Writing in the midst of the culture wars is a bit like pre-booking a spot in the ‘woke’ Gulag – we do it to get in early and reserve a decent looking shovel.

When the world slides toward tyranny, you might as well start digging next to the contrarians, agent provocateurs, whistle-blowers, comedians, and dissidents. There is no greater joy than waiting for mainstream media to arrive dead last, scratching around at what’s left of the truth with biodegradable sporks and sloppy headlines.

Don’t worry. However grim the Covid dystopia gets, at least we know that we’re ‘safe’ for the Christmas holidays.

The trouble with ‘safety’ is that it tends to suck the joy out of life. I’ve done things that would attract the disapproval of our esteemed chief health officers – up to and including sitting with a giant T-Rex skull between my thighs on an Argentinian dig site in the middle of the desert with a rapidly approaching oil pipeline.

What is the risk assessment for accidentally licking bits of Yellowcake Uranium that get confused with dinosaur bone? Do I have to inform the government every time I bed down in the sand with scorpions?

I can safely say that whatever I drank on a Croatian gulet has permanently transformed my body into a hostile environment. Covid would take one look at me, mutate and cough itself back out to safety. That’s the thing about humans – we eat the wrong things, travel to dangerous places, tempt fate, and generally live.

Politicians are keen on ‘safety’ because they exist on a rotisserie, skewered at both ends by the press while the public roast them from below. We only pay attention to politicians because they smell good served up with a side of chips, squished into the twenty-four hour news cycle somewhere between MAFS and football.

The bottom of the food chain prioritises safety, which might help explain why our premiers have constructed a new world order complete with digital fortresses made by the same people who brought you the NBN.

This ‘safety’ strategy didn’t work for New South Wales – which ended its political year with a massacre.

Everything was going so well for Berejiklian and her inconsistent sidekick Barilaro until Chant tied to re-adjust her third face mask and tripped over a power cord – plunging the state into darkness. The Minister for Energy and the Environment was too busy picking bits of endangered sea-eagle out of his wind turbines to fix the lights, so Coalition MPs were left to blindly hack-out their unresolved tension with iPhones and Tweets.

Staffers dragged bodies out of the fray for days until Dominic Perrottet emerged victorious, stepping through the grisly remains of failed peers on his way to anointment at the factional Conclave.

It is unclear whether Perrottet survived the bloodbath because he’s handy with a sword, ducked at the right moment, or if he’s being braised as a sacrificial lamb for a different festive event. If Perrottet finds himself with the sins of Covid sticking out of his rump like twigs of rosemary, Kean could turn the temperature up and nick the leadership without touching a carving knife.

In Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews upset China, who complained that his viral ad campaign to promote Melbourne made the Communist regime look ‘weak’ and ‘open’. Things could always be worse. The top search result for Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton is a picture of a slug surrounded by ads for insect killer. Everyone knows that slugs are the snails that didn’t quite make it and are so unappetising that even the French won’t eat them. Speaking of which, Morrison coughed up Christopher Pyne all over Macron like a fossilised fur ball.

The French aren’t happy about their wrecked submarine deal but honestly, it’s not practical to stay mad at the only three countries that rescued them from extinction – twice. If left to his own devices, Macron would get his white flags made in a Chinese factory.

Meanwhile, at the height of Cancel Culture, Canada has re-elected the serial black-face addict Justin Trudeau whose personality could best be described as a ‘cloud-based’ beta-version riddled with errors and spyware. He wanders around the campaign trail like a slightly shit Tim-Tam genie with a packet of self-replenishing bad ideas. Trudeau stood idle in front of the press for so long that people inter-cut the 90s internet dial-up tone into the gap, proving that the absence of conservative parties across the Western world has created a vacuum of power so strong it has started sucking in single-celled organisms.

When US President Joe Biden gifted the world’s most dangerous terrorists an army, New Zealand rushed to congratulate the progressive apocalyptic cult on their achievements. To be fair to Jacinda Ardern, it’s easy to get the Taliban confused with the Climate-Change-Crisis-Extinction-Rebellion-Justice movement. They both obsess about the LGBT community, spend time re-writing the school curriculum, pledge to destroy the West, shill for China’s sacred renewables industry, and pray for the end times.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change part one of the Sixth Assessment Report, the climate catastrophe is ‘widespread, rapid, and intensifying’ – which sounds like something a dodgy weatherman says fudging his way through a ten-day forecast.

If that was 2021 at a glance, what are we supposed to make of 2022? Do we wrap ourselves in plastic, head down to the Harbour Bridge and set off a few tonnes of fireworks – or are we too scared of loud noises and bright lights?

“If you’re starting at the point of absurdity, where are you supposed to go from there?” asked the bemused Bill Leak, staring down the comparative sanity of 2017.

Cartoonists express the lunacy of our world with such clarity that it makes them dangerous to those trying to bury the truth. Writers have shovels, but the likes of Bill Leak attack the idiocy of Australia’s political class with an excavator.

If we allow bureaucracy to limit humanity under the pretence of ‘safety’, their boundaries will become a box. Remember, the government are a bit like oiled-up Greeks bearing gifts – it’s best for everyone if you say ‘no’ and shut the gate.

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