Doing Time
Everyone has heard of Ben Roberts-Smith. Until this week, just about nobody had ever heard of Sean Black. Sean Who?
The Nationals and other Coalition also-rans have been attacking Pauline Hanson for employing a convicted rapist. This is their best idea. This is how they respond to the over-the-cliff collapse of their voter base. How they react to the fact that we do not love them anymore.
Employing a convicted felon? Perhaps we should ask the Labor Minister Tanya Plibersek for a response. She is married to a convicted drug dealer. Who is currently the head of the NSW Treasury. He has previously headed Premier and Cabinet, and Education, and Communities and Justice. You read the last one correctly.
His name is Michael Coutts-Trotter. He got a second chance in life, courtesy of the late Michael Egan, a key Labor figure and a senior member of Bob Carr’s Government. AI search summarises things:
In 1986, he received a nine-year prison sentence as a drug dealer selling heroin to addicts. He served two years and nine months in jail before parole in 1988. He graduated from the University of Technology Sydney with a degree in communications in 1995.
Nine years. Nearly twice Sean Black’s sentence, as it happens. Who knows how many drug addicts’ lives were ruined, perhaps even terminated, as a result of M C-T’s 1980s commercial activities?
Like Sean Black, Mr Plibersek did his time. Society (well, the establishment) has more than forgiven the latter.
https://lsj.com.au/multimedia/justchat-michael-coutts-trotter/
Coutts-Trotter says he wants others to be given second chances. Like Sean Black, perhaps?
Or perhaps we should ask Chloe Bryce for a response to the Hanson issue. Her husband, Bill Shorten, has been accused of raping a sixteen-year-old girl.
https://www.advanceaustralia.org.au/porter_faces_trial_by_media
Credibly accused (see under “we believe you”). Never convicted. Now the Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra. Salary north of one million a year. Generous super. No such luck for Christian Porter, another accused of messing with a sixteen-year-old.
Black is nothing but a pawn in a bigger game. Just like Ben Roberts-Smith. More on BRS below. It is a game of spin the political bottle in relation to doing time. Of who gets targeted by the powers-that-be, and how the latter go about their games.
Justice is a funny thing. Justice is a political thing.
In the heat of a by-election campaign (Farrer) with a lot riding on it, it might be argued that all is fair in love and war. With apologies to Ben Roberts-Smith.
But it tells you a lot about legacy politics. And about the current state of the Nats. Their new leader is on a mission to destroy Pauline Hanson and, so he believes, One Nation. The strategy reveals the idiocy and the contempt for his base. A base declining and abandoning him. The Liberal James Patterson has joined the desperate fight.
The war on One Nation has many combatants. John Howard. The Fairfax press (aka Channel Nine). The Nationals. The Australian newspaper (aka establishment “conservatism”) and Rupert Murdoch.
They each have their own agendas. What have they all in common? They fear populism. They hate populism. They misname populism. They fear the common man. They think that populism is something other than the views and aspirations of ordinary Australians. Whom they detest and fear.
They are the UniParty, clinging to shared power through a no-longer-fit-for-purpose electoral system that disenfranchises around a third of voters. Voters who still pay their taxes. When they have to.
Back to the hit and miss “justice” system, which the establishment (in all its forms) uses for its various political ends. Ideology as justice. Going after One Nation is the current agenda item. And it is as sickening as all of the other recent establishment justice “projects”.
There has been a narrative this week. Because of a Newspoll. That Hanson and One Nation have tanked. AND tanked because of the Black affair. The excitement across the Uniparty and its fellow travellers has been palpable. Except that three days after the Newspoll, another poll (Sky News) has One Nation Nation level with Labor. Yes, level. And way, way ahead of the Patterson-Canavan generation of Coalition F-team politicians.
Life is full of ironic coincidences.
