In another time, and another place, the shirts started out Brown, then segued to Black. It appears that Australia chose to avoid an interim and simply raced to the dark side.
Black Uniforms, as worn by bureaucratic representatives of some of our government agencies, are symptomatic of something else. They are symptomatic of a creeping malaise at the highest levels of political leadership in this nation.
Uniforms generally are not worrisome. Our local footy teams wear them. Our aged care workers and nurses wear them. Our police wear them. Our defence force personnel wear them. Uniforms of all of those kinds have existed for obvious reasons since the day dot. They are part of the visual landscape, and we are well used to them.
But Black Uniforms resonate differently. Black Uniforms stand for something quite different. They don’t represent love, light, or awareness.
When the political leaders of this nation conduct press briefings on matters such as refugees or national security, all too often they backdrop themselves with the flag, and a bevy of black-uniformed bureaucratic operatives.
All of that smacks of another time, and another place.
A time when anybody who was different, anybody who was vulnerable, anybody who was an ‘other’, anybody who was powerless … was demonised as Untermensch.
The predilection of our current government to choose the dark, the black, the oppressive, and the suppressive, as the guiding light for their ideological agenda concerning the poor, the unemployed, the refugees, the homeless, the religiously different, and the politically at variant, speaks of a very dark philosophy that we thought had been eradicated from this earth at the closure of the year 1945.
Not even the most conservative governments of our past, and there have been some, chose to enact such an overt parade of such a black philosophy. This current government is doing it with such unchallenged ease.
People say that it could never happen here. People also forget the lessons of our own history.
When Francis de Groot rode up and severed with a sword the opening ribbon on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge in 1932, he did so as a representative of the New Guard, he did so as a representative of the Australian Fascist Right.
So I simply say, in this era, look at our current government. Look closely at the kind of people that head a number of key of Ministries in that government. Look at the level of power they have been given. Think about how easily the masses fell into line at the last federal election.
Then have a really long hard think about those Black Uniforms.
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