Local residents seeking CCP FIfth Columnists under orders from John Howard.

Dear reader. For three weeks we’ve been experimenting with a new technology of the internet age. We’ve opened up a foreign language bookshop. You might think that opening up a bookshop is a bit of an anachronism, but we think that bookshops are about to have a renaissance. 

WE feel this so strongly because we did a little test the other day. We spent a whole day reading all the web news sites until we suffered an attack of “WUO”. WUO is not a Chinese Government telecommunications giant, it is the simple acronym for “Web Users Overload”. A simple diagnosis for users of the web who become disconnected from reality. It’s a common affliction for those who have everythng at their fingertips and yet know nothing. It’s the guiding principle of governance the world over, and because of its spreading creep, we thought the bookshop offered a stable rational platfom from which to re- assert the value of the written word. 

WE looked all around Melbourne for a suitable location. We employed social anthropologists, business development research assistants and demographers to establish the most likely place for a bookshop to succeed. We wanted to make our bookshop an “open forum” for political and social discourse. Though we were tempted to stock the complete Mills and Boon, we started purchasing deep thinking tracts on society and change. We felt an urgent need to give the public at large a vehicle for which to question the platitudes of politicians, and re- evaluate all the stuff that they digest unquestioningly from Rupert, Lord of Murdoch on a daily basis. 

Eventially we settled on Doncaster.

In a sub-literate society you’ve gotta believe in something. Melb Uni declined our invitation to come to our bookshop launch.

Doncaster you say? Where the newly rich occupy anodyne antiseptic apartments all in shimmering whiteness?.. You see we liked the “feng shui”, as our Taoist philosopher Le Tzen told us, “it’s good for the soul”.  And besides, he said, whisking his pigtail from over hs shoulders, “an elevated place is best to give rise to elevated thought”. 

Sought advice from Hong Kong booksellers, but they’d disappeared.

That week we took on a new lease, and “New Directions” bookshop was opened. The first week we did a feature on Germany, and whilst Nadia the lady from the bakery across the mall plied us with apfel strudel and kirchen, we sold books on the new Germany and it’s struggle with reintegration of the one million asylum seekers, the EU and the problems with Brexit. WE sold quite a few books and the tourist guide of Rhine cruises proved very popular. The next week we did a theme on Spain and sold quite a few Borges, Marques, and framed Goyas. The public began to queue outside the shop before opening, and we believed we’d struck upon a winning formula. We’d proved the public still had an apetite for reading. Then, last week we explored the theme of China and Xi Jinping.  No one came. We couldn’t sell anything. Even the spring rolls we prepared for the launch of the last testament of a Hong Kong bookseller before his organs were harvested for political re- education couldn’t do it. We were stuffed. We were dumbfounded. We were pole-axed. 

John Howard (GPME*). Keeping us “SAFE”.. from evil fifth columnists from ccp, terrorists, lgbti stirrers, republicanism, journalists, jay walkers, outstation aboriginal communities, etc, etc

We had no answer till last week. It was on the news. John Howard (arguably our greatest P.M ever) summed it up. The fifth column of the Chinese comunist party. Their expatriate citizens are acting as Chinese nationals to take out society over. Under orders from Beijing. Start with fish and chip shops, real estate, then work outwards into restaurants universities and then… you guessed it bookshops. Learn Mandarin or Perish. And he should know, the  man who still protects all Australians to make us SAFE. Thankyou John for warning us. We’re moving, back to North Fitzroy. Where there’s an apetite for people like us. And it’s SAFE from foreign interference. Doncaster, and the bamboo curtain stretches now right across the middle ring suburbs. 

We stand united to stem the flood, 

But the river is red. 

And it’s rising from the east. 

• GPME, (Greatest Prime Minister EVER!!)