My view of the year that was (part 1)

I finished the year 2019 with a piece titled George Christensen and other secrets about the rather rotund figure of George. Well, not about his wholesome physique but about why he needed to spend so much time in Manilla.

“Many fellow parliamentarians now call him the ‘Member for Manila’ because of his frequent travel to the region, including an astonishing 28 trips in a four-year period.”

Then as we Australians are apt to do, we shed as much clothing as possible and began our annual sojourn into the January siesta. Little did we know what was to confront us in the year ahead.

As for me, well, as one day merged with the next, I continued to write and in January a four-piece post arose from my keyboard. I gave it the title The baggage they have lugged from one year to the next means 2020 will be a hard slog not because I was trying to be prophetic, I was just pointing out how badly we were being governed and how ongoing it was.

And in my view, it has engaged the whole of 2020 and will do the same in 2021. During this period to make matters worse the country was ablaze with the ruddy redness of bushfires.

I followed up with another article in January; As prophetic as I may be in which I said: “I don’t see myself as being particularly gifted in prophetic wisdom, but on at least three occasions in 2019 I said that it would take an event of catastrophic proportion to wake the Australian population from its malaise over climate heating.”

That it happened attached no pleasure to my words. That they make for a catalyst for action does. A Guardian Essential poll (1 December) saying that “Three-quarters of Australians back a target of net zero by 2030” would seem to support my words.

In February I wrote my best read piece for the year; You cannot be a leader and a bare-faced liar at the same time. In it I lambasted Scott Morrison’s need to lie all the time. “Never in the history of this nation has a government been so unfit to serve, and never in the history of this nation has its people been so indoctrinated with so much propaganda that they, in effect, discarded any sense of levelheadedness or reasoning to re-elect this sordid lot of corrupt politicians.

And yet again I am compelled to watch Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the one with the mouth that weaves its way in and out of problems with all the charm and vigour of a rattlesnake ready to strike, and thus my writing may be intoxicated with the venom of his untruth and lies.”

It of course has never stopped and he continues on with his Trumpish bullshit. I followed up that piece with “Keeping the bastards honest”: Was it just a passing fad that lost its way? The government had promised to have a national corruption body done and dusted by last December, but strangely, more than a few scandals seem to have gotten in their way.

Controversy still raged into March and April about Sports Rorts, the Prime Minister’s holiday during the fires and if he didn’t believe in the science of climate change, he was at least believing the science of COVID-19.

March came and I lifted my game. I wrote four pieces in anger as the appalling governance continued. However, with the help of the Murdoch press the conservatives, despite them experiencing disaster after disaster, were becoming increasingly popular.

I wrote The shopping spree and a 12-pack prize which was a spoof on buying toilet rolls during the height of the pandemic.

At the height of the virus, when the question of who can you trust was first and foremost in the public eye, I wrote this piece; The Public versus Scott Morrison such was my anger at this un Christian man. This was followed by; Our greatest failure has been the decline of our democracy in which I posed the question that conservatives were hard-pressed to explain: How come the science of climate that discovered our planet is overheating and threatening our existence is somehow different (and unbelievable) to the science that discovered a virus that also threatened great destruction? They were indeed A government trying to fix everything while they’re not even working (which was another post which referred to the fact that they wouldn’t allow the parliament to sit).

What makes the Morrison government’s actions of the past week so astonishing points out how the government used socialist monetary policy to resist the effects of the recession we inevitably found ourselves in. And remember that’s where we were headed prior to the pandemic.

In April I was so disgusted with the lying of this conservative government that I was compelled to write A layperson’s guide to lying:

“Lying in Australian politics has also reached unprecedented levels. The Prime minister and his Cabinet have taken lying to such depths that it is not disingenuous to suggest that this government under Morrison no longer has a moral compass nor any understanding of truth.”

With the virus now ripping the heart out of Australia, masses of people joining the dole queues, education upended, sporting fixtures being cancelled together with the arts and businesses across the country we were all looking each other in the eye wondering what was going to hurt us next. There wasn’t, it seemed, anything that this virus couldn’t reach and destroy.

It was a time when presenting facts to people who had reasoned by virtue of their feelings that they are right was totally futile. Conspiracy theories intermingled with the headlines of the Murdoch press to create an atmosphere of despondency.

At the end of April I posted It’s more than just a virus: there are culture wounds and abscesses of leadership:

“So submersed had we become with all the consequences and complications of COVID-19 that it preoccupied our minds as if nothing else existed.

And rightly so, given the deathly possibilities this virus insinuates upon society.

Like rust this deadly infection, without instruction, without fear or favour, spreads itself throughout the community; the wealthy and the poor die. The aged and not so aged.

Its side effects include the wrecking of lives, families, and the devastation of economies and cultures with the possibility of a world recession.

Without a cure our only defence is isolation and some meaningful rules that – if followed – suffice as effective and efficient weapons.

The rich with a negative worldview see the gloom as a reason to protect themselves and their wealth. The poor with no recourse to health insurance die because Trump hates the word Obama. But the rich do too because of an unpreparedness to combat this killer.”

To be continued …

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My thought for the day

Death abides
Love hides
Goodness vanishes
Suffering manifests
Truth a causality
Faith is lost
Humanity stumbles
But
Hope survives

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