8 May 2019

Patrick Marlborough calls for a sense of perspective: “There is a gross imbalance in Australia’s ‘political’ violence. On one side, we have the eggers, the recent total sitting at two, who have delivered a scrambled message of discontent and rage at powerful political figures, figures from a political class that also wields violence, but on a much grander and ominous scale. … For almost 20 years Australia’s Prime Ministers have been active dungeon keepers of the nation’s brutal gulag archipelago. Few have reveled in the role as much as Scott Morrison, who is, after all, the current iteration’s gloating mastermind. We are by now, as citizens, privy to the dark nature of our illegal detention camps. Children as young as ten attempt suicide by immolation, mouths are sewn shut in desperate protest, and minds and bodies are broken by a wheel that we have all had a hand in turning. It is a violence beyond that of an egg (unbroken) to the head.”