Dear reader,

incredibly, if you’ve been following this saga, our heroes, led by Australia’s bravest and most decorated soldier ever, ‘Benny Boy’ Roberts Smith have been playing it safe. Hoping that in their heart of hearts the dingy, dark, dusty stairwell that seems to be going upwards will deliver them ‘from evil’ as is biblically said. 

And yet, after the fire and brimstone of Dutto and Sophie, arguably both deep and committed Christians committed to a fairer and more equitable Australia, they are  perilously poised as they’ve decided to a man, after all the experience they’ve had over the past six months with men and women of religion, they’d rather hang around with individual of no interest in religion at all. 

It’s a vexed issue, but with the stakes so high they’ve found the professed religiosity one way or another of those in power, from Angus, the Cayman Island trust fund owning Energy Minster, to Tudgey and his shagging ex secretary, to Barnaby and his ‘family values’, and even SCOMO and his ignorance of who shagged Mrs Culthorpe our tea lady whilst on parliamentary secondment a little ‘off putting’. Or as HRH Prince Andrew is fond of saying ; ‘un-becoming’!

All the religious conviction on hand in our nations highest office, the high roller lounge at Crown Casino, would be as useless as famously said as ‘tits on a bull’. Not that having tits on a bull is gratuitous insult to those of the bovine species that would prefer gender re-assignment. It’s just that for the vast majority of herbivores, graminacae eaters and even rodents who are fond of a bit of vegetation to supplement their diet, gender specificity as to religious conviction seemed hardly relevant when people are in peril. Either as victims of a villainous plot crafted by two of the most nefarious individuals in Australian politics. Or just as ordinary people in having their wages cut and their living standards lowered. Made worse by the knowledge  that though they sink to the bottom of the heap, their so called leaders are left sinecured and unassailable.

Now this is sounding like a bit of sermonising, which we are loathe to indulge in,  as it smacks of religiosity.  Ours is to record events as they happen and not to sermonise. To record that precise moment when as it has famously been said;  ‘the people have spoken’. 

Not the electorate, and the ‘Teal-nado’ that tore through hitherto safe Liberal seats. 

Not the change which has swept through leafy and well to do suburbs and displaced politicians less odious than the fire and brim-stoners with left leaning reformist…… WOMEN!

Not the shake- up on conservative politics that leaves us with the hard right rump of uber conservatives who may anticipate change and borrow from the Trump-ish republican party Copy book. 

Not those people who would divide and conquer society with Replacement theory and any other odious divisive strategy to further alienate the hard right looneys from the common or garden conspiracy looneys, 

That is all a given. 

Not that the custodians of these formerly safe seats were anything other than illiberal.  But the fact that the real leaders in this saga, Ces, Quent, and Terry, and their noble warrior hero the much maligned and misunderstood ‘Benny Boy’ Roberts Smith may yet escape from the perils of Dutto and Sophie. And as we all know post election, or just post a bad day at the office, there is always hope. Hope springs forth from the dust of disaster, and strangely they had up to this point managed to escape a fiery destiny wedged as mere prawns, (a deliberate malapropism) to Dutto, the most powerful copper in the land and Sophie, earnest and committed member of the Fair Work Commission. Who incidentally, let it not be forgot has a stellar public record of looking after retired law professors in back paddock sheds generously donated for their well being. Because she is and will always be compassionate and caring, And as has also been famously said the ‘Teal- nado’ would never have existed if it weren’t for Sophie’s principled stand against her nemesis; OTHER WOMEN !

We return to our saga, our heroes going upwards to who knows where?

‘I dunno Ces’, Quent whispered to his companion, ‘these steps have been going up for ages, surely we must be getting near the’……… Quent stopped mid sentence as the incandescent glow of Benny-Boy’s helmet mounted flashlight illuminated the grey, oblong of a steel door. 

Above the steel door in faded lettering they could see the words ‘Surface Exit’. All of them gathered behind the formidable bulk of Benny-Boy and breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. ‘This is it, aint it’? Noone dared to answer, too terrified to think that it may be another false lead, another source of disappointment, another collapse of expectations. 

Like when, ( just to use an implausible example) a clean sweep is made of inner urban seats to proclaim teal independents. 

They hope,  (just to use an implausible example) that this time, for the first time in decades there may be a sensible policy debate and real legislation destined to reform and adjust the levels of equity and fairness in a society riven by latter day Thatcherism. We acknowledge that this is an implausible hypothetical construct still born by the vested interests of big business, superannuation funds and structural generational inequality, but we just put it up as a hypothetical to illustrate a trenchant point. 

Which is….  they’d learnt from bitter experience to hold their breath and just hope. 

Hope against hope that this time, after years spent waiting, that door could be opened and from within its dusty portal the blinding light of an entirely new and profound destiny would greet them.  

But will it? 

Find out in the next tangentially implausible episode; 

’the door is more of a door than a mere portal. ‘Is it then a Christian Portal’? 

And what of the blind trust fund? 

‘How can trust be blind? Are these blinds Venetian? In space as in the far-canal no one can hear you.  And if they do…… ‘is this our deaf in Venice moment’?