As Stephen Conroy leaves Parliament today, this is the last missive from Fake Stephen Conroy.

If you are reading this, I have been murdered.

However, if I’m reading this aloud in Parliament, I was subsequently raised from the dead by dark, unholy forces. Now, stripped of my divinity, I exist to torture the living through cruel and needlessly complicated machinations.

Anyway, enough of the formalities.

Today marks the last time I will sit with you in this chamber, or eat with you in the cafeteria, or watch you while you sleep.

According to Google, empathy-afflicted humans deal with the loss of a colleague in different ways; some mourn them, while others will celebrate the achievements of a life well-lived.

I don’t care either way, to be honest. What you do at home while you think about me is your own business. Just don’t upload it to the internet.

There is one thing, and one thing only, that I, your brutal and beloved parliamentary enforcer, expect of you dummies today: sit down, shut up, and listen.

In 2007, I tried to warn Australia that sexual deviancy and terror on the internet threatened to drown our great nation under a tide of semen and blood.

Now here we are, almost a decade later, and our children are gay-marrying cats wearing suicide vest tuxedos, and elderly Australians can’t buy a carton of milk without fighting off the molestations of tentacle monster gangs.

We’ve gone some way to undoing the damage. Our craven capitulations to the other side on metadata retention and ubiquitous surveillance are steps in the right detection, but there is much work that remains.

Twitter, for example, remains a persistent threat to our way of life, emboldening punters with a sense that they’re entitled to question us directly, and that it’s OK to Photoshop our faces onto the tips of penises.

But that’s not my problem anymore.

What’s next for me? Twenty years in Parliament is my private sector ace in the hole. I don’t want to tip my hand, but if I’ve played my cards right, odds are I’ll hit the jackpot.