Originally published in Edition One (2022) of Farrago. 

Dear diary, 

It has been a big few weeks, my worst New Year’s ever. Firstly, I had to cancel my holiday with Jenny and the girls because so many people were getting COVID (absolute buzzkill!). I just don’t understand what people want from me! I go away when there’s bushfires and they get annoyed at me. I stay here when everyone is contracting the virus and they still get annoyed at me! Talk about a rock and a hard place. Even worse, there are so many people complaining about these things called RATs and at first, I thought they were talking about the rodent plague that swept through rural New South Wales around 6 months ago now, was it? At that point I was just thinking, why would it be such a bad thing that no one could find any in the whole of Australia?! I was even planning with the marketing team to rebrand myself as The Exterminator. It’s lucky I didn’t because it turns out that people actually wanted RATs. As I said, rock and a hard place. 

Now I don’t want to bang on about these RATs, but I was shocked to find out that people wanted them for free. Damn communists. Can they not see that I am trying to take a hint from our American pals across the Pacific? After all, my good friend Donald seemed to have no problem with the famous American health system! I don’t talk to the new guy of course because he doesn’t remember my name so one has to assume all is going well over there. 

Then, just as I thought there was no light at the end of the tunnel, Novak Djokovic arrived for the Australian Open. I think it’s played in Victoria? It should probably be called the Victorian Open then, that bloke down there is such a megalomaniac he’d go for it.

Novak didn’t follow the rules, and as Jenny tells the girls, rules are rules. Unless you have lots of money of course, then you can take your case straight to the high courts. That’s what they don’t teach you at school. I got pretty annoyed when the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, accused us of subjecting Novak to torturous conditions. All we did was put him in the same facilities that we have detained asylum seekers in for the last seven years. No one has ever made me aware of any complaints from them, so I think he is being a bit precious. I’ve already asked my friends to make me a second statue for my desk to go next to my “I stopped these” plaque. It will be a statue of Novak and it will say “I stopped this”. Pretty smart, I think. I mean I didn’t really stop him. It was Alex Hawke, but no one will remember that at the polls.

That brings me to today, and it’s been such a whirlwind of a day really. All I did was ask the national cabinet to let children drive forklifts…I mean what’s the big deal? They just don’t see the bigger picture. The way I look at it, if our kids can drive forklifts, I am sure that they’ll be able to drive tanks! And guess what I just bought? $3.5 billion worth of tanks and armoured vehicles. I can’t wait until it all falls together in the coming years! We will have our own little child army ready to go. Ball’s in your court Xi. 

Until next time, 

PM.