Australians are the canaries laying at the bottom of the birdcage with all their little green and gold feathers gathering on the floor. 

The rest of the world isn’t quite sure what to do about our swift death. There are no obvious signs of injury. No pools of blood or scratches on the bars. 

Most expected Australia’s legacy of bravery would ensure tyranny met a vicious battle, as Churchill famously said, in every street and on every beach. Reality has disappointed even the most bleak-eyed pessimist. The truth is, we didn’t fight at all. 

Our geopolitical peers have been left with a puzzling sight. Was it a batch of bad seed that got to us, or a serious gas leak that endangers the other birdcages? 

Australia died of fear. 

Humans have become drug addicts, and I don’t mean to the absurd desire to volunteer as lab rats for a new breed of vaccines. We are a species prone to addiction in both our personal lives and as an unruly mob that loves to fixate on celebrities whose shadows we crowd. 

We believe in dreams that are bigger than ourselves. This translates to a civilisation obsessed with ideas, charisma, and – most dangerously of all – emotion. 

When a tiny rocket made its way to the moon, it dragged the minds of the world beyond their terrestrial prison. The same is true of war. While only a few hold the swords, the nation swells behind the battlements. Humanity is a hive species and there are occasions when we can be woken as a swarm of souls. 

Romantic notions of irrational and ill-fated grandeur are a credit to our survival, but they can prove fatal when exploited by unscrupulous politicians and cult leaders. Today’s bureaucracies are a little of both. They masquerade as political ‘science-based’ movements while utilising the emotional torture instruments of superstition. 

The best politicians are the ones who impress with their achievements while the worst get up on their pulpits and languish about in the rhetoric of apocalypse. The likes of Matt Kean best be careful flirting with the end of the world. There are plenty of civilisations older and more deserving than ours which keep company with ghosts. 

It is too late to argue the merit of our path through the next century. The topic of our epic has been penned years ago when we were first Roofied with fear propaganda. The inconsistently named Climate Change saga began before we became dependent on the high. It was here that we learned to reward ourselves for spreading hyperbole, panic, and terror. Public displays of devotion to hysterical politics became a rung on the social ladder. 

Covid proved that pandemics have more success than intangible, existential deadlines – which is why the United Nations has taken to re-branding everything a ‘pandemic’, regardless of the topic. 

Savvy politicians have since promised a paradise of safety and position within the Church of Covid so long as you can prove your compliance with an arm-selfie and government-approved digital vaccine passport. Its popes and priests vary in their interpretation of vaguely written doctrine, allowing them to make bold promises while drafting nasty pieces of legislation. 

Obscure rules render political power limitless, while the ability to roll one ‘State of Emergency’ into the next has kept held Australia in a parallel legal system where none of her laws or rights can defend themselves. 

Humanity made its gods out of fear, and fear is quite capable of fashioning new gods out of half-wit, talent-less politicians. Ours are a variety of spineless, ball-less, heartless Ascomycota growing between the crevices of parliament. 

Australia should not be in this position. The robust contest of election usually ensures that the public have a reasonable mechanism to choose their own fate. Across the West, global politics has homogenised parties from the left and right, resulting in identical solutions to complex problems. The true meaning of ‘Globalisation’ is that of an unelected global government. 

This is no accident – it is the deliberate work of international socialists who operate with the express purpose of reshaping the world to their monetary advantage. 

While the United Nations issues a rainforest’s worth of international directives every year to manipulate the social behaviour of party politics, the World Economic Forum takes our leaders through simulations in handling fear. They have been rehearsing pandemic responses for years, ensuring that when the inevitable happened, our unimaginative politicians would behave in a pre-planned manner with no room for the public to protest. Their roadmaps might as well be a set of orders from on high. 

Our future has been decided by foreign pencil pushers. These are people who have no interest in the survival of our nation – only the profit of its demise. 

While it is obvious that we are perfectly capable of reducing empires to ash in a temper tantrum, think what a great shame it would be if it were to happen through sheer incompetence… People place too much certainty in the future and too little faith in the lessons of the past. History watches us with a sadistic curl of its lip as we recycle ourselves into another iteration of tyranny. 

How many Liberals believed Prime Minister Scott Morrison when he pinky-promised vaccinations would remain voluntary for Australians – or when he insisted that the government would only be using incentives? 

Fact-check, Mr Morrison. Placing an entire nation under house arrest and forbidding them to travel, work, or shop unless they comply with vaccination is not an ‘incentive’ – it’s a threat. Political leaders are all too keen to use ‘science’ as a brush to paint themselves in a superior fashion. They use the trust associated with the profession to validate their political regimes, regardless of how wicked their ethics prove. 

Whatever your personal position on Covid vaccines, millions of Australians are being bullied and coerced into taking them. Forgive me for being old fashioned, but that is a moral line which I will not cross. 

I am a great lover of science, but anyone who has studied its past knows that science is too often the plaything of monsters. Not everything that is possible is good, and not everything that can be done should. 

‘The Greater Good’ is almost certainly a trap baited with fear. 

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at Ko-Fi.