Most corporate brigands and their socially autistic executives remain unconcerned or even apathetic about the devastating consequences resulting from its plundering escapades because they are unlikely to experience any pain and are often rewarded with a golden parachute.

The ultimate objective is to accrue satisfactory returns for its shareholders, which is typically accomplished by whatever it takes.

This was quite evident following the Upper Big Branch and Deepwater Horizon disasters in the United States and Rio Tinto’s desecration of cultural heritage rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia.

Other significant events include the BHP Billiton and Vale mining disasters at Samarco and Corrego do Feijao in Brazil, the Boeing 737 Max airline disasters and the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in Lebanon.

Much of this destruction and desolation is nonchalantly categorised as a cost of doing business or collateral damage and ‘all it takes for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing’.

The disruption and subsequent crisis generated via the COVID-1984 pandemic will be transformed into an opportunity and a more intense and dystopian version of capitalism beckons.

Much of the creative destruction is evident and the replacement infrastructure and processes are already established, which include artificial intelligence, remote learning, supra-surveillance, big data, algorithms, predictive analytics and a cashless society.

It will be supplemented by genome editing technology with a return of eugenics, the rattling skeleton in the closet of Fabian socialists.

Back in 1785 at Warwick Assizes in England, one of my early ancestors was sentenced to death for burglary and the theft of a gown and other minor items.

The sentence was subsequently commuted to seven years transportation, which included a brief internment on a prison hulk in the River Thames.

In January 1788, he arrived at Port Jackson in Sydney harbour aboard the merchant ship Alexander, which was outsourced by the UK government to transport convicts to Australia and became part of the First Fleet.

A rebellious streak and several bouts of recidivism eventually saw him relocated to Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, where he subsequently died and was buried in a pauper’s grave at a convict cemetery near Richmond, about 10 kilometres north of Hobart airport.

It probably accounts for my seditious traits with a total disdain towards Pecksniffian lickspittles and an abhorrent distrust of authority, although it provides me with an alternative and often iconoclastic worldview.

This enables me to challenge any skerrick of injustice through immigrant eyes and undauntedly expose many far worse white collar crimes, corruption or corporate malfeasance.

Indeed, Australia’s peak safety body and its cohorts of Cimmerian crusaders should reflect on the following maxim from the American Baptist minister and civil rights campaigner, the late Martin Luther King Jr: ‘In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends’.

This reflects and aligns with infamous elegy from Martin Niemöller about the cowardice of German intellectuals under the totalitarian Nazi regime during the late 1930s:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.