This document is part of an archive of postings on Australian Politics, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written. My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia. My Blogroll. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this document.

Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?

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30 April, 2020

Australia could get 90% of electricity from renewables by 2040 with no price increase

On windy nights only, presumably.  What do you do when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? They talk blithely of pumped hydro and batteries but omit to mention that the costs for both are vast while the output is trivial

Australia could get 90% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2040 without an increase in power prices, according to an analysis by the energy and carbon consultancy RepuTex.

Under current government policies, the country is on track to have 75% of its electricity generated by renewables within 20 years, but the analysis suggests a weak federal policy framework would lead to wholesale prices rising for a period after 2030.

RepuTex’s latest outlook for the national energy market finds investment driven by state policies, including renewable energy targets in Victoria and Queensland, will help keep wholesale electricity prices down throughout the 2020s.
Zali Steggall calls for investigation of Coalition plan to underwrite gas, hydro and coal power
Read more

But it says wholesale prices would rise again in the 2030s without federal policy to encourage investment in new clean energy generation before ageing coal-fired power stations close.

RepuTex examined two scenarios, one that forecasts wholesale electricity prices under current government policies, and another that forecasts prices under the Australian Energy Market Operator’s more ambitious “step change” scenario that uses a carbon budget in line with the Paris agreement. It has made a summary of its report and methodology, but not the full report, available on its website.

Under current policies, Australia would reach 50% renewable energy by 2030 and 75% by 2040, despite the absence of a federal policy framework beyond the underwriting of new generation investment scheme.

The report finds new investment would be driven by state-based policies and renewable energy targets, which RepuTex forecasts would bring about 17 gigawatts of new capacity by 2030, along with 4GW of rooftop solar and 3.5GW of new storage capacity.

The falling costs of clean technology would put pressure on coal and gas generation and lead to 18GW of thermal capacity exiting the market by 2040. It forecasts wholesale prices would remain at roughly the current level, between $50 -$70 a megawatt hour, over the next 10 years. Wholesale electricity prices have fallen by nearly 50% over the past year.
Energy companies will face pressure to lower prices as wholesale costs tumble
Read more

“As new renewable energy and storage projects such as Snowy 2.0 are commissioned, along with the continued uptake of small-scale resources, traditional volumes for black coal and gas-fired capacity are likely to be eroded,” RepuTex’s head of research, Bret Harper, said.

But the report finds that a disorderly closure of coal-fired power stations would push wholesale prices up in the 2030s in the absence of federal policy to guide investment.

RepuTex found that an increase in wholesale prices could be avoided under the more ambitious scenario, forecasting that average annual prices in the 2030s would remain below $80/MWh. The step change scenario sets out an emissions budget for the electricity sector that would lead to decarbonised energy systems by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement commitment of keeping global heating below 2C.

RepuTex forecasts this scenario would lead to Australia reaching 70% renewable energy generation by 2030 and 90% in 2040, and that the combination of more renewable energy, improved storage technologies and a carbon budget would be “fatal” for coal-fired power.

“The most interesting thing is we can have this decarbonised energy system and it won’t cost any more,” Harper said.

“In fact, it costs slightly less. Just in the last year even, energy storage costs have really come down, whether it’s battery or pumped hydro.”

SOURCE  






Coronavirus in Australia: Eased restrictions ‘not too far away’, Scott Morrison says

Eased coronavirus restrictions are “not too far away”, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says, adding there is one thing all Australians need to do to speed up the process.

So far, more than 2.8 million people have downloaded and registered with the government’s COVIDSafe app.

Morrison likened having the app to applying sunscreen when being in the sun, saying millions more need to download it. “I would liken it to the fact that if you want to go outside, when the sun is shining, you have to put sunscreen on,” the PM said on Wednesday. “This is the same thing.

“If you want to return to a more liberated economy and society, it is important that we get increased numbers of downloads when it comes to the COVIDSafe app,” Morrison added.

“This is the ticket to ensuring that we can have eased restrictions and Australians can go back to the lifestyle and the many things that they previously were able to do, and this is important.”

The PM said he wants Australia to become “COVIDsafe” - which means “we can release the pressure”.

“We can release some of the stress which is in families and individuals across the country from isolation, and ensure they can get back to work, school, back to normal, get back to sport,” he added.

Morrison said he couldn’t see international travel “occurring anytime soon” but looks forward to when life in Australia goes back to normal. “The risks there are obvious,” he said of international travel.

“The only exception to that, as I have flagged, is potentially with New Zealand, and we have had some good discussions about that. “But I look forward to the time when Australians can travel again within Australia.”

He said mass gatherings wouldn’t be happening soon either, but flagged places of worship could open for private prayer.

“I look forward to the time where they can see, whether it is the AFL, the netball, the NRL, or whatever code they support, and being able to watch that again.

“But I can’t see them going along to a game for a while, those larger mass gatherings. “I can see, I suppose, the opportunity for those seeking private prayer in a place of worship, I can see that happening.

“I can’t necessarily, though, see the larger services occurring again.”

SOURCE  





Coronavirus Australia: Deal could hold key to PM’s own kids returning to school

In a dramatic escalation of the fight to get teachers back into the classroom, Prime Minister Scott Morrison will announce a plan to put some “sugar on the table” and allow private schools to bring forward up to 25 per cent of their annual funding.

And the deal could hold the key to his own daughters Abbey and Lily returning to their Sydney private school after the Prime Minister complained he could not send them back until normal classroom teaching resumed.

The Prime Minister has insisted he would send his kids back to school “in a heartbeat’’ this term as long as the school was offering proper classroom teaching.

“I mean, they were sitting in a room looking at a screen, that’s not teaching, that’s childminding,’’ he said. “And schools aren’t for childminding. Schools are for teaching and they’re for learning.”

Sources have told news.com.au that the NSW Government could be plotting a course towards a similar June 1 deadline for a majority of kids back at school, with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian confirming: “We will see a return of face-to-face teaching from 11 May, and then will consider accelerating a full return to school as soon as possible.”

Education Minister Dan Tehan wrote to private schools on Tuesday night, noting recent claims that some private schools could be forced to close as cash-strapped parents fall behind in fees or switch to the public system. He is proposing to allow private schools to bring forward funding they would otherwise secure in July.

Schools can use the cash to purchase COVID-19 supplies including hand sanitiser and ‘deep clean’ classrooms.

In the letter obtained by news.com.au, Mr Tehan insists that the medical advice is clear: it is safe for students to return to classes.

“There is very limited evidence of transmission between children in the school environment and … on current evidence, schools can remain fully open,’’ he writes.

“The purpose of this payment option is to financially assist … schools in their response to COVID-19, while also encouraging them to re-engage with their students in a classroom-based learning environment.”

To be eligible for the first payment of 12.5 per cent, private schools must comply with the condition of approval imposed on 9 April 2020 to be open for physical campus learning in term 2 and to have a plan to fully re-open classroom teaching by 1 June 2020.

For the second payment of 12.5 per cent, schools need to commit to achieving 50 per cent of their students attending classroom based learning by 1 June 2020.

NSW Catholic Schools CEO Dallas McInerny said for those schools that had offered parents fee relief the offer could prove attractive.  “There are educational and economic reasons why we want kids back in school. I think from week 3 you will start to see more of our schools heading back to full tilt,’’ he said.

“The main constraint is the availability of staff. Some Catholic schools have responded very generously with fee relief for families affected by COVID-19 and for those schools, this could prove attractive.”

Independent Schools Association CEO David Mulford said increasingly parents wanted children to return to classes. “I think there’s a growing sense parents want children back at school now,’’ he said.

“Noone has ever said it’s going to be the best solution, online learning. Some people thrive and others don’t. Some subjects thrive on it and others don’t.”

But the proposal is set to spark a furious backlash from teachers’ unions, who warn the rush back to classes is “risky” and could spark a second wave of COVID-19 cases.

According to the Independent Education Union representing teachers at private schools in Queensland and the Northern Territory, the current case to reopen schools to all students is a high-risk strategy.

Dr Adele Schmidt said current calls for schools to reopen ignored established research regarding the potential for students to infect scores of contacts with a disease in a given day.

“So much is still unknown about this disease and a shift back to ‘business as usual’ in our schools is a fraught and dangerous one – relying on claims that have not been well tested nor peer-reviewed about the infectivity of COVID-19 in students and students themselves as infection agents,” Dr Schmidt said.

“While early data on transmission of COVID-19 in New South Wales schools would appear to confirm that transmission among children is less common than for influenza – we don’t yet have robust data on virulence of the coronavirus in question.”

SOURCE  






Australia Post hires hundreds, puts posties into vans to deliver parcels

Australia Post has put hundreds of its posties behind the wheels of delivery vans in an effort to keep up with a huge surge in demand as self-isolating Australians are buying more online.

The national postal service will also hire 600 casual workers across its network and call centres to manage the surge, which has led to "significant" delivery delays across the country.

Parcel volumes have been at Christmas-like levels for weeks, averaging almost 2 million a day since just before Easter. This marks a 90 per cent increase compared to the same time last year, acting chief operating officer Rod Barnes said.

"For the last four weeks, we have been operating our processing and delivery services seven days a week, with our dedicated staff working on rotation over the 24-hour period, each day," he said.

"We appreciate that delays can be frustrating and want to reassure that our people are working hard to get customers' parcels to them safely and as quickly as possible."

The company has also repurposed 15 sites across the country and turned them into processing facilities to sort parcels, and has chartered an additional eight freighter flights as the shutdown in commercial aviation limits access to passenger plane deliveries.

Australia Post has received regulatory relief from the federal government, which has lifted parts of its community service obligations to allow letter deliveries every two days in metro areas. Letter demand has halved in recent weeks.

Two thousand letter-delivering posties will now be retrained to deliver parcels, which the postal service hopes will reduce strain on the broader delivery network.

"In the last weekend alone this additional staffing allowed us to accept and process an unprecedented 3 million parcels into facilities from ecommerce customers," Mr Barnes said.

"To assist in getting these parcels to customers' doors, we have refocused 700 of our people, a mix of posties and drivers from our StarTrack business, to provide additional van deliveries across the country."

Mr Barnes asked for compassion in this unprecedented time and warned abusive behaviour towards employees would "not be tolerated".

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here




29 April, 2020

Solely digital learning isn’t fair or sustainable

If the best that can be said for digital education is that it’s useful for some months during an unprecedented pandemic, then there probably isn’t much to be said for it normally.

While it’s generally good to look on the bright side, it would be incredibly naïve to think the current situation for Australian schools presents more opportunities than threats.

The research on the efficacy of education technology is inconsistent.

Even in normal times, it is not clear that tech helps students to learn – and these are not normal times. It may benefit some highly motivated learners, but others will be worse off.

Making the transition for millions of Australian students to digital learning is arguably necessary as a temporary, emergency measure. But there is no strong evidence it is more effective than face-to-face classes.

SOURCE  






Ban on GM crops set to go in South Australia

The South Australian parliament is set to pass legislation to lift a ban on genetically-modified crops on the state's mainland

Legislation to lift the ban on genetically modified crops on the South Australian mainland is set to pass state parliament after negotiations between the Liberal government and the Labor opposition.

Primary Industries Minister Tim Whetstone says under proposed amendments local councils will have six months to apply to remain GM-free, though a final decision will still rest with the minister.

Kangaroo Island will also remain GM-free.

"This agreement is a great outcome for South Australian farmers who will have the opportunity to reap the benefits of growing GM where that is best for their business," Mr Whetstone said.

SOURCE  






Top medical authority says Australia in ‘the same position as New Zealand’

Although Australia has been less strict

Australia’s top medical official has claimed Australia was seeing similar results to New Zealand despite not pursuing the country’s “elimination” strategy.

Australia’s chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said Australia was in a similar place to New Zealand where PM Jacinda Ardern says they’ve made significant strides towards eliminating coronavirus.

“There’s not a great difference between the aggressive suppression we are seeking, and elimination,” Prof Murphy told ABC’s 7.30 on Monday night.

Ms Ardern yesterday declared the country had “won the battle” against widespread community transmission of coronavirus, as the country eased some of its lockdown measures.

The country’s elimination strategy was enacted through lockdowns, with only essential services operating for more than four weeks and residents urged not to leave home.

But Prof Murphy said he was pleased with the results Australia were getting and said there was very little difference in the outcomes between Australia and New Zealand.

“The sort of numbers we’re getting at the moment … are pretty good, and if we can continue them as we expand our testing … that’s as good as elimination in many respects,” Prof Murphy said. “Elimination just means you’re not detecting any cases. It doesn’t mean you can relax.”

In New Zealand, a country with a population of five million, they’ve recorded a total 1122 cases of coronavirus. Of those infected, 19 have died.

Australia has recorded more than 6700 cases of coronavirus and 83 people have died from a population of 25 million.

Prof Murphy explained there could still be undetected coronavirus cases in the community, or asymptomatic carriers transmitting the virus.

“There’s not a great difference between the aggressive suppression we are seeking, and elimination.

“In fact we’re in pretty much the same position as New Zealand who have stated their claim to be one of elimination.” “We’re in a very similar place.”

SOURCE  






‘A terrible tax’: Is it time to abolish stamp duty?

Stamp duty is back in the spotlight as the federal government draws up a raft of emergency plans and structural reforms to get the economy back on track after the devastation wrought by COVID-19.

Many key figures are urging the government to abolish stamp tax as an unwieldy weight on both the property market and people’s flexibility, making homes unaffordable for first-time buyers, and creating barriers for those wanting to move closer to work, upsize or downsize. 

However, others argue that now isn’t the time for such sweeping change, when state governments are using stamp duty revenue for a major series of funding measures to soften the blow of the pandemic.

“Stamp duty is a terrible tax, it should be repealed and this is the perfect time to do it,” said Dr Shane Oliver, AMP Capital chief economist.

“It will have to be a gradual removal and replacement with some kind of land tax so later buyers aren’t unfairly affected.

“The problem with stamp duty is that it’s a massive impost on a single transaction which inhibits economic decision-making in a less-than-optimal way. But land tax would be levied on the value of land and applied to all landholders equally and be done in a much fairer way.”

The critical issue is the timing. With the Reserve Bank predicting the economy will shrink up to 10 per cent in the first half of this year, hours worked to plummet by 20 per cent and unemployment to remain over 6 per cent for the next couple of years, the danger is that stamp duty’s abolition could prove a deflationary move.

Yet Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe this week said, in planning the recovery, the first on the list of reform measures was “the way we tax income generation, consumption and land”.

It’s widely believed Dr Lowe was referring to a series of reports commissioned over the years with proposals to raise less money from state conveyancing duties on property transactions and income tax in the future, and more from state land taxes and GST.

Domain Group economist Trent Wiltshire co-authored a Grattan Institute report in 2018 on how to improve housing affordability, and recommended axing stamp duty in favour of a broad-based property tax.

He said removing stamp duty had the almost unanimous support of economists, academics, the Productivity Commission, Infrastructure Australia and government tax reviews.

Now, he still feels the same, but has doubts about the timing of such a move.

“Long term, reform will create benefits for the economy and boost the Gross Domestic Product significantly,” he said. “But those benefits take a while to accrue and whether now is a good time to do it … It’s not something that will provide a short-term boost to the market.

“Abolishing stamp duty and replacing it with a broad-based, flat-rate land tax is a policy that should be pursued and could be part of a whole bunch of reforms once we emerge from this, but it isn’t a policy that will help the market rebound over the next few months, and that’s what we need.”

The arguments for axing stamp duty include that it’s an inefficient tax, levied only on those buying property in any particular year, and makes property more expensive for both purchasers and then, by association, renters. It thus also becomes an obstacle for people – and businesses – wanting to move and is also expensive to collect, costing 70 cents for each dollar raised, according to Treasury modelling.

On the plus side, it raises a great deal of revenue for state governments which they now have never been more in need of, to arrest some of the economic fall-out from the pandemic.

But that sum does rise and fall, sometimes quite dramatically, according to the number of property transactions taking place, and the strength of the property market, making planning difficult.

State budget papers show that in NSW, for instance, stamp duty revenue in 2018-19 was $7.4 billion, down 24 per cent from 2016-17’s $9.7 billion. In Victoria, it slumped by 13 per cent over the same period to $6 billion in 2018-19.

Ken Morrison, chief executive of The Property Council of Australia, pulls no punches.

“There’s a consensus among economists and policy-makers that stamp duty is the worst thing in Australia,” he said. “It distorts behaviour, cripples job creation, lowers growth, and locks people into housing that might not be appropriate for their needs. 

“Really, by anyone’s standards, it’s a terrible tax. There’s a lot of debate at the moment about corporate tax, but stamp duty is two times worse for the economy than company taxes and sets a new economic benchmark for worst taxes.

“We need to get the economy going and facilitate construction growth, and getting rid of stamp duty will help.”

However, he doesn’t like the idea of replacing it with a land tax as he says the rate would have to be too high to replace the revenue raised by stamp duty.

“Let’s rewind the decision to five to six years ago when we had GST being put on the table as the centrepiece for reform and getting rid of some of our worst taxes,” he said. “That’s what we would encourage governments to do as they move into reformist mode.”

Economic and policy consultants Urbanised Advisory Services is also advocating for the abolition of stamp duty. Managing director Stephen Albin says the whole system of property taxation needs urgent attention, and the time is ripe.

“It’s a bit of a mess at the moment and we should take the opportunity in the existing circumstances to really review the tax system and create different ways or securing revenue,” he said. “There should be more stable sources of revenue so the ebbs and flows don’t have such a major impact on budgets, and ways of making housing more affordable.

“There are good arguments for land tax to replace stamp duty and the Productivity Commission and Treasury are now looking at how they are going to levy taxes in the future. This is the perfect time for reform.”  

Stamp duty is certainly becoming an ever-greater cost of buying homes. According to Domain figures, stamp duty paid on a median-priced home went up between 2004 and 2019 by 102 per cent in NSW to a high of $42,269, 183 per cent in Melbourne to $44,164, and 189 per cent in Brisbane to $11,013.

“It’s an awful tax,” said Adrian Kelly, national president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia. “It’s most particularly a drag on first-home buyers, with the ANZ ceasing to offer mortgage insurance products – which I suspect the other banks will follow – which means they’re have to raise a 20 per cent deposit plus stamp duty.

“So it’s becoming an even bigger problem in the current climate. It also reduces the mobility of everyone else with the housing stock, including older people wanting to downsize to a smaller home, and people wanting to change jobs. We need a broader tax base, and one that doesn’t provide so many impediments to buying a home.”  

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






28 April, 2020

New rules for pubs and clubs

Widespread social distancing measures will have to be implemented at pubs, public transport, cinemas and local sporting ovals before they can re-open once Australia begins to ease its coronavirus lockdown measures.

Pub bosses are discussing a raft of rules to minimise social contact - including bans on communal items like pub buzzers, water jugs and plastic laminated menus.

A leading tourist board has also warned hotel buffets will not be open for service - with guests turning to in-room dining during the first phase of restriction easing.

'I think there will be a lot more in-room dining. People won’t be as keen to eat in the restaurant,' Tourism Accommodation Australia CEO Michael Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph.

It comes as the federal government, health experts and state leaders work on plans to restart sport and get Australians back to work ahead of a review of coronavirus restrictions on May 11.

With a vaccine yet to be developed, the Australian Hotels Association said a 'new world order' should be expected when pubs open their doors again.

'They [pub owners] are thinking about anything that people touch – water jars at the end of the bar, those laminated menus, the buzzer,' the association's NSW chief executive officer John Whelan said.

'Live music is a real difficult one. Possibly seated. A lot of hotels are giving real consideration to everything. They all accept social distancing is here to stay for a while.'

Australian National University microbiologist Peter Collignon last week told Daily Mail Australia pubs and hotels may not return to normal until September - although they could re-open under strict conditions in July.

Sign-in and sign-out procedures to maintain contact tracing and a 50 per cent capacity limit at venues are among those measures being discussed by hospitality industry leaders.

The implementation of a staggered return to work could also reduce the risk of transmission on buses - accompanied by a ban on standing and preventing passengers from sitting next to each other.

Temperature checks of customers and staff may also become the norm in leagues clubs and cinemas. ClubsNSW, which represents 1,200 member venues, said patrons could be tested on arrival under a plan set to be reviewed by an infectious disease expert and then submitted to the state government for approval.

Spectators at community sports games may also have to socially-distance and keep a safe distance away from each other.

Hoyts CEO Damian Keogh is meanwhile overseeing the creation of a checklist ahead of a tentative plan to return to business for July. The 20-point checklist features a chequerboard-based seating plan in the chain's theatres and online payment being the only way to buy a ticket.

SOURCE  






New school rules

Strict new rules have been introduced as children return to classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Students in New South Wales will be banned from using playground equipment and bubblers when they return to their classrooms for term two next month.

They will also be banned from sharing food or pens, according to Department of Education rules.

Schools will also have to post any new COVID-19 cases that affect their school to their Facebook page to keep parents and caregivers informed, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Teachers will have to watch young students wash their hands to ensure they are doing it properly.

Hand sanitiser will be available in all classrooms and provisions are in place for at-risk teachers to work from home.

Drop off, pick up, recess and lunchtimes will also be staggered to ensure social distancing.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced this week the plan for children to gradually return to schools from May 11.

The plan will see students return for one day a week to ensure they comply with social distancing measures.

The education department plans to increase the number of days students are at school in a staged way and hope to have all children back at school full-time by Term 3.

During the first stage of on-campus learning, parents will be encouraged to keep their children home except on their allocated day of face-to-face learning. Initially, about a quarter of a school’s students are expected to be on site at any one time. 

Classes will be split across schools, allowing schools to appropriately social distance students and teachers.

'We are grateful to all families who kept their children home from school at the end of Term 1 and to teachers who worked tirelessly to deliver education online,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'This allowed us critical time to prepare our schools to develop better online learning options and for considering additional hygiene measures to allow schools to return.

'We know that nothing is more important than a child’s education, and we must begin to return our students to their classrooms in a considered way.'

Most students began remote learning in March after the Premier asked parents to keep their children at home.

SOURCE  






UBI still an unbelievably bad idea

Opportunists across the political spectrum have been emboldened by the current crisis to propose all manner of terrible ideas.

And among the worst is the universal basic income (UBI) —  a payment to all citizens, unconditional on income or wealth, without any obligation to be in work or study.

Supporters have seized on the government’s pandemic JobKeeper scheme as evidence we’re finally ready to embrace a UBI.

Of course, fans see it as panacea in good and bad times alike.

In good times, it’s the supposed solution to virtually all economic, ecological, and social ills. And in the current crisis, they argue a UBI is uniquely suited to deal with the surge of unemployed, the strain on the welfare system, and the apparent fiscal willingness to spend.

But not only are they wrong to equate JobKeeper with a UBI, they’re also mistaken that the coronanomics support their case anyway.

The JobKeeper payment imposes an effective wage floor for those employed in businesses facing an immediate, massive fall in revenue. These extraordinary circumstances are expected to be temporary, and when the crisis eventually ends, so does the payment. The worker is expected to go back to work, or to seek work on Newstart.

That’s a far cry from the UBI, which is not only permanent, but also is designed to remove the obligation to seek work.

Moreover, UBI proponents fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the economic conditions and today’s world of work.

Rather than a permanent reduction in the demand for labour, the present shutdown is a temporary contraction in labour demand due to forced closures and social distancing (with related reductions in short run supply).

Moreover, if economic life under social distancing has taught us anything, it’s that work has been supported, not threatened, by technology (exactly the opposite of what UBI supporters have been claiming). Indeed, technological integration into work — and study for that matter — has been a lifeline, saving jobs and livelihoods for many.

The other claim is that the government’s unprecedented spending allegedly reflects a willingness for meeting a UBI’s exorbitant price tag. But the government’s big-spending economic rescue package has been forced by a temporary crisis; there is no evidence of a commitment to permanently bigger government.

Moreover, when the costs are being counted, there’ll surely be little left in the piggy bank to fund a UBI.

Good policy options in this crisis are hard to come by and there’s no shortage of terrible ones being prosecuted. Despite what the economic illiterates say, a UBI remains an unbelievably bad idea.

SOURCE  






'Ready to go': Drought's end in sight after rains and more to come

Garry Hall, a cattle breeder, has had more rain since February than for all of 2018 and 2019, and the Macquarie River is flowing past his property at the rate of a billion litres a day.

And yet, as welcoming as the rains have been, they are well short of drought-breaking for his farm in northern NSW and the nearby Ramsar-listed wetlands. Both have struggled through a once-in-a-century dry spell.

"A large area of the Macquarie Marshes hasn't seen water yet," Mr Hall said. "It's pretty important to get it in there to start the long journey back".

That journey, though, has begun after widespread rain over NSW and other eastern states this year. Catchments have become wetter so follow-up falls will be more likely to create run-off and reach dams across the Murray Darling Basin. Odds for such rainfall have also improved for coming months.

Bureau of Meteorology charts show moisture level in the top 100 centimetres of soil improved sharply between last December and last month. NSW shows some of the biggest changes.

Still, Matthew Coulton, the bureau's acting general manager for water, said "drought means something different to everyone you talk to ... I don't think it's over for anyone yet". "It's important to remember that long droughts can have periods of green. It was 36 months of very hot and dry weather that led to the conditions we saw at Christmas," he said.

"It will take a lot more than two or three wet months to fill dams and get regional communities back on their feet."

Little of the rain has reached the big dams on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range. Burrendong Dam, which supplies much of the water for the Macquarie River, remains at 16.4 per cent full, while Keepit Dam on the Namoi is at just 13.7 per cent.

WaterNSW data shows catchment inflows of major rivers so far lag the most big flows in 2016-17.

Those dams and rivers, though, could be in for a relative wet winter and even into spring, as climatic conditions favouring above-average rains set in, according to the latest bureau outlook.

Waters in the Indian Ocean off north-western Western Australia are warmer than usual, a set-up that typically produces clouds that deliver moisture across Australia's centre and south-east, said Andrew Watkins, head of the bureau's long-range forecasting.

"If one of those north-west cloudbands interacts with a cold front or a cut-off low ? that's when we get some big rainfall totals over a large area," Dr Watkins said.

With higher soil moisture levels and more cloud cover, overnight temperatures across most of Australia will also likely be milder than normal, he said. Days will be closer to average warmth.

"The drought's broken when Burrendong is full," said Mr Hall, adding the outlook for the Macquarie catchment is promising.

"Orange and Bathurst haven't had much rain ? you wouldn't say it's oozing water," he said. Still, "it's primed, it's wet and ready to go".

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






27 April, 2020

Coronavirus: We’re paying a high price for saving not many lives

The most absurd document published by an Australian government in recent times must be from Victoria’s Health and Human Services Department, which claimed 36,000 Victorians would have died from COVID-19 without the tough lockdowns brought in by Premier Daniel Andrews.

I understand governments, having made very costly interventions, have a strong incentive to “prove” how necessary they were. But surely the department could have been less ridiculous than claiming more than 0.5 per cent of the state’s entire population would have died? That’s far worse than anything Italy, Spain or New York has experienced so far. That’s a much greater share of Australians left dead than the vastly more lethal Spanish flu managed a century ago (0.28 per cent, according to recent research by Harvard economists), when doctors didn’t even have antibiotics.

Sweden, with a population half as large again as Victoria’s, has endured a little over 2000 deaths, and it has not imposed stage three lockdowns. Its cafes and bars have stayed open, with limited ­capacity.

