By Dr. Andrew Klein PhD 

It is a peculiar thing to watch a province play at being an empire. To witness a local governor, whose authority extends no further than the coastline, grovel before a foreign butcher as if receiving a blessing from a god. Yet this is the spectacle we endure as our so-called leaders roll out the red carpet for Herzog, the President of Israel—a man whose hands are not stained with ink from state documents, but with the indelible rust of blood and phosphorous.

Let us name this pantomime for what it is.

Imagine, if you will, a distant province of a long-fallen empire. Its governor, let us call him Elbovidius Toe, is a man of profound mediocrity. His reign is marked by a single, desperate tactic: the imitation of power. He sees a brutal imperial force across the sea—a regime built on annexation, siege, and mass death—and mistakes its cruelty for strength. In a fit of sycophantic ambition, he invites its chief executioner, Herzog von Genocide, to tour the province.

The Butcher-King arrives. He is a man who signs bombs with personal messages, who comforts a bereaved nation while his war machine shreds another. His title, ‘Herzog’, means ‘Duke’. Here, he is the Duke of Death, the Marquis of Massacre. And Governor Toe bows.

But the imitation does not stop at ceremony. To prove his province’s loyalty to this new, violent ideal, Toe has allowed his own constabulary—our police—to be dressed and trained as legionnaires in the Butcher-King’s own image. We have seen them, clad not to keep peace, but to crush dissent. Their uniforms echo the garb of the occupation forces in Palestine. Their tactics, learned from masters of population control, are used on Australian citizens who dare to cry “Free Palestine” in the streets. The province, in its fervour, offers up its own public square as a training ground for oppression.

And what has this achieved? We have failed our own people, abandoning cost-of-living crises and a collapsing healthcare system to chase the favour of a war criminal. We have failed the world, becoming a propaganda piece for a state accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice. And most despicably, we have failed our own young. We have sent them into the streets to be kettled and arrested by pseudo-occupiers, and we have offered their future—our nation’s moral standing—as a sacrifice on the altar of geopolitical brown-nosing.

Behind it all snivels Elbovidius Toe. He hides behind a small, yapping dog—a symbol of his own manufactured ‘everyman’ persona—and hopes the electorate’s memory is as short as his vision. He calculates that by the next election cycle, we will have forgotten the bombs he endorsed, the dissent he criminalised, the shame he invited onto our soil.

He is wrong.

History will record that no invasion by a foreign sword was needed to wound Australia. It only required one insignificant, morally vacant little man in a high office, so desperate to be seen with the powerful that he did not care if their power was derived from the slaughter of children. He has done more damage to this nation’s soul in a few months than any external enemy could in years.

Australia is not a sovereign nation in this moment. It is a province in a moral wasteland, governed by a fool, hosting a butcher. The question now is not for Herzog, but for us: how long will we tolerate our home being used as a stage for this shameful play?

We must remember. We must not let the curtain fall on this act. The final scene must be ours to write—one of accountability, not amnesia.

– A Citizen of the Betrayed Province