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The answer came well before the question. Something hidden in the undergrowth of my heart; unearthing it was an art form meant for the most determined bugs. Those petty thoughts that bugged me waited for the whoosh to be scattered to the winds. Out here in the bush nothing is predictable and nothing nearly happened.
On 7 February in Manado, Sulawesi, Sajjad, a 24 year old man who had just finished a degree in IT, doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire. He died six days later. On the day of his death, Australians woke to the government's claim the passage of the Medevac Bill would restart boats from Indonesia and weaken Australia's borders.
Distant she said. Superficial was his word. Words to describe all that they cared, after the years gone by, long gone, and two children now almost reared. Twenty they were, those changing years. Love replaced by void, even fears. A house, a high hill, ambitious pride. A façade, an emptiness.
What do Indigenous and Muslim Australians have in common? They are the foil against which normative White Australian identity is contrasted. The latest group to join them are African migrants, subject of a new campaign of fear. Because the stories we tell ourselves can change, one day there might be one that honours all of us.
David Leyonhjelm recently thanked men from South Asian backgrounds for delivering his pizza, groceries and online purchases; for rolling up their sleeves for jobs others refused. This gesture is seriously problematic. The casual service industry is broken and exploitative and needs to be carefully regulated and constantly audited.
When government corruption is chronic and the streets are ruled by armed gangs, there are no collective funds for quality health care or education. The thousands of migrants at the US border are fleeing the effects of climate change, wide-scale government corruption, brutal state violence, and flourishing non-state gang rule.
That up to one in ten Australian jobs are now performed by temporary migrants demonstrates a continuation of our past abuse and commitment to privileging capital over worker rights. Coupled with the rise of temporary and insecure work, our reputation as a human and labour rights leader is now under threat.
Under such conditions, it is hard to get people to concede that what they believe might be incomplete. No one wants to give anything up. This is an attempt to get people to give something up. Here is how to do it: ask what is the worst that can happen. Then accept that it may have already happened. But not to you.
New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian's call to halve the state's migrant intake, and Federal minister for cities Alan Tudge's proposed a mandatory five-year regional settlement scheme for migrants, have both left policy observers scratching their heads. And with good reason.
The EU is facing the consequences of its own actions. It will not link political violence to migration, and wishes to maintain its humanitarian façade, so there is little opposition to what Salvini and his ilk are perpetrating against human rights. The web is now so tangled it is no longer a mere issue of racism.
Bach Chaconnes, Chopin Preludes and high pitched whines joining cello duets ... has me thinking though, about the repositories of silence, because it's been here and waiting, in the 45 degrees of stairwell, the angle providing harbour, a balloon of silence, the colour of healing.
Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.