In Response to the Recent Decisions Made by the Labour Government

What is victory and what defeat

For Australians now

Asked to nominate their leader?

What is it for the candidates

Who eddy on the pinwheels

Of popularity contests –

Whose whirlpooling rhetoric

Seeks the former,

Whirpooling moral codes

The latter, but for every waking minute?

With the twin announcements

Of an emissions trading scheme

Set to save a handful of dollars yearly

For working men and women, while cursing them

To watch their grandchildren grow

In a world with ample dirty power enough

To be outed by fickler, darker skies –

In a world with coral reefs acidified white

In a world with no choice but to turn

In torrid, desperate, befuddled thrashes

Reminiscent of the death throes

Of a fawn with an arrow through its side

And the watershed agreement with PNG

Many of us searched within for the traces

Of hope once held for a better polity

And found instead a void that surely now

Only protest, protest on a scale

Of bitterness and numbers never seen

Protest not carried out, chiefly, online

But on the front line, on the picket line

Can attempt to refill –

The vote, as we well know, is not the answer.

But who will mobilise us?

What does it take to turn children

Of twenty-first century apathy

And terminal myopia

Into men and women still capable

Of raising their voices in a crowd

Without embarrassment?

No doubt that Kevin Rudd had analysed

Those points of political weakness in his armour –

Education, climate change, ‘illegals’ –

Long before reclaiming leadership

So that he might redress them

With death-defying speed and seize

Office for another infernal term.

Who now will match his enterprise

Of deed proceeding intentions

Held clandestine from us until too late

And bellow en masse

That he has defied nothing

But the pride of self he might once have had

Now buried with those outcast souls

Beneath the moribund seas?

Something hard to name is still inert.

A property that doesn’t understand

The meaning of ‘too busy’

The meaning of ‘too hopeless’

The meaning of ‘too hard’ –

A property only catalysed

In the presence of flesh and blood

Of collectivity’s strange and powerful frequencies.

Or are we just another sad refrain

Of the old proverb:

A nation gets the leader it deserves?

Ask yourselves, Australians,

What is victory and what defeat

To me, then act with a clear conscience

And a full heart as we roar our discontent.