You don’t need the cynicism of Diogenes to look at every turn and see quite absurd government decisions piously inflicted on us for reasons that enthralled few but indebted all.

 

In the large is the perverse idea that Australia can change the weather for the world for the price of Net Zero in Australia. A cost which is ultimately paid by you from everything from your groceries to housing costs to your power bill. The only reason this impossible position is persisted with is the billions being made by some.

 

In the small is an example of classic incredulity. Flying foxes are apparently in a precarious state of survival. The fact that roosts with their tens of thousands are in cities and towns such as Tamworth and Muswellbrook is irrelevant to the edict. If you disturb them from their upside down deification on your house from your tree in your backyard, by such actions as closing your wheelie bin lid too loudly, you will be subject to laws which ultimately are attached to fines for tens of thousands of dollars or jail time.

 

Councils are basically left powerless by this clueless law which emanated, paradoxically, from a state Coalition government for which the Minister then is now the Leader of the NSW State Opposition. So much for the Coalition’s former core value of small government.

 

These state laws work hand in glove with the Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC). They all work in the same oeuvre; a statement of calamity of the impending demise of mankind or nature as a precursor for legislation to restrict your rights and make the state more preeminent in your life.

 

There is certainly flora and fauna that should be protected, but hundreds of thousands of bats across towns in the Hunter, New England and elsewhere should not be in that group.

 

The problem is no one seems motivated to organise change, they have given up rather than been won over. Instead, there is the frustration that the government that is supposed to represent the people is representing bats.

 

The bats do have a very unique attribute that should be noted. They are the carrier of a rabies like virus, bat lyssavirus (ABLV), which is 100% fatal to humans if they contract it. The prognosis: paralysis, delirium, convulsions and death within a fortnight. Tragically, one man died from this in Northern NSW this week. Only a few have contracted the virus from the bats, but all have died from it. There is no cure.

 

In between legislation to change the temperature of the globe and possible jail time for disturbing bats is a raft of other proclamations that are similarly ludicrous but accepted only because so many people believe government is both beyond their reach and beyond their comprehension.

 

Political party’s membership has plummeted along with the public engagement in politics. The placating of pressure groups and the ingrained view of an ABC Radio National senior government bureaucracy with its 2% audience, a fair swag using faux virtue to underwrite their lifestyle, has resulted in a disengagement of the wider body of Australia by reason of cynicism.

 

So when you stay in a motel in Muswellbrook with the stink of thousands of bats for which some carry a rabies-like virus which will kill you, and you realise that if you hunt them away you are committing a crime, then think, this is the same government that is responsible for how the nation manages the most precarious times since World War 2. Unfortunately, many of the laws are supported by us in the Coalition, in fact some of them were brought in by the Coalition.

 

And here is an epiphany about our global effect on other countries by Australia having a Net Zero policy. No one else cares away from us sending them cash. It is as irrelevant as our irrelevance lately on devastating display at the G7 meeting, which we are not part of, and the NATO meeting, which we are also not part of. It is as irrelevant as Australia being unable to get a Prime Ministerial meeting with the President of the United States; as irrelevant as China not caring what we think as they do live fire exercises in the sea adjacent to Sydney.

 

Australia will need a lantern to find someone in government willing to see what we are doing to ourselves and bring back logic, reinstalling the order that the state is a servant of the people and not the other way around.