This month’s version is about justice in modern Australia. The continuing campaign in the media against BRS – seen in the highlighting, misnaming and spicing up of unexceptional developments such as BRS’s longstanding, un-hidden plans to move overseas, the publication of aspects of prosecution trial plans, such as prospective witnesses – is all part of a narrative-building play to ensure that there is no fair trial for the man. No doubt, these drip-fed snippets will continue to drop, all the way to the trial, months and probably years off.
All this makes them look both stupid and desperate. Almost an own-goal, you might say, such is the gaucheness of the AFP and the rest of the Get-BRS cabal. But they DO mean to get him convicted, and, failing that, to ensure that his reputation is forever besmirched.
The apparently selective treatment of alleged and real wrongdoers is no accident, as it happens, and as the old left used to say. Whether it’s Porter versus Shorten, or Sean Black versus Coutts-Trotter, or BRS versus the four soldiers who have apparently confessed to murder but have been granted, not just immunity, but also anonymity, or front-line soldiers versus top brass and the politicians who start or join wars. Or Lehrmann, or Pell, or Craig McLachlan.
The players, their motives and their methods are the same. Who are the players?
Politicians on the lookout for causes or ideologues with eye-balls over their targets, like the mean-girl friends of the murky Brittany Higgins case. Politically motivated prosecutors who advise media ahead of time when public arrests are to be made. See also under Alan Jones. Like the princess of the vexatious rape case, Sally Dowling, the New South Wales DPP. Woke judges. Privileged journalists who benefit from the leaks. The modern corporate copper. See under VicPol. Or Krissy-with-a-K from AFP.
And the strategies and tactics are the same.
Talk up alleged crimes and misdemeanours until they become moral panics. Identify the bad guys. (They are always male). Try the identified perps in the court of public opinion. Leak like sieves. Create narratives that will embed among the low information punters in the front bar. Use social media to spread the word. Have photographers on hand to capture the money shots. Enlist politicians who have their own motives for selective condemnation. (Sean Black was a Godsend for the likes of low rent Liberal politicians like Patterson). Lower the cone of silence over those not to be condemned. The lucky ones excluded from the claws of politicised justice. Those not considered an enemy of the elites. Like the two Bills, Shorten and Clinton. In these cases, what happens on tour stays on tour.
Another name emerged this week, a name unfamiliar to most people. This man is, in fact, Australia’s most decorated living soldier. Not BRS, as it happens, but Keith Payne, a Vietnam hero.
Keith Payne, now aged 92, saved the lives of 40 wounded soldiers in the battle of Ben Het during the Vietnam War.
His bravery in 1969, while under enemy attack and being injured himself, was recognised the following year when Queen Elizabeth II presented him with the Victoria Cross.
Mr Payne is Australia’s last living Vietnam War recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious military decoration for “valour in the presence of the enemy”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-24/keith-payne-calls-for-better-veterans-care/106473374
Keith is old school on prosecuting vets for alleged war crimes. What happens in war stays on the battlefield.
The modern-day soldier and, increasingly, the non-combatant, is expected to fight in hybrid warfare:
Hybrid warfare is a strategy blending conventional military force with unconventional methods—including cyberattacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and proxy operations—to destabilize an adversary below the threshold of open armed conflict. Often called “grey zone“ warfare, it aims to exploit vulnerabilities in democratic societies and blur the lines between peace and war.
See also:
Then there is fifth generation warfare or 5GW. See, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare
Talk about murky. It is the CIA normalised and accepted by today’s politicians. The CIA (MK Ultra) used to mess with people’s heads, through LSD, for example. It was Manchurian candidate type stuff. Now, there is no weapon off limits. These are the routinised tools of the modern warfare state.
And, now, to boot, you can use remote-controlled weapons that kill the innocent as well as the “guilty”, that is, the enemy as defined. The drones do the heavy lifting. President Truman’s Enola Gay now has its theatre-level equivalents. THEY never get indicted for war crimes, do they?