“Some 36,000 Victorians would have died,” the 10-page analysis warns. “We have acted early and decisively to avoid catastrophic outcomes.”

New Zealand, which has become the poster child for fans of tough lockdown, now has 17 deaths attributed to COVID-19 — more than Australia, where states have gone nowhere near as far, adjusted for population.

Based on the simplistic Victorian analysis, Japan, South Korea and Sweden, which haven’t gone into lockdowns along Victorian lines, can expect deaths of 635,000, 256,000 and 51,500. These ­nations, all flirting with “catastrophe” according to Victoria, have respective death tolls so far of 330, 240 and 2021.

Garbage in, garbage out.

“Currently, the estimated Reff (the number of people an infected person will infect) in Victoria is 0.5; if Reff is kept below 1, an outbreak will slowly wane,” the Victorian analysis says.

Remarkably, analysis presented by Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy on Friday, based on an analysis of actual infection trends, estimated that the Reff was below 1 in every state and territory before the stage three lockdowns took effect late last month. In other words, the virus was waning in response to stage one and two restrictions (which caused much less economic damage) already.

However many lives the more onerous restrictions have saved, the cost is looking enormous and far more than we typically spend to save lives. If we’d followed the Swedish trajectory we might, crudely, have an extra 4500 fatalities by now (our population is 2½ times the size).

For the federal government alone, that works out at $48m per life saved, given the $214bn in budgeted federal assistance.

That’s more than 10 times the conventional estimate for the statistical value of a human life — “how much society is willing to pay to reduce the risk of death” — according to a 2014 federal government document from the Office of Best Practice Regulation.

And that’s only the raw cost to taxpayers of saving the life, not the bigger social and economic costs flowing from economic shutdown to slow the coronavirus.

Even if deaths mount considerably, as they are likely to, the excess focus on preventing COVID-19 deaths, as opposed to the 3000 other deaths a week in Australia, is likely to remain.

Ben Mol, a professor of obstetrics at Monash University, and Jonathan Karnon, a professor at Flinders University Medical Institute, argue what matters is life years saved, not lives per se. The median age of death from COVID-19 has been around 80 in Sweden and Australia.

This suggests an even greater over-reaction. “Assuming a willingness to pay $70,000 per life year saved, then Australia would, from a rational perspective, be prepared to pay not more than $3.8bn to justify the gained life years,” they tell Inquirer.

That’s about 1.2 per cent of the $320bn the government and Reserve Bank intend to spend to counteract stage three lockdowns, for which there’s no evidence.

“Non-emergency healthcare has stopped, resulting in significantly fewer people presenting with acute heart problems, stroke and other serious illnesses, which is causing unnecessary deaths. Some cancer screening has also ceased,” the two doctors say.

“Sweden is saving the 50-year-old from dying from cancer, stroke or a heart attack, while Australia saves the 79-year-old to die from COVID-19 at an economic cost which is a multiple of what we would normally allow in health care. We all wish we could save both, but that bid is not on the table,” they add.

To be sure, Sweden’s economy, heavily linked to the rest of Europe, still more or less in lockdown, has been hit hard, but its businesses have a greater chance of hanging on. Its jobless rate is expected to rise from about 7 per cent to 10 per cent, a far smaller increase than is expected here.

And people can still sit in the park, swim at the local pool and meet friends for dinner — which, while hard to put a dollar figure on, must be worth something.

Sweden refutes the idea that everyone would be cowering in their home even without severe restrictions. After all, in Europe 5 per cent of deaths from coronavirus are under-60s, and swathes of the population have it already.

Sweden won’t have to borrow as much, either: according to the International Monetary Fund, Australia’s stimulus effort — the biggest in the world — amounts to 10.6 per cent of gross domestic product; Sweden’s is 2.2 per cent.

The crisis has created an opportunity for extremists to remodel society with a much larger role for government, as former treasurer Peter Costello warned this week. Calls to permanently lift taxes, turn the JobKeeper payment into a universal basic income and nationalise swathes of the economy have grown louder.

The health sector unions and doctors will probably use the virus as leverage to obtain pay increases, even though only 43 people were in intensive care as of Friday because of coronavirus. Others simply enjoy seeing the growth of state control. After World War II, businesses that benefited from controls ­wanted to keep things as they were.

“No Australian wants to see hundreds of Australians dying a day of coronavirus,” Murphy said yesterday. No one does, but we need to be aware of the costs of saving some lives over others. Sadly, resources are limited.

We must ask whether we’re prepared to pay similar sums to save individual lives in the future. From the health sector’s standpoint, taxpayers can never spend too much on health. On April 1, Victoria ordered an extra 4000 intensive care beds (from existing capacity of 450), 551 million gloves and 100 million masks and 14.5 million gowns at a cost of about $2.5bn. Only 20 ­people were in an intensive care unit in Victoria yesterday from coronavirus.

When pandemic best-practice guides are written in coming years, having a well-resourced health system is likely to figure more highly than shutting down swathes of the economy. We might not be able to afford another response like this.

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Queensland and Western Australia to lift some social distancing restrictions

As Australia successfully flattens the coronavirus curve, some states have decided to cautiously relax restrictions.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced some of the state's strict isolation measures would be relaxed on Saturday, May 2.

Speaking with reporters Sunday, Ms Palaszczuk said Queenslanders would be able to shop for non-essential items, go driving and have picnics.

They will also be allowed to meet with people not from their households and travel within 50km of their home.

Western Australian Premier Mack McGowan followed suit, announcing today that it would relax the two-person limit on indoor and outdoor gatherings from tomorrow, Monday, April 27. Up to 10 people will be allowed to gather for non-work activities, as the state recorded another day of no new COVID-19 cases.

The Premier stressed the changes were minor and that if Queenslanders did not act sensibly, the restrictions would be enforced again.

"I know these sound like strict rules, everyone, but we are in different times and I'm trying to be flexible and listen to what the public is saying," she said.

“So, if you are over 65 or over 70, and I know it’s really difficult for people being at home for long extended periods of time, I would suggest going for a drive during the week, Monday-Friday. Because on the weekends, it’s family time, and you won’t be in contact with children who are either being home schooled or the children of essential workers who are at school.”

She also explained that families would be able to have picnics, or if you are single, you can go with one other person.

“You will be able to go shopping for non-essential items like clothes and shoes. So at the moment, people are going out for essential items like going to the pharmacy and going to the grocery store,” she said. “Well, you will now be able to go to get a pair of shoes or to get a new shirt.

“But once again, we don’t want you spending hours in those shopping areas. It’s about making your list and going there, getting what you need and then coming home.

“Also, you’ll be able to go to national parks. We’ll be reopening our national parks, but the day use areas will not be open, nor will the toilets.”

Queensland was the first Australian state to relax COVID-19 restrictions after recording just three new cases of coronavirus on Saturday.

Here is what you need to know about Queensland’s plans.

WHEN:

 * It starts 11.59pm Friday, so effectively people will be free to move around on Saturday onwards for recreational purposes.

HOW FAR CAN I TRAVEL?:

 * Travel has been restricted to 50km from your place of residence to prevent mass movement of people between cities and towns.

ARE SOCIAL DISTANCING MEASURES RELAXED?:

 * Definitely not. Social distancing of 1.5m and hygiene must be maintained and if it’s not adhered to, stay-at-home restrictions could return.

 * All other rules on gatherings, including limitations on the number of people who can visit a household, remain in place

CAN I CATCH UP WITH FRIENDS OR JUST FAMILY?

 * Only members of the same household are permitted to gather in public, so it’s not a chance to party in a park.

WHAT CAN I DO?

 * You’re allowed to go for a drive for up to 50km from your home

 * You’re permitted to ride a motorbike, jetski or even spend time on a boat for pleasure

 * Shopping for non-essential items is also allowed but it does not mean the business you are visiting will be allowed to open

 * You can have a picnic with a family or visit a national park but be mindful toilet facilities will NOT be open.

 * The Queensland Government will review COVID-19 restrictions again in a fortnight.

SOURCE  





Coalition is aiming to change Australia's environment laws before review is finished

The environment minister, Sussan Ley, has flagged the government may change Australia’s national environment laws before a review is finished later this year.

Ley said she would introduce “early pieces of legislation” to parliament if she could to “really get moving with reforming and revitalising one of our signature pieces of environmental legislation”.

It follows business groups and the government emphasising the need to cut red tape as part of the economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis, and comes as the businessman Graeme Samuel chairs an independent statutory review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. An interim report is due in June, followed by a final report in October.

When the review was announced, the government said it would be used to “tackle green tape” and speed up project approvals.
Conservation plans help boost threatened mammals, scientists find

Environmental organisations have stressed the need for tougher environmental protections to stem Australia’s high rate of extinction. Australia has lost more than 50 animal and 60 plant species in the past 200 years and recorded the highest rate of mammalian extinction in the world over that period.

Ley said, with the interim report due by the middle of the year, she expected Samuel would “in the course of the review, identify a range of measures that we can take to prevent unnecessary delays and improve environmental standards”.

“Where there are opportunities to make sensible changes ahead of the final EPBC review report, I will be prepared to do so,” she said.

On Thursday, Ley and the prime minister, Scott Morrison, said work was already under way to speed up environmental assessments of projects and that the number of on time “key decisions” in the EPBC process had improved from 19% in the December quarter to 87% in the March quarter.

An environment department spokesman said key decisions covered three items in the assessment process: the decision on whether a project requires assessment under the act, the decision on what assessment method will be used, and the final decision on whether or not to approve the project.

“For the December quarter 2019, the Department met 19% of the 80 key decisions due that quarter. This increased to meeting the statutory timeframes for 87% of the 61 key decisions due in the March quarter 2020,” he said.

The environment department also publishes annual data on the percentage of EPBC-related decisions that are made on time. This data covers several types of decisions in the assessment process, not just the final approval of a project.
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In the 2018-19 financial year, 60% of decisions were made on time.

But it is not just project assessments that are subject to delays. Species assessments and recovery planning timeframes have also become longer in recent years.

Brendan Sydes, the chief executive of Environmental Justice Australia, said there was nothing preventing the government from making changes to the act before the review was complete. But he said it would be “a bit strange to act on draft recommendations rather than the final report”.

“Clearly the draft will be the first opportunity people have to scrutinise or see what the Samuel review is likely to recommend,” Sydes said.

He said the review was about more than just streamlining the act and there were other important priorities, including improving protections for threatened species.

“It really ought to be treated as a comprehensive package of reform if there are to be reforms after the review,” he said.

“No one opposes the act being as efficient and effective as possible but we really need to have a focus on the objectives the act is attempting to achieve, rather than streamlining and processes.”

David Morris, the chief executive of the Environmental Defenders Office, said there could be instances where it was sensible to propose legislative changes before the review was complete, but it would depend on what was being proposed. “We’re supportive of sensible changes to legislation,” he said.

But he added the government “would want to avoid any perception that they were making poor environmental decisions and then fast-tracking those at a time when people are distracted by a major pandemic”.

Amelia Young, the national campaigns director for The Wilderness Society, warned against the idea that cutting environmental protections could act as an economic stimulus measure once Covid-19 restrictions are eased.

“Weaker environmental protections and fast-tracked infrastructure approvals are not part of a safe and positive future for Australia as we recover from the coronavirus challenge,” she said.

Young said many Coalition MPs had shown concern over the suffering and loss of wildlife during the bushfire season and were aware of heightened environmental concern in the community.

“Many government MPs met with our local membership groups and discussed the issue at length. These MPs well know that there is huge community support towards better protecting Australia’s natural environment,” she said.

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'The risk is in the staff room, not the classroom': Scott Morrison takes a swipe at teachers' complaining about going back to work - telling them they are no different to supermarket staff and bus drivers

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has criticised the teachers' unions for protesting the return to classrooms.

Mr Morrison has urged states to urgently reopen schools on advice from Australia's top health adviser - saying that students do not pose a risk of spreading coronavirus.

But Mr Morrison’s insistence that classrooms are safe has drawn mixed reactions, with some unions threatening to stand firm against returning to normal operations.

In some states, teachers' unions have continued to urge families not to send children to school.

'I mean, we’ve got people who are going to work in supermarkets every day,' Mr Morrison told Sky News.

'We’ve got people who are doing jobs all over the community, driving buses, and they’re doing great work and they’re turning up to work to do those things.'

Mr Morrison said the risk for teachers was 'not in the classroom; their risk is in the staffroom'.

There is mounting evidence to back the medical advice that children are less prone to catching and spreading COVID-19.

Chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said NSW Health has done a large study including testing children with no virus symptoms and found no evidence they were transmitting the disease.

'This is quite different from influenza, where we know they are sometimes super-spreaders and can spread the virus,' he told reporters on Friday.

'Most children who have contracted the virus in Australia have contracted it in the family home ... not contracted it in the school environment.'

The health advice says appropriate workplace safety measures should be taken to protect teachers, including cleaning door handles, desks, computers, hand-rails and playground equipment several times a day.

The advice also says classroom furniture should leave as much space between students as possible and children should be encouraged to keep 1.5m apart from others when entering classrooms or during break times.

Teachers have been told to keep 1.5m apart from each other in staff rooms, but Scott Morrison said the measure does not apply to students in classrooms.

'The four square metre rule and the 1.5m distancing between students during classroom activities is not appropriate and not required. I can't be more clear than that,' he told reporters.

Mr Morrison also emphasised there was no requirement for minimum floor space per person, unlike other enclosed areas such as shops.

However, unions have slammed the Prime Minister's advice as contradictory, and are adamant social distancing measures are vital to ensure the safety of their members.

In a statement, the Australian Education Union said the social distancing guidelines 'provide little clarity about how governments are going to ensure a safe working environment for teachers, principals and support staff'.

'It is still not clear how governments expect schools to manage social distancing for adults. It is contradictory to have one set of rules for adults outside of the school gate and another inside,' the union's federal president Correna Haythorpe said.

They also hold concerns the requirements around regular cleaning and making sure soap or hand sanitiser is freely available are not being met.

Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin Bates indicated he was open to observing the government's notion to gradually reopen classrooms, but more information was needed on why schools are exempt from the 4sqm rule.

The QTU will consult with the state government and examine the findings of the NSW study on Monday. 

The Queensland government will review its decision to close classrooms to all students other than those from families of essential workers and vulnerable children on May 15.

In Victoria, all students are encouraged to learn from home for term two, but schools will remain open for vulnerable children and children of essential workers.

AEU Victorian president Meredith Peace slammed Mr Scott Morrison's directive.

'It is ­bizarre that the Prime Minister has been ­telling us for six weeks how important social distancing is but today he has basically said that it no longer matters for students or teachers,' she said, The Australian reports.

'Throughout this pandemic we’ve been worried that many seem to be neglecting the health and safety of teachers, and these comments only reinforce that. While we’re as keen as anyone to return to normal life, including a return to school, we must plan that return carefully to ensure the ­safety of both staff and students.' 

In a full-page newspaper advertisement published on Friday, the State School Teachers' Union of WA urged parents too keep their children home if possible - against the government's advice.

The union made reference to physical distancing guidelines issued by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, claiming they can be adhered to when schools have limited numbers 'but not when they are full'.

Education Minister Sue Ellery condemned the advertisement as 'misleading'. 'The AHPPC advice has been from the beginning, and is now, that because of the low risk of transmission, schools are safe for staff and students and should stay open,' she told 6PR radio.

'There is reference to distancing but it's about very specific things.'

In Western Australia, classes will open for all government school students from Wednesday but attendance will not be enforced.

SSTUWA president Pat Byrne later issued a statement claiming the union's position was 'consistent with the state government's approach'.

'Teachers support the managed return of face-to-face teaching, as part of an approach which is consistent with the gradual easing of school distancing requirements by government,' it said.

'Support them by keeping your kids home if you can - then we can make schools as safe as possible until we can all be back at school together.'

NSW schools are due to return for one day a week from May 11, the third week of term two, with a gradual progression to full-time learning as restrictions are eased.

South Australian students will ­return to school next week.

The school debate runs alongside other government initiatives to relax COVID-19 restrictions.

On Friday, the national cabinet ­released ten principles to make workplaces safe, and is focusing on strategies to get people back playing sport.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






26 April, 2020

Mesoblast treatment achieves "remarkable" results for critical Covid-19 patients

An Australian-developed stem cell treatment has drastically increased survival rates in trials for ventilator-dependent patients suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to Covid-19.

Melbourne-based regenerative medicine company Mesoblast (ASX: MSB, NASDAQ: MESO) has been engaged in trials with New York City's Mt Sinai hospital to intravenously infuse its product remestemcel-L in patients, and the early signs are promising.

The sample size of 12 patients may be small, but 83 per cent (10) of them have survived after the stem cell treatment compared to a 12 per cent survival rate for ventilator-dependent Covid-19 patients with the condition at a major referral hospital network in the city.

Mesoblast reports 75 per cent of the patients (9) were able to come off ventilator support within a median of 10 days, compared to a 9 per cent rate for patients treated with standard of care during March and April.

Seven of the patients, who were given remestemcel-L within five days under emergency compassionate use, have been discharged from the hospital.

Using bone marrow aspirate from healthy donors, Mesoblast's proprietary technology is currently used to treat a condition called acute graft versus host disease (aGVHD), which many suffer after receiving a bone marrow transplant (BMT).

But as the Covid-19 pandemic took centre stage, the company hypothesised Remestemcel-L would be able to treat what is known as a cytokine storm in the lungs that often occurs with serious Covid-19 cases.

The company then quickly mobilised plans for trials in the US, Australia, China and Europe.

"The remarkable clinical outcomes in these critically ill patients continue to underscore the potential benefits of remestemcel-L as an anti-inflammatory agent in cytokine release syndromes associated with high mortality, including acute graft versus host disease and Covid-19 ARDS," says Mesoblast chief executive Dr Silviu Itescu.

"We intend to rapidly complete the randomized, placebo-controlled Phase 2/3 trial in COVID-19 ARDS patients to rigorously confirm that remestemcel-L improves survival in these critically ill patients.

The company's chief medical officer Dr Fred Grossman emphasises a significant need to improve the "dismal survival outcomes in COVID-19 patients who progress to ARDS and require ventilators".

"We have implemented robust statistical analyses in our Phase 2/3 trial as recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to maximise our ability to evaluate whether remestemcel-L provides a survival benefit in moderate/severe COVID19 ARDS," he says.

SOURCE  






Much ado over a minor crisis

Keep a sense of historical perspective

Tom Switzer

This has been the week of doomsayers. Forecasters talk about double-digit unemployment. A major airline has gone into voluntary administration. Businesses of all kinds are retrenching staff. Employees are sacrificing their salaries. We face a massive amount of debt. We clearly face hard times.

But it may help us get through them if the Australian people keep a sense of history and perspective. Remember nothing on the horizon suggests we face sufferings of the kind that were commonplace a century ago. Those were the days of a world war (62,000 Australians were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner), a much deadlier pandemic than Covid-19 (we suffered more than 12,000 deaths during the Spanish influenza in 1918-19) and a Great Depression (many did not find new employment until the Second World War).

As we commemorate Anzac Day this weekend, bear in mind that our troubles in coming months look pretty paltry alongside those of our grandparents and great-grand parents.

Yes, the coronavirus crisis threatens many with disappointments and distress. But we should recognise that the sacrifices demanded from us will be infinitely smaller than those of past generations in crises of war and depression. And we should recognise that if Australia recovers from the Covid-19 economic shock, our leaders should put in place the kinds of economic reforms –- tax, workplace, infrastructure, superannuation, education – that CIS has long supported.

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Coronavirus Australia: Everything Scott Morrison announced on Friday

Prime Minister Scott Morrison highlighted how suppression of coronavirus in Australia was working, while addressing several other issues on Friday.

Mr Morrison noted “the good progress that has been made”, pointing out how NSW was now encouraging anyone with symptoms of the virus to get tested.

He said we were now in the third phase of the outbreak, the “community phase”, where the virus actually moved within our own community.

The National Cabinet, after meeting again on Friday, agreed to expand testing criteria across Australia to all people with mild symptoms of COVID-19.

Mr Morrison said this would ensure cases were quickly identified. “This is a very important pillar of how we will be dealing with this virus going forward into the future,” he said.

“We already have one of the most, if not most, comprehensive testing regimes in the world, and this is a key, a key tool for us going forward.”

WEARING MASKS NOT NECESSARY

Mr Morrison said National Cabinet had accepted the advice of the medical expert panel that “it is not recommended” that masks are “necessary to be worn”.

“It's not about protecting you from infection. But that's why, when people were leaving airports and things of that nature, they were wearing them to prevent the transmission,” he said.

Chief medical officer Brendan Murphy backed him up. “We have very low case numbers in Australia, and these masks often aren't of particularly good quality, and they often provide a false sense of security and make people not practice the social distancing measures that we want,” Professor Murphy said.

“So we are not recommending the general community wear masks. We have been saying that consistently through the pandemic.”

Mr Morrison said the 4 square metre rule, and 1.5-metre distancing between students during classroom activities, “is not appropriate and not required”.

The exemption left some parents confused, but Mr Morrison said the advice from medical experts was clear. “I can't be more clear than that,” he said in a press conference.

Mr Morrison said that was based on advice from Australian Health Protection Principal Committee.

The government's expert medical panel is preparing a series of recommendations on easing some restrictions on social gatherings.

In three weeks’ time, National Cabinet will meet to consider a roll back of strict measures designed to slow the spread of coronavirus, thanks to Australia’s success in flattening the curve.

Aged care homes across Australia were put on notice to stop leaving seniors locked down in their rooms over coronavirus fears, and banning visitors and carers.

As families complain some aged care homes are taking a draconian approach to patient safety, Mr Morrison urged providers to do the right thing.

“Having people stuck in their rooms, not being able to be visited by their loved ones and carers and other support people, that's not OK,” he said. “We are not going to have these as secret places, where people can't access them. They must.”

The much-discussed coronavirus tracing app still isn't ready, but Mr Morrison said it was “not far away”. “We're making great progress,” he said.

“The app will soon by released. There are still some issues we're working through late in the piece, which is to be expected. We're not too far away now.

“Earlier this week, as I indicated to you, it received the in principle support of the National Cabinet, and we have been taking that through its final stages in recent days.”

National Cabinet has agreed to a set of “COVID-19 Safe Workplace” principles.

“This is all about getting Australians back to work and ensuring that, when they go back to work, that they and their families can feel safe,” Mr Morrison said.

“It's to ensure that there are important principles in place, there are protocols and procedures that, should a COVID-19 case present in a workplace, then the rules that people need to follow.”

SOURCE  






'This is not a one-off hit': Sydney universities cut courses and casual staff

Western Sydney University has warned staff it will cut casual workloads next semester as it faces mounting financial shortfalls over the next three years due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It comes amid mounting concern about casual workforces across the state's universities, with Sydney University slashing 30 per cent of its arts courses and one-third of casuals at the University of NSW reporting they've lost work.

"This is not a one-off hit," WSU Vice-Chancellor Barney Glover told staff via video link on Thursday. "The challenge is bigger in 2021 [and 2022] than it is in 2020."

The university has flagged a $90 million shortfall in 2020, which could grow to between $120 and $130 million in 2021 and 2022 as travel restrictions remain in place and anticipated growth fails to materialise.

University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Paul Wellings on Thursday also revealed a shortfall of $90 million linked to COVID-19 restrictions, which he said would have "compounding effects for subsequent years".

Wollongong executive leadership will take a 20 per cent pay cut for 12 months and freeze non-essential external recruitment.

Professor Glover said WSU would compensate by increasing domestic student numbers and reducing expenditure, including by cutting its casual budget in semester two while courses were predominantly delivered online.

Casual staff will be prioritised for work on new six-month online courses created by the federal government's higher education relief package, but Professor Glover said the scheme did not "go far enough for the sector at the moment".

"We don’t believe the Commonwealth has done enough to support international students," he said, noting WSU was considering reducing fees for international students.

But Professor Glover said the University of Sydney and UNSW were in a more difficult predicament, facing budget shortfalls of $470 million and $600 million respectively this year.

Sydney University's arts and social science faculty has been told to cut its courses by almost a third next semester to reduce the cost of casual staff as revenue plummets due to COVID-19.

Academics have been asked to target courses that were not essential to the progress of a degree, even if students had already enrolled in them.

Resources needed to be focused on core units to focus on the quality of subjects still on offer, and to save money "to ameliorate the impact of a downturn on staffing into 2021", one school within the faculty was told in an email. "The 30 per cent reduction will have impacts on student choice, staff teaching and the availability of casual work."

A report compiled by the University of NSW Casuals Network showed that one in three casuals at the university had lost work this month, costing them an average of $626 a week, and 42 per cent were working unpaid hours.

Higher education workers do not qualify for the federal government’s JobKeeper scheme.

A spokeswoman for Sydney University said the reduction of courses offered by the arts and social sciences faculty was unrelated to COVID-19, and was designed to ensure the school could "operate sustainably in the medium to long term".

The university had also asked managers to look at workloads. "We anticipate we will contract fewer casual teachers for semester two than previously projected. To date, we have no plans to terminate anyone’s employment," she said.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here




24 April, 2020

Massive win for Israel Folau as footy star beats a discrimination complaint and starts cashing in on Rugby Australia payouts - while his former teammates are forced to take pay cuts

A gay rights activist who likened himself to a vicious dog before going after Israel Folau for a homophobic Instagram post has had a complaint to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board torpedoed for being 'vexatious'.

Campaigner Garry Burns wrote to the government watchdog in December, complaining about the former rugby player's infamous Instagram post claiming 'hell awaits' gay people.

Mr Burns also complained about Folau's comments in a video church sermon linking severe droughts and unprecedented bushfires to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in late 2017.

NSW Anti-Discrimination Board president Annabelle Bennett last week wrote to Mr Burns 'declining' the complaint because she was satisfied it was vexatious and 'a flagrant abuse of process such that no further actions should be taken'.

The major legal win comes as Folau starts to cash in on his payout from Rugby Australia as current players begin to take major pay cuts to keep the game afloat.

Israel Folau and his wife, former netball player Maria Folau, pose together in a selfie posted on social media    +4
Israel Folau and his wife, former netball player Maria Folau, pose together in a selfie posted on social media

Dr Bennett found Mr Burns had not pursued the complaint under the state's Anti-Discrimination Act 'in order to avail himself of the processes afforded under the legislation but for a collateral purpose, as a means to pressure the respondent to settle with him'.

The president wrote that the inference was that the settlement sought by Mr Burns was 'directed to the payment of money'.

Dr Bennett noted the activist had disregarded the confidential nature of the process by issuing a media release which stated, in part: 'Fellas, I'm just like a vicious Alsatian dog. Once I grab hold of the leg, I don't let go until the bone is bare and bloodied. One way or another, I will get that remedy from Mr Folau'.

Dr Bennett also wrote that Mr Burns had sent numerous 'inappropriate' emails to Mr Folau's lawyers.

In response to Wednesday's ruling, Mr Burns has written to the Anti-Discrimination Board seeking his complaint be referred to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

Mr Burns stated that Folau's alleged breach was public 'and so is my work in defence of homosexuals'.  Mr Burns has previously demanded an apology and a $100,000 donation to charity.

The sacked Wallabies star sparked outrage on April 10 last year when he posted the homophobic comments on Instagram.

Folau's lucrative contract was torn up by Rugby Australia boss Raelene Castle before he launched legal action and reached a multi-million dollar settlement in December.

The terms of the settlement were kept private but is believed to be worth about $3million - the remainder of his four-year contract, after originally seeking a whopping $14 million.

