The caller on Raf Epstein’s ABC drivetime show had a theory on Scott Morrison’s ministergate scandal that Epstein didn’t have much time for. “I’m just wondering, you know,” John said, “if this concentration of power is the preparation for a coup.” Epstein was having none of that: “I don’t think anyone’s talking about a coup, John. I don’t think that’s realistic. But you could say a measure of how bad this was, is it makes talk of a coup sound normal!”
That was last week, and listening to it, one marvelled at the contortions of the liberal mind. Of course it can’t be a coup, we live in a liberal democracy, but the fact that it looks like the preparations for one is the scandal’s greatest sin, because it’s more characteristic of a banana dictatorship than a liberal democracy. Which is what we are, even though we don’t look like it due to ministergate. Which is what makes it so bad. Which…
John’s voice I’d recognised as that of a veteran radical, a signed-up Trot during the Dismissal of 1975. He sounded a bit startled but not surprised to get the liberal shutdown. Within a few days the rest of the public sphere had caught up to his vanguard. The prime minister had had himself commissioned, without public ceremony, to five key ministries at the start and part-way through a pandemic. He’d kept it near-totally secret. So had the governor-general, it turned out, by not recording it in the vice-regal diary. David Hurley was appointed by Morrison, restoring a patriarchal military figure to the centre of life, rejecting any women and First Nations nonsense.
So we have an ex-head of the armed forces appointed by a prime minister who is a believer in signs, myths and an interventionist God, who turns himself into a potential government-of-one, a move which the governor-general makes no record of.
This is the point where one breaks out what I have previously called the “Hollywood effect”, which is that the more likely you are to find a conspiracy plausible in a film or TV series, the less likely you are to believe it in real life, even when the actual stages of the event are identical. Some movie in which a journalist with incriminating floppy discs gets run off the road, a half-empty Scotch bottle planted in his car? “Ah, well,” you say, swigging kombucha, “the syndicate would have to do that because he was about to expose Plan 7.” Insurrections, power grabs, conspiracy, closer to home? Conspiracy theory….
So what — apart from paranoid hypervigilance and NSW Liberal Party factional warfare raised to the nth level — would explain such a grab? Well, let’s turn to the Book of Revelation.
Last week we noted that ScoMo’s repeated references to sailing the ship through the tempest of COVID came from the gospels. But what if he had seen greater portents in the news — signs of disaster that only a military Christian and a Christian prime minister could deal with? To that we look to Revelation, the final book of the Bible, author unknown — now simply designated “John of Patmos” — and possibly composed on drugs, or at least ergot, grain-mould that prompts hallucinations. Addressed to the “seven churches of Asia’, Revelation tells a terrifying story of a war in heaven and earth between good and evil leading to Judgment Day.
Quick summary: after a bit of rigmarole, God unseals seven books, which bring forth the four horses and riders of the apocalypse: a white horse for power, red horse for war, a black horse of (market-based) famine, and the pale horse of plague. Then an earthquake, then seven angels appear and celestial war consumes a third of the earth. In chapters 12 and 13:
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. (12.3)
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. (13.2)
After which it’s more apocalypse until heaven is revealed and all the fornicators are in the pit.
Sooooo pretty obviously, the pale horse is COVID, the black horse is the coming global financial crisis, the red horse is war, and the white horse is the UN, taking global control (“don’t trust … the United Nations”).
The red dragon, well, duh, China. The beast? The leopard is traditionally Persia/Iran, the bear is Russia, the lion is India. The Ukraine war and China and others’ refusal to condemn Russia, essentially backing it, is what plunges us into global war. Did Morrison see COVID as the fourth horse, the prelude to humanity’s great test? Would this be sufficient to persuade that emergency arrangements should be in place?
How would it go? Well, the dragon attacks Taiwan, the Coalition government actually wavers as ScoMo, powered by prophecy, takes us into a war going nuclear. He advises the governor-general to sack the five ministers he doubles, and the defence and foreign affairs ministers. He then advises the G-G to prorogue Parliament (if it’s sitting), and call elections for seven weeks hence. The prime minister, controlling key domestic ministries, and the G-G is commander-in-chief in this two-person executive council. Ambassadors work to them. It’s all legal and constitutional. After that, who knows?
Possibly, once again I am burying a serious point in flights of fancy, though I suspect by now most Australians would have absolutely no doubt that Morrison might well have been steering government by a lunatic book of deranged prophecy. But if you wrote this stuff like most of the press corps, you’d die of boredom. But the brevity of our constitution, the ambiguity of its directions, combined with the ambiguous powers of the governor-general, and a political right that has made its anti-democratic intent plain, all show us how a legal coup is possible. We arguably had one in 1975, and based on the same principle: the governor-general can ignore the Parliament. Whatever ScoMo’s motives, ministergate served as an awfully good rehearsal.
But really, plagues and red dragons? So 1200BC. What was the more obscure moment that might have started it all off for ScoMo? Could it have been this, early in Revelation, before all the malarky starts?
And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. (4:4)
These are surely the 24 members of the First Nations Voice to Parliament, as recommended in the Langton-Calma report, in discussion from early 2020. As it was suggested they be chosen by community, they are clearly elders, and their mooting is portentous.
And this …
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication (17:4)
… is clearly Katy Perry’s 2015 Superbowl concert. Look at the eyes of the beast, people! Scarlet! On the airwaves, in the air, signs and wonders…
