Patriot Realm

I sit here, amazed, gobsmacked and in shock that the man who won the unwinnable election has now potentially lost his Prime Ministership through bad marketing, bad management and bad attitude.

It was all his to keep. All his to hold on to – yet he has thrown it away with one disastrous Public Relations nightmare after another.

Those words are just the  edge of what people who have been destroyed by these terrible bush fires  are feeling.

They are at the end of their tether, they have suffered mentally   the fear of what could happened and then it did.  They have suffered the loss of their homes and  burnt out properties, their treasured belongings , that can't be replaced.  

 Their children have seen and experienced things that most only read    about in a book.  Lost favourite teddy bears  , their beloved cat and dog.   Not to mention the animals on the farms that have been burnt and then had to be put out of their painful misery.  It goes beyond even imagining let alone experiencing it.  

Fire is and always will be part of life in Australia. What we do to minimise its impact is critical and surely should be managed as a single policy rather than State by State? 

Thanks Neville for your insightful opinion piece. I look forward to hearing what others think of this.

Here we are with another year gone and the year 2020 ahead of us.     When you think about it , the time is made up of memories,   Birthdays, Christmases ,Weddings, even memories of the tough times.

I am very concerned for the children who will be in need of responsible parenting after these fires. How the parents respond is pivotal to their ability to move on. Will the parents politicise this or will they let the kids play the glad game? - patriotrealm

That my friends, is the situation in a nutshell.

I am not suggesting for one moment that being a Political Activist is wrong. Quite the contrary. If you have a strong feeling on either side of the political Great Divide, it is your right to express your view and I may not agree with you but, as Voltaire said, I defend your right to have it.

I have always been an environmentalist. I have enjoyed the great bounty that this planet has offered us: from fjords to forests; surf to sandy coves; lakes to lagoons; towering trees to tiny tadpoles; alpine air to the mossy smell of a cascading waterfall.

My heart has always been a slave to our wildlife, domestic critters and the sheer wonder of the wide open spaces – whether they be millions of acres of the Outback or the glory of the night sky when seen from a dark and isolated spot somewhere, anywhere, on this planet we call Earth.

How will the parents of these poor children feel when one day their boy/girl says to them: How could you? You were supposed to protect me and you did this to me?

Indeed, how will we as a society feel? How are the children, whose parents are giving them hormones to change their little bodies from male to female, how, just how, are those kids going to feel in decades to come when some of them realise that this had all been a terrible mistake?