According to The Australian, the settlement is being paid off in instalments with those payments at risk should Rugby Australia go under if forced into insolvency.

The payout comes as Rugby Australia makes painful budget cuts with some players sacrificing up to 60 per cent of the salaries.

Folau could end up better off financially than his former teammates who can't take the field while the sport is suspended due to the coronavirus.

The former rugby union star has since signed with Super League side the Catalans Dragons.

SOURCE  






Brethren church provides food boxes to Queenslanders in quarantine

The Brethren are very fundamentalist -- if being loyal to the Bible makes you fundamentalist  -- JR

Aussie charity, the Rapid Relief Team (RRT), has partnered up with the Queensland Government to deliver hundreds of donated food boxes to Queenslanders in COVID-19 self-quarantine.

The RRT is working with the Queensland Community Recovery service (QCR) to support individuals and families in self-quarantine by providing food boxes to those who may be struggling or otherwise unable to leave their home.

Hundreds of food boxes have been packed by RRT volunteers from the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC), who of course did so while observing Government health advice and social distancing measures.

They will be delivered to individuals and families all across Queensland, most of whom are temporary or casual workers, and who are in self-quarantine at home.

RRT Managing Director Ron Arkcoll said care and compassion were at the core of RRT’s outreach programs and said they were thrilled to be able to offer a small gesture of help to those who needed it.

“While we know the covid-19 crisis continues to throw up never-before-seen challenges for us all, we are so humbled to be able to provide a small amount of relief to Queensland families who are currently in self-quarantine,” he said.

“Our volunteers are committed to supporting our local communities through these tough times.

“Whether that’s filling a family pantry with some staple food items or putting a smile on the face of a neighbour – from an appropriate distance! – we hope these small gestures go towards providing some relief.

“I want to thank the Queensland Government for their assistance and for always putting the people of Queensland first - and I also want to thank our RRT volunteers who go above and beyond every single time, no matter the need.

“In fact, in the last few days, one of our volunteers drove a 6-hour roundtrip to deliver a single food box to a family in quarantine –  it’s stories like these that truly represent the Aussie spirit of mateship – I couldn’t be prouder,” he said.

The RRT is currently supporting people in self-quarantine in Queensland who have been referred by the QCR, however, are working to expand support to other states.

Media enquiries: Lauren Devlin 0449 041 214





Coronavirus Canberra: Crazy Lake Burley Griffin rule amid pandemic

Canberra residents strolling around Lake Burley Griffin must now walk clockwise only following the introduction of an odd new rule designed to combat COVID-19.

The idea behind the policy is that social distancing measures will be more easily adhered to if pedestrians and cyclists are travelling in the same direction around the landmark.

Signs explaining the new requirement have already been placed around the lake, according to the National Capital Authority.

“Clockwise is COVID-wise. Remember 1.5m social distancing. Pedestrians and cyclists, please where possible travel in a clockwise direction around Lake Burley Griffin,” the signs read.

However, the rule will be voluntary only, and will not be enforced by authorities.

The suggestion has caused a stir on social media, where it was described as the “most Canberra solution ever” by journalist Tom McIlroy.

“Peak Canberra – turning the lake into one big roundabout,” one person joked, while another said: “This is surely left over from April 1.”

However, others took issue with the Government dictating “how to walk” while others argued the policy would do little to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

“Any traffic engineer will tell you that this will lead eventually to large groups of people in close proximity for a sustained period,” one Twitter user argued, while another said it “won’t stop people coming up behind you and running past ignoring distance”.

A National Capital Authority spokeswoman told news.com.au the area around the shores of Lake Burley Griffin was always popular with walkers and cyclists, especially during warm autumn days.

“The NCA continues to look for ways to assist the community at these times hence the uptake of the ‘Clockwise is Covid-wise’ campaign and (we) encourage all users to follow the initiative to assist with social distancing on the popular bridge to bridge walk,” the spokeswoman said.

“The walking paths afford plenty of open space for social distancing in a city environment and most users have been doing the right thing (by) complying with the 1.5m guidelines.”

She explained the campaign was an initiative by the Pedal Power cycling organisation and that the signs were erected on Wednesday this week to assist with social distancing.

She said walking and riding in the same direction would help residents maintain a recommended distance.

“We continue to monitor the central basin walk while we review options to reduce risk and encourage all to do the right thing at this heightened time,” the spokeswoman said.

“We also share responsibility of Lake usage with the ACT Government.”

The Canberra rule comes as the Government prepares to roll out a coronavirus tracking app which will be available for downloads within weeks.

The app is voluntary, with Health Minister Greg Hunt insisting to ABC News it will come with “very strong privacy protections”.

“The app is one of the elements that will help us put in place the protections and precautions to take the road out,” he said.

“Our tracing is really doing very well. We have very strong public health units which means they can find out that if I’m diagnosed or you are diagnosed, whom we have been in contact with. The app will assist that process.”

And speaking on 2GB this morning, Prime Minister Scott Morrison acknowledged the frustrations caused by strict lockdown restrictions, but warned that easing them too soon could spell disaster.

SOURCE  






'Tell that to the families of the 175,000 dead': Model Elyse Knowles is slammed for calling the COVID-19 pandemic a 'GIFT' for the planet

Elyse Knowles called the deadly COVID-19 pandemic a 'gift' to the planet on Wednesday.

It didn't take long for the online backlash that followed, with many people branding the 27-year-old model's comments as 'idiotic'.

As of Wednesday evening, there have been 2,578,930 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, which have resulted in 178,096 deaths. 

'People have lost their lives. This is no gift from the planet. It's a tragic illness killing thousands. Idiotic comments,' one person wrote.

Meanwhile, another person wrote: 'So from Brunswick to Byron and now you're an expert? Yes things have changed but at what cost? Clearly the human cost means nothing to you.'  

But there were some people who agreed with Elyse and rushed to support the model by voicing their opinions online.

'Probably not the context but she’s right. Extremely sad and unfortunate that deaths are occurring but the facts speak for themselves globally with drops in pollution and consumption, higher air quality and clear water channels,' one person wrote.

'Humans are the plague of the earth and in lock down the world is starting to slowly heal itself before we start destroying it again,' another person agreed. 

Elyse's original comments came during an interview with A Conscious Collection on Wednesday for Earth Day. 

'While the spread of coronavirus has been devastating in countless ways, if we look for a silver-lining we’ll find the gift it’s given our planet,' she said.

The Myer ambassador went on to list the benefits including cleaner air, 'glistening' beaches and rivers and wildlife enjoying 'a safer home' as people stay home to practise social distancing.

'Mother Nature has proven to us all that by minimising the collective human footprint, our world can take a breath and re-set,' she continued.

'It’s ignited the fire in my belly to keep advocating for positive change! We have ONE world. We have to treat it with absolute care.'

Elyse is a passionate environmental advocate who moved to Byron Bay with her boyfriend Josh Barker last year in order to live a more environmentally conscious life.

Meanwhile, Elyse was criticised last month for sharing photos from her camping trip to Moreton Island in Queensland.

The former Block contestant left fans fuming after she uploaded a picture of herself and Josh alongside a gushing caption about their 'magical week'.

Responding to the backlash, Elyse explained that she hadn't been aware of the severity of the pandemic when she and Josh set out on their holiday.

'A lot has changed in a week, let alone daily. We were away last week, and it was more so we weren't near anyone,' she wrote.

As soon as they became aware of the severity of the situation, she said, they made every effort to return home to Byron Bay.

There are currently 6,647 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, with 74 deaths.

SOURCE 

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





23 April, 2020

Zero Qld COVID cases but restrictions stay

Queensland is refusing to relax its COVID-19 social-distancing restrictions despite no cases being recorded overnight.

Queensland has recorded zero coronavirus cases for the second time this week as the health minister urged aged care homes' bosses to allow loved ones to visit.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk beamed as she announced there were no overnight cases and the state's total of confirmed cases remains at 1024. The state has undertaken more than 90,000 tests.

"So, that's two zero cases this week. And we are really on the track to be smashing that curve," Ms Palaszczuk said.

She also called on Queenslanders to download a COVID-19 tracking app, which the federal government wants to roll out to monitor contact people may have with anyone who has tested positive.

She said the app would be a crucial step towards relaxing social distancing restrictions. "If we are going to ease restrictions down the track we will need Queenslanders to sign up to that app," she said

There are 20 people in hospitals around the state with seven in ICU, including six on ventilators.

Queensland Health will release a 'heat' map online from midday on Wednesday to indicate the hot spots for COVID-19 around the state while also detailing the number of recovered cases and those in quarantine.

It will also provide a regional breakdown of local government areas, which some other states are already doing.

"We're also going to have active cases, recovered cases, and community transmission," she said.

Health Minister Steven Miles said reports some aged care facilities were refusing visitors and not allowing residents out of their rooms were concerning. He urged "all of those aged-care homes across Queensland to allow family members in to see loved ones". "There is no need for aged care homes to be in lockdown. Families should be able to visit their loved ones," he said.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young agreed, saying the virus had so far been spread in aged care homes by staff, not visitors. "If you're unwell don't go and visit, but if you are well it's important to go and visit and it's important to go and talk to your relative on a regular basis," she said.

She said there were still monitoring a COVID-19 cluster  connected to Cairns Hospital but there were no new additional cases.

On Tuesday, it had been disclosed three COVID-19 cases were detected in Cairns Hospital after a Brisbane technician [a "diversity" hire] visited the pathology lab and was later diagnosed with the illness.

Testing in the far northern Queensland city is now being expanded to rule out further community transmission.

Initial contact tracing of lab staff found nothing but blood tests revealed three employees contracted the virus and have since recovered.

SOURCE  





As coronavirus cases continue to fall in Australia, a debate about the need for balance arises

The value of one human life is an old philosophical debate with no unanimous agreement but that the value is finite is generally seen as persuasive

Most Australians accept that temporarily shutting down large parts of the economy is a difficult but necessary part of beating the coronavirus.

But others are using the tough measures as an excuse to engage in a cruel debate that pits the lives of Australia’s elderly against the cost to the economy.

The journal Science first floated the question in late March when it published research under the headline: Experts weigh lives versus economics.

The article discussed the dilemma being faced by macroeconomists who were “more familiar with gauging how interest rates might influence employment”.

“If it turns out a lot of people get infected and have few symptoms, the economically sensible approach might be to let the infection spread and accept that there will be some death toll,” researchers wrote.

Less than two weeks later, the following headline appeared in the Australian Financial Review: Lives matter but at what cost?

The author, John Kehoe, wrote that “there is a high economic and social price being paid” for Australia’s efforts to flatten the curve and save lives.

“Unemployment is surging, businesses are closing, incomes are being slashed. People are hurting,” he wrote.

Then he took it one step further by making the case that Australians over the age of 70 aren’t worth as much as younger Australians.

“Many seniors have had time to enjoy careers, children and grandchildren,” he began. “My father is 68 and insists he’s had a good run. With the swimming pool and tennis club in his Victorian town now closed, his daily pursuits are off limits. His physical fitness and mental wellbeing are suffering.

“Some seniors like him would not put their own life above the livelihoods of their children and grandchildren, if the economic and social costs become too great.”

Unsurprisingly, the piece caused outrage. Journalist Jan Fran was among those who hit back at the “reductionist” argument. “Maybe I’m wrong but none of the spicy ‘let the virus spread to save the economy’ hot takes are written by poor, sick, old or disabled people,” she wrote on Twitter.

“They’re always written by some legend in a suit who did some maths and worked out that your nan is probs not worth saving as much as — say — a young, healthy person who will contribute more to the economy.

“This is true if you think a human being’s value should be measured by their economic contributions. “If that’s the case then just cut the sh*t and say you think some lives are worth more than others because of the money/capital they make/earn/produce. Actually, say it!”

She argued that those willing to sacrifice the elderly to keep the economy running have “flattened what it means to be human”.

But Kehoe isn’t the only one pushing hard to remove strict quarantine laws and reopen businesses. The Institute of Public Affairs was slammed when it released a bizarre video on April 7 arguing that reopening churches, restaurants, cafes, bars and community sport was a “sensible” idea, despite experts everywhere saying the opposite.

“Our response to the coronavirus outbreak has decimated our society, ruined thousands of lives, turned Australia into a police state and, worst of all, put hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work,” the think tank’s policy director Gideon Rozner argued.

He said it was time for state and federal governments to come up with a plan to win the lockdown and let people rebuild their lives.

“Do it safely with appropriate social distancing measures in place, but do it now, not in six months, not in one month. Now, because Australians were not meant to live like this, and we cannot allow this to go on any longer,” he says. “Enough is enough. It is time to begin to end this lockdown now.”

Of course, to do so would be catastrophic. New modelling from the Doherty Institute and Monash University shows that Australia, plainly, is not ready.

It reveals that if Australia’s reproduction number — how many people could be infected by just one case — increased from below one to somewhere around 2.5, there could be more than 70 deaths in just three weeks’ time.

“If we lift measures, and it depends how much you lift them, but if we were to lift all of them and we get back to a reproduction number of 2.5, then we’re back on an exponential curve,” Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said.

“The numbers would get up to 10,000 in a matter of weeks. So we have to keep the reproduction number below one in order to maintain the pressure down on the numbers that we have in Victoria.”

SOURCE  






Qld. Government introduces 'fairness formula' so tenants impacted by coronavirus can renegotiate leases and avoid eviction

A 'fairness formula' will be introduced in Queensland to help struggling tenants and landlords renegotiate leases amid the coronavirus lockdown, after proposed new rental laws were widely criticised.

The rental market is one of several sectors that have been impacted by the global health crisis, with many tenants unable to make payments after losing their jobs.

The state government last week proposed a set of measures to help protect tenants who cannot pay their rent from eviction and if their lease expires during the crisis, but landlords complained those steps were too much in favour of renters.

New guidelines are expected to be released on Wednesday after the legislation is passed, The Courier-Mail reported.

'While we expect most tenants and property owners to come to an agreement, where this is not possible, we will provide a compulsory, free, fair and independent conciliation service to resolve issues,' Housing Minister Mick de Brenni said in an email on Monday.

Under the revised proposals, tenants must be able to prove they have lost at least 25 per cent of their income, or that their rent exceeds 30 per cent of their income, to access COVID-19 rental relief measures.

A tenant would also not be able to break a tenancy agreement without being able to prove a a loss of at least 75 per cent income of income.

The original legislative framework was widely denounced by the real estate sector, which said tenants - who could originally claim relief without proof - were being protected at the expense of landlords. More than 400,000 letters of complaint were received by the Labor Government.

Mr De Brenni said the government had made changes that aimed to strike a better balance between protecting the rights of landlord and tenants.

'Tenants and property owners in significant financial distress are also being supported through a $20 million rental grant package, announced with the framework over a week ago,' he said.

Real Estate Institute of Queensland CEO Antonia Mercorella said they are satisfied with the revised framework. 'It also ensures stability for the Queensland property market as well as for consumer confidence going forward,' she said. 'It provides both tenants and property owners with certainty and clarity surrounding the Prime Minister's no eviction moratorium.

'The minimum income reduction threshold for tenants to meet before they qualify for the protection measures is in line with other jurisdictions (stated and territories).

SOURCE  






Rule of law meets Covid-19

In the space of just a few weeks, the rule of law in Australia has both triumphed in the High Court’s judgement in Pell v The Queen and taken a battering from state governments’ social distancing rules under emergency powers invoked in the name of fighting Covid-19.

The rule of law does not mean imposing the iron fist of a police state, shades of which are to be found in the states’ restrictions. It means, among other things, transparency and lack of ambiguity in the law and the absence of arbitrary action in its application and enforcement.

Most of us accept the need for some social distancing rules to apply for a short period, but the current restrictions go to absurd lengths, lack clarity, leave too much leeway for arbitrary action by officials – and for all those reasons offend against the rule of law.

The relevant NSW ministerial order, for example, includes a list of acceptable reasons for people to leave their place of residence and puts all other reasons – a very large and unspecified residual – as in the unlawful category. This approach offends against the very idea of a free society in that it is a law defining what we CAN do, not what we CANNOT do. Free societies don’t need to be told what they can do.

The inconsistencies, ambiguities and potential for misinterpretation in the NSW order abound. Little wonder that people don’t know what they can and can’t legally do and police and bureaucrats are making up their own interpretations as they go.

The rule of law isn’t like a decoration to be taken down when it becomes inconvenient to the exercise of state power. It is there to protect our freedoms from abuses of state power. The Berejiklian government should immediately rescind this repugnant ministerial order and replace it with something that is less restrictive, unambiguous and defines what residents of NSW cannot do, not what they can do.

In the meantime, it would not be a bad thing if everyone in possession of one of those on-the-spot police fines exercises their right not to pay it and to have their case heard by a court.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here







22 April, 2020

'How can you say that?' Economics professor is slammed as 'heartless' for arguing Australia would be 'better off' if it had NOT gone into coronavirus lockdown

An economics professor has been slammed as 'cold' and 'heartless' for suggesting  Australia prioritised health over the economy by going into coronavirus lockdown.

University of New South Wales Professor Gigi Foster sparked outrage from fellow panellists and other economic professors while answering questions about the  impacts of shutdown measures on Q&A on Monday.

Professor Foster suggested Australia hadn't properly weighed up the economic consequences of tough restrictions introduced to reduce the death toll, and argued the 'economy is about lives' too.

'What frustrates me is when people talk about the economic costs of the lockdown they often don't think in detail in terms of counting lives,' Professor Foster said.

'Has anyone thought about how would you get a measure of the traded lives when we lock an economy down? What are we sacrificing in terms of lives?

'Economists have tried to do that and we try to do that in currencies like the value of a statistical life.

'If you do that kind of calculus you realise very quickly that even with a very, very extreme epidemic, in Australia, we are still potentially better off not having an economic lockdown in the first place because of the incredible effects that you see.  'Not just in a short-run way but in many years to come.'

Her views prompted a shocked response from fellow panellists on the ABC program. 'How can you say that?' ACTU secretary Sally McManus fired back. 

'We're avoiding what's happened in the UK, what's happening in the US, the idea of having our ICUs overrun, our healthcare workers dying as well is just the most horrible thought.'

'It's horrible either way,' Professor Foster replied. 'The coronavirus has made the world awful. There's absolutely no doubt about that.

'In order to have a proper discussion about trade-offs, you need to think in terms of lives you're giving up.

'I know it's invisible lives and difficult to imagine when we aggregate, for example, all of the health effects and the mental health effects and the effects of people right now who have illnesses other than COVID-19.' 

Earlier in the program, Professor Foster said human welfare costs should be considered more broadly. 'I reject the idea it's lives versus the economy. It's lives versus lives. The economy is about lives,' Professor Foster said. 'It's about protection of lives and human welfare and livelihood.'

Simon Longstaff, executive director of The Ethics Centre disagreed with Professor Foster's argument.

'There's so many things we can do to address the economic consequences on people's lives. It's not just the economy. Incidents of mental health. There's many things which are human fact beyond those,' he said.

Professor Foster later proposed Australia could implement a herd immunity strategy until a coronavirus vaccine was found.

Her comments on the program sparked division on social media, with some accusing her of being 'harmful and arrogant' and others praising her for her 'rational' response.

'She lacks capacity to appreciate that a mass outbreak would lead to same shutdown within a short time frame. A broad and orderly controlled shutdown is preferable to chaos of humans and companies dropping like flies,' one viewer tweeted.

Another added: 'Has Gigi considered the economic cost of post traumatic stress on a population like Italy? Is there a model for the way the economy and people behave after that?'

'What a disgraceful and cold thought process this woman has,' a third said. 'Has no respect for humanity, is all about the economy and the money.' 

Professor Foster was also criticised by some in her own profession. 'Hundreds of us warned today against the views like Gigi Foster's,' University of Melbourne economics Professor Chris Edmond tweeted.

'I’m an economics professor, and Gigi does not speak for me,' Steven Hamilton, a U.S-based professor tweeted.   

But not everyone was critical. 'Gigi Foster makes some excellent points and should not be trolled,' one supporter tweeted. 

'Gigi Foster is very much sharing a holistic rational view on coronavirus, not an emotional one that clearly doesn’t appeal to the everyday Australian,' added another.

SOURCE  






A harsher lockdown? If you’re under 60, and in good health, crossing the road is more dangerous than COVID-19


And even if you’re over 60, you may not even want to see the economy trashed while you are isolated from your children and grandchildren for months. Maybe you’d prefer to take the risk

A bizarre “open letter” to the Australian government, signed by more than 100 economists, calls the trade-off between health and economic outcomes a “false distinction”, urging hard lockdowns until the coronavirus can be “comprehensively addressed”.

What might the 3.6 million Australians who may soon be out of work as a direct result of government regulations, according to a new report by the Grattan Institute, make of the “false distinction”? The lockdown might be considerably shorter if those calling for it, including the professors, had to take a large pay cut until it was lifted.

As Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, said on Monday, governments were doing “enormous damage” and must acknowledge restrictions would have to be lifted even in the face of potentially higher death rates. Trade-offs are Economics 101. To stay locked down until a vaccine emerges, or until we “eradicate” the virus, was farcical, King suggested.

Charles Goodhart, one of the world’s top monetary economists of his generation, said late last month that from a strictly income-maximising point of view “let it rip” made sense.

“Given the age and frailty of those likely to die, this increased death toll in 2020 would have been almost entirely offset by sharply lower death tolls over the subsequent decade,” said Goodhart, himself in his 80s. “While one should keep such an analysis in mind, such a cold-hearted policy would have been morally wrong, and socially and politically entirely unacceptable,” he added.

Indeed, cautious easing of restric­tions — which is happening in Europe — is all anyone could advocate in the circumstances. COVID-19 can prompt many deaths and overwhelm health systems.

“The measures put in place in Australia, at the border and within the states and territories, have reduced the number of new infections,” the open letter said, with no evidence. Some probably have, but we don’t know yet which social-distancing measures are effective.

Simply because A follows B doesn’t mean A caused B. Australia’s weather, relative population density or island geography may play a role in our relative success too. We don’t know. The passage of the virus in Sweden, Japan and Taiwan, which haven’t locked down, is markedly better than in Italy and Spain, which did.

Certainly, the benefits of shutting down schools is debatable, unlike the terrific inconvenience it has caused millions of families.

Banning individuals sitting on a park bench, playing golf or meeting any more than one other person may well be seen in time as excessive once considered studies emerge. Certainly, governments didn’t go this far a century ago when dealing with a far worse disease.

If you’re under 60, and in good health, crossing the road is more dangerous than COVID-19. And even if you’re over 60, you may not even want to see the economy trashed while you are isolated from your children and grandchildren for months. Maybe you’d prefer to take the risk.

The death of a 93-year-old in a nursing home has become a daily national news story. Every death is a tragedy, but government policy should be guided by evidence, not emotion.

“Could the images of people dying on stretchers in tents in hospital parking lots be blinding us to the greater harm we may be causing across society through our efforts to avoid those awful deaths?” asked one of our top philosophers, Peter Singer.

It’s looking less like we’re facing the once-in-a-century Spanish flu-type virus we all feared, which justified draconian measures in the first place. And studies in California and Germany are finding more people have the virus without symptoms than first thought.

About 60 million people die each year and coronavirus has claimed 165,000, many of whom were elderly and unwell and might have died soon in any case.

India and Indonesia remain the big unknowns. These two poor countries endured the brunt of the Spanish flu, losing respectively 5 per cent and 3 per cent of their total populations, the equivalent of more than 70 million people today. As of Monday it is estimated COVID-19 had killed about 1200 people across both countries, which is tentatively reassuring.

In defiance of the professors, Sydney’s Randwick council on Monday reopened its beaches for exercise. The impact on gender equality is yet to be determined, but surely it is a sideshow.

SOURCE  






Cardinal Pell and the Ladies of the Left

The next time you hear some strident feminist sounding off about glass ceilings and the supposed exclusion of women from decision-making, think of the case of George Pell. No connection? Oh yes there is. Gender quotas were not only filled but arguably exceeded by the volume of female participation in the long and sorry saga of Pell’s persecution.

All that blather you still hear on places like Radio National about men being in charge of everything and women chained to the sink is no longer true, if ever it was. Very powerful, high-achieving women had a big say in cooking up the case against Pell and in putting him away. Their involvement shows that the notion of male domination in the professions is a straw – I suppose we should say – person, set up by feminists to foster the myth that women are “oppressed” (by white conservatives males like Pell, presumably; as paid-up members of the Left, feminists would naturally believe that).

Let’s see, who shall we start with? Well, Louise Milligan of the ABC hurled herself into the fray very early on. As a reporter, she has more opportunity than most people to air her views, courtesy of your tax dollars. But not content with that, she wrote a book as well (on the taxpayer’s time?) telling the world how guilty Pell was, or more accurately, how guilty she had decided he was, since her literary effort appeared some time before any accusations against Pell had been made in court.

Then there was the woman who published the book, Louise Adler. She used the once respected imprint of Melbourne University Press to disseminate Louise’s anthology of vicious tittle-tattle, which conceivably did its bit to prejudice the minds of any potential jurors who read it. It might be noted that Adler’s other name is Mrs Max Gillies. She is married to the comedian emeritus of the elderly Dismissal-fixated Left, once a virtual fixture on the ABC – where else? – for his unflattering impersonations of Sir John Kerr and John Howard, two of the most noir of the elderly Left’s bêtes noires. Perhaps he has added George Pell to his repertoire, using Louise’s book as a source, if Mrs Gillies brought him home a copy.

Next in line chronologically is Belinda Wallington. She is the magistrate (indeed, the Supervising Magistrate for Sexual Offences at the Magistrates Court of Victoria) who sorted out the original charges against Pell, chucking out the flimsiest and sending him for trial on the others, which it now turns out were not much less flimsy. There is a photograph (below) of Belinda and Louise together in May 2017, when they took part in a cosy ABC natter-in called The Conversation Hour, with the topic “George Pell allegations and Law Week”. There is, of course, no known photograph of the Wallington with Pell.

As we know, the first trial was a washout and a second trial was held, which led to Pell’s conviction. This gave another of our ABC ladies, Leigh Sales, a thrill of joy. Introducing her programme she announced in ringing tones, categorically and as though she was the bearer of great good news (which indeed it was to people like her), “George Pell is a convicted paedophile.” Leigh was clearly untroubled by any of the doubts as to the justice of the conviction, doubts that more than a year later would lead the High Court to overturn it.

Our fifth influential female is Chief Justice of Victoria Anne Ferguson. She it was who presided over the Appeal Court that turned down Pell’s appeal against his conviction, an action for which the Victorian court was reproached by the High Court in no uncertain terms. Ferguson and a male judge were two-to-one in this against a third judge (male) whose dissenting judgment anticipated much that the High Court had to say.

Ferguson was appointed to her post as Chief Justice of Victoria by the Labor government of Daniel Andrews, which seems to have decided that substantial experience of the criminal law was not necessary for the post and that a former commercial solicitor would do as well. Andrews, one imagines, is not been best pleased by Pell’s acquittal, given that he thought it was “shameful” for Tony Abbott even to visit Pell in prison. Has he never read Matthew 25:36?

Andrews issued a statement after the acquittal that pointedly ignored the judgment and assured all “victims” of child abuse, and by implication Pell’s accuser, that he “believed” them. Apart from the fact that you can’t believe Pell, as the High Court does, and believe his accuser at the same time, Andrews hasn’t heard, and probably never will, what most of those other “survivors” have to say, so how can he “believe” it?

