Advance Party
The osprey hovered over the site each morning. The forces stirred. He was at a loss how to deal with any of it. The Iran War began in the Middle East, and how any of it would end was anybody's guess. We, that is Australians, were being fed bullshit at scale, at a massive scale, and the silence that made them weep, the peregrine falcons that would hover over that same site, they, at least, were clear in their intent.
While the osprey, four of them now, the parents who had hatched their young out on that pier and now swept above with their offspring, as if all our flying dreams were hatched from despair, because how would you feel, having seen so many dreams and flights of fancy crash land on this barren plain, the one that ran behind our eyes as we exchanged banalities at the dog park. And the osprey soared above.
He was welcomed by the victimhood, or the sisterhood, Paul, the editor at the local paper was moving on to a job as press officer for the Kiama Council, and his own routines and work pressures and desire for achievement, for greatness in defiance of age, the passing years, the fragility which the multi-coloured armour protected, all of it mattered so much and mattered not a jot. All he could hear was: the world is so beautiful.
As every last thread picked itself out and determined intent; as these moments circled inward and Australia, on one surface or another, kind of functioned but didn't really, because the hypocrisy was too intense, the social cohesion, that government coined or exploited term, so shamelessly exploited, was in reality too shattered for a coherent whole.
Australia? You couldn't make this up. The deliberate destruction. The Grand Mufti had half a year before declared a fatwa against the Zionist entity. The Jewish lobby and its naked abuse and manipulation of the government sponsored narrative was evident for all to see. Thousands of dead children in Gaza had done that. There was no denying the catastrophe of it.
And war in Iran? He filled up his car with petrol. He worried about building a vegetable garden. He worried about building a future.
And the quiet night ate through all their lives; and they sank ever deeper into their own lives, a silence which was not a bond. Those days were gone.
MAINSTREAM HEADLINES
MICHAEL WEST MEDIA
On December 22, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese engaged former Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson to conduct an (not really) independent review into Australia’s federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies following the Bondi terrorist attack.
The FOI reveals Richardson is being paid $5,000 per day.
78-year-old Richardson has had a distinguished public service career, serving as the Director General of ASIO from 1996 to 2005, then as the Australian Ambassador to the United States to 2010, then as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to 2012 and then, finally, as mentioned above, Secretary of Defence to 2017.
But since he left, he really hasn’t left.
He’s a roving insider that has fared well from the public teat in retirement with over $1.3M in sole sourced gigs including a Review of the Legal Framework of the National Intelligence Community, a review of Integrity Concerns and Governance in Regional Processing Administration (Home Affairs) a review into the (non) Transfer of 2003 Cabinet Records and a review into the structure, governance, performance and direction of the Australian Submarine Agency.
TOTT NEWS
There is yet another COVID booster now available – yes, really
CAFE LOCKED OUT
https://cafelockeddown.substack.com/
Why Would We Travel the Road To Iran?
Bernie was coming out of a small post office that serviced the tiny hamlet north of Coffs Harbour when the police stopped her and wanted to know why she wasn’t wearing a mask.
She told them she had an exemption, but she had left it at home. This was true, but they didn’t care.
After a few words, they arrested her by throwing her down to the sidewalk with such force that they broke her sternum.
Melika talks about how free her people used to be. A people who loved to dance. To which I replied, that once, my people loved to laugh. We called it taking the piss and we thought it was a foundation block of our identity, but now jokes are frowned upon, and our hate speech laws are trying to match the UK’s where you can go to jail, even if you are a grandmother, by posting something that some finds offensive.\
SKY NEWS
‘National reckoning’: Security experts warn of crumbling social cohesion as Labor oversee terror events and global turmoil
Australia's leading national security experts have warned about the decline in social cohesion under the Albanese government, amid controversy over globalise the intifada chants and Ayotallah Khamenei tributes
GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA
https://www.theguardian.com/au
Australia’s shameless support for the US attack on Iran makes us gullible, duplicitous, or both
THE NIGHTLY
https://thenightly.com.au/politics/taha-association-melbourne-islamic-group-may-lose-670000-funding-after-khamenei-tribute-c-21814151
Taha Association: Melbourne Islamic group may lose $670,000 funding after Khamenei tribute
The Federal Government is reviewing a $670,000 election pledge to an Islamic community group in Melbourne after it held a gathering to mourn Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Video emerged on the centre’s social media accounts of it live-streaming a religious gathering held on Sunday “in honour of His Eminence Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei”, with three speakers during the 80-minute event.
Now Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly has asked her department to put the application on hold and reassess the grant’s purpose.
“Like all governments, we do give grants to community organisations, whether they be religious organisations, for mosques, temples, for sporting groups, but we take seriously our expectation that the activities of those organisations and the activities of those groups are conducted within the rule of law and within the expectations of taxpayers and the standards that taxpayers expect,” Dr Aly said after questions from the Opposition about the funding."\
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