THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND – PART 3
Everything a lesser ranking employee does they can be scrutinised for, even the tiniest infraction, a constant, brutal act of terror designed to break their spirit and threaten their job unless they reveal themselves to be just as vindictive, and their loyalties as a sycophant unquestionable. In an environment where victims are blamed for what is inflicted on them, discouraged from reporting offences, and complaints are ignored, this results in tragedy, too often fatal. The predators are in charge of ‘helping’ the victims.
Those who attempt to alert a more senior and external authority of problems including systemic failure, the entrenched culture of corruption, and worse, quickly discover that laws prohibiting workplace harassment and protecting whistle-blowers are, in reality, a cruel fiction. They, like most anything a politician says, are merely another illusion of positive change and justice. More often than not, whistle-blowers, witnesses and victims are bullied into silence and then dismissed or fired, defamed for their efforts and, in some cases, even prosecuted for ‘misconduct’ or some other bogus crime as punishment for doing what was right.
Victims are too often instructed to report their “complaints” to the very people who are at fault and those individuals will then investigate themselves and make a recommendation for further action, despite the complaint they made indicating the ‘investigator’ is the problem. As if an offender will even bother to record a complaint against themselves let alone investigate it or recommend further action. There is no way to work around this conflict of interest.
Political representatives insulate themselves from reality, and the people they claim to represent, with their wealth, position, ignorance, arrogance, and a cadre of minions programmed to respond with insincere letters filled with placating rhetoric and misdirection to deflect, and if needs be, silence complainants. Those who dare challenge this vile behaviour quickly join the ever growing, uncountable ranks of the victims, forced to remain silent, financially and psychological damaged by the process, often catastrophically and beyond any means to recover.
The upper ranks of the police and public service are protected by politicians and the so-called Crime and Misconduct agencies they control. Those who seek to reveal the canker within are subjected to the very same entrenched culture of corruption they seek to expose in the hope of affecting positive change, isolated and silenced, the crimes, predators, systemic failure and injustice concealed and enabled.
It is only when the media, in their efforts and ambitions to gain fame and profit from whatever ‘story’ they choose to tell, that the full extent of this systemic failure and corruption is revealed. Child abuse in Churches. Child abuse in Youth Detention Centres. Abuse in nursing homes and mental health facilities. Fraud in the Health Department. Misappropriation and entitlement rorts by politicians. Failures and Workplace Bullying in Health, Education, Child Safety Services, the Police and Military.
The recent revelations concerning the scamtacular activities and lifestyle of Adam Cranston, son of Michael Cranston, the Deputy ATO Commissioner may appear shocking to members of the public who live in the blissful ignorance of indifference, but to tens of thousands of Australians, the $165 million dollar fraud is just further evidence of the incompetence or corruption (pick one) of the ATO. Those tens of thousands are minimum wage workers whose employers refused to pay their Superannuation, and of the ATO who stuffed them around for years claiming they were investigating, and then bullied the victims into silence when they discovered there had been no investigation at all.
How is that possible? How was the ATO able to get away with this massive systemic failure? How was it able to isolate and silence tens of thousands of victims? How is it still able to do this without any recompense to the victims, or penalty to those responsible? How is it possible Cranston could maintain such a ranking position, with the massive pay that comes with it, and fail to notice his son’s lavish, opulent, obscene life of wealth and privilege was funded by such fraud? The fact that he was charged with abusing his position as a public official suggests he did know, and actively attempted to conceal the crime.
And then there’s Clive Palmer, currently playing the persecuted, impoverished martyr in the inquest into the collapse of Queensland Nickel in early 2016, which left almost 800 refinery workers out of jobs, pay and entitlements, and creditors owed about $300m. Palmer, who occasionally makes valid points during his unhinged ranting tirades, once criticised Campbell Newman for sacking almost twenty-thousand public servants with the comment “you have to spend money to make money”.
He was right. A voice of reason in an unreasonable environment. But what Palmer said, and what he meant, are two different things. In his world, spending money to make money is actually the illusion of spending money to convince others to invest where they lose and he emerges unscathed with their money. Palmer’s actions during the glacial collapse of Queensland Nickel demonstrate that rather eloquently, giving away millions, tens of millions, to friends, family and himself, syphoning money away and leaving others to pick-up the $300m black hole of debt he had created.
