I want to begin by managing expectations. Readers who come to this dossier hoping for a bombshell will be disappointed. The Collective’s position on reptilians in Canberra has been settled since 1998, it is shared by every serious researcher I have corresponded with, and I am setting it down here only because Shane says the site “needs a Canberra one” and because the Bureau’s most recent letter asked us to “stop implying things” and I would prefer to state them.
So, stated: there are reptilians in Canberra. Not many. Enough. Moving on.
1. Background
The reptilian hypothesis holds that a cold-blooded, shape-shifting, non-human species occupies positions of influence in the governments of the world, maintaining a human appearance through a mechanism that fails briefly under stress, bright light or direct questioning. The hypothesis is international. The Collective’s contribution has been to apply it, methodically, to the one national capital within driving distance, which we have not driven to.
Canberra was selected for the national capital in 1908 following a long search for a site that was inland, cold, elevated and, critically, built from nothing on a plain where nobody was already living to notice. I will simply observe that if I were a species that needed to be left alone, that is the brief I would have written.
2. Blink analysis: the method
Human beings blink, on average, fifteen to twenty times a minute. Reptiles blink rarely, and when they do, some species do it with a secondary membrane that moves sideways. The method is therefore simple. One obtains footage of the chamber. One counts.
Between 2004 and 2018 the Collective recorded 1,140 hours of parliamentary broadcast on VHS, then DVD, then a hard drive Shane bought, and I reviewed a sample of 212 hours at quarter speed with a clicker from the Show. I counted blinks for every member in frame for longer than thirty seconds, and recorded the result against the time, the topic under debate and whether the member was speaking, listening or “doing that thing with the papers”.
I did not record names. I want to be clear about this for legal reasons and because Noreen made me promise. The register records seat positions only, and the seat positions have been ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ at the request of the Collective’s legal adviser, who is also Noreen.
3. Findings
Exhibit A — blink rates, 212-hour sample
Members blinking within the human range (15–20 per minute): 71 per cent. Members blinking above the human range (nervous, or caffeinated): 22 per cent. Members blinking below 6 per minute for a sustained period: 7 per cent. Members observed not to blink at all for a period exceeding four minutes while being addressed directly: ▇▇. One of these was later found to be asleep. The rest were not.
Seven per cent. In a chamber of that size, seven per cent is a caucus.
The low-blink group showed three further characteristics. They were disproportionately seated towards the rear of the chamber, where the lighting is softer. They blinked less when the subject under debate was water, and markedly more when the subject was heating. And in four instances, at quarter speed, with the brightness turned all the way up on the second bedroom television, I observed what I can only describe as a sideways flicker across the eye, lasting one frame, which Shane says is “compression” and which I say is a membrane.
4. Temperature
Parliament House is kept, according to its own publicly available facilities information, at a stable internal temperature year-round. The precise figure is not the point. The point is that Canberra is the coldest capital in the country, that the building is dug into a hill, that the hill is grassed over so that heat is retained, and that the entire complex is, functionally, a very large, very expensive, climate-controlled burrow with a flagpole on it.
Any reptile keeper will tell you what a heated enclosure with a basking area and a hide looks like. I have been to the pet shop in Toowoomba and I have seen one and it has a smaller flagpole.
Consider also the sittings calendar. The chamber sits least in the depth of winter and the height of summer, and most in the mild shoulder seasons when a cold-blooded body can be comfortably active. The official explanation is that members return to their electorates. The electorates, I note, are warmer.
5. The lizard on the lawn
In the spring of 2011 a visitor to the Collective, a retired fencer from Goondiwindi, reported that on a coach tour of the national capital in 1994 he had seen, on the lawn in front of the building, “a bloody big lizard, just sitting there, looking at the door like it was waiting for someone”. A guide told the group it was a bearded dragon and “very common”.
I accept that it was a bearded dragon. I accept that they are common. I would merely ask the reader to consider what the lizard was doing. It was not basking; the fencer was clear that it was in shade. It was not hunting; there was nothing on the lawn. It was facing the door. It was, in the fencer’s words, waiting for someone. On a lawn, in 1994, the year they took Beryl, a reptile sat facing the door of the national parliament as if expecting a colleague to come out.
The fencer has since passed, and his account is preserved in the Tuesday group minutes of 18 October 2011, where it is followed by the words “Cheryl brought a slice”.
A word from management
Lyle watched the parliament channel for fourteen years with a clicker. That is the finding. If you want to know why the building is warm, it is because it is an office and people work in it. The lizard was a lizard. I have asked him to put the hard drive in the shed because the television in the second bedroom is now "for research" and I cannot watch the tennis. — Noreen
6. Why this is not controversial
I am often asked, usually by Keith, why I treat the reptilian question as settled when I treat, for example, the Big Dam as merely “unverified but true”. The answer is evidentiary weight. The dam has one survey and a hammer. Canberra has 212 hours of footage, a clicker, a temperature regime, a sittings calendar, a lizard and the testimony of a fencer. It is, by the standards of this Collective, overdetermined.
I am also asked why, if it is settled, nothing has been done. The answer is that the people who would do something about it are in the building.
The Collective’s position is accordingly that the matter requires no further research, that the Bureau’s request to “stop implying” has been met by stating, and that any reader who disagrees is welcome to count blinks themselves, which nobody has ever offered to do, which is itself a finding.
7. Suppression
This dossier was first drafted in 2012 and has been removed from the site three times: once by a hosting provider who cited “terms”; once by Shane, who cited “Mum”; and once by persons unknown, on a Tuesday, when the second bedroom computer was found switched off at the wall with the hard drive unplugged and a pamphlet about drought assistance on the keyboard. We were not in drought. We are never in drought when the pamphlet arrives.
It is republished here in full, with the seat positions redacted, the blink register held offline, and the hard drive in the shed, as requested.
Appendix A — Observations excluded from the sample
- Members in frame during a division (too much movement to count).
- Members wearing glasses with a reflection (frame rate interference).
- Members who were, on review, a portrait on the wall behind the Speaker.
- One member who blinked 61 times in a minute while being asked a question about a submarine; excluded as an outlier, though noted as “a different problem”.
Appendix B — Correspondence
Letters sent: to the Department of Parliamentary Services (one, 2013, regarding thermostat settings); to the Bureau (four, 2012–2019, regarding what the Bureau is for); to the pet shop in Toowoomba (one, 2016, regarding enclosure sizing, answered helpfully). Letters received: one, from the Bureau, asking us to stop implying things. Filed. Pamphlets received: one. Also filed. We were not in drought.
Document U8MC-DOS-07. Status: SUPPRESSED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.