War crime has a whole new meaning. No one, as yet, of the modern, woke era of highly selective, politicised war-criminal hunting, has come up with ways of detecting, pursuing and prosecuting those now engaged in hybrid warfare or 5GW. It all makes a bit of a mockery of the pursuit of Afghan vets themselves engaged in murky combat.
Meantime, those with the power in modern democracies, where politicians make up their own rules and never deign to consult us about matters of import, where they offload responsibility as a matter of course to the non-elected, where they make stuff up and get the media to spread their lies, where they force people to take lethal jabs for political reasons, where they torture the notion of “justice” to within an inch of its life, and where they routinely defer to those with even greater power across the globe, continue to get away with, well, literally murder.
They, too, are engaged in hybrid warfare. Hybrid lawfare. Their own war waged against the enemies of the state. As they define them. It is curated justice. In 2017, it was George Pell. In 2020, it was against anti-vaxxer protesters in the streets of our cities. That was Covid justice, and there were multiple state Covid crimes. Still unpunished. Politicians lied. People died. In 2026 it is BRS. Who will it be in 2030? The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of men. Well, mostly, it is the rule of women, as it happens.
The foot soldiers are all on-message.
Let us all hope that, one day, some of the guilty up-top will get to do time. And that the innocent pawns in their perennial games will not.
But the war on political enemies in which the justice system is used as a plaything, contorted and twisted out of its original shape is itself part of something far bigger, goes on, unabated. One famous British writer reported on truth and the Spanish Civil War (in which he had just fought):
In 1942, after fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937), a disillusioned writer returned to London to write about his experience. It wasn’t just that the fascists in Spain had won and his side—a small, anti-Stalinist Marxist group—had lost. What frightened him was the ease with which truth itself had been erased and replaced by propaganda.
“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories ... and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
The writer was George Orwell, and the quote appears in his book “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.”
Hayek, Orwell, and ‘The End of Truth’ | The Epoch Times
But Orwell also wrote about bigger themes, a little later. As we all know. Especially the war on truth itself. As did F A Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom.
Econ Journal Watch 22(2), September 2025
Two of the intellectual giants of the century of war were calling out soft and hard power used by the state and central planners to subjugate individuals. The use of raw power has replaced the rule of law. In the 1930s, the (Nazi) State infamously used propaganda. The elites all still use propaganda, of course. Including, perhaps especially, the so-called democracies. It was neocon propaganda that got us into the BRS war in the first place. Sugar-coated, but still neocon propaganda. One example.
But they now have the tools to make their use of power ruthlessly efficient, through technology, the panopticon of the e-Karens, the international technocracy, the fascist corporatism of stakeholder capitalism (globo-cap), the cosying up to China, the globalism of Europe and its allies, the replacement of nativist electorates by more congenial, multi-culti populations, the deep administrative state run by the managerial class, the woke military elites and the HR-led recovery.
Now they get Channel Nine to help do their dark state stuff. And go after their designated scapegoats.
Covid proved that nothing is off limits. Nothing is impossible to those who think that justice is merely a tool of war. A war by the state on its own people. We are the ones doing time.
Lest we forget the methods of the modern state. Lest we forget.
Paul Collits
24 April 2026
Good job Paul
All very true alas. Was reading just this week an old essay by the great, late Malcolm Muggeridge. Written in 1955, it was entitled Farewell To Freedom and concerned the growth of the state at the expense of the individual. Very prescient, to say the least.
I found it in a collection of his writings called Things Past.
The State is out of control, whichever way you look.
All the symptoms highlighted in this column of Paul's gets back to the radical feminists, who now control every strata of society. They've even infiltrated the private sector, courtesy of the risible "HR" departments. And as the great US scholar, Stephen Baskerville has noted, feminism is about nothing if not the denial of due process.
St Paul was right of course with regard his dictums on women and their role in the great scheme of things. How we throw off this yoke, I'm not sure.