Palmer has consistently attempted to portray himself as one of the little people, endearing himself to them by championing causes where the masses suffer injustice. But he continues to undermine his own efforts as his ego and self-absorbed idiocy emerge from the murk, boasting of his wealth even as he claims to live a frugal life of abstinence and suffering. He also claimed the way he was being treated by the government was worse than the way the Nazis were treated during the Nuremburg trails, as if the Nazis were somehow the victims and crimes they had committed were all lies.
Aside from the offensive nature of his idiotic remarks, Palmer seems to have forgotten the first rule in the predators and conmen playbook: a lie must be based in fact, believable, and resonate (in a positive way to ensure manipulation is successful) with the target. His claims about most anything are incredible, in every sense of the word, and the continued absence of his bloated, idiot nephew – who has failed to return to face questions about missing millions, as ordered – are starting to raise a host of other questions.
Like why everybody is pointing the finger at Palmer, as well-deserving as that greedy git is for blame, when he was able to get away with what he did by a complete failure of government to implement regulation to prevent the tragedy of that god-awful mess. Why tens of thousands of dollars are wasted on pointless legal actions while the wage-workers are shafted and risk-reward investors get bailed out by creditors. Why the wealth of Palmer has not been seized as proceeds of crime. And why nobody seems to have actually heard from Palmer’s over-privileged, rotund nephew (only his lawyer) but there seems to be no suspicion he is long dead and buried in a sand-trap on Palmer’s golf course, or under some concrete slab where Palmer has property, along with whatever incriminating evidence he may have provided.
But these astonishing crimes and systemic failures are not the only ones. And none of these monumental blunders are isolated incidents, no matter how many times politicians try to sell us on that crap. This is an ongoing, fundamental failure. It has been going on for decades, and knows no State or international borders. Patrick Stewart himself spoke of the problem, the flawed attitudes of authorities and the community which enables this kind of problem, in particular the entrenched culture of corruption that conceals and enables domestic violence and child abuse, referring to incidents that occurred decades ago but which have not changed with the passage of time. The victim blaming when those authorities knew nothing.
These horrid attitudes and behaviours continue because nothing tangible, nothing real is being done to end the cycle. These problems continue unabated because those tasked with cleaning up the shit mess are the ones ultimately making and causing the shit mess. They set the example. They refuse to do what is right, what is necessary to expose and eradicate it. They are the ones isolating and silencing victims through a rotten legal system and intimidation because there is no disincentive to deter their vile behaviour.
Even when a politician comes out and uses the advantage of Parliamentary Privilege to make ‘allegations’ against those who brutalised them, negating unjust laws that force every other victim to suffer in silence, never speak of what they endure every day, it rings hollow. As does the empathy and support they are then shown by other political figures. It looks like a cynical grab for votes, a way to curry favour with desperate victims hoping for change. But when it comes to real action, when real victims ask for help… nothing. The response is the same reprehensible treatment as dished out by rotten police and public servants.
Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? Absent because the resentment of self-centred scumbags is directed at blaming victims who are ‘stealing’ their taxes for making stupid decisions like being placed into the custody of an abusive adult, or falling for the deceptions of a predator who nobody warned them about, or getting in the way of arseholes who should never have been given a position of authority and take pleasure in inflicting even greater misery on victims simply because they can.
You see them on social media sites and forums, accusing people like me of “talking shit” and being “liars” because we reveal uncomfortable facts they don’t want to hear. Some of their profiles or comments indicate that they are public servants themselves, and their idiotic comments prove my point. My response to those kind of fools is very simple: here is the evidence. Get a big screen tele, the size of your wall, so you can get my blog to come up in big print for your tiny little brain to read the writing (on the wall) and then shove it up your arse. Good people don’t care what you want to believe. We don’t care what you think. You being silent or, better yet, vanishing from the world tomorrow would be a big step toward fixing the problems.
In the end, there is very little difference between the predator who brutalises a woman or child, or even a man, and the predator lurking in the ranks of the community, police or public service that blames and bullies those seeking help, isolating and silencing the victim in order to conceal and enable those crimes, predators, systemic failure, and injustice. Those who are silent may be said to condone, but those who force others to remain silent are complicit.
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