So, the holidays are over and Parliament is back, and it took no time at all for the crushing boringness of the House’s routine to extinguish any interest the nation’s journalists might have had in my stunning expose of Motel Christmas Island. I tell you, this democraticy of ours is sick when someone like me can put so much work into independently and thoroughly investigating matters of national importance and then have so much trouble cutting through to his public through the media. Sometimes I really wonder what my purpose is in this place, attempting to work with such a confusing and frustrating system that is seemingly imperfluous to rationality and logic. And after the events of the past week my confusion and frustration have only grown more larger.
It all began last Tuesday morning. I was sitting in my Parliament House office putting the cardboard letters into the clear plastic sleeves on my new red pencil case when Susan suddenly burst in and convened an office meeting. I’d been trying to call her mobile phone for an hour and had left four voice messages asking for help to find an ‘S’, a ‘T’, an ‘E’, and a ‘V’, and was just about to leave another asking if I could use a sideways ‘M’ instead of another ‘E’. Susan told me to put it away and got everyone to gather around the main desk.