It is this perverse willingness to accept any and every abuse allegation made by anyone, anywhere, whether motivated by truth, vindictiveness or vengeance, that has led not only to the legal shambles deplored by the High Court, but to the growth, aided and abetted by sinister lawyers posing as compassionate champions of the “hurt” and the “damaged”, of a bloated child-abuse industry which has yielded a harvest of destroyed careers among the wrongfully accused to set against the numbers of genuinely abused for whom it has obtained justice and compensation.

Although supposedly a Roman Catholic, Andrews comes across as viscerally anti-Pell – the two positions seem not to be irreconcilable, such is the power of Pell’s conservatism, religious and secular, to excite hysteria and loathing in the ranks of the Left. Only Tony Abbott seems to possess this weird, almost shamanic, capacity to the same degree.

Back to our catalogue of inquisitorial females, so let’s not overlook eminent jurist Kerri Judd, Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions and another Andrews appointment. Kerri was resolutely opposed to Pell’s appeal being upheld by the High Court and informed the bench that the best thing to do was to send him back to Victoria for another of those trials they do so well there. The court declined to accept this sage advice, which it described as “specious”.

Our national broadcaster seemed to delude itself that it constituted an alternative branch of the law vis-à-vis Pell, one that could influence the mind of the High Court through one of its mendacious “investigations” of the sort it made a fool of itself with when it tried to convict President Trump of colluding with Russia. The reporter behind that, Sarah Ferguson (“I’ve spent my professional life understanding power and trying to give succour to the weak when abused by power,” as she sanctimoniously informed an ABC in-house puff) presented three programs on child abuse by Catholic clergy, full of recycled “revelations”. It is perfectly possible that the ABC calculated that this would persuade the court to weigh very carefully the consequences in adverse public opinion, whipped up partly by itself, of any decision to acquit Pell. If so, it would only show how hubristic the ABC is. Certainly, Sarah’s programs were timed to coincide with the High Court’s deliberations, and either rain on the parade if Pell were cleared or give one last slam to the prison door if he were not.

The ABC is always crying poor but spent vast sums sending Sarah around the world to put her nasty snipes together, a vindictive squandering of taxpayers’ money that makes reform of the ABC even more urgent.

I haven’t touched on the female lawyers and “victims’ advocates” who gathered around the scaffold in the hope of seeing Pell’s head roll. Consider instead some of the many women who took his part – three female justices among the unanimous seven-to-zero of the High Court bench, the nuns who gave him hospitality on his first night of freedom, the female journalists such as Rita Panahi, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine who stood up for him and maintained his innocence when the pack was baying for his blood. It’s non-feminists who’ll be proud of them.

SOURCE





A dozen students per classroom, disinfection after every lesson, no stationery or canteen: How pupils' school life will change forever after COVID-19

Children will be returning to school in Queensland for the first day of term two

Those few teachers and students who do go to school for term two will encounter a very different classroom to the ones they knew before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some children returned to school in Queensland for the first day of term two on Monday after five weeks of learning from home during state-wide lockdowns.

Queensland's policy was largely the same as New South Wales - that distance learning was preferred and schools were only for the children of those who must work outside the home during the lockdown.

Pupils in Queensland now have to bring their own stationery to school and use hand sanitisers as they walk between classrooms that will allow no more than 12 people per 52 sq/m room.

Schools have had to rearrange furniture in classrooms to maintain those social distancing protocols by keeping people at least 1.5m away from each other.

Frequent cleaning has also been recommended by state authorities with special attention placed on light switches, door handles, desks, toilets, taps and sinks.

The Gap State High School in Brisbane sent letters to parents with a full list of changes, The Courier Mail reported.

It had employed cleaners during the school day to disinfect classrooms, furniture and bathrooms during breaks.

At that school, a maximum of ten students will be assigned per classroom for all lessons throughout the day.

Students must bring their own food, as the canteen will be closed and pupils will not be allowed to leave school grounds to buy lunch.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk stressed that schools are only open for vulnerable children and children of essential workers who are unable to learn remotely.

As a result, The Gap State High School will send attendance surveys to parents each fortnight so school authorities can decide how many teachers they need on site and how to ensure social distancing policies are being met.

'If you are working from home and incapable of supervising to ensure your child is getting online resource work happening then contact your principal,' Ms Palaszczuk said. 'But now is not the time to be sending your child to school if you don't meet those categories.'

Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said sending the children of non-frontline workers to school would make social distancing protocols impossible to meet, jeopardising the safety of students and teachers.

'We want to make sure we can exercise social distancing, we want schools to be a safe environment because remember if there is an outbreak at a school, it will immediately be shut down and parents will have to cope with that.'

The new procedures are expected to run for five weeks and will be reevaluated on May 22.

It comes after Ms Palaszczuk announced that 5,254 laptops would be distributed to students across the state to ensure all pupils could continue their education from home.

Telstra donated 5,000 simcards and 4,000 dongles and hotspot devices to make sure all children had access to internet learning portals.

Up to 15 per cent of the state's students are expected to show up at school on Monday.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






21 April, 2020

ABC ‘saw’ the future — but it still hasn’t arrived

Extraordinarily false prophecies

Computer modellers, like the ABC’s Dr Norman Swan, have been found wanting by the coronavirus pandemic

To be fair to Norman Swan, he wasn’t the only one to caution that unless we sat motionless in a corner and wrapped ourselves in Glad Wrap we’d be heading down the Italian route before we knew it.

Computer modellers, like the ABC, have been found wanting in this pandemic. The reasons are not dissimilar; both are prone to selection bias, both are inclined towards omniscience and neither is afraid to go where Albert Einstein feared to tread.

Einstein once wrote that some things “were beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation”. That was in 1930, however, before the invention of the Excel spreadsheet, a tool that allows us to forecast with unwarranted certainty on subjects we barely understand.

Swan was right to encourage his Twitter followers to “believe in maths not magic”. The difficulty with computer modelling, however, is that it’s hard say which it is.

Four weeks ago the Grattan Institute fuelled the rising anxiety about the spread of the coronavirus with a forecast that the pandemic would be out of control in Australia by mid-April. Grattan’s modelling was widely reported on the ABC and in Nine’s newspapers where no number is too scary to warrant a headline.

“Australia prepares for 50,000 to 150,000 coronavirus deaths,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald on March 16.

Eight days later it gave prominence to Grattan’s claim that the rate of new confirmed cases would overwhelm the capacity of intensive care units by mid-April.

Not for the first time, the apocalypse was less earth-shattering than forecast.

Last weekend there were 55 COVID-19 patients in acute care hospital beds, about 2 per cent of ICU capacity at the start of the crisis and less than 1 per cent of its expanded capacity.

The national death toll stood at 68, which is tragic enough, but considerably short of the SMH’s expectations. Exaggerated claims matter a lot when dealing with threats like pandemics or climate change. They can lead to expensive mistakes.

Australia was on the verge of one of these four weekends ago when the number of confirmed cases was a sixth of today’s figure, but rising too fast for comfort.

State premiers felt the pressure of public opinion, animated by excitable headlines, that was pushing them to take draconian steps towards closing down the economy. Fortunately, calm heads prevailed. Calls from the business community, a voice largely absent from the debate at that point, warned of the consequences of the hard lockdown for which some were calling.

The mining, construction and manufacturing sectors felt the threat. Hardware stores feared being classified as a “non-essential” part of the economy.

The closure of cafes, restaurants and bars under social-distancing rules has been serious enough. So has the closure of our borders.

In the light of what has happened since, however, these were not unreasonable steps to stop the exponential growth in infection. Neither should they be lightly abandoned so long as the threat of a second wave remains.

Yet the disproportionate measures Grattan and others were demanding, many of which have been adopted in New Zealand, would have been a catastrophic error of judgment.

We must remind ourselves that the public policy aim was not human immortality, nor the protection of the population from contagious disease. It was to maintain the integrity of our health system, a goal the federal government has achieved by taking practical steps to increase the supply of acute-care beds and reduce demand, without tightening the noose around the economy.

The role of Health Minister Greg Hunt, rightly praised in the memoirs of a former prime minister for calm management of his portfolio, will one day be recognised as critical to our ability to rise to the challenge.

One might have hoped that the calls for Australia to commit economic self-harm would have subsided by now. Sadly they have not. Last week the Grattan Institute was at it again, urging that the present restrictions remain in place for at least three more months.

It would, Grattan admitted, carry big short-term economic costs, shaving six percentage points off Australia’s annual GDP. But that’s OK, two of the centre’s researchers wrote last Thursday, because businesses and individuals could be kept afloat with the government support.

Modelling our economic future is no less difficult than modelling the spread of the virus. No offence to the OECD, which came up with the much-quoted figure of a 2 per cent hit to GDP for every month of restrictions, but it amounts to little more than an educated guess.

The atomised supply chains in today’s globalised economy make its interdependencies far harder to map than they were in 1958, when Leonard E. Read wrote his famous essay tracking how pieces of cedar wood, zinc, copper and graphite miraculously combined to produce a pencil.

What we do know, thanks to modelling somewhat more robust than that others have relied upon, is that the path out of the anticipated recession grows steeper and longer every day the restrictions stay in place. We know that $150bn in government support will not be enough to save every business, let alone every job.

Few of those who argue that normal business activity can resume only when COVID-19 infections have been eliminated altogether are dependent on the productive economy, the part that must survive on its wits rather than handouts. That distance encourages the heedless attitude to economic outcomes with which we have become familiar in the climate debate, where dire predictions, each one more catastrophic than the last, are used to silence dissenting voices.

Fortunately, the immediacy of the COVID-19 pandemic allows us to apply the truth test to alarmism even as it is occurring. The experience will not be wasted if we emerge from this crisis appreciating the virtues of a proportionate and incremental response.

SOURCE  





More insane Coronavirus policy

On 31 March, Australians in New South Wales awoke to the discovery that, overnight, they had been put under house arrest. For some at least, the shock could not have been greater if, like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, they had found themselves transformed into an enormous insect. For the last fortnight, Australians have discovered that almost everything other than sitting at home has been criminalised, with neighbourhood snitches just waiting to dob them in.

It reached a nadir at Easter when Tasmanian premier Peter Gutwein announced that police would use helicopters to spot ‘unnecessary’ travel. ‘Today the gloves come off’, he snarled. ‘We are going to police this. The period of education is over.’ Tasmanian police questioned the occupants of 89 vehicles about why they had the temerity to be on the road. It brought to mind Captain Yossarian in Catch-22. ‘Morale was deteriorating, and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril and here he was jeopardising his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.’

Meanwhile, an ‘explosion’, at least by Tasmanian standards, of 66 new coronavirus infections was traced not to people reading books on park benches, or jogging on the beach, or even driving their cars, but to two hospitals in northwest Tasmania, which inexplicably proved to be incapable of undertaking basic infection control while treating a passenger from the ill-fated Ruby Princess, and may or may not have had an ‘illegal’ dinner party.

General Gutwein is only the latest officer in the army of clowns running Australia to come a cropper. His woes directly stem from the mess made by his mess mate, the NSW minister for health, the aptly named Mr Hazzard, who, if he were a packet of cigarettes, would have a sign across his forehead warning: ‘This minister is a health hazard.’ Alas, Australia’s medical authorities match the minister when it comes to incompetence.

Hazzard and his hapless officials learned nothing from the fiasco of the Diamond Princess, in which 712 of 3,711 passengers and crew were infected by Covid-19 during a month-long onboard quarantine and 12 people died, including our first virus victim. When the passengers and crew finally disembarked, US health officials allowed their nationals to fly back even though it was clear that many were probably infected, jeopardising the health of everyone on the plane.

When its sister, the Ruby Princess, sailed into Circular Quay, NSW health officials made exactly the same mistake, allowing the ship’s 2,647 passengers to disembark because they assessed them as ‘low risk’, even though the ship’s physician had requested an ambulance for two patients and said that 15 others were sick and had tested negative for influenza. Was Hazzard apologetic? Of course not. He angrily defended his advisers who consulted ‘to the WHO in communicable diseases,’ no less. Someone needs to tell him Taiwan are the experts.

If that weren’t bad enough, on 14 April it was revealed that the company overseeing the management of the Ruby Princess had allowed meals for its 1,000 crew members to be prepared in the ship’s galley until last weekend, despite warning signs it was the epicentre of the vessel’s infections just as had happened on the Diamond Princess a month earlier.

It’s as if The Three Stooges were running the country, and it might be funny if people weren’t dying as a result. Three-quarters of all deaths in Australia are linked to just three sources of infection – the Ruby Princess and three other returning cruise ships in NSW, NSW aged-care facilities, and the cancer treatment ward of a major public hospital in Melbourne.

Instead of putting the entire population of Australia under house arrest, state health departments should be putting in place stringent measures to protect vulnerable people – older Australians, particularly those in aged-care facilities, and Australians with underlying health problems. The government did warn Australians not to take cruises on 10 March, but it did nothing to assist elderly people trying to self-isolate at home.

One of the saddest coronavirus deaths was that of Labor MP Ged Kearney’s father-in-law, an 82-year-old who caught the disease just shopping for groceries. That shouldn’t have happened. When supermarkets stopped providing online shopping, the government should have funded shopping services. Likewise, staff in aged-care facilities should all be regularly tested for the virus, as should anyone else providing services to the vulnerable.

The state governments locked down the country, justifying their actions by referring to headlines that warned, ‘We’re going to run out of ICU beds’. On 18 March it was claimed Australia would need 650,000 ICU beds over the course of a year. On 31 March, the day NSW went into lockdown, there were 2,378 beds in 191 ICUs across the country and there was the capacity to surge to 4,261 if necessary. Even that was deemed insufficient, with a government taskforce ‘working around the clock’ to procure ventilators to increase capacity to 7,500.

Did the tidal wave of deaths arrive? At the time of writing there are 79 people in ICU beds around the country and there have been only 63 deaths – two deaths per million. Even so, this week we were urged by the Grattan Institute to join New Zealand and shoot for zero infections before unlocking the economy. This is absurd. We don’t aim for zero road or flu deaths. The cost is not just economic; as unemployment rises so do suicides.

Rather than relying on rubbery figures, our model should be the real-world success of Taiwan. They had no lockdown, like Wuhan. Cafés, restaurants, businesses, museums and schools have to put in place social distancing, people use face masks, there is quarantine for overseas arrivals, and testing, treating and isolating for the infected while tracing their contacts. The result? Only 395 cases and six deaths. Yet the Australian PM Scott Morrison shows no signs of doing this.

On Wednesday, GetUp!’s national director sent an email to his troops praising the PM delivering beyond their wildest dreams, spending $320 billion in a few weeks. It makes the Rudd Labor government look almost modest in comparison. While some businesses go broke, others can’t find workers, who’d rather get the JobKeeper subsidy. More than 80,000 businesses have registered for the $130 billion payment, which is so poorly designed that everyone from barristers to baristas is in on the lurk, attempting to qualify.

Tenants, too, have been incentivised to stop paying their rent to the chagrin of mum and dad investors. When one reads on the front page of the Australian that the PM has won plaudits from the Australia Institute, a progressive think-tank, one thinks not of Kafka but the sci-fi horror flick, The Fly, and its memorable tagline: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’

SOURCE  





Digital giants Google and Facebook will be forced to pay for news content generated by the Australian media in historic move

Digital giants Google and Facebook will be forced to pay for news content generated by the Australian media in a lifeline for the struggling industry.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher will on Monday announce a mandatory code on digital platforms to be finalised by July, bringing forward a November deadline.

The decision to fast track the code follows a collapse in advertising revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to many newsrooms, especially in regional areas, closing or scaling back their operations.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission last December handed down its report following an inquiry into Facebook, Google and the impact other internet giants are having on the media industry.

The ACCC was negotiating with big tech and media companies on a voluntary code of conduct that would have been made mandatory in November if no agreement was made before then.

The new code will include enforcement, penalties and ways to deal with disagreements between the global platforms and local media companies.

'The groundbreaking report prepared by the ACCC into digital platforms was world-leading and now paves the way for a mandatory code of conduct requiring payment for content,' Mr Frydenberg said. 'This will help to create a level playing field.'

Prices for content or the nature of commercial agreements would need to be negotiated but remedies would be put in place to force tech companies to accede.

Facebook and Google have a stranglehold over the digital advertising market and benefit greatly from the content of news publishers on their platforms, social media, search queries and digital video.

News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller said Google and Facebook had built trillion-dollar businesses by using other people's content and refusing to pay for it.

'The decisive move by the government to go directly to a mandatory code of conduct between the international tech giants and Australian news media companies is a vital step that can help secure the future of Australian journalism,' he told News Corp.

Nine chief executive Hugh Marks also welcomed the move.

News Corp and Nine have cited the impact of digital platforms on their bottom lines as part of their move to close down AAP, the national newswire.

SOURCE  





Green Snouts Sniff Around For A Pandemic Windfall

The Pope, deprived of the counsel of Cardinal Pell, the Church’s most astute voice, foolishly called coronavirus “nature’s response” for failures to act on climate change.

It was, therefore, hardly surprising that coronavirus would be recruited to push for additional renewable energy subsidies to reinforce those that have already created today’s high cost, low quality electricity.

Coal Wire, an anti-fossil fuel publication, was quick to swoop on a Harvard study that said the pollutant PM2.5 exacerbated coronavirus and that coal power stations were an important source of the pollutant.

Actually less than 5 percent of PM2.5 particulate emissions come from energy production.

Also, fast out of the blocks was the anti-fossil fuel head of the Paris based International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol.

In the ‘never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste’ style, Birol argued that boosting “clean energy technologies, such as solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries and carbon capture should be a central part of governments’ (stimulus) plans”.

This is echoed by a petition signed by 180 EU politicians and activists. The IEA expects new renewable energy installations to fall this year, largely because of supply disruptions.

The Australian branch of global network Climateworks followed this with a revised Decarbonisation Futures Report and its head, Anna Skarbek, explained to The Guardian’s Adam Morton how the virus could be used to accelerate the subsidized renewables push.

Given the high cost and low reliability of wind/solar, that would be a huge call even if enforced demand reductions had not brought a halving of last year’s $90 per MWh spot price.

Sure enough, the market response differs from that hoped for by the subsidy-seekers and alarmists. Coal use remains on an upward trajectory.

According to GlobalData, “Over the next four years, the production of thermal coal is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 1.9 percent to reach 7.6 billion tonnes by 2023, due to increasing demand from India and China.”

Goldman Sachs has halved its EU carbon price forecast, and Bloomberg notes a collapse of demand for rooftop installations.

Matthew Warren, a former lobbyist for the renewable industry, now calls for a managed “deceleration” in its support by governments.

But, taking its cue from the IEA, Australia continues to pursue the mirage of renewable energy cost innovations.

Captured by his bureaucrats, Energy Minister Angus Taylor is not only allocating $70 million in search of a fanciful breakthrough in converting hydrogen to energy but he is insisting – wait for it! – on grant applicants using renewable energy to power the trials.

I have a piece in the Spectator reviewing the disaster wrought by governments bending to green alarmism and subsidy-seekers.

Subsidies and regulations requiring the use of wind/solar for electricity generation currently cost Australian households and businesses over $4 billion a year.

Moreover, this has caused the closure of low-cost reliable coal plants and, as a result, brought a $55 per MWh increase in the wholesale electricity price between 2015 and 2019.

With a market of 230,000 GWh, the 2015-19 price increase has brought a cost of almost $13 billion per year.

Hence, we are paying $17 billion a year to harm ourselves! Abandoning the electricity subsidies and regulations offers us a benefit of $170 billion – that alone would recoup over half the $320 billion spent on coronavirus-driven stimuli/consumption support.

Regulations like those on energy have for decades led Australia to forfeit what should have been the world’s highest living standards.

Unraveling them offers an opportunity to minimize the impact of the coronavirus measures.  But have we got the caliber of politician that understands this and can push through the necessary reforms?

SOURCE 

 

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





20 April, 2020

Coronavirus Australia: Where is the stimulus money coming from?

Australia is following the UK and the USA into a money-printing binge

After dropping $18 billion in its first stimulus package, and $66 billion in its second package, it’s suddenly put the foot to the floor and announced an extra $130 billion in the third package. Then that’s been topped up with another billion for childcare.

As they say, “A few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there, soon you’re talking real money!”

All this spending is designed to keep the current recession from being too sharp or going on too long. Nevertheless, it has some people nervous. Are we spending too much?

Permit me to reassure you. We can afford this. If needed, we can spend even more.

As the next chart of historic data shows, Australia’s public debt has been very high in the past – peaking in the Second World War, before falling to be far lower before the Global Financial Crisis. (Note, this chart stops in 2008.)

Our net national debt looks modest compared to other countries. It is just 18 per cent – far lower than in the USA, where the comparable figure is around 100 per cent; or Japan, where net debt is 150 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Australia has a $1.9 trillion economy. That’s nearly two trillion dollars, and it doesn’t just happen once. That sum flows through Australian hands every year. (GDP is like a river, not a dam. It measures a flow of money and things, not a pile of money.)

Our GDP is worth equivalent to $75,000 per person (this is what we call GDP per capita). Again, this is how much economic activity there is every year.

So when the Government spends an extra $130 billion in one shot in the middle of a desperate crisis, it’s not even that much, in terms of our economy.

Total coronavirus stimulus spending of $276 billion would represent 15 per cent of our economy. We don’t have to pay that off all in one shot. We can let the debt sit for ages, just paying the interest, if we so choose. That might be a good choice, because at the moment, interest rates are extremely low. This is a cost-effective point in history to go into debt.

As the next chart shows, our current net government debt has been rising, but it is just 18 per cent of GDP. The Government can spend many billions more and still keep net government debt well below 100 per cent of GDP.

HOW DO WE PAY IT BACK?

There are two main ways you can make your debt go away, and a sneaky third way.

The main way we make debt go away is by paying tax. The Government taxes us more and spends less so it can have a surplus, and it uses that surplus to pay back the people we borrowed from.

You can see an example of this in the chart above – in the early 2000s, then-treasurer Peter Costello ran a bunch of surpluses and finally got the net debt to GDP ratio back below zero, just before the GFC.

At the last budget, you will remember, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was expecting a surplus. Running lots of surpluses was going to let us slowly pay off our debt, and the forecast looked like this:

This chart is now ancient history, of course. If we ever get to zero net debt it will be much later than 2029-30. And it will require a lot more surpluses.

This is the main argument against spending too much – today’s young people will pay higher taxes for the rest of their lives to fund the expansion in debt caused by extra government spending.

The second trick for making debt disappear is inflation. While $200 billion might seem like a lot now, if we get some inflation over the next 30 years, it will shrink before our eyes.

Anyone who has a mortgage or a HECS debt knows what this is like. On the day you graduate or the day you buy your house, it seems massive. Twenty years later, the sums involved seem a lot smaller. If Australia’s GDP goes to $10 trillion in 30 years time, (which it would if we had 3 per cent growth and 2.5 per cent inflation every year), the debt we took on to survive this recession will seem much less significant.

This raises a key point about the ratio of net debt to GDP: You can make it get smaller by growing the GDP side of the ratio. And you can make GDP bigger using either economic growth or inflation. One reason Japan has such high debt ratios is its GDP hasn’t grown much since 1990. It has had both low growth and low inflation.

The sneaky third way to pay back debt is just printing money and giving it to your lenders. Governments can do that, but historically they have chosen not to, because it tends to cause hyperinflation. However, a variation of this idea is coming back into fashion, with a new name – Modern Monetary Theory.

One reason for the resurgence of Modern Monetary Theory is that the rich world has seen very little inflation recently – Australian inflation has been below the 2 per cent to 3 per cent target range for years. Why worry about inflation when we haven’t seen it for so long?

According to a recent note from Oaktree investment co-chairman Howard Marks, this crisis could shove Modern Monetary Theory into the mainstream.

“Possibly without serious vetting and a conscious decision to adopt it, Modern Monetary Theory is here,” Mr Marks said in a recent note to clients. Of course, the people who like this idea say it has the risks of inflation covered off. Expect to hear more and more about this the higher the national debt goes.

SOURCE  





New Queensland rental law changes to protect 'mum and dad' investors

New rules to heavily protect tenants during the COVID-19 crisis will be altered to protect "mum and dad investors" after the original draft was heavily criticised by the real estate sector.

Queensland Housing Minister Mick de Brenni said revised guidelines would be published in the coming days although the prime objective was still to protect financially troubled tenants from eviction.

Despite the Prime Minister claiming lockdown may ease by mid-May, the Queensland Premier is cautious of interstate transmission and may introduce tougher border controls.

"We know for many of those mum and dad investors they are not rich, they are not wealthy, they have simply invested in a property for the family's future," he told reporters on Friday.

"Our guidelines protect that investment and ensure that there is a process for landlords and tenants to come together to reach a result where tenants simply can't pay the rent."

He said tenants could not simply say "I am not going to pay the rent" and that the JobKeeper and JobSeeker packages should provide enough income for tenants to meet their rental obligations.

A framework would be set up for landlords to reach an amicable solution in instances where tenants could not pay. "There will be compulsory conciliation ... which will include full disclosure of the financial situation of the tenant," Mr de Brenni said.

The Minister said there would be a moratorium on evictions and that virtual inspections would be available for landlords wanting to sell a property.

There was a fear the initial guidelines were too heavily weighted in a favour of tenants and could have led to a fire sale of investment properties, according to leading academics.

Under the initially proposed measures, tenants would have been able to ask for rent reductions without proving financial hardship, deny entry to properties and gain automatic six-month extensions on leases.

The Real Estate Institute of Queensland said the financial burden placed on landlords could stretch out to a year.

Griffith University Business School lecturer Dr Sacha Reid believes current and prospective housing market investors may look elsewhere to park their investment funds if tenants have too much power.

"(It) may force people into the stock market and out of property because there's more security in the stock market than the property market if all the rights are with the tenants," she added.

"If a tenant can demand a rent reduction with no capacity to repay that reduction, then why would you subsidise someone else's lifestyle when you can put it in the stock market and ride out the variations in that?"

University of Queensland Professor Shaun Bond said many households had investment properties to build retirement savings and any legislation that adversely impacted landlords had repercussions.

Yet, even if a landlord could evict a tenant struggling to make ends meet, they were still likely to struggle themselves to find a replacement tenant. "If you did have a tenant you wanted to evict, you are probably not going to be able to quickly find a new tenant anyway," Mr Bond said.

"People have to work out, do they sell or how much can they get through the next few months?

SOURCE  






Loss of international students set to blow $30b-$60b hole in economy

The Australian economy faces a projected hit of up to $60 billion within the next three years while international students are blocked from coming here due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The blow from each six-month intake of foreign students lost could equate to the hit the economy took when Australia lost its entire car manufacturing industry.

The country’s eight most prestigious universities face the largest loss of revenue, because of their greater intake of international students, but smaller and regional universities are also likely to suffer severe financial consequences that could force them to shed staff and cut back on courses.

Modelling by Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute projects that Australia’s university sector will lose between $10 billion and $19 billion between 2020 and 2023, depending on how quickly the nation’s borders are reopened to students.

A further $20 billion to $38 billion in wider benefits to the national economy would also be lost.

The overall projection could result in a hole in the economy of between $30 billion and $60 billion.

Mitchell Institute policy fellow Peter Hurley said each six-monthly intake of students missed due to travel restrictions would deliver an estimated economic blow equivalent to when Australia lost its entire car manufacturing industry.

