Rattling a stick inside a swill bucket

Australia recently recorded its highest national road toll since 2010 with significant increases in road traffic fatalities across most major states. The Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics reported 1,332 deaths in the 12 months to November 2025, which is a 3% increase on the previous year. The Australian Automobile Association expressed extreme concern over this escalating frequency rate and demanded an urgent review of the National Road Safety Strategy.

Despite consistent and widespread road safety campaigns an incongruous series of glittering and multicoloured gigantic billboards remain strategically located in many commercial hubs across Australia’s main cities. The most notable exception is in the Australian Capital Territory, where legislation restricts any form of roadside advertising. It reinforces the precautionary principle and protects the community’s cherished aesthetic standards.

Most of these ostentatious eyesores are shrewdly mounted at busy intersections on major arterial and inner city ring roads and deceitfully circumvent any statutory requirements or recommended government guidelines. This lurid gallimaufry of inveigling iconography is wilfully designed to distract motorists and other road users.

Moreover, it garners attention for an extensive range of goods and services that the canaille and other gullible consumers want but never really need. Many of the contraptions are invariably purchased on credit and typically thrill for a nanosecond and last maybe just a tad longer.

The beguiling advertisements frequently feature junk food, alcoholic beverages, sugar-laden soft drinks, captivating internet deals and countless trendy gadgets, which predictably include the latest smartphones with a myriad of mindless accessories. Planned obsolescence ensures most of these otiose electronic devices promptly become redundant. The defunct objects typically end up gathering dust amongst supine bluebottles on a cluttered shelf in a recycled computer store or suburban opshop until they are eagerly acquired by some furtive trainspotter, boneyarder or loitering rock spider.

Attempts to identify which socially autistic panjandrum sanctioned installation of these hideous roadside carbuncles or the specific government agencies that receive a cut from the bountiful advertising revenue are extremely frustrating and often futile. The ceremonial trauma is shrouded in a miasma of obfuscation and rapidly degenerates into a war of attrition.

A tyranny of bureaucracy prevails, which ensures any complainants reach a call centre to endure excruciating looped renditions of Fűr Elise or Greensleeves. The relentless torture is inevitably exacerbated by a chatbot with an intermittent and sinister recording……. “Thank you for holding, your call is important to us and is being monitored for quality assurance and training purposes”. Meanwhile, truth and accountability are nonchalantly sacrificed to secure the lucrative income and preserve reputations or conceal the bungling ineptitude of faceless apparatchiks and other enigmatic poltroons.

Regardless of the separation of powers, subsequent coronial inquests are cunningly orchestrated to defend the fortress. Its primary objective focuses on protecting the interests and accrued assets of a corporatised or captured state. This is bolstered by a bastion of parasitic arms-length bodies or quangos littered with ersatz academics who masquerade as expert witnesses using junk data to venerate scientism.

Indeed, commerce has an established tradition of manipulating evidence and statistical analysis to create and maintain an auspicious environment to support its entrepreneurial objectives at material and ideological levels. The venality has been corroborated over many decades, especially throughout the agricultural, tobacco, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Beneath an alabaster of humble inquiry, sympathy and sensitive acknowledgement lurks a denial of the agenda concerning how the circumstances of death can be established without apportioning blame or liability. This superficially beckoning charade is an anachronistic forum involving an adversarial wolf in inquisitorial sheep’s clothing.

Many seasoned barristers believe cross examining at coronial inquests is akin to working with both hands tied behind their back. It is a hopeful but often hopeless counsel of perfection that delivers a retrospective judgement of convenience. The intimidating vaudeville regularly relapses into a provocatively painful and dystopian nightmare for many of the bereaved and bewildered relatives. Meanwhile, an accumulation of esoteric dilemmas is aggravated by a patronising disposition of unaccountable power armed with a thesaurus of sesquipedalian rhetoric.

A brutal delay, deny and die hendiatris confirms the pageantry of law has very little to do with the discovery of truth or realisation of justice. The callously pragmatic quest for objective truth repudiates any skerrick of compassion, candour or dignity. A sophism of closure frequently arises although grief is a harrowing personal journey without a destination and any attempts to measure this noble and profoundly emotional response to loss extirpates its intrinsic importance.

Judgement and justice remain agonisingly ambiguous for many grieving families and their only parole during a prolonged torment of burning injustice is death or dementia. Distraught dependents are often left chasing smoke with plenty of unanswered questions blowing in the wind like withered synthetic flowers and fluttering plastic windmills at a makeshift roadside traffic accident memorial.

George Orwell’s splendid novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published back in the 1930s and bemoaned materialism. It featured Gordon Comstock, a disenchanted media relations factotum who described advertising as rattling a stick inside a swill bucket. How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?