Dennis Richardson was announced and then failed to assuage the grieving families, or petitions including sporting greats, or indeed just about anybody. But it did achieve, perhaps, taking the heat out of the situation, the fever pitch of doom which followed the attacks, and perhaps, when the government and the Prime Minister went back to the capital after their long summer break, offered them a framework on which to operate.

Nothing would be solved. 

Diversity is our strength would remain the government's endlessly repeated slogan.

And social cohesion, achieving a brief illusion through the shutting down of alternative voices, would become another wasted and wasteful government program. Boomerang.