Whatever happened to responsibility? SAS, Covid, Robodebt; The game is rigged, y’all….

So naive, I know. There was never a golden age. But omfg it is blatant af at the moment.

Nineteen Australian SAS soldiers are under investigation for murder and torture of Afghanis. You’re seriously trying to tell me that nobody in the chain of command knew, and found ways not to know, to look the other way? It was their fucking job to know, and to do something about it (the clue is in the name – command-er).

There will be some trials, some convictions, but only of those who pulled the triggers, not of the people who let them do it. Meanwhile, David McBride, the guy who tried to blow the whistle, still has the threat of serious jail time hanging over him. Presumably they can’t let him off because the encouragement it would give other whistleblowers, and the precedent it would set in the Assange case.

Meanwhile, there’s “outrage” that someone in South Australia, on a visa that doesn’t allow him to work more than 20 hours a week, should lie to contact tracers about where he might have got the lurgy, leading to a lockdown (that has now been lifted, mostly). Meanwhile the actual question – why have the South Australian authorities not learnt from the experience of Victoria; security guards at quarantine hotels should not have/need side hustles? Convenient that. Puts me in mind of how that drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket got everyone to use Private Gomer Pyle at their outrage at his humiliations of them. Look over HERE. Look at this person who is the proximate cause of your problems. Do not look at any underlying foul-ups…

But the biggie is about “robodebt.” The Australian government unleashed an algorithm that sent threatening letters to people on benefits telling them they’d been overpaid and cough up or else. People were sent into destitution, depression. There were suicides.

Literally minutes before a class action law suit was to go to court, the government caved and did a payout, without admitting wrong doing, but sparing themselves the danger of having to give evidence under oath (perjury is probably the last taboo).

Peter Van Onselen, an academic and professor at University of Western Australia nailed it, pointing out that this started when the Social Security Minister was Scott Morrison [though it started under the Gillard – ALP- government] , escalated when the Treasurer was Scott Morrison and reached its pinnacle when the Prime Minister was… Scott Morrison.

There can’t be an investigation, let alone a trial because, well, fish rot from the top.

See him here on Insiders expressing exhaustion on the topic.

Of course, it was ever thus.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

The. Game. Is. Rigged.