“International university students are a pipeline, so if you miss a six-month intake it is revenue that is not going to be in the system for two to three years,” Mr Hurley said.

“It really is a worst-case scenario for universities.”

The revenue universities have drawn from international students increased by 137 per cent between 2008 and 2018, the institute’s report, Australian Investment in Education: Higher Education, states.

International university students spent $3.72 billion on fees in 2008 and $8.83 billion in 2018.

International student numbers grew 58 per cent in that time, meaning universities also increased their fees to international students.

“There are more of them and [universities] are charging them more,” Mr Hurley said of the sector's increasing reliance on international students.

Meanwhile, revenue from domestic students increased 43.2 per cent as student numbers grew 37.5 per cent, but without a comparable hike in tuition fees.

Victoria and NSW combined draw slightly more than two-thirds of total Australian revenue from international students, claiming $5.99 billion out of a sector-wide $8.76 billion in 2018.

Six universities made more than half of their student revenue from international students, including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Sydney, the University of NSW, the University of Queensland and Federation University in Ballarat.

Mr Hurley said the larger universities were in a healthy financial position before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and had resources to draw on during lean times.

Most smaller universities had less reliance on foreign students but also had less in reserve and would likely be forced to make tough decisions.

“They’re not going to go bust but they will have to cut costs – they will cut staff, they will cut courses,” Mr Hurley said.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Morrison government has guaranteed $18 billion in funding for universities' domestic education in 2020, pegging the support at expected student numbers before the hit to enrolments from the pandemic. Ordinarily, it would be revised down throughout the year if student numbers were lower than anticipated.

Universities have welcomed the government support but warned it does not address the "big hole" in revenue from the loss of international students.

International education providers have also been alarmed about long-term damage to Australia’s reputation after Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently said it was “time to go home” for foreign students and workers who couldn’t support themselves.

Education consultant Claire Field said the lack of support being shown to international students by the Australian government right now could also do lasting reputational damage to the university sector.

"Our approach is in sharp contrast to the UK, NZ and Canadian governments, all of whom are extending to international students the same support they’re providing their citizens," Ms Field said.

Ms Field said international student enrolments plummeted by 20 per cent 10 years ago following a spate of attacks on Indian students, which attracted overseas media focus.

"If Australia doesn’t provide financial assistance to international students who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus crisis I expect the damage to the sector to be far greater this time," she said.

SOURCE  






Fines and freedoms

When a learner driver is fined more than $1,650 for ‘non-essential travel’ by going for a driving lesson despite the general coronavirus lockdown, what lesson should we learn?

That the most important thing is not preventing the spread of coronavirus, it’s following the rules.

Eventually common sense prevailed, and the fine was dropped, but only after media pressure. After all, the driver was enclosed in a car with her mother: the chance of either contracting coronavirus or infecting others is indistinguishable from zero.

And the number of counter-common sense instances of police enforcement is growing.

The level of government intrusion into the lives of ordinary Australians that has occurred in the past three weeks would have been unbelievable just three weeks before that.

At a minimum, this situation should have required three things from government: serious and credible evidence that the limitations were necessary; extraordinary care in drafting legislation and police implementation to avoid overreach (ie not leaving it to individuals discretion); and clear and unambiguous signposts for when the restrictions will be lifted.

Arguably, not a single one of these things have been done. The second and third were clearly ignored in the rush to give power to police. The rate of new infections has now fallen below the level on 18 March, when the restrictions on large gatherings were announced — yet no end is in sight.

Obviously, this is a constantly evolving situation — and government may have more information than they are letting on — but how can we possibly accept a lack of transparency and detail in the face of such extreme measures?

The concern is that such measures are not actually justified at all medically, only politically. The fear, so potent a motivator at times like this, is not the enduring imposition of a police-state (as some seem to be claiming), but the permanent, partial, erosion of the expectation of individual liberty.

In the next crisis, which is unlikely to be a severe pandemic, people will be less resistant to the imposition of serious restrictions on their freedoms. History tells us such powers, once successfully asserted, will be used again.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here




19 April, 2020

New coronavirus laws give police too much power

Laws restricting our movement introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have given police the opportunity to flex their muscles over the Easter holidays. They have fined hundreds of people so far for leaving their homes without "a reasonable excuse".

Public order legislation like this has long been criticised for the discriminatory way in which it is used against marginalised members of society - the indigent, the homeless, the young, and Indigenous Australians. These new laws are no exception, although normally law-abiding citizens are now also finding themselves under the police glare.

A key problem is that public order legislation like this often uses open-ended and vague terms to describe behaviour which creates an offence and allows police to act. That gives police broad and discretionary powers to decide what is against the law and what isn't.

Under the new public health directions in NSW, some activities are expressly defined to provide a “reasonable excuse” for leaving your house. But whether other activities provide a “reasonable excuse” is a matter left for the exercise of police discretion.

This is where the difficulty begins. The day after these restrictions were enacted, the authorities in NSW and Victoria publicly expressed contradictory views on whether they allowed a person to leave home to visit their boyfriend or girlfriend. (Victoria, quite properly, amended their restrictions to make it clear that this was allowed.) Whether a person commits an offence by visiting a loved one should not be left to the discretion of the Police Commissioner.

Indeed, the prominence given to the NSW Police Commissioner in relation to what is at heart a public health crisis is also perplexing.

His recent comments about the attempts by the NRL to restart competition surely stepped over the line between policing and policy. So did his strident condemnation of activity which is not, in fact, prohibited.

If golf is an allowable form of exercise then so too, surely, is surfing. There is no prohibition on walking through bushland, or swimming at a beach, or sitting on the grass in a park. Each of these activities can be undertaken consistently with leaving one’s place of residence for the permissible purpose of exercising, yet each of these activities has been the subject of public shaming and policing action.

The public shaming has undoubtedly inspired an element of “self-help”. One MP, Labor’s Liesl Tesch, took it upon herself to knock on a stranger’s door and inspect their licence to confirm they were a “local”. Others have used the new restrictions as a basis for more readily obtaining police attendance at what would otherwise be a mere complaint about noise.

That self-help may have also claimed a political scalp - it is far from obvious that former NSW Arts Minister Don Harwin breached any law by driving between one place of residence and another.

NSW Police have taken to providing regular updates about people who have been charged with offences or issued with penalty infringement notices. Interestingly, these are often accompanied by move-on directions. The descriptions of the offending behaviour provided by police do not establish a clear basis for the exercise of these powers.

It is too early to assess whether COVID-19-related penalty infringement notices are being issued disproportionately in socioeconomically disadvantaged parts of Sydney (despite the publicly-shamed behaviour occurring in more wealthy parts). But the descriptions provided by police forces throughout Australia already suggest that these new regulations have been frequently enforced against the homeless, the mentally unwell, and youth.

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic presents a challenge for public health regulation. Police enforcement necessarily accompanies that regulation. But for the public to have confidence in these restrictive measures, they need to be clearly defined.

Further, these measures need to be enforced in a way which is clearly directed towards protecting public health - and not as a proxy for public order. Public confidence in the justice system demands the same.

SOURCE  








When a mother accused parents of having “blood on their hands”, Samantha Maiden knew things had reached a new level of weird

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the debate on schools, kids, and COVID-19 in Australia descended into complete hysteria.

One minute the kids in my suburb were enjoying a few weeks of sunshine after smoke blanketed the city and closed the highway out to the beach.

The next, the coronavirus appeared on the horizon and parents seemed to divide into warring camps of those who wanted kids to stay at school and those calling for shutdowns.

Personally, it was only when I read a Facebook post from a mother accusing parents who wanted to send kids to school of having “blood on their hands” that it was clear things had got pretty weird.

Parents all over Australia are dealing with home schooling kids, and not all are loving it. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
Parents all over Australia are dealing with home schooling kids, and not all are loving it. Picture: Jake NowakowskiSource:News Corp Australia

Another highlight - my 10-year-old son getting bailed up by a woman pushing a pram down at the local park and asked if he was in a “family group” with the other 10-year-old child at the basketball court. Unhappy with the answer, she started photographing them.

Like most Australians, my family supports the measures to introduce social distancing and close state and international borders. The border closures are vital and need to stay in place.

The debate over when to reduce restrictions around schools, however, is a minefield.

Many parents still believe that children are silent carriers of COVID-19 and schools are “petri dishes” with students infecting teachers.

Some parents and teachers are happy to keep schools closed indefinitely if it “saves lives”. But does it?

Some of the nation’s top scientific minds advising Australia’s COVID-19 response concede we simply don’t know yet if school closures have had a big impact at all.

But the early evidence here in Australia and China is that students are not big spreaders to adult teachers in school.

That’s why the argument “why can I teach a classroom of 30 kids but not go to a pub with adults?” is not a particularly good argument. It is different, according to the scientists who study the coronavirus.

For years politicians have been urged to listen to the science on climate change, but teachers and parents who don’t want to return to classrooms won’t listen to the experts on COVID-19 and schools.

The official medical advice has never changed: schools remain safe to stay open.

What changed is some states buckled under the pressure of parents and teachers’ unions to close schools.

Many parents took that as a message that schools are unsafe. They promptly voted with their feet and kept kids at home.

In some states, education ministers have proposed to re-open schools “when the health advice changes”, despite the fact it never advised to shut schools in the first place.

Around about the same time my son was getting bailed up by the basketball police in mid-March, the deputy chief medical officer Paul Kelly gave a very simple explanation about what we know about COVID-19 and kids.

“We know from where the virus has broken out, very few kids get the illness,’’ he said.

“Those that get the illness are mainly mild, they don’t appear to be transmitted between children – in fact, it’s more likely that children will get it from their own parents and other people in their households. And closing schools, we know, does cause a major disruption to society and to families.”

Just four days later, schools around the country started to effectively shut down.

The idea of a sensible middle way, where you allow at-risk teachers to work from home and extend the same choice to families, was sacrificed on the altar of panic and fear.

So, don’t be fooled by the soothing tones of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s love letter to the nation’s teachers this week in his Facebook video.

The message was blunt: If supermarket workers, truck drivers and hospital cleaners can fight COVID-19 for the minimum wage by simply doing their day jobs, why are teachers still working from home?

The Prime Minister’s message was designed to get parents to ask more questions about why schools are closed.

Respecting teachers’ amazing work educating children and making the switch to distance learning should not preclude parents from questioning politicians’ decision to close schools.

Despite claims essential workers can send children to school if necessary, many parents I have spoken to say teachers actively discourage this. Certainly, this was also my experience.

But the real risk of the current arrangements is not inconvenience for parents but lifelong consequences for disadvantaged teenagers.

On the eve of a recession, some will leave school without even finishing high school and never return.

Others will be trapped at home with parents who may be struggling with unemployment, depression and substance abuse. These kids have a right to an education. They are safer at school.

As feared, many grandparents are being called on to help with homeschooling, just as authorities feared.

Just like the brawls over toilet paper in supermarket aisles, this is a debate that has sometimes seemed more driven by fear, emotion, and anxiety than science.

If you don’t want to send your kids to school, you remain free not to. But families who want their kids to return to classrooms should be offered the same choice.

SOURCE  





Australia’s kangaroo courts

Bettina Arndt

Whilst here too public attention is also firmly on the pandemic, our own unfair system of adjudicating rape on campus remains firmly in place, despite the Queensland Supreme Court decision last November determining that universities have no jurisdiction to adjudicate sexual assault. At the time Education Minister Dan Tehan told the universities, through TEQSA, to leave such matters to the criminal courts.

As I am sure most of you know, I spent last year speaking on university campus drawing attention to these illegal courts – clearly with considerable success, given the ferocious orchestrated attack on me by End Rape on Campus activists following the award of my Australia Day honour.

Earlier in January I had recruited people to send a draft letter to universities across Australia asking a series of questions compiled by lawyers who are helping with this project, to try to ascertain each university’s status regarding regulations adjudicating sexual assault. See the draft letter here.

The answers from the universities ranged from arrogant, dismissive one-liners, to pages of long, obtuse gobbledegook. Our lawyers are working on compiling an overview document to sum up how the university sector is dealing with this issue.

With all our courts closed down at the moment, there’s no news yet on University of Queensland’s appeal of the Supreme Court decision. I’ll let you know when we hear more about that.

Bettina Arndt:  bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au






Calls for pointless lockdown restrictions to be lifted

The first lockdown restrictions that should be relaxed are the ones that “don’t make biological sense, Australian National University infectious diseases physician Peter Collignon says.

“Sitting on a bench by yourself, fishing by yourself, walking on a beach if it’s not crowded. Why do they matter?” he told news.com.au.

“These things protect people’s sanity when there are going to be restrictions for a long time.”

Australians are living under strict lockdown rules in some states but the Morrison Government has flagged restrictions could be eased in four weeks, once three things are in place.

Prof Collignon believes pubs will still be closed for a while but other activities that were low risk could be looked at.

“A lot of things we are doing are panic reactions from seeing on television what’s happening in New York or London, where they have lost control of the infection, rather than doing what they are doing in Korea, which is a similar nation to us” he said.

Once nonsensical restrictions were lifted, Prof Collignon believes the next step would be looking at restrictions in places like South Australia, which were less strict compared to states like Victoria.

If South Australia’s restrictions are working to control the virus, then other more strict controls may not be necessary.

South Australia doesn’t have a two-person limit on gatherings, and instead allows groups of up to 10 people to meet. It also doesn’t force people to stay home unless they have a good reason, such as exercising.

Despite this, it has managed to get its new infections down to very low numbers, or even zero new cases on some days.

Prof Collignon said the basic advice to keep 1.5 to 2 metres away from others, and for people to wash their hands regularly, seemed to make a lot of difference. “We know this works and people will keep doing this intuitively over time,” he said.

But others, such as allowing people to go to supermarkets but not let them go outside even if they were two metres apart, did not.

He said it was important that the rules made sense if people were expected to maintain social distancing measures for six months to two years.

“A lot of people will go stir crazy if they are locked inside their houses,” he said.

“We’ve got to work out what to do based on a nuanced approach rather than imposing what works in a place like Bondi Beach across the entire state.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked what restrictions could be eased first during an interview on 7.30 on Thursday night.

He said they would want to move on things like construction and manufacturing and those types of activity.

“Today we talked at National Cabinet in particular about things like infrastructure and how we can get some of those works moving,” he said.

He said there would also be opportunities in retail.

“I think what you’ll see is more people being able to work at work, that might be on a roster type basis. I mean, some of that is happening now already,” he said.

“But what we are looking to do, and schools also come into that ultimately, and what we’re looking to do is get the pace, get the churn, the activity in the economy moving back up.
“Because when that happens, then people’s jobs come back into play. Their incomes come back more strongly. And their reliance on the welfare system and the JobKeeper program will diminish over time.

“The way out of this is to get on top of the virus and to get people back into work and in their incomes. When we do that, we’re winning.”

SOURCE  





Property industry figures are questioning the NSW Government’s $440 million rental package that offers little help to one group of renters and some believe unfairly puts the burden onto landlords

Major property industry figures have raised questions about the NSW Government’s $440 million rent relief package announced this week.

While welcoming the clarity after weeks of speculation, some industry leaders believe the package does not solve the crisis.

The plan announced this week includes allocating $220 million to residential renters and landlords as well as an interim two-month moratorium that leads into a six-month ban on all evictions because of COVID-19.

The CEO of peak industry body REINSW, Tim McKibbin, said while the measures are a start, it fails to address many concerns such as passing the financial burden from tenants to landlords.

House for rent. Real estate sign. Front yard. No people.
An interim two-month moratorium on evictions is in place across the state. “The plan continues to expect a great deal of landlords to shoulder a significant amount of the burden,” he said.

Mr McKibbin said while the government was absolutely right to offer assistance to tenants, there is little protection for landlords, 80 per cent of whom are mum and dad investors with one investment property.

“What if the landlord loses their job or faces difficulties? These are questions that are not being asked at the moment,” he said.

“While they can take a mortgage holiday, in the end they are still going to be stuck with higher repayments once this is all over.”

Mr McKibbin said one of the biggest grey areas not addressed is the eligibility of share houses for assistance if only one party is affected.

“The policy does not state whether the whole household needs to meet the threshold or if only the individual needs to,” he said.

“There is also no clarity on if assistance would cover the entire household, even to those not affected by COVID-19, or if the one who lost their job is the only beneficiary.”

The Tenant’s Union of NSW welcomed a temporary stop on evictions, a requirement for landlords to engage in meaningful negotiations and greater advocacy support for tenants.

“This is an important announcement which gives people greater certainty about their living situation and their ability to stay home during the COVID-19 period,” said Leo Patterson Ross, CEO of the Tenants’ Union.

Mr Patterson Ross said it was important the proposal provides a comprehensive moratorium and rent relief package that does not open up loopholes.

Ray White managing director Dan White said there needs to be a clear and efficient process for both tenant and landlord to prove hardship from COVID-19.

“As an industry we think we can play a role in helping all parties achieve this,” he said.

Mr White said a concern surrounding vulnerable tenancies was that insurers were yet to clarify if landlord insurance covers epidemics such as COVID-19.

“Landlord insurance providers are all currently advising that a termination process should be stringently followed by managing agents to ensure a future rent default claim will be upheld in the landlord’s favour,” he said.

The Ray White managing director said it was their position that tenants who do not have the ability to meet the financial commitment of their rent because of COVID-19 should have the right to terminate their lease without penalty.

SOURCE
  
 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here










17 April, 2020

Coronavirus Australia: Infection rate continues to decline as Australia ponders ‘exit strategy’

Australia now has 6,449 coronavirus cases.

That’s an increase of only 39 in the past 24 hours - with four states or territories registering no new cases.

The only state to register double-digit instances of new infections was New South Wales.

However, there was a 63rd death - another Ruby Princess passenger who died in Canberra.

In the past 24 hours, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory all registered no new cases.

Victoria recorded only eight, Tasmania registered only four and Queensland and Western Australia reported five apiece.

New South Wales was the only state with a double-digit number of new cases with 16.

It comes amid a testing blitz, with several states softening the criteria to ensure more people are tested.

In Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, anyone showing symptoms can request a coronavirus test from their GP.

A woman in her 60s died, becoming the 19th fatality linked to the Ruby Princess debacle.

National Cabinet will meet again on Thursday. It’s expected they will discuss Australia’s exit strategy from the pandemic as the number of cases continues to drop.

State and territory health officials have indicated it would take prolonged proof that the curve was flattening before restrictions would lift.

SOURCE  







Western Australia considering lifting its coronavirus restrictions within weeks

An Australian state is considering lifting its coronavirus restrictions within weeks and allow social gatherings, schools and businesses to go back to normal.

There are 532 COVID-19 cases in Western Australia -  the second lowest out of the mainland states - and the number of infections grew by only five cases on Wednesday.

Premier Mark McGowan said the state had not just flattened the curve of coronavirus cases but 'driven it down to being nearly non-existent'. 

'We've got to work out how we get our economy back up,' Mr McGowan said.

Despite the low number of cases in the state compared with more populous parts of the country, WA has some of the most draconian laws in Australia - including heavy fines for going between nine designated regions without an essential reason.

Mr McGowan said the state's infection rate was extremely low by world standards, reiterating any potential plans to tweak restrictions should not be expected until May.

'It is like playing a game of chess,' he said. 'You're just constantly looking at what the angles are, what the options are, what the potential pitfalls are.' 'But it's a very serious game of chess because people's health is at risk.'

A series of legislative measures have been put before state parliament to support the economy and community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr McGowan told parliament efforts were already underway to manage WA's economic recovery, with Public Sector Commissioner Sharyn O'Neill appointed state recovery controller. 

Curtin University epidemiologist and pro-vice chancellor of health sciences Archie Clements believes WA is well-placed to begin loosening restrictions.

'Most of the cases can be directly traced to a known source so it doesn't look like there's much going on by the way of undetected community transmission,' Professor Clements said.

'All in all, we've probably avoided the worst of the epidemic and I think with the current numbers it's likely that the epidemic will peter out in WA.'

The government wants a sustained period of low transmission and has made clear the hard border closures will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Professor Clements predicts a phased approach where the lowest-risk activities are relaxed first.

'That will be things like rather than having businesses closed, they might reopen things like restaurants but with a lower density of patrons,' he said.

'They might allow small community events to take place. And then I think it will be allowing things like schools to go back, and I'm hoping that will be sooner rather than later.

Teachers are still concerned though about how schools will function safely in term two.

There are 33 patients in Perth hospitals, including 11 in intensive care.

A decision on education will be made after the national cabinet meeting on Thursday, with WA public schools scheduled to begin term two on April 29.

But State School Teachers Union of WA president Pat Byrne said members remained concerned they did not have access to personal protective equipment like health workers.

'There's no question that the best form of learning is in the classroom,' she told reporters on Wednesday. 'What the dilemma for us is, is how to put that consideration against the consideration of safety and health for both the students and the adults who work in a school.

'We've already seen some teachers walking off the job. Very small numbers, but we have seen it.'

Health minister Roger Cook said he was 'fairly comfortable' with schools opening for term two.

'I think there's a lot of anxiety in the community and obviously we're very cognisant of that,' he told reporters.

Premier Mark McGowan agreed face-to-face schooling was best and he did not want to see children educated from home for the rest of the year, but refused to pre-empt the outcome of the cabinet meeting.

SOURCE  






Coronavirus Australia: Mass exodus of older teachers and pregnant women likely to be enforced

A mass exodus of older teachers aged over 60 and pregnant women from the nation’s schools is likely to be enforced for the next six months under a back-to-school plan being considered by political leaders.

As the national cabinet meets today to consider a battle plan to make schools safer for teachers, the Prime Minister has ramped up his call for teachers to return to the classroom.

But the push will come with some conditions, including guarantees that at-risk teachers can work from home, free COVID-19 tests for educators, more soap and hand sanitiser and a phased return to classes.

The ban on at-risk teachers may include pregnant women, over 60s and even teachers aged over 50 with asthma and heart disease, who will be encouraged to work from home.

But it could also spark teacher shortages with up to one in five teachers likely to be in an at-risk category.

Federal and state officials have told news.com.au mandatory temperature checks had not been proposed in official health advice to national cabinet.

Futuristic handheld scanners were deployed across Singapore in recent months allowing for contact-free temperature checks in schools and for classes to remain open.

That prompted calls for similar checks in Australia. But officials don’t believe it’s an option here. One reason is that young children’s temperature can often spike when dropped off by parents and childcare and preschool.

“It is fraught. Only non-contact laser type thermometers would even be considered from a health perspective and finding more than 2000 for every school in Queensland would be a challenge,’’ Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin Bates said.

“Singapore was checking every child and have still had to move to close schools as infection rates got out of control. Many of our members would like it but we would probably prefer to rely on parents monitoring their children’s health and not sending their children to school if unwell.”

After cases spiked again this month, Singapore has now joined Australia in effectively closing schools.

Mr Bates said teachers remained frustrated with the mixed messages that large gatherings were safe for schools but not for adults who were banned from eating in restaurants and pubs.

“What we have heard over and over again is that kids don’t give it to other kids and that’s great. But what about teachers?’’ he said.

“Our concern is that schools could become hot spots for the spread of the disease.”

When school returns on Monday in Queensland, COVID-19 safety rules will require a ratio of just 12 students to each teacher to allow for social distancing.

But Victoria is standing firm that it will not consider any return to classes until at least July 12.

“My advice to the Victorian Government was and continues to be that to slow the spread of coronavirus, schools should undertake remote learning for term two,’’ Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton said.

“This is because having around a million children and their parents in closer contact with each other, teachers and other support staff has the potential to increase cases of coronavirus not just in schools but across the community.

“Schools are not ‘dangerous places’ and parents should feel comfortable sending their kids to school – if they need to. But the mix of onsite and off-site learning supports better physical distancing overall, reducing risk as we drive new cases down. As risk changes, we’ll reassess.”

Teachers and parents remain sharply divided over whether it is safe to return children to classrooms.

According to a news.com.au survey with more than 40,000 respondents, 44 per cent of parents believed it was safe to return to school while 56 per cent disagreed.

Scott Morrison revealed this week he would send his two daughters Abigail and Lily back to school in a “heartbeat” if they were going to be taught by teachers, complaining the distance learning model was “childminding”, not education.

The Prime Minister’s daughters have relocated with his wife Jenny to live the Lodge in Canberra during the COVID-19 crisis so he can attend daily briefings with heath officials and staff.

But the PM said he would not send his kids back to their Sydney private school until it went beyond “looking at a screen”.

“I kept my kids in school till the last week because they weren’t getting taught in school in that last week, they were looking at a screen. That’s not teaching; that’s child minding,” he told 6PR radio.

“It isn’t just about that kids can go along and sit in a hall and be minded; we want them to get educated.

“We’re on school holidays in NSW so the kids are at home but I’d have them back in a heartbeat if they were getting taught at school. At the moment we’re lucky they can have a learning environment at home.”

SOURCE  






Beyond the church: How Australia's sacred spaces are evolving

Whatever ties we have to faith, churches remain a part of Australian life and community.

Religion historian and University of Sydney professor Carole Cusack, said it was in the 19th century that churches began popping up everywhere.

"Once the transportation of convicts became less and people came as free settlers to a land of opportunity, there was a massive burst of church building," Dr Cusack said.

Fast-forward to the era of the Beatles and some started to disappear.

"There has been considerable decline in church attendance since about 1960 and a lot of churches have become redundant," Dr Cusack said.

"They get deconsecrated. They're made into different things."

While the decision to buy and reinvent a church space might be a no-brainer to some, Dr Cusack said others were less sure.

"People have mixed feelings about that sort of thing. They think that that's kind of a profane destiny for a building that was intended as sacred."

So how do investors and business owners feel about occupying these spaces without putting on a Sunday service?

Cafes, studios and dance practice

When real-estate photographer Adrian Gale photographed Naracoorte's Church of Christ he had no idea he would buy it a year later. While in love with its natural lighting and ancient walls, something more urged his interest. "I just love the story of it," Mr Gale said

The church was built in 1906. When the congregation outgrew the small hall, they built a kids' ministry and supper hall on the back. When they outgrew that, they moved.

The building has been a practice room for the town band, a Seventh Day Adventist Church and a funeral business.

"Most Naracoorte people have probably been to a funeral there in the past 20 years," Mr Gale said.

As well as his photography base, Mr Gale lends the space to other community events like yoga, baby showers and wedding ceremonies — something he feels is his responsibility.

"Churches themselves in history have been so involved in supporting communities and being a part of communities," he said.

"We're able to keep a space in the community in a whole different way."  It is a feeling that is also felt 50 kilometres down the road at Erica Bowen's restaurant in Penola.   For Ms Bowen and her husband, the Methodist church they made into a home for their business had "a good feel about it".

Like Mr Gale, she has familiarised herself with the church's history — information that has not gone to waste.  She said the couple were often asked about the building's origins. Then there are the people that know the space well, like the Irish dancers that used to practise there.

"People come with their own stories on top of what we are … which is pretty cool," Ms Bowen said. "Breathing life into something that's old to make it new again always has a good story to it."

Mr Gale explained the opportunity as one of stewardship, not ownership. "When a building's 110 years old ,you don't really own a building like that, you're more a steward of it for the season that you own it," Mr Gale said.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






16 April, 2020

Pell injustice shows why we need to restore fairness to the law

The unanimous decision of the High Court quashing George Pell’s convictions was the end of the matter for Australia’s most ­famous Catholic priest. But to understand the dreadful state of justice inside our courts, you need to go back to where this courtroom drama started.

The decision by the primary judge preventing Pell’s legal team from using psychological evidence about the credibility of the complainant points to a much deeper dilemma about how the accused can defend themselves from allegations of sexual assault in 2020.

Pell had the wherewithal and the resources to pursue his wrongful conviction to the country’s highest court. But spare a thought for others in jail today who may have faced what Pell did, and are not so well-equipped to appeal to the High Court. It is likely Pell is the tip of the iceberg.

My colleague, Chris Merritt, ­deserves praise for exposing this ­little-known and devastating weakness at the heart of the Pell prosecution. Last September, Merritt revealed for the first time that Pell’s accuser had suffered long periods of psychological problems requiring treatment. But Victoria’s Evidence Act meant that not only were Pell’s lawyers unable to access details of those psychological issues and treatment, but the jury could not be made aware of them, or even the fact Pell’s lawyers asked for them. The public was also in the dark about this until Merritt’s careful reading of Pell’s application for special leave to the High Court.

It is high time that more of us understand how the legal system, not just in Victoria, has become dangerously skewed against defendants in sexual assault cases. It stems from well-intentioned but ill-considered amendments to evidence laws in 2006. In an attempt to ease the undoubted stress and pain caused to complainants of sexual assault from being cross-examined on their past psychological history, section 32D of the Victorian Evidence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act makes it almost impossible for a defendant to gain access to a complainant’s psychological records or bring evidence of those issues to a jury.

The section sets up an impossible circular threshold: without having access to the relevant evidence, defendants must convince a judge that they cannot properly defend themselves without putting the psychological evidence to the jury.

There is, undoubtedly, a need for sensible, measured steps to ­address the fact sexual assault is under-reported, and the court process is traumatic for its victims. But when these cases are often contests of credibility, it is neither ­sensible nor measured to strip a defendant of the ability to adduce relevant psychological evidence in that contest.

Pell’s legal team had one hand tied behind its back from the start. This was compounded by the flawed judicial method adopted by Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell. Without the benefit of seeing and listening to the complainant give evidence at trial, the majority decided that he was a truthful witness, that he was not a liar or a fantasist.

The majority’s reliance solely on the complainant’s credibility to uphold the jury’s verdict against Pell delivered a double whammy — it meant Pell faced a reverse onus to prove to the jury that the complainant was lying, but Pell could not satisfy that reverse onus by tendering psychological evidence about the complainant that may have helped to prove that.

The majority’s arrogance was breathtaking because they knew about the complainant’s history of psychological treatment but didn’t mention it in their decision to ­uphold Pell’s conviction. Indeed, their approach was so simplistic as to be reckless: by relying exclusively on the credibility of the ­complainant, they effectively discharged themselves from having to carefully consider all of the other evidence that raised reasonable doubts as to whether the ­alleged sexual assaults could have occurred.

Human nature is fallible. Alleged victims do lie. In the ACT last year, Sarah-Jane Parkinson was sentenced to more than three years’ jail on charges of making a false allegation of rape against her former husband. Studies show that witnesses can also unconsciously lie, genuinely believing something to be true even if it is not. Alleged victims might also be co-opted by others for a cause. Some or all of that may have happened in the Pell case.

Yet ill-considered sections in Victoria’s Evidence Act, that prevent the tendering of psychological evidence, have cemented into law the dangerous tenor of our times. When zealots in the #MeToo movement and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews say that they believe all victims, they knowingly chip away at a court system that is based on evidence, the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof and due process. Just straight to conviction and jail, then?

Injustice has been legislated into the NSW legal system too. In a recent case, a trial judge was forced, by NSW evidence laws, to exclude a woman’s proven history of making false sexual assault claims. Despite the trial judge pleading for these brutally unfair laws to be reformed, the NSW ­Berejiklian government has done nothing.

While we wait for the outcome of the defendant’s appeal of the trial judge’s decision, which was heard last week, we are left with the dreadful likelihood that other defendants have been wrongly accused, tried and found guilty where alleged victims have told lies about alleged sexual assaults for revenge or simply because they were suffering from delusions or confusion arising from psychological conditions.

This is what happens when, with the best of intentions, we depart from first principles. In his 1760 Commentaries on the Law in England, the great common law scholar William Blackstone stated the principle that our legal system is founded on: “It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent person suffer.”

Some misguided souls might say that Blackstone’s ratio is a get-out-of-jail card for rapists; that it needs to be reversed or restrained to deliver victims justice. In other words, the Blackstone 2020 Victorian edition should read “it is better that an innocent man be punished than a complainant have his or her credibility challenged”.

The #MeToo advocates tell us that men have been getting away with sexual assault for years. That is correct. Some say it is about time the tables were turned. That is wrong. While the desire for revenge is understandable — particularly among those who have suffered greatly — it surely cannot become a new organising principle on which society, and our legal system, is based.

Even for those whose motivating principle is more noble, wanting to bring an end to sexual assault, unbalanced and unfair rules of evidence are not the right way to get there. Substituting one form of injustice for another is not justice, and it is not noble. Once you allow systematic injustice in sexual assault cases, on the ground that Blackstone’s maxim is outdated, where do you stop? Which group of defendants will next be deprived of the means of defending themselves because their alleged crime is under-reported and needs to be reined in?

Who will next be deemed unworthy of basic principles that underpin our legal system? As ­Pell’s case shows, there, but for the grace of God, go I.

SOURCE  






Coronavirus school closures: Scott Morrison issues direct plea to teachers to return to classroom

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has issued a direct plea to teachers to return to the classroom and join the “great heroes” of Australia including cleaners, supermarket workers, nurses and paramedics who are fighting COVID-19 simply by doing their jobs.

Warning parents the education of the nation’s children was “hanging in the balance”, he urged principals and teachers’ unions to hold talks on how classrooms could be made safe.

But he could be picking a major fight with unions despite his message of admiration for teachers, because many educators insist it is not fair to put them on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis.

In a televised message to parents and teachers, the Prime Minister has urged schools to work towards a return to face-to-face classes.

“As we confront these crises our nation currently faces, the health crisis of the virus, the economic crisis of the impact it is having on people’s livelihoods, there are people doing just amazing jobs, great heroes,’’ he said.

“Of course, in our health care system, our nurses and our doctors, our pathologists, the paramedics, right across the board, the cleaners in our hospitals all doing incredible work and we thank them for it.

“But there’s another group I want to talk about today, and that is our teachers. I want teachers to know from me, both as a parent and as a prime minister, just how appreciated you are and how important the job is that you’re doing right now and how much you are needed.”

But Mr Morrison added it was vital children did not become the silent victims of the COVID-19 crisis because they were denied an education.

“And at this time, as our nation fights this coronavirus, your role has become even more important. Your students and their families are relying on you more than ever. The education of our children hangs in the balance,’’ he said.

“During these times, many students will continue distance learning. It’s a choice that they may have, some more than others. But we know for some families and students this won’t be possible. And their education, what they learn, is at great risk of suffering this year. This will particularly be the case for families who are disadvantaged and on lower incomes.”

This week, infectious disease expert Professor Peter Collignon told news.com.au that teachers faced a greater COVID-19 risk from a supermarket than classrooms and urged teachers to return to classrooms with conditions, including excluding teachers over the age of 60 and pregnant women.

But a patchwork of arrangements has emerged with some states returning to school faster than other jurisdictions.

Political leaders in NSW and Victoria privately concede fears teachers would strike if they kept schools open were a major trigger for the decision to defy the medical advice that schools should remain open.

Despite a majority of states including NSW, Victoria and Queensland moving to distance learning, the Prime Minister has never wavered in his insistence that the medical advice maintains it is safe for schools to remain open.

SOURCE  






Australia's private health funds could reap windfall from coronavirus – report

Private health insurance funds stand to reap a windfall of between $3.5bn and $5.5bn due to a dramatic fall in elective surgery and other medical procedures during the coronavirus crisis, according to new research from the Australia Institute thinktank.

Health expert Roy Harvey said if the funds failed to pass on the dramatic fall in costs to customers, more people will flee a private health insurance system that is already in a death spiral.

Harvey, who worked with Australia Institute research director Rod Campbell on the report, said that if premiums were cut in line with services the federal government would also save $1bn to $1.5bn a year in subsidies.

The Australia Institute paper, “Private eyes ..., hips, etc”, models the effect on the funds if benefits paid to members drop by between 30% and 50% during a six-month period.

Factors taken into account include health minister Greg Hunt’s decision last week to pay at least $1.3bn to private hospitals to take over beds potentially needed to accommodate Covid-19 victims, and sweeping bans on dental services introduced by dentists.

Harvey said that many funds have abandoned premium hikes that were planned for this month, but this was not enough.

“They’ve been saying we won’t put through the 4% increase that they’re allowed to do in April, but if they say, ‘Oh, we’ll give you a 40% discount’, people might stay.

“If they keep their rates unchanged, people will leave in droves.”

The coronavirus pandemic has hit a private health industry that experts say was already in a “death spiral” because young people, who get relatively little from the product, have quit paying premiums.

This has left the funds with a membership increasingly weighted towards older people, who typically require more expensive medical procedures.

The escalating financial instability of the industry led the regulator to warn in February that only three will be viable in two years unless urgent action is taken.

“It sounds as if you’re not talking about a viable system or a product people want to buy,” Harvey said.

“The thing is unsustainable, it’s undermining the public hospital principle of equity and allowing doctors to charge fees that take people out of the public hospitals.”

He said it was hard to estimate the impact of the pandemic on private health using publicly available figures, but the $3.5bn to $5.5bn range was a good starting point.

“I think any detailed study would come up with figures that are in the range,” he said.

“Other people can say, ‘Oh, I think it’s this or that’, but it’s really to get a discussion started.

“The Productivity Commission could sort this out in less than a week in terms of getting good estimates.”

He said the funds should be held accountable for their windfall and money saved by the government could be used to fund other things, such as domestic violence services, that are needed during the pandemic.

“The savings to the commonwealth alone could be one to one and a half billion [dollars] – one and a half billion used to be a lot of money once,” he said.

Campbell said the insurers looked set to trouser their windfall billions.

“Insurers claim to be supporting their members through the crisis by delaying premium increases, but they should be passing on these significant savings to households,” he said.

“If the commonwealth does not ensure savings are passed on to customers, it will be one of the most egregious subsidies ever given to an industry already infamous for receiving handouts.”

SOURCE  






Palliative care

There is suddenly a lot of panic over the number of ventilators available in Australia. Likely provoked by headlines around the world proclaiming there are not enough. But is this really the only thing we need to be worrying about?

It may be that people who ‘miss out’ on a ventilator would not have benefited from it — or may not have wanted it in the first place.

The overwhelming focus on the number of ventilators provokes fear as it conjures images of the frail and elderly being forgotten and forced to die alone.

But it doesn’t have to be like this if we ensure national availability of palliative care and advance care planning.

Last week the median age of the Australians who died from COVID-19 was 81 years. A Chinese study has shown that older age is the greatest risk factor for developing respiratory failure and death. Nearly half of the patients who died in Italy had three or more comorbidities, such as hypertension and diabetes. Generally speaking, those who are most effected by COVID-19 also seem to be those who would be the least likely to survive an ICU admission for any reason.

Facing an extraordinary humanitarian and resource crisis, Italian doctors spoke out about rejecting people from ICU based on “potential survival”. Another has said “[Who lives and who dies] is decided by age and by the [patient’s] health conditions. This is how it is in a war.”

These solemn declarations give the impression that those deemed ‘unworthy’ will be left uncared for. It implies that we cannot do everything for everyone and so must do nothing for others.

But this is wrong. Too often doctors speak of there being “nothing left to do” but there is always the opportunity to relieve suffering. We must ensure that palliative care is available for those Australians who would not benefit from a ventilator or who do not wish to be ventilated. Palliative care is well equipped to treat these patients.

Nonetheless, in the best of times, let along during a pandemic, palliative medicine is easily overlooked. Unbelievably, Australians over 80 years of age, dying from non-malignant disease, such as respiratory failure, are currently the least likely to receive palliative care — partly due to a lack of referral.

But it is not just the medical fraternity who need reminding about palliative care.

There has never been a more pertinent time for all Australians to consider what type of medical care they are — and are not — willing to endure.

Many self-actualised 80-year-olds view pneumonia as “an old friend” and upon its arrival entrust me to ensure their dignity and not send them to the cold clinical ICU to suffer a drawn out death. This is an advance care directive.

In an Australian audit of 2,285 patients over 65 years of age, across six states and territories, less than 30% had an advance care directive indicating a person’s preference for care. Even in aged care facilities, less than 50% of residents have a care directive indicating whether, for example — they want to be transferred to the emergency department, be resuscitated or what consequences of medical treatment they would consider unbearable. This is despite evidence demonstrating that advance care directives promote autonomy.

If we don’t ask, we won’t know how people wish to be cared for if their lives are threatened.

The current lack of integrated access to palliative care and responsible advance care planning is something we need to be worrying about. Many older Australians will forgo a ventilator but we will only know this if we ask and if we reassure them that they will always be cared for — ventilated or not.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here







15 April, 2020

Australia's next coronavirus challenge: As curve flattens, experts warn we face a grim choice: end lockdown now and accept a spike in deaths or keep restrictions to save lives but risk economic ruin

Australia faces a daunting choice between easing lockdown measures and causing a spike in COVID-19 cases - or risking economic disaster by keeping the restrictions in place in a bid to save lives.

That's the opinion of some infectious disease and economic experts who are calling for coronavirus restrictions to be lifted to allow places such as beaches, schools restaurants and cafes to re-open.

But some of Australia's top scientists disagree, and say relaxing restrictions too soon could be disastrous and potentially lead to the failure of the health system.

The debate comes as Australia appears to be successfully flattening the infection curve, with just 33 cases confirmed on Sunday - the lowest since March 12.

There were 6,325 cases in the country as of Monday morning, with 59 deaths. 

Danish political scientist and economist Dr Bjorn Lomborg said the economic impact of lockdown measures in Australia was not worth the pain given a 'second wave' of infections would likely arise in the coming months.

'The reality is, if we just want to stop coronavirus in its tracks, we have to shut down society almost entirely, and in the long run, that is not a sustainable solution,' he told 60 Minutes.

'We need to have the conversation, how much should we tackle corona, versus how much should we avoid totally destroying the economy?   

'At some point, we actually need to say "this is enough. If we go further, we're going to damage the economy more than the few extra people we're going to save''.' 

Dr Lomborg, the president of a think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, compared the coronavirus response in Australia to the reduction of speed limits on the roads.  

'If you want to save everyone who dies in traffic, you should just take it down to five kilometres an hour,' he said.

'Nobody would die. But of course, the point is, you don't want to do that because it also has huge social ramifications.'

Dr Lomborg said Sweden's middle-ground measures to stem the coronavirus' spread should be emulated by Australia should to avoid economic disaster.

Sweden has allowed domestic flights to continue, while restaurants and schools remain open.

By slowly spreading the virus through the community, the Scandinavian nation's health officials hoped to achieve herd immunity.  

Herd immunity occurs when enough people are immune to the coronavirus through exposure to the illness, or via a vaccine.

But Sweden is now considering imposing tighter restrictions on citizens and Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Sunday the country's coronavirus measures were 'not good enough'.

Disease modeller Professor Emma McBryde and Australian National University microbiology expert Professor Collignon suggested low-risk demographics like children could be used to spread the virus slowly and boost immunity.

They said evidence suggested children were less vulnerable to the virus.

'If we do everything we possibly can to make sure that no-one dies from coronavirus, people are going to start dying from other things,' Professor McBryde said.

'Children could be the key to getting out of lockdown.' 

Professor Collignon added: 'All the available evidence around the world is children under the age of 15 rarely get this [the virus] and rarely get complications.'

Chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said last month - as Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to close schools - that children appeared to be less susceptible to COVID-19.

The Australian government though has remained steadfast in the belief herd immunity is not a path the country should be going down.

'If we attempt herd immunity we would end up with a very large number of people severely unwell and a very large number of people would die so we're not going down a herd immunity approach in Australia,' Deputy Chief Medical officer Michael Kidd told ABC News Radio on Sunday.

But Professor Collignon has questioned the scientific benefit of confining Australians to their homes - rather than encouraging them to take in more fresh air outside. 

'If you're outside in the sunshine - and sunshine itself is a sterilising agent - I would think if you keep your two-metre rule, you'll be safer there than inside,' he said.

'Providing you are maintaining your social distancing and minimising the people you're having close contact with, I can't see how that is going to transmit much infection.'

Experts have already warned Australia's tough social distancing measures will mean far fewer people are immune to the deadly bug.

The tough enforced rules could prove to be a double-edged sword, with any relaxation of lockdown restrictions potentially creating a huge spike in cases, scientists predict. 

Overseas, in countries like the U.S - where nearly half-a-million people have been infected - lockdowns could end within just a few months, or even weeks.

This is because huge swathes of the population will have been struck down with the virus and either died or recovered, making them immune.

But in Australia, not enough people will have been exposed to COVID-19 - meaning it could still prove fatal for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions. 

The situation has the potential to create a dangerous new social stratification in Australia, with healthy people allowed outside and the elderly trapped in their homes until a vaccine is produced.

Paul Komesaroff, Professor of Medicine at Monash University, told Daily Mail Australia the Federal Government's 'responsible' approach to the pandemic may be a mixed blessing.

'In the UK and the United States - because of the irresponsibility of the political leaders - they missed the opportunity to impose restrictions early and huge numbers of people are getting the disease,' he explained.

'But it does mean that the peak is very, very sharp, and it may well be that the timeline for them is shorter than it will be for us. Ironically.'

Others, however, argue lockdown restrictions haven't gone far enough.  

Professor Raina MacIntyre, the head of Biosecurity at the University of New South Wales's Kirby Institute, wrote a paper together with three other scientists outlining the benefits of a short, sharp lockdown for Australia.

The scientists said Australia's gradual approach to locking down the country, adding new restrictions on a rolling basis, was not enough.

A silent epidemic may be growing, driven by mild or asymptomatic infections of people who did not meet our testing criteria,' the scientists wrote.

Travel bans have been the most successful element of Australia's approach, but the gradual increase of social distancing and the failure to shut schools meant it was not enough.

'It will leave us dealing with COVID-19 for much longer, with a slow trickle of new infections that keep feeding the epidemic,' they wrote on the UNSW website.

'What's needed is a short, sharp lockdown for two to three incubation periods (four to six weeks), combined with scaled up testing capacity and expanded testing criteria.'

'This strategy, similar to South Korea's approach, would reduce the size of the epidemic substantially, spare the health system and give us a more manageable baseline from which to best protect Australia until a vaccine is available.'

They also said the measures do not have to last six months to 12 months - but only four to six weeks.

'China has demonstrated the feasibility of a short lockdown followed by phased lifting of restrictions,' they said.

A short, sharp lockdown of four to six weeks would enable Australia to control the epidemic quickly and get the numbers to a controllable baseline.

After that, the economic recovery can begin with the gradual lifting of restrictions.

'The slow trickle approach, especially if schools remain open, may result in continued epidemic growth, potential failure of the health system, and a far longer road to recovery,' they wrote.

SOURCE  






We may be over-reacting to an unremarkable coronavirus

Stay safe. Keep well. Perhaps a hysteria has gripped the nation, at extraordinary cost, when we’re telling each other to take special care over a disease that in three months has killed about 60, in the main quite unwell elderly people.

Even in coronavirus hot spots in Europe and the US, there’s greater chance of being killed in a car accident than being harmed by COVID-19, according to research published last week by Stanford scientist John Ioannidis.

“The risk of dying from coronavirus for a person under 65 years old is equivalent to the risk of dying driving a distance of nine to 415 miles by car each day during the COVID-19 fatality season,” he concluded.

Yet many of those under-65s have had their lives pulled apart, including loss of 195 million jobs around the world this quarter, according to the International Labour Organisation.

In Australia at the very least, with so few deaths and infections, the response to the virus is starting to appear to be a damaging over-reaction. Last month’s draconian response by officials — inducing a recession, destroying millions of jobs and businesses, and locking us all up — was at least politically understandable. The hankering for total lockdown, cheered on largely by those who would be relatively unaffected by it, was irresistible.

Yet as more real data rolls in — as opposed to the wildly inaccurate epidemiological forecasts of millions of deaths globally and many thousands locally — justifications for massive interventions, fiscal and civil, are dwindling.

We were told lockdowns were needed; otherwise hospitals would be swamped. But during the first 11 days of the month, the number of people in intensive care in NSW has fallen to 30, of whom 21 were using ventilators. That’s 2 per cent of available ventilators, even before 3000 more arrive.

Fears of a Spanish flu-like pandemic, which killed almost 40 million people a century ago, are looking exaggerated as the global death toll from COVID-19 approaches 120,000, which is 0.2 per cent of the 60 million people who will die this year from all causes (including more than three million from respiratory infections).

Yes, the lockdowns and social distancing in theory must have slowed the spread. But evidence is thin. Sweden and Japan, for instance, have not imposed lockdowns yet have far fewer deaths as a proportion of their populations than Spain, Italy or France, which have.

The Spanish flu killed 1.2 per cent of Italians, according to new research by Harvard economist Robert Barro, equivalent to 720,000 people today. Almost 20,000 Italians have died of (or with) COVID-19 so far, putting the virus more on par with flu pandemics of the late 1950s and 60s, when governments refrained from destroying their economies. The weakness of the virus itself, rather than wise government action, is the likelier reason the death toll is not as grim as first predicted.

“The likelihood of someone dying from coronavirus is much lower than we initially thought,” Ioannidis told Greek media this week, forecasting that “the mortality rate will be slightly — but not spectacularly — higher than the seasonal flu.”

Indeed, almost 80 per cent of the population of Gangelt, a German town highly exposed to COVID-19, was recently tested to see if they had had the virus. About 15 per cent had, without any symptoms, implying an infection death rate of 0.37 per cent — about four times as bad as seasonal flu but much lower than figures of 1 per cent to 3 per cent first feared.

The first officially detected case of COVID-19 in Australia was in January, eight weeks before lockdowns took effect. Does anyone seriously think only 6400, yesterday’s domestic tally, have been infected? It’s the infection fatality rate — not the official rate of infection — that matters: official tallies are meaningless when so many are asymptomatic.

“I am much more concerned about the consequences of blind shutdowns and the possible destruction of a (Greek) economy where 25 per cent of the GDP is based on tourism,” Ioannidis said.

For the Australian economy, the costs of the response to COVID-19 will be profound too, quite aside from the significant additional debt burden. Joblessness soon will likely double, based on a Roy Morgan survey for last month. The costs of loneliness and inactivity are harder to measure.

“Another month of mass isolation will cost the West at least the equivalent of a million deaths in terms of reduced quality of life,” says Paul Frijters, a professor of economics at London School of Economics using his index of wellbeing. That’s too bad for Victoria, where Premier Daniel Andrews has extended the nation’s most severe lockdown for another four weeks.

If Austria and Denmark — each with many more total deaths and more new infections than Australia — can see the sense in beginning to lift restrictions, so should we. Hospitals have plenty of capacity and new infection rates have tumbled.

Everyone has a right to a view on this fundamental question. Disease experts’ forecasts have proved hopelessly wrong anyway.

It’s not certain a vaccine will ever emerge, but we obviously can’t stay locked down for six months. The longer it lasts, the harder it will be to switch the economy back on. The businesses won’t be there. The economy isn’t a machine like the bureaucracy but a complex set of relationships that will atrophy.

Why not let sport occur without crowds, parliaments sit, young people swim at the beach, businesses reopen, provided they observe social distancing principles? No one is saying “let it rip”; clearly insulating the vulnerable from this virus is a high priority. But it appears less likely the virus will wipe out 5 per cent of India, or 3 per cent of Indonesia, as the Spanish flu did.

We urgently need randomised testing to see how widespread the coronavirus already is. The Prime Minister has said COVID-19 is akin to a one-in-100-year event. It’s unlikely that’s true of the virus, but it’s looking true of damage caused by hysteria.

SOURCE  






'Nonsensical': Photos from Bunnings and beach spark social distancing debate



The two photos were posted to a Facebook page for the community of Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast, on Easter Saturday.

The photo from inside Bunnings Noosaville shows a queue of people practicing social distancing, however there were concerns over how full the store was.

It then raised questions as to why people could not spend time at Sunshine Coast beaches, with tourists and locals alike urged to stay away.

“Meanwhile at Bunnings and Noosa Main Beach,” a man said on the picture comparing the busy Bunnings store to the abandoned beach.

A woman commented saying the rules were “nonsensical”.  “Very interesting contrast in pictures,” she said. “Indoor crowds at Bunnings OK but whatever you do, don’t spread out at the beach.”

Another said it was “not safe when too many go in at once”.

“Yeah what a joke, government telling everyone to stay home yet the shops are open it’s a bit of a laugh,” a man commented.

Others however commented Bunnings was an essential service and if it closed a number of people would be out of work.

One also made the point the number of people could be capped within stores but could not be in a public space.

Bunnings had encouraged people to shop at the store for supplies ahead of the Easter break, with research showing 65 per cent of Australians had at least one unfinished DIY job to do at home.

As Easter is a busy time for Bunnings, it urged people to get in early so social distancing guidelines could be maintained.

“We know the importance of customers being able to access the products they need, whether it’s for urgent home repairs and maintenance, supplies for tradies to keep their businesses running or items for home projects to keep people active,” Bunnings Managing Director Mike Schneider said.

The Bunnings boss claimed the hardware giant had seen an increase in demand for necessary products that customers needed for DIY projects or to maintain homes.

“We’re also hearing from customers that these projects provide a useful physical and mental distraction to the challenges of extended periods of time at home,” he said.

“We also understand the importance that a reliable supply of key products is to both DIY and trade customers to keep their business running and support their local communities, particularly with emergency repairs and maintenance.”

SOURCE  






Are schools open or closed for term 2 amid coronavirus in Australia?

Australian governments’ positions on whether to send children to school in term two while coronavirus social distancing rules are in force has many parents confused.

Throughout March the Morrison government opposed school closures on the basis of medical advice, but the issue was forced by Victoria bringing forward its school holidays and other states and territories introducing pupil-free days to prepare for online learning.

Now, with the end of school holidays approaching, the national cabinet, states and territories are revisiting their guidance about whether to continue learning at home or send children to school.

What does the federal government say?

On Sunday the federal education minister, Dan Tehan, said the federal government “wants all schools open”. The issue will be revisited at national cabinet on Thursday, with the federal government pushing for a consistent national approach.

Tehan noted states and territories had “put in place different arrangements”. “But what the nationally consistent approach is, when it comes to parents who have to work and vulnerable children, schools have to be open and have to make sure that they provide a safe learning environment for those children.”

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





14 April, 2020

Coronavirus triggers Australian self-sufficiency push

Austraia would be greatly impoversished if we had to make everything ourselves.  China will always be way cheaper at making most things. But giving local industries with good prospects a bit of a push to get them going would make some sense.  But that would give the government the job of picking winners -- and they have no expertise at that.

 It is very hard to see any one thing that we should stop importing and start making ourselves.  At the moment there would be some justification for producung more face masks etc but the next emergency might be quite different and generate different shortages. We just don't have the predictive power to make any changes that would be reliably useful


Australia's reliance on imported products will be put under the microscope by the federal government as it pushes the economy to become more self-sufficient in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has started quietly pulling together a policy roundtable from the public and private sectors so agriculture is the industry "best placed" to thrive after COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed as rain soaks into drought-baked paddocks of eastern Australia.

Mr Littleproud said even though agriculture delivered just 2 per cent of GDP, the industry would be crucial in helping the nation rebound after this crisis.

"Growing the industry is going to be so important to helping our nation repair. It's the bedrock of our nation's economy and our nation's security," he said.

He was circumspect about bringing back food manufacturing jobs, but said there were opportunities for “new jobs in innovation and science” to boost livestock and crop yields with new farming techniques and technology.

Richard Heath, executive director of the think tank Australian Farm Institute, said there was potential to look at job creation through food manufacturing, provided the government brought in "very different policies".

"This is where it gets really complicated," Mr Heath said, explaining that post-coronavirus "Australia will still have really high processing, energy and labour cost".

"We'd have to add some sort of economic stimulus, or export and import restrictions, to create a competitive processing sector," he said.

Moves to wind back Australia's free trade policies would meet resistance from the government.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday said that even the current demand for locally made medical equipment "should not be seen as an argument for protectionism" and Australia didn't "need to engage in mass national subsidies of industries".

Mr Frydenberg said there would have to be a "proper assessment" of global supply chains and that while Australia was self-sufficient in terms of agriculture, other areas such as fuel security would need to be closely considered.

Grattan Institute household finances program director Brendan Coates said while there were benefits of having global supply chains and not being overly reliant on domestic supplies, there should be careful consideration about concentrating too much risk in one place.

"The crisis has clearly exposed that Australia did not have adequate domestic supplies or productive capacity for critical health equipment like masks, respirators and some of the reagents for producing tests for COVID-19," Mr Coates said.

"We've maybe relied more heavily on China than we should've," he said, adding that firms had started diversifying outside of China in the past decade into other countries.

EY Asia Pacific supply chain reinvention leader Nathan Roost said there was an opportunity for a rethink of the Australian manufacturing strategy and supply chain at a national level.

"There is an effort by corporate enterprises and government departments to identify additional suppliers in different countries, including Australian sources of supply, to limit future input disruption or shortages," he said.

Former NSW primary industries minister Niall Blair, who retired from politics last year and started a new role as professor of food sustainability at Charles Sturt University, is bullish about the prospect for new jobs in agriculture, particularly exporting food products to the growing Asian middle classes.

"There are enough people, with enough disposable income, for us to be able to make a lot of money out of our higher quality, clean and green, value-added food and fibre products," Mr Blair said.

"I've seen people in China pay $11 for a litre of Australian milk. They just don't trust their own produce in some cases and they've got the income to afford it."

Mr Blair said new food processing systems, where food waste was recycled in biodigesters to produce heat and methane for power, could reduce ongoing operating costs.

"Some of the smarter farming and processing businesses are starting to generate their own electricity, their own heat and their own fertiliser, which can make them a lot more sustainable."

Carolyn Creswell, founder and owner of Australian muesli brand Carman's, said local production had enabled the company to meet a 50 per cent rise in demand during coronavirus restrictions.

"So many times I've had conversations that we could have had packaging printed in China and saved a bit of money. What happened to a lot of companies, they could actually make the product, they just didn't have the packaging," Ms Creswell said.

SOURCE  






NOAA’s Bogus Climate Scare: “Near-Annual” Great Barrier Reef Bleaching

Climate alarmists are back with a new and far-fetched Great Barrier Reef scare, just a few years after their most recent claims of massive coral death in the Reef proved false. No, alarmists, we are not entering a period of “near-annual” widespread bleaching.

Mark Eakin, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Australian edition of The Guardian that rising ocean temperatures may have pushed the world’s coral reefs into annual “mass bleaching” events from which corals can’t recover.

However, this year’s bleaching hardly qualifies as the “mass bleaching” Eakin describes. Even The Guardian acknowledged, “Many areas of the Great Barrier Reef are known to have experienced severe bleaching this summer, likely killing many corals, but others, including tourist reefs near Cairns and the Whitsundays, only experienced mild bleaching. Most offshore reefs in the far north escaped bleaching entirely.”

The reefs in the far north, which have “escaped bleaching entirely,” are the ones closest to the equator and thus in the warmest water.

"Climate at a Glance" provides a summary of the scientific evidence regarding coral reefs and climate change. The summary documents that corals have existed continuously for the past 40 million years, surviving and evolving in temperatures and carbon dioxide levels significantly higher than what exists today. Indeed, corals thrive in warm water, not cold water. Among the myriad factors thought to have driven recent coral bleaching episodes are, “oxybenzone (a chemical found in sunscreen), sediment runoff from nearby coastal lands, and cold temperatures like those recorded in 2010 off the Florida coast.”

Australian coral reef expert Dr. Peter Ridd recently debunked claims in 2016 that up to 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died during a bleaching event. “At the extreme, 8 percent died,” Ridd reported.

“There’s about the same amount of coral now as there was in 1995,” Ridd added.

“Of all the ecosystems in the world, in fact, the Reef is the one best able to adapt to increasing [temperatures], whether that’s natural or whether that’s anthropogenic. Half a degree temperature change certainly doesn’t cause mass bleaching events.”

Still other peer reviewed studies have indicated modestly warmer oceans cause an expansion of corals’ ranges. For instance, a team of Japanese scientists published a study in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters indicating corals off the coast of Japan expanded their range as water temperatures increased. The scientists, with access to 80 years of national records from temperate areas of Japan, found corals were expanding poleward as waters warmed, reporting, “[f]our major coral species categories, including two key species for reef formation in tropical areas, showed poleward range expansions since the 1930s, whereas no species demonstrated southward range shrinkage or local extinction.”

SOURCE  






Memo stating babies would be separated from COVID-19 mothers retracted

The state’s largest private hospital has apologised for telling mothers with COVID-19 that they would be separated from their babies immediately after giving birth, prevented from skin-to-skin contact and made to sign a consent form if they wished to care for their newborns.

The Sydney Adventist Hospital outlined its new rules for COVID-19 maternity patients in a newsletter on Thursday, describing protocols at odds with the World Health Organisation and peak Australian and UK obstetrician bodies.

The hospital's management told The Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday the newsletter was incorrect, "lacked subtlety" and would reissued new advice that stressed COVID-positive mothers would be offered the choice to stay with their babies or be separated from them to reduce the risk of transmission.

Birthing hospitals across Australia are considering their approach to managing the risk of COVID-19 in the absence of uniform protocols from health departments. The mixed messages and confusion have inflamed anxieties among expectant mothers, partners and healthcare workers.

The now-retracted communique from Sydney Adventist (known as The San) informed COVID-positive mothers and their partners: “Your baby will be, with your consent, taken to a room close by straight after birth and nursed in a crib to reduce the transmission of the virus to your baby”.

“This is in line with advice from our paediatricians and in accordance with hospital policy," it said.

“Unfortunately, we will be unable to provide skin to skin contact with your baby at birth. We understand this is a very difficult concept to consider, however the effect of the virus on your newborn is unknown and we will be doing everything possible to protect you both.

“Your baby will be nursed separately from you until your tests, and those of your baby, are negative," the newsletter said.

Babies would be fed expressed breast milk by nurses, and if a mother felt well and wanted to breastfeed and care for their baby, she would be asked to sign a consent form prior to birth, the document read.

Chief executive of Adventist HealthCare Brett Goods said: “On behalf of the hospital I’m very sorry we have caused people distress".

Mr Goods said the newsletter “lacked some subtlety” and “seemed overly weighted [towards] 'this is what the hospital wants to do and if you don’t want to do that you’re going to have to sign a consent'." “It was unfortunate,” Mr Goods said. “We want to correct that.”

Dr Neil Ginsberg, the San’s head of paediatrics, said the new communique would stress that mothers who may have COVID-19 would be cared for in a separate part of the maternity unit to other patients and could choose to stay with their babies. He said the risk of transmission was "extremely, extremely low".

"But we also just wanted to make sure that if somebody was looking for as close to 100 per cent or risk aversion, that that option could be offered,” Dr Ginsberg said.

“We decided the best option would be to offer two pathways where the mother could remain with their baby if that is what they wanted and educating them about those risks," he said.

"The second option was for mums who were highly anxious and concerned about those risks; we would offer them the opportunity to separate [from] their babies at birth."

Separating babies from COVID-positive mothers was at odds with the World Health Organisation as well as guidelines from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG), which states a COVID-positive mother “should not be automatically separated from her baby, but should take enhanced precautions with general hygiene and consider a face mask when feeding.”

RANZCOG does not support testing asymptomatic babies for the virus and stipulates that women with COVID who wish to breastfeed should be encouraged and supported.

College president Dr Vijay Roach said the risk of babies contracting COVID-19 from their mothers in utero or during birth was low.

“If the mother or baby is unwell, or the baby is premature, or if there are other risk factors, then the baby should be assessed and transferred to the nursery,” Dr Roach said.

Dr Ginsberg said The San’s approach was in line with the US Centre for Disease Control advice.  “There is a huge amount of information that is unclear at this stage,” Dr Ginsberg said.

Dr Nisha Khot, an obstetrician and councillor with RANZCOG and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) acknowledged "this is a rapidly evolving situation but recognised bodies like RCOG and RANZCOG are monitoring all emerging evidence".

Dr Khot said current evidence suggests that mothers and babies should not be separated immediately after birth.

A spokesperson for NSW Health said the ministry "supports RANZCOG advice that does not recommend separating a newborn from its mother if she has COVID-19".

SOURCE  






Year 12, kindy should get priority when school goes back: teachers' federation

The NSW Teachers Federation has suggested a staggered return to school once health authorities and governments start lifting social distancing restrictions, beginning with year 12 and kindergarten.

As schools prepare to deliver term two online, federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said leaders needed to think about how to ensure an "orderly return" when circumstances changed, avoiding a deluge of students when older or vulnerable teachers were unable to return.

The NSW Teachers Federation says year 12 and kindy should be given priority when schools reopen.
The NSW Teachers Federation says year 12 and kindy should be given priority when schools reopen.

"An option could be a staggered return to our schools," he said. "I've advanced a proposition that part of an orderly [process], we could consider a return of year 12 and kindergarten, followed by year seven and year six, and progressively pad that out."

Educators cautiously welcomed the idea, although they said the process would be complicated and schools would need to be consulted.

It comes as Education Minister Dan Tehan said ministers were looking at options to make school systems more flexible and open for some students. "Is there an opportunity maybe to bring year 12 students back one day a week?" he said.

"Or would there be an opportunity for those doing vocational education at school to do some of their practical work at school? Or chemistry students - would they be able to come to school one or two afternoons a week to do the practical side of their chemistry?"

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government will be using the school holiday period to consider its options for term two and beyond.

“We will communicate this with school communities before school returns. All options will be considered in line with health advice,” she said.

While pandemic experts say children are not believed to drive the spread of COVID-19, teachers have been concerned about their safety, particularly those who are older or have underlying conditions. A 2017 workforce survey found the average age of NSW teachers is 37, but up to a fifth are over 50.

Before they began holidays on Thursday afternoon, NSW schools were not closed but were delivering remote learning to everyone, and parents were encouraged to keep their children at home. About 94 per cent of families did so. By this week, two thirds of the public school teaching workforce were working from home.

Schools have prepared to deliver term two lessons online. But as parents feel the stress of supervising students while working, or students become more restless about learning alone, some predict the number of students attending schools will rise.

Craig Petersen, head of the Secondary Principals Council, said the danger of allowing students to return whenever their parents chose could lead to a situation in which there were more students at school than teachers available.

An ordered return - prioritising high-needs years as suggested by the federation - made sense, but it would be complicated, he said. Year 12 teachers, for example, might have an underlying health condition, while some schools ran a "compressed curriculum" in which years 10 and 11 also did HSC subjects.

"This needs to be carefully thought through," Mr Petersen said. "It introduces a whole range of complexities. What we need is for the principals' associations, for the federation, and for educators to be consulted."

Mr Petersen said parents were already ringing schools, confused about what to expect next term. "We have to have clarity around this, schools cannot be left in this position where we become the target of parental concern and anxiety about decision we have no control over," he said.

"We are extremely frustrated with the lack of consultation and consideration for what's in the best interests of our students."

Jenny Allum, the principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, said schools had proven their ability to respond to changing circumstances over the past month. She said a staged return was "certainly a possibility", especially one involving year 12 as a priority.

"You can have 24 [year 12] kids working in three classrooms with one teacher, you can't have a class of 24 kindergarten kids in three classrooms with one teacher," she said. "But we are conscious that it's a significant demand on parents, to be supervising younger kids at home and trying to do their own work."

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






13 April, 2020

Pandemic is a grave moment in human history

Tom Switzer 

Since the first responsibility of the state is to protect its citizens, it is easily understandable why, faced with a pandemic on a scale not seen since 1918, draconian measures have been taken internationally to try to keep loss of life to a minimum. These measures have been taken not just in nations with a long-standing cultural taste for intervention, but in those where liberal and libertarian ideas have hitherto prevailed.

Two challenges face these polities: first, to judge carefully when restrictions can be lifted and to strike a balance between the damage caused by the virus and that caused by economic ruin; second, to ensure those restrictions do not leave a legacy in liberal societies, but are removed so society can proceed as before.

The coronavirus pandemic is a grave moment in human history. But it should not prove to be so pivotal it changes society profoundly and permanently.

But once the main threat has passed, restoring the liberty of citizens to go where they wish on public property, when they wish, and with whom they wish may prove the least of the problems for the societies that have chosen draconian measures to combat the spread of the disease.

Far harder will be removing wage subsidies, reducing debt and re-stabilising economies. For more, read my SMH column.

In response to my column, critics said the Covid-19 crisis is an indictment of “neo-liberalism.” By this, they mean the very market reforms of the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello era that helped spur Australia’s nearly 30 years of unbroken economic growth with low inflation, low interest rates and low unemployment and no great widening in inequality.

Never mind that today’s economic crisis a liquidity problem caused by the extraordinary government economic shutdown to stem the spread of the virus. It has nothing to do with free markets or dodgy CEOs.

Although relief in a crisis is a proper role for government — especially addressing short-term hardship (job loss, illness) — the critics are using this crisis as an excuse to increase permanently the size of government and the burden on taxpayers.

However, the way out of this crisis is not via higher levels of government, which will only saddle future generations with skyrocketing debt and deficits. It’s via a new economic reform agenda that encourages individual enterprise and freedom, incentives to work and invest and improve prospects for tomorrow’s growth and prosperity.

In any case, all this is a reminder of how quickly things have changed since our February 19 pubic event on Coronavirus and China. Back then, no one -- including people who presumably know a lot about infectious diseases -- predicted that COVID-19 would seriously threaten western liberal democracies and trigger a severe economic downturn.

Back then, the focus was primarily on China. Coronavirus, some scholars argued, highlighted the already low levels of trust in party-state media reporting. Others disagreed, arguing that Beijing has handled the crisis better than anyone had expected compared with two decades ago.

Via email: events@cis.org.au




One of Australia's top universities will allow students to use Year 11 results to apply after coronavirus caused disruption to the school calendar

One of Australia's top universities will allow students to use their Year 11 results to apply for courses.

Students can apply to undergraduate programs at Canberra's Australian National University (ANU) for 2021 with their Year 11 scores, due to the school year being disrupted by COVID-19.

The university believes taking earlier results will lighten stress levels for Year 12 students after a tumultuous year of study.

ANU begin making offers in August, with Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt advising prospective students to apply in the upcoming school holidays.

'All Year 12 students who want to study at ANU can focus on completing their studies and preparing for university, knowing that if their marks from Year 11 meet our entry requirements they can join one of the world's leading universities,' he said in a media release.

The Year 11 results offer follows on from further successful alterations to ANU's application procedure, where students are assessed on extra-curricular activities beyond their scholastic achievements to gain entry into the university.

Students who apply with Year 11 results must go on to complete Year 12 for their scores to be valid, with accommodation and scholarships available for successful applicants.

Professor Schmidt said the new application procedures are based on research to ensure the best students are given the chance to go to ANU.

'This change was to help our students,' he said. 'Rather than have them choose their university only a few weeks before term starts, we now assess students on their academic results through Year 11, as well as their extra-curricular achievements and personal circumstances.

'The success of this new approach over the past year means we are well placed to offer thousands of talented school-leavers across Australia the chance to study with us here in Canberra.

'This is particularly important as they are dealing with the stress of finishing their studies during a global pandemic.'

Australian Year 12 students have been told they will be able to graduate this year despite the disruption to their studies caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

Federal education minister Dan Tehan on Tuesday confirmed the states and Commonwealth agreed students will still proceed to finish high school this year.

'For all those students out there, for all those parents out there, there will be no year 13, there will be no mass repeating. You will get your leaving certificate this year,' he said.

The announcement followed a phone meeting between state and federal education ministers this week to discuss the impact the COVID-19 pandemic upon studies.

Mr Tehan also said the government did not want those students studying from home for part of the year to be left behind when assessments roll around, and grades may be adjusted to account for the disruption.

'When it comes to how the ATAR is calculated and assessed, the Commonwealth is going to do further work with the university sector, with the vocational education sector and will come back to the Education Council in May,' he said.

'What we all are going to do is to endeavour to make sure that this year's ATAR scores are the same as last year's ATAR scores... But we will take into account those students who have to learn from home, those who might not be able to access the technology like others do.'

SOURCE  





Maritime union faces $3m hit for unlawful action after dispute with energy giant

The Maritime Union of Australia has agreed not to launch any unlawful strikes or pickets against multinational energy company Chevron for the next decade or forfeit $3 million under an agreement reached in a protracted dispute over the company's use of foreign labour.

If it breaches the agreement and is forced to give Chevron the compensation payment, it would be one of the largest payments ever levied against an Australian union but much smaller than the $22 million the company initially sought over the union's campaign to keep foreign crews off Chevron ships.

The fine will hang over the union as it enters into negotiations with the company on a new enterprise agreement covering workers at its offshore facilities, which include multibillion-dollar gas fields.

Federal Court judge Katrina Banks-Smith on Thursday ordered the union, which is one of the country's most strident, to pay the fine if any of its organisers or delegates have a hand in any unauthorised industrial action at any Chevron project, including its giant Gorgon gas field.

The union will still be permitted to undertake industrial action where it is allowed under legislation.

Justice Banks-Smith's decision, which put into effect a deal agreed between the union and company, ends an almost eight-year-long dispute that began when the union held up a ship called the RollDock Sun transporting freight to the Gorgon project for two days in June 2012.

The union was angry the vessel was crewed by foreign workers rather than local seafarers.

In one email to other union members quoted in the court's judgment, the union's Western Australian secretary Chris Cain said it had "been f---ing this vessel about for the last 2 days" and went on to list ways the union would use safety measures to delay it further.

The judge criticised the union for using safety as a tool of industrial conflict and issued an immediate penalty of $30,000, in addition to the $3 million potential compensation payment to Chevron.

MUA National Secretary Paddy Crumlin said he welcomed the end of the saga.

"We accept the $30,000 fine, which allows us to finalise this issue and move on with developing a more constructive and functional relationship with the company under the existing industrial bargaining framework," Mr Crumlin said.

The maritime union, which is part of the CFMMEU, is bargaining for a new enterprise agreement at Chevron in coalition with the Australian Workers Union.

"This collective agreement, which is supported by the overwhelming majority of Chevron's direct employees, provides an opportunity to deliver a good outcome for the company's business requirements along with the needs of their direct offshore employees," Mr Crumlin said.

Chevron declined to comment.

SOURCE  






State power has been recruited in an effort to destroy Cardinal Pell despite the flimsiest of evidence

Driven by hatred of the church

The nation’s High Court, by a 7-nil margin, quashed five convictions of child abuse for which Cardinal George Pell spent 13 months and 10 days in jail in Melbourne, almost all of it in solitary confinement. There, he was denied the opportunity to celebrate Mass, and had no access to the Sacraments, for months on end.

At the eleventh hour, the nation’s highest court redeemed some of the credibility the Australian justice system had lost, reminding the nation and the world that the rule of law is not yet dead. That assertion, however, remains doubtful in Victoria (Australia’s second largest state in terms of population). There, the conduct of the Pell case routinely violated principles of justice recognised as sacrosanct in every civilised society.

His Eminence’s conviction, on the unsupported testimony of a single complainant, without any forensic or documentary evidence and with no supporting witnesses, was more reminiscent of the judicial processes of totalitarian states, where trial results normally accord with the political and cultural mores of the state, and the expectations of the ruling elite.

In the Pell case, everything hinged on the credibility of the complainant, whose name remains suppressed in Australia. Nor was he even required to appear in person - even in a closed court. In the first trial, he gave evidence via video link from a remote location, comforted by a “support’’ dog! In the second trial, held after the jury in the first trial failed to reach a verdict, the complainant’s cross-examination was replayed to a fresh jury. In both trials, the Cardinal’s defence team -- and therefore the jury – was denied access to vital evidence: specifically, that the complainant had a history of serious psychological problems that required treatment.

Shortcomings in the conduct of both trials were manifold, including the failure to take the jury to St Patrick’s Cathedral on a busy Sunday morning to see the atmosphere in which the offences allegedly occurred. The Victorian Court of Appeal’s shameful decision, by a 2-1 margin, to reject the Cardinal’s appeal in August 2019, compounded the injustice. The judges in the majority based their decision on the credibility of the complainant. Only the dissenting judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, one of Australia’s most experienced jurists in criminal matters, was ‘quite unconvinced’ by the complainant’s evidence. In a 204-page judgement, he argued Pell’s conviction “cannot be permitted to stand’’ because there was a significant possibility that the Cardinal was innocent.

In its verdict delivered in Holy Week 2020, the High Court of Australia agreed.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, the state’s political leader, clearly did not. He released a brief statement after the High Court decision: “I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you.’’

In that extraordinary and dangerous statement, he effectively declared a “presumption of guilt’’ on anyone accused of child sexual abuse. The people who mean the most, Andrews said, were “the victims’’.

But this is to beg the question. There was no such “victim’’ in the Pell case – only a complainant whose complaint was wrong. In this case, the only victim was Cardinal Pell, who was wrongly convicted and jailed.

Andrews’ Victoria leads the nation in encouraging so-called “gender fluidity’’ among children and teenagers, boasts Australia’s worst abortion laws -– which other states have copied -- and put liberal euthanasia laws into effect last year, causing the deaths of 52 people in the first six months.

The Premier was also responsible for mandatory reporting legislation that requires priests to violate the Seal of Confession. Incredibly, Andrews, a Catholic who has opposed Catholic teaching and discipline at every opportunity, and whose children attend Catholic schools, has never been rebuked – let alone placed under any canonical penalty – by the Bishop of any Victorian Diocese.

There is a time and place to acknowledge the damage done to minors by sinful sexual abusers. This was not such an occasion. In this gross miscarriage of justice there was no “victim’’ of sexual abuse, only a complainant.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






12 April, 2020

Why Australia is printing money

It is and that may concern many Australians.  But the UK and te USA have been doing it on a large scale for years with no obvious ill effects. 

It goes back to a recommendation by John Maynard Keynes that the government should spend more money than it takes in during a recession or depression.  And that is exactly the situation today.  We are in a situation where a Keysnesian stimulus is appropriate.  When people are not spending because they have lost their jobs, it would normally send lots of businesses broke.  Businesses need people to keep spending. So it makes sense for the government to do their spending for them.

Usually, of course, the government would spend on their own projects but this time governments are actually putting a lot of the new money directly into the pockets of those who have lost their normal income.  But either way the government can and should spend up big on keeping people and businesses afloat.

Unfortunately, governments really like spending money without first taking it in and Keynes has legitimated that.  Keynes said to print money in a recession but government have ignored that restriction and printed some money regularly. So there is usually a small amount of money printing going on.  That is why prices are usually rising.  The extra money leads to extra demand for goods and services and that pushes prices up -- which we refer to as "inflation".

The interesting question, these days is how much you can get away with printing without causing inflation to "roar". Economists always thought that inflation would roughly mirror the amount of new money printed. But in recent years we have seen that you can print a large amount of money and get only a small amount of inflation.  First Obama and now Trump have used that extensively in that they have spent far more than the government has raised in taxes. We have yet to see where that will end up


Hundreds of billions has been spent to help the economy and interest rates have tumbled. But the central bank has also splashed on another plan

The Federal Government has splashed more than $200 billion in support packages to keep the economy ticking over as the coronavirus halts trading for nearly all industries.

The central bank has chipped in, too, recently slashing interest rates to a record level of 0.25 per cent at an emergency meeting.

It has also injected a huge amount of cash into the economy by purchasing $36 billion worth of government bonds since March 19 “to do what is necessary” to help ease the burden on the suddenly surging jobless Australians.

“The Bank has injected substantial liquidity into the financial system through its daily open market operations to support credit and maintain low funding costs in the economy,” the Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe said in his statement this week.

“It will continue to ensure that the financial system has sufficient liquidity.”

The central bank will continue to buy government bonds but this will be pulled back and done on a smaller scale in the near term.

But what does this all mean?

Also known as quantitative easing, an avenue to inject money into the economy is by creating extra cash and using that to buy government bonds or other financial assets, AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said.

“They could buy mortgages or corporate debt, which is what the Federal Reserve does in the US, or they could buy shares, which is what the Bank of Japan sometimes does,” he told news.com.au.

The process of buying and selling bonds is part of the RBA’s standard monetary operations to maintain liquidity in the financial system, though this is isn’t usually done through printing money.

SO THE RBA IS PRINTING MONEY?  Essentially, yes, says Dr Oliver.

“For all intents and purposes, they physically print it because they engage in a transaction with a bond holder — which could be a bank, it could be a fund manager, or it could be a foreign organisation,” he said.

“They're going into what you call secondary market for Australian government bonds, when a bond has already been issued by the government and someone has already bought it.

“That bond holder can then sell it on or trade it. So the reserve bank goes into these secondary markets, buys those bonds and in the process transfers money into the account of the person selling the bond. “And to do that, they obviously have the cash backing that.”

The money used to purchase the bonds is electronic but the central bank would have needed to back that up by creating more cash. “Money doesn't just get created in thin air, the Reserve Bank would use printed money to buy that,” Dr Oliver said.

“The RBA is actually increasing the size of its balance sheet and the asset it gets is a government bond. But the liability is, in principle, cash.”

BUYING BONDS IS A GOOD THING

The process has become a popular economic policy move across the globe in the recent months as the coronavirus cripples supply chains and halts business. The United Kingdom and the US have embarked on similar schemes.

“The problem facing Australia right now is a supply shock with people stuck at home and can't work in some cases,” Dr Oliver said.

“But there's also a demand shock so anything the Reserve Bank can do to make it easier for the government to borrow money to finance things like wage subsidies, higher unemployment benefits and payments to companies to help them through this period is a good thing.”

WILL AUSTRALIA SUFFER LATER ON?

Like any of the stimulus packages being hurled at the frontline of the economic crisis caused by the deadly pandemic, it is increasing the nation’s debt.

“It will come at a cost but providing it's managed well and the Reserve Bank, when the time comes, puts an end to money printing before inflation becomes an issue, then I don't think it's a major problem,” the leading economist said.

“It’s similar to federal government borrowing money to pay wage subsidy and other supportive measures through this period in that it will come at a cost down the track if it’s not withdrawn. “The trick is that once the need is over, then it’s brought to an end.”

SOURCE  





A picture to make Australians laugh

A British police officer in Brighton tells a member of the public that sunbathing is against the law.



Sunbathing fully clothed on a bed of stones?






Free childcare is all very well but what about those who have to provide it?  Who is looking after them?

It seems that no matter who you talk to these days, people are doing it tough. Thankfully, a great many families are still able to eat and celebrate Easter this weekend thanks to the government's recent offerings such as the free childcare plan and Jobkeeper payments.

Just this morning NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian announced that the state will be offering free preschool for all ages for the next six months. And while these latest government schemes will go a long way to helping a great many families, they are also crushing others in the process.

Louise White is a mum-of-two and Family Daycare Educator based in Ryde, Sydney. For many years she's helped care for other people's children within her home and it's a job she's enjoyed since her own children were younger.

Now she'll continue to do so ... while earning only half of what she was earning before.

In a post shared to her Facebook profile, Louise detailed how Family Daycare Educators are being disadvantaged by the government's free childcare scheme.

"What the government has failed to mention is that child care is free for the parents at my expense and at the expense of every Family Day Care Educator who has had her income halved over a matter of days," Louise wrote in her post.

Louise explained that the childcare subsidy works by allowing parents to essentially pay what they can afford, through means testing. So while one family might pay $25 per day, another might pay $50 a day.

So if Louise charges a flat rate of $100 per day (as an example), the government would pay the difference. So on one family that would be $75 and $50 for the other.

"This will cripple us"

Now the government have committed to paying half of all childcare fees, which sounds great on the surface, but as Louise pointed out, she's *no longer allowed to charge the gap*.

So rather than receiving one percentage from the family and the remainder from the government, Louise only receives half of what she was earning previously from the government and families don't have to pay anything.

"As of Monday I will earn half of what I earned last week and I will be working the same hours with the same children, doing the same job," wrote Louise.

"I am taking a 50 percent pay cut so that families who are still working and earning their full pay can have free childcare. My family is not a high income family. This will cripple us."

This QLD centre owner doesn't welcome the free child care news, and why this VIC mum working in childcare is worried about coronavirus.

Louise says she loves all of the children in her care, and trusts their families are all taking the relevant precautions, but she is still opening up her home to six families a week. Caring for four children each day, for five days a week over 10 hours a day.

"I am not given PPE, I am not able to social distance from the children (they are all under five and still need lots of love and cuddles) and I am exposing my home and family every day," Louise said.

"All Family Day Care Educators are in the same position and are now expected to do it for half the income."

Louise pointed out that while Jobkeeper payments may help some, it won't help all Family Daycare Educators and isn't available until May.

"We all have to try and operate at our usual high standards, buying equipment, paying our bills and running our businesses," she said, "while only receiving half our pay."

SOURCE  






Mum rejects ‘virtual classroom’, writes ‘hard email’ to Grade 1 teacher

Homeschooling to a government formula is hard.  Is no formal schooling an option in today's circumstances?

Overworked parents have been given “permission to let it all go” — including homeschooling their children — as responsibilities and expectations pile up and quarantine stress builds.

Mother and world renowned archaeologist Sarah Parcak struck a chord on social media this week when she shared her decision to pull her son out of Year 1 for good.

“We just wrote a hard email,” she explained to her 45,000 followers on Twitter. “I told our son’s (lovely, kind, caring) teacher that, no, we will not be participating in her ‘virtual classroom’, and that he was done with the 1st grade.

“We cannot cope with this insanity. Survival and protecting his well being come first.”

“We both work full time, I also help run my non profit AND manage a complex project in Egypt AND am running a COVID-19 tracking platform. So, his happiness trumps crappy math worksheet management.

“Managing his education is a bridge too far right now. I also cook, manage cleaning, have a garden etc (husband does 50% of housework BTW, we are a team). The thought of homeschooling makes me want to barf. It’s a f*cking joke.

“He reads a lot. Plays outside a lot. We read to him a lot and talk to him a lot. He gets history lessons.

“Our goal is to have our son come out of this happy and not be long term emotionally scarred (lord knows life will do that anyways). F**k worksheets. F**k shitty math worksheets especially.”

She told her followers to “let it all go” because “it doesn’t f***ing matter”. “School doesn’t f***ing matter right now. All your kids will remember is how they were loved. Promise.”

SOURCE  






Coronavirus: Charting a way out of this crippling Pollyanna world

This week there were big black police cars marked Public Order and Riot Squad cruising around the quiet suburb where I live. It was 10.30 in the morning. There were barely any other cars on the road and no sign of any public disorder, let alone a riot.

There were seven rangers in my park the day before, more than the number of people exercising, or walking, or looking for a ray of sunshine. On the same day, a tiny bay — not a beach, and not far away from me — was locked up with 2m-high fencing so surfers couldn’t find refuge in the waves. Like the riot squad, the rangers and the men putting up fencing were all just doing what they were told to do by superiors.

Which is the same as the Morrison government. They keep telling us they are doing what their superiors, a panel of scientists, are telling them to do. Closing down businesses, large gatherings, sport, church services, culling funerals and weddings, curbing gatherings to two people, unless you are with family or friends you live with.

Two people? It wasn’t so long ago that governments were making room in their ministries for ministers for social isolation. Now, our governments are forcing the country into strict isolation, under threat of jail.

After only two weeks of this, many people are asking whether we are in a corner with no discernible way out. These sentiments are serious. They will get more serious in another week, two weeks, in another month. Talk of putting the country into “hibernation” for six months seems ridiculous. Can it really work?

We are told there is “no magic” to the highly hypothetical modelling released this week. It is guesswork then? If it is not guesswork, please entrust us with meaningful information that we can use to judge whether the cure is worse than the disease.

All we can see so far is an arms race of restrictions on how we live and work by state and federal governments. Let us award Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews first prize in this alarming competition for doing the most to close down an economy and constraining citizens. With that out of the way, it is time for the federal government, using real metrics rather than hypothetical modelling, to start planning how to reopen the country.

To be sure, listen to medical experts. And then add, weigh up and parse other information too. Information such as the economic costs of shutting down businesses, the long-term effects of unemployment, the costs of piling debt on to future generations, the ability of the country to deal with future crises from a position of economic weakness. Other information too, such as the costs of isolating millions of Australians, the mental health costs, the diseases that won’t be treated properly during this pandemic. And share it with us, even the uncertainty.

From chief scientists to premiers to police commissioners and the Prime Minister, they have all talked about the journey we are on together. Journey together? Short of our political leaders mapping an eventual path to recovery for us, and sharing that with us, there is no journey, only confusion.

There is not going to be a “snap back” to normality — that is the stuff of dreams. It is more silly ­language that must stop. But please, Prime Minister, take us into your confidence, trust us by telling us what you are watching to plan for recovery, so we can watch for the same metrics. There is a need for some meaningful light and hope for a country swathed in darkness, uncertainty and fear.

Trust is a two-way street. If you trust us with a way out, we might trust you. We will also have some hope, some light at the end of this tunnel. Not trusting us is surely the road to civil disobedience. It’s only been two weeks and people are getting tetchy, itchy, restless. Has the government factored this in? Have they worked out what might be the tipping point for when we disobey and hop over fences?

There are powerful forces working against a meaningful exit strategy. The first one is human nature, always planning for the worst, avoiding all risk instead of managing it sensibly. That is killing our economy right now. It is leading people to despair. The second equation is that no politician is going to be held responsible for the future suicide of an unemployed young man who has lost hope. But they imagine they will be held responsible for the immediate death of a 94-year old from, or with, COVID-19.

No wonder many feel we are heading on a path more dangerous than a virus. Alas, if we want the government to come clean with us, it is time for us to come clean with ourselves. There is no easy option here. We can’t build walls around the country indefinitely. We can’t keep 25 million people in lockdown without dreadful, deadly consequences. We can’t keep praying for a vaccine. What if there is not a vaccine for a year, two years, five years, ever?

Even building up immunity may not work. What if there is another virus just like this one next year, or the year after? The economy in ruins, how do we support another six million who would be thrown out of the workplace by shutdowns. The shocking truth is we may have to learn to live with a killer virus just as we live, and some die, from other killer, albeit non-contagious, diseases.

Before this pandemic is over, we are all going to have to address some tough ethical questions. Questions of life and death, questions about rationing scarce resources, and questions about who gets priority when there is only one parachute but two aircraft passengers. A virus that disproportionately kills old people raises awful, but unavoidable, questions.

But in today’s society, Pollyannas will claim that all lives are of equal value, and that everyone has an equal claim to our limited ­resources. It is heartwarming. It is also wrong.

How do you answer an 83-year woman who says her life is every bit as valuable as that of a teenager? If there is only one ventilator in the COVID-19 intensive care unit, someone has to choose between giving it to the old woman who may have many health problems and only a few more years to live, or to an otherwise healthy 19-year-old. Do we make them toss a coin? How do we decide, if not by judging which life has more value?

Steve Waterson’s sobering piece last weekend had one particular line that has stuck. Life is precious, but it is not priceless. That is a confronting reality. All sorts of dreadful decisions are frequently made that will save some lives and cause others to die. Who gets the liver transplant, an old man or a young woman? Why aren’t all very expensive lifesaving drugs offered free of charge? Because we do not have infinite resources, so we choose some which we will offer for low or no cost.

Maybe one benefit of the COVID-19 pandemic is that Pollyanna thinking will be put to bed. We can surely never again pretend that hard choices, about life and death, need not be made.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





11 April, 2020

Arts funding in decline

And the pips are squeaking. Arts personalities are not only reliably Leftist themselves but they also abuse conservtives.  And they expect a conservative government to keep giving them money?

The basic point at issue is WHY should the government fund the arts?  They are enjoyed by only a small minority of the population.  The average Joe follows sport, not the Arts.  But as an elite pursuit, the political elite, particularly on the Left, are sympathetic to the Arts and cheerfully divert the taxes of the average Joe into the pockets of people who have nothing but contempt for the average Joe.

There is always some pretence that the Arts are "uplifting" in some way but I have never seen any solid evidence to that effect. Hitler was devoted to the Arts.  Was he uplifted by them?


Hitler at Bayreuth

 And the arts were well supported by the brutal Soviet system.  So reducing  subsidies to the recreations and entertainments of the elite is a proper activity of a democratic government


As any performer or comedian will tell you, timing is everything.

The cliché was never more painful than last Friday, when the Australia Council for the Arts handed down the results of its four year funding round for smaller cultural organisations.

The results were heartbreaking. Some of Australia’s most important and innovative arts organisations have lost their federal funding: the lifeline that they had counted on to try and ride out these extraordinary times. The list of organisations being “transitioned out” of Australia Council funding includes the Sydney Writers’ festival; many of the nation’s literary magazines, including Australian Book Review, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books, and a long string of theatre and dance companies, such as Sydney’s Australian Theatre for Young People, Adelaide’s Restless Dance Theatre, Perth’s Blue Room and Melbourne’s famous small theatre La Mama.

For perennially hard-pressed cultural organisations, funding cuts would be difficult in any climate. Unfortunately for Australia’s small cultural organisations, this is the very worst time of all.

The coronavirus outbreak has heralded wrenching changes to all sectors of our economy. But with the possible exception of aviation, no sector has fared worse than culture.

This is not a “recession” or a “downturn” by any normal definition. In response to coronavirus, whole sectors of the cultural industries have completely ceased operating.

By government fiat, every single performing arts company in the land has shut down in recent weeks. Every festival. Every theatre, opera house and music hall. Every public address or panel of speakers. The majority of art galleries and museums.

The arts minister, Paul Fletcher, argues that arts organisations affected by the restrictions can apply for the government’s jobkeeper package – indeed, he wrote in a media release that the stimulus could total billions of dollars across the cultural sector when finally totted up. “Most organisations in the arts sector are expected to meet the eligibility requirement of revenue having fallen by 30% or more, given that performances have been suspended and venues closed,” Fletcher’s statement notes.

This is scant consolation for the organisations that lost their funding late last week. The jobkeeper package is not even legislated yet, and there are many questions as to how it might apply.

The answers are depressingly familiar. The current funding round is the tortuous outcome of years of creeping austerity levelled on the Australia Council by successive Coalition governments. The pain began in Joe Hockey’s first budget of 2014, and was followed by the notorious “Excellence Fund” raid sortied by George Brandis, in which $105 million was ripped out of the Australia Council to pay for a parallel funding program dreamed up by the former arts minister in a flight of vainglory.

Some of the excellence funding was eventually returned, but in real terms Australia Council funding has declined by nearly 20% since Labor left office in 2013.

To compound matters, most of the Australia Council’s funding is quarantined for a group of larger performing arts companies co-funded with the states and territories, known as the Major Performing Arts organisations. These big companies, such as Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet, and the various state orchestras and theatre companies, soak up three-fifths of the Australia Council’s total budget. There simply isn’t much funding left to go round.

The dilemma is made even more painful by the fact the smaller companies (often known as the “small-to-medium” sector) have double the audiences of the majors, and produce around four times as much work each year. However, they get about a quarter of the funding.

 There is enough money to fund Australian culture properly, of course. It’s simply a matter of political will

As a result, the Australia Council has been left in an invidious situation. As a matter of policy, it is not allowed to take money from the major companies. But it doesn’t have the money to fund the small-to-medium sector properly.

The inevitable result was Friday’s bloodbath.

For a lover of culture, going over the list of who missed out is shocking. Companies of the calibre of La Mama, Australian Theatre for Young People, Polyglot, Liquid Architecture, Australian Book Review, Overland, Information and Cultural Exchange, the Sydney Writers festival, St Martins, Restless Dance Theatre, The Blue Room Theatre, Barking Gekko, the Sydney Review of Books and Ensemble Offspring are some of the most significant cultural organisations in the country. There can be no pretence that they have failed to win funding because they lack merit. They aren’t getting funding because there isn’t enough money.

There is enough money to fund Australian culture properly, of course. It’s simply a matter of political will. While the Australia Council’s annual budget is less than $200 million, the government has announced economic stimulus measures worth nearly $200 billion in recent weeks. Yes, some cultural organisations will benefit from the stimulus measures. But we are now throwing nationally significant arts companies to the wolves.

Aren’t there bigger priorities than arts funding in a pandemic, you might ask? Yes, of course there are. Everyone in Australian culture agrees that social distancing is necessary and that the festivals and theatres must shut. No one argues that arts funding should take priority over hospitals. But surely we can now agree that culture matters too.

As Benjamin Law pointed out in a perceptive article last week, what are the locked-down citizens of Australia doing in their time of crisis? They are reading, watching Netflix, listening to podcasts, singing and dancing at home. They are making culture.

Covid-19 is an opportunity to ask ourselves as a nation why we take our artists and cultural organisations for granted. Why, even in an emergency, can’t we find the money to fund a couple of hundred of the most important arts organisations in the country properly?

The answers are both complex, and simple. Historical precedent, conservative antipathy to arts funding, and enduring beliefs that artists are not really deserving and that culture is not a real industry all play a part.

But the simpler explanation is a failure of imagination.

SOURCE  





Cardinal Pell 'plans to spend the rest of his retirement in Sydney' after his release from prison - because the Pope isn't giving him his old job back

Cardinal George Pell will spend the rest of his retirement in Sydney where he feels more comfortable and can move around more freely, according to reports.

The 78-year-old travelled from Melbourne to Sydney on Wednesday stopping briefly at a servo to buy a phone charger and newspapers.

He arrived at the Seminary of the Good Shepherd in Homebush, in Sydney's inner west, at around 9pm on Wednesday.

It is understood that he will spend the rest of his retirement at the seminary, where he has briefly lived before.

Pell had hoped to return to Rome but there has been no job offer from the Pope and his previous role has been filled.

He had been appointed at head of the Secretariat for the Economy to fix the church's finances following a number of financial scandals.

But the role was handed over to Spanish priest Fr Juan Antonio as Pell continued to fight child sex abuse charges.

Cardinal Pell was freed from jail on Tuesday after Australia's top court ruled he had not been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

In 2018, a jury convicted him of abusing two choirboys in the 1990s. The cleric has maintained his innocence.

Pell was released after spending 405 days in Barwon Prison, in regional Victoria.

He spent his first day of freedom driving up to Sydney where he is expected to spend the rest of his retirement.

During a pit stop at a petrol station on the Hume Highway in Victoria, the Cardinal told media he was 'very pleased' to be free.

He apologised for not dressing better, saying he wasn't expecting company on the trip.

'Before you arrived, it was better here,' he told media at the service station when asked about life behind bars, before adding his prison experience was 'not too bad'.

He also asked reporters to adhere to social distancing and not get too close to him.

One of George Pell's accusers accepted the high court's decision to overturn his child sex abuse conviction - saying the law is 'weighed in favour of the accused'.

Known as Witness J, the former choirboy came forward after another accuser died in 2014 and claimed he too was abused by the cardinal.

He said he understood there must be 'due and proper process' in a civil society, but feared the system was flawed  - leaving many child sex offenders unpunished.

'I respect the decision of the High Court. I accept the outcome,' Witness J said in a statement released by his lawyer, Vivian Waller.

'It is difficult in child sex abuse matters to satisfy a criminal court that the offending has occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt. 

'I understand why criminal cases must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt.

'No-one wants to live in a society where people can be imprisoned without due and proper process. This is a basic civil liberty.

'But the price we pay for weighing the system in favour of the accused is that many sexual offences against children go unpunished.'

But Witness J said he hoped the outcome wouldn't discourage child sexual abuse survivors from coming forward, and reassured them 'most people recognise the truth when they hear it'.

'I am content with that,' he said.

In a statement on Tuesday, Cardinal Pell said he bears no ill-will toward the man, now in his 30s.

The decision has been divisive and police are now investigating the vandalism of Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral.

'Rot in Hell Pell' was emblazoned on the doors of the cathedral where he was alleged to have abused the two choirboys.

Before leaving Melbourne, Pell wanted to visit family and friends but decided against it due to the coronavirus restrictions.

SOURCE  





Year 12 exams must go ahead

Keep calm and carry on. That should be the clear, consistent message we give Year 12 students at the moment.

And yet education Ministers met earlier this week to discuss the plight of Year 12s amid calls to cancel the ATAR and end-of-year exams, apparently in order to reduce student stress caused by coronavirus developments — as though radically overhauling how students are admitted into universities within one year wouldn’t lead to even more anxiety for Year 12s.

And it is incredibly naïve to think the practical problems of an entirely new university admissions system could magically be resolved between now and the end of 2020.

One proposal is to replace the ATAR with a ‘learner portfolio’ based on extra-curricular activities and subjective assessments.

But the ‘innovative’ thought-bubble alternatives to the ATAR are especially unfair for high-achieving disadvantaged students. Advantaged students tend to have more extra-curricular opportunities and professional networks, so would gain an unfair benefit in competing for places in high-demand university courses. Just imagine the differences in CVs and ‘learner portfolios’ between students from wealthy inner-city suburbs areas and those in low-socioeconomic areas.

Exams may not be enjoyable for students, but they are the great equaliser in education. They assess and rank each student’s academic ability in each subject in the same way at the same time, with transparent and detailed methodology.

In any case, it would be unfair to change the rules for Year 12s at this late stage. After all their hard work in Year 11 and up until now, students deserve to receive a meaningful Year 12 certificate — based on rigorous exams rather than vague superficial indicators — at the end of this year.

Sure, the current situation with many students not attending school makes it harder to prepare, particularly for disadvantaged students who don’t have access to effective learning support online or at home. A simple solution to this is to encourage secondary schools to remain open with normal classes for just their Year 12 students, if they don’t have adequate online classes in place.

Teachers are still working hard to ensure their students are prepared anyway. It’s been inspiring to see teachers so quickly get their heads around less-than-ideal education technology to ensure they can continue teaching and answering student questions.

Thankfully, education Ministers remain adamant that students will receive ATAR scores this year and it appears Year 12 exams will go ahead (but might just be delayed by a month or two). They shouldn’t backdown. Whatever other harm the coronavirus will do to Australia, we should insist it won’t stop Year 12 students from getting the rigorous qualification they need for future life.

SOURCE  





Our liberty and prosperity are in peril if COVID-19 triggers an arms race of compassion

Tom Switzer

Since the first responsibility of the state is to protect its citizens, it is understandable why, faced with a pandemic on a scale not seen since 1918, drastic measures have been taken to try to keep loss of life to a minimum.

However, some of the emergency policies launched to respond to the coronavirus pandemic could remain in place and that will more deeply entrench government across the economy and civil society.

Political leaders face two challenges: first, to judge carefully when restrictions can be lifted and to strike a balance between the damage caused by the virus and that caused by economic ruin; second, to ensure those restrictions do not leave a legacy in liberal societies, but are removed so society can proceed as before.

This won’t be popular to read in certain circles, but the enthusiasm with which some governments – at home and abroad – have decided to print money and increase police powers has been disturbing.

When police accost people sunbathing alone – or use drones to monitor people walking on hillsides (as they have done in England) – people are entitled to be outraged. The delight some police take in asserting the powers the state gives them is uncomfortably clear.

The coronavirus pandemic is a grave moment in human history. But it should not be prove to be a pivotal one, becoming a moment where society changes profoundly and permanently.

Once the main threat has passed, restoring the liberty of citizens to go where they wish on public property, when they wish, and with whom they wish may prove the least of the problems for society. It will be far more difficult for governments to remove wage subsidies, reduce debt and restabilise economies.

For one thing, some workers will be seduced by the new dispensation, unaware that the cost to supposedly richer taxpayers is nothing compared with the cost to the future of the economy.

For another thing, the socialist that seems to exist within even supposedly liberal, free-market politicians finds it so easy to prevail, because those politicians feel it gives them an acceptable degree of serious power.

This sits at odds with true liberals – that is, those who believe that the function of governments is to find ways of distributing power from the state to the people.

The pandemic has forced the closure of many businesses in every economy. Some of the smaller and more vulnerable ones will never reopen.

Once the grave threat from the pandemic has passed, governments should do everything possible to ensure a minimum level of regulation so the next wave of entrepreneurs can enter the marketplace as easily as possible. This means resisting the temptation to increase taxes, which would stifle innovation, retard the recovery and risk drawing the world into a 1930s-style depression.

Of course, businesses have generally supported the widespread subsidy of wages around the world while they are closed. It means they can afford to retain staff and not have their employees’ hardship on their conscience.

However, these can only ever be emergency measures. The destruction of prosperity and personal liberty that would come from their retention should be easy for any businessman or woman to understand.

And sadly, there are too many precedents. In many nations that participated in World War II and ended up on the winning side, the statist, over-regulated, high-taxation regimes deemed essential during the war lasted years after 1945. In Australia, food, clothing and petrol rationing persisted for several years.

How long can the present restrictions last before people start to rebel against them? In recent days, food shops have been looted in Italy, and Italians have used social media to call for a rebellion against the harsh lockdown. Could we expect civil disobedience and disorder here?

The problem for western governments is they have drawn up a template for dealing with a pandemic that focuses on saving life first and saving the economy later.

So far, that judgment seems to be popular across Australia and elsewhere. But what if things return to normal by September (as the Prime Minister expects) and the coronavirus returns in a year’s time, as the 1918 pandemic did? Can the western economies go through this process again, suspending economic reality and printing money?

The temptation, indeed the political compulsion, to do so would be enormous. An arms race of compassion, such as we are witnessing now, will be on between those governments, with one fearing to be outdone by another and to look poor in the eyes of the electorate. Meanwhile, reckless spending policies will pile up an unsustainable mountain of debt, culminating in a generation of young people who don’t know what it is to be able to find a good job.

When this crisis is over, responsible governments should do everything to ensure a true return to normal. If they fail, future historians may view the general prosperity and freedom we’ve taken for granted in recent decades as an aberration

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here







10 April, 2020

Coronavirus Queensland: 10 new cases out of 3,000 tested

Good news for Queensland.  Out of 3,000 SICK people only 10 had the virus.  That indicates  that the new cases are the tiniest fraction of the overall population.  And only a tiny fraction of them will die

Queensland has recorded just 10 new coronavirus cases overnight, taking the state’s total to 953.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said Queenslanders were doing a good job but flagged tougher travel restrictions would come into force.

More than 3,000 patients were tested yesterday with only 10 returning positive results. Overall, 66,700 tests have been done since the pandemic began.

There are 33 people being treated in hospital for COVID-19, with 11 in ICU.

However, residents who travel to a declared hotspot in NSW will need to quarantine for 14 days when they return from midnight tomorrow.

The State Government also announced all Queensland residents will require a border pass when returning back into the state. There were no changes to interstate freight.

Traffic police have also revealed how they plan to stop Brisbane daytrippers heading down to the Gold Coast over the Easter weekend.

The tough new measures are aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus, with the Easter break seen as a battleground in the war against the continued spread.

Police said they are making themselves more visible and are monitoring traffic flow throughout the state to clamp down on people who ignore directions not to travel over Easter.

TREASURER Jackie Trad has applauded the mining and agricultural sectors for propping up the Queensland economy during the coronavirus crisis, but warns the state’s bottom line will take a hit.

Asked today how the budget will fare in the longer term, the Treasurer said mining and agriculture were the standouts.  “They are keeping us fed and there is revenue coming in the door,” she said.

“But we do anticipate significant drops in GST revenue from the Commonwealth. “We know that people are unlikely to be buying or selling houses so there will be a drop in stamp duty transfers, so there will be significant reductions in revenue.”

SOURCE  






How Australia IGNORED the World Health Organisation and stayed one step ahead on COVID-19 - after the WHO argued against closing the border, refused to call the virus a 'pandemic' and praised China

Australia appears to be finally flattening the infection curve in its battle against COVID-19 after the government decisively chose to ignore the World Health Organisation and respond to the pandemic in its own way.

That's the view of Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who told Daily Mail Australia the WHO has badly let down Australia down by being 'glacially slow' to respond to the coronavirus crisis.

The UN body - which is paid $8.4million a year by Australian taxpayers for membership and receives tens of millions of dollars more in voluntary contributions - stalled on declaring a pandemic, told countries to keep borders open and heaped praise on China despite the Communist Party's appalling attempt to cover up the outbreak, which erupted in Wuhan in December.

The organisation copped the wrath of US President Donald Trump on Tuesday when he called it 'China-centric' and threatened to withhold funding.

But the Australian government has forged its own path toward stopping the virus, managing to already bring down infection rates and slow the spread of the deadly disease, without following advice from the WHO.

Today Mr Hastie, a former SAS solider who now represents the Western Australian division of Canning in the federal parliament, slammed the organisation for its indecisiveness.

'The WHO has been glacially slow in its decision-making,' the 37-year-old told Daily Mail Australia. 'When Beijing shut down travel from Hubei to the rest of China on January 23 - but strangely not from Hubei to the rest of the world - why didn't the WHO act decisively then?

'It could've prevented the mass global exportation of COVID-19 then by declaring a pandemic and alerting governments around the world of the danger ahead. 'Closing borders then could've saved lives and a lot of economic hardship.'

Fellow Liberal MP Dave Sharma also criticised the WHO on Wednesday. He told the ABC: 'I think the WHO's revealed some serious shortcomings, and I think they've revealed themselves to be a politicised organisation.

'They have been too willing to accept Chinese explanations for this virus and the source and the causes.'

He said it was right for the world to respond to China with 'anger and consternation and demand some sort of transparency and accountability in future.'

Mr Sharma also criticised the WHO for failing to include Taiwan, an island nation claimed by China, which has not been allowed to join the organisation.

Taiwan saw the pandemic coming and implemented strict social distancing and contact tracing measures which have held the virus at bay - but the WHO, pandering to China, kept it cut off from global information networks and refused to learn