Fallen Leaders Fit for the Ignoratorium

The Apollo 11 moon mission remains one of the greatest scientific and engineering accomplishments in human history. It is even greater when you consider the extraordinary risks involved, including the very real possibility that three men could have ended up floating lifeless in space for eternity.

The risks for astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins didn’t end when they returned to earth. Nobody was sure, because nobody had ever completed such a mission, how the lunar experience might alter a person. Or, in the case of Collins, how many hours of lunar orbit might alter a person. Collins went all the way to the moon but never set foot on it.

It was thought possible that the astronauts might unwittingly bring back with them some form of space virus, or be changed in other ways that made them dangerous to normal earth-based humans. So NASA enforced a strict twenty-one-day quarantine, beginning from the moment the astronauts’ return craft left the moon.

(Interestingly, a beautifully researched piece on this subject at the website Space.com—published in June 2019, just months before the coronavirus pandemic began—notes that by the time of that first Apollo mission, “public health professionals had generally moved on from crude tools like quarantines”. Considering she was only talking about a period of three weeks, author Meghan Bartels must have been astonished by Melbourne’s subsequent 262 days of Covid confinement.)

As soon as they landed in the Pacific Ocean, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were equipped with isolation garments and taken to a specially-built quarantine facility, the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, at what is now known as the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

By all accounts, the Lunar Receiving Laboratory was a fine place to spend some time post-moon. Besides the expected standard appointments, it also featured a lounge, a library and several medical examination rooms in case anyone developed a sudden case of moon fever or became a literal lunatic.

In short, it was the perfect location for someone to come back down to earth. And so the Laboratory was used for astronaut quarantine following other moon voyages, until NASA scientists worked out that they didn’t have any space viruses to worry about. The Laboratory was then re-engineered for different space-related purposes.

But we still have need to assist those returning to earth after their time aloft. In particular, we need to help former Australian prime ministers and party leaders find their way once they’ve left office. A period of reflective isolation prior to rejoining broader society would certainly have helped Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Paul Keating and John Hewson—the Michael Collins of this bunch, who orbited power but never quite touched it.

In a nod to the original twenty-one-day quaran­tine for Apollo voyagers, let’s compel all future ex-prime ministers and similarly-rejected PM-adjacent party leaders to immediately spend a calming 210 days—at minimum—in political and commentary quarantine. The additional time is required because Canberra is weirder than the moon, or indeed all regions in the known universe. Canberra viruses may not be real in a biological sense, but just talk to anyone who’s spent a few years in the nation’s capital. They’re real, all right.

But where to locate our post-prime-ministerial holding pen? Not Canberra, obviously. So how about the original Lunar Receiving Laboratory itself? The joint was scheduled for demolition in 2020, but Covid evidently scuttled those plans. It’s just sitting there, an ideal facility in an ideal location. Consider how our plainly troubled, endlessly talkative ex-politicians plainly required a Laboratory vacation.

For a start, nobody in Houston knows who the hell Rudd, Turnbull, Keating and Hewson are, which would have helped them gain some valuable beyond-Canberra perspective. And Houston has an Australian consulate, too, just in case any PMs caused diplomatic issues by attempting to escape. Not that they’d want to. The psychological benefits of Texan confinement would be so great that some discarded leaders might instead request extended stays.

In Houston, secure inside the lab, ditched Aussie PMs wouldn’t carry any weight at all. Rudd would have been known to staff only as the guy who kept talking in his sleep about Rupert Murdoch. Turnbull might have delivered a few speeches about climate change to confused kitchen staff but otherwise wouldn’t have been a problem. You’d expect Keating to get a few scientists offside by telling them how they were doing everything wrong and then maybe redrawing NASA’s plans for a Mars landing, but again he’d have been largely ignored.

This would all have been to their long-term betterment. Hewson might have occupied himself by writing columns for a non-existent Lunar Laboratory newsletter, until a janitor posing as the newsletter’s editor fired him due to the need for greater gender diversity. Thus he’d have been steeled against future identical outcomes, such as the Nine newspapers cutting him loose this year.

Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, who coped with relative ease after losing leadership, might have felt put out by a quarantine requirement. More likely, though, is that they’d have made good use of their time. The occasional permitted day trip under close supervision might have seen Abbott drop by some of Houston’s sports venues or cycling zones. And Gillard, known for an occasionally arch and self-deprecating sense of humour, could have enjoyed reflecting on her own political demise during a visit to the city’s impressive National Museum of Funeral History. (I’ve been there, by the way. Creepily, it was the first place to ask me if I qualified for an old-age ticket discount. That’s not exactly a question you appreciate when surrounded by coffins, hearses and the embalming machine—appropriately, very well-preserved—that drained all of former President Harry S Truman’s bodily fluids.) 

Temporary accommodation at Houston’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory would be a great gift both for recovering politicians and the Australian public, who thanks to that post-career pause might be spared years of self-obsessed whining.

At the same time, Houston could celebrate its Australian assistance with a new slogan. They really need one. Since 2014, Houston has been stuck with this: “A City of No Limits”. But if former Australian prime ministers were housed there, the place might go with: “Houston: We Have Your Problems”.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a condition generally associated with survivors of warfare. Of course, it didn’t always go by that name. Shattered individuals who returned from the two World Wars were instead described as suffering shellshock. No particular treatments beyond rest were usually prescribed.

Australian repatriation hospitals were full of such individuals. It is very likely, given how many Australians fought in those and subsequent wars, that some PTSD sufferers are or were in your families.

Younger folk who’ve been fortunate enough not to experience combat are doubly blessed by avoiding PTSD. But they are enduring a similar syndrome, according to shrinks observing the panic youngsters exhibit about climate change.

“You may have heard of PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder,” Californian psychologist Noah Oderberg recently told the US ABC network. “A psychiatrist came up with pre-PTSD because it’s not a trauma that’s already occurred. It’s a fear of a future trauma so it’s this new idea. And it involves anxiety and depression.”

Pre-post-traumatic disorder! It’s the shellshock you suffer before you’ve even been shelled. Or shocked. Oderberg is “seeing more and more people bringing up the subject of global warming in therapy citing feelings of sadness and despair”.

Give it a year or two and we’ll be seeing PPTSD turning up in Australia on employee medical leave applications. Or possibly not; our more fearful climate change types tend not to have jobs, which gives them plenty of time to interfere with those who do.

In Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, for example, a mob called Blockade Australia have taken to blocking railway lines servicing the coal industry. This tactic also interrupts other services. “They’re shutting down the whole network—grain, cotton, passengers,” Southern Shorthaul Railroad owner and director Jason Ferguson told the Daily Telegraph. “It’s having a devastating effect.”

They’re causing economic trauma, and they’re quite happy about it. That’s because, as Blockade Australia explains in frequent press releases, “Australia is a death cult driving global climate collapse”, “Australia is killing the world”, “Voting doesn’t work” and “Only actions like this can disrupt the flow of money”.

Their actions may in turn be disrupted by stopping the flow of Centrelink money to the bank accounts of Blockade Australia activists, who are currently planning a week-long blockade campaign in Sydney. “This is what it will take,” the group warns, “to bring Australia to its knees.”

Not wanting to cause undue stress for these people, authorities treat them with great delicacy. Their commerce-damaging antics are generally left to play out for hours, and any court penalties are lenient.

But the genuinely traumatised—those who miss work or other engagements due to activist showboating—won’t tolerate this forever. Keep an eye out for mentions of Blockade Australia in the news. They may be in for a shock.