Indeed, Nye Bevan was a shrewd charismatic orator with a majestic Welsh accent and during parliamentary question time he never failed to empty the austere tea rooms.

This often involved tormenting his many adversaries including Sir Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George with a unique brand of imaginative tolerance using Friedrich Nietzsche’s apophthegm……This is my truth, now tell me yours.

Many decades later amidst a maelstrom of rampant unfettered neoliberalism, relentless propaganda and authoritarian populism, the aphorism still resonates.

Moreover, most of the resultant elective dictatorships have degenerated into kleptocratic kakistocracies and speaking truth to power in an era of universal deception is considered a revolutionary act and tantamount to sedition.

In many developing nations such as Papua New Guinea the egregious governance and systemic corruption is quite blatant and is verified by its ranking in the World Economics 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index. However, state malfeasance and corporate turpitude is also prevalent in many advanced western democracies including Australia.

Moreover, it is cunningly disguised by a sinister web of bureaucracy, which is administered by enigmatic apparatchiks to protect the interests of the powerful at the expense of the powerless.

During the 1980s the concept of free market fundamentalism involved a transatlantic tryst between the illegitimate daughter of Satan and the Gipper with the merger of economic doctrines from the Austrian and Chicago schools.

This was embraced by the Hawke and Keating ALP governments in Australia and intensified exponentially following the election of Liberal-National coalition government under John Winston Howard in 1996.

Irrespective of political stripes this maelstrom of neoliberal skulduggery, bastardry and organised spivvery has been unashamedly replicated across Australia and infiltrates every structural level of government.

The ideology promised freedom of choice under a paradox of there is no alternative but even the birds are chained to the sky.

It is exacerbated by behavioural economics or nudge theory and artificial intelligence but as many indigenous Australians can testify, there is no need to be behind bars to feel incarcerated.

This sinister malaise with its many ganglions is underpinned by the neoliberal slash and burn hendiatris of deregulation, diminution of trade unions and privatisation.

It also involved major industrial relations reform with reconfiguration of employer and employee relationships under the sophism of WorkChoices, which became the LNP government’s nemesis under John Howard.

Meanwhile, the Milky Bar Kid seized the opportunity and followed the yellow brick road to Canberra under the Kevin 07 charade.

Next - Kevin 07 – The Milky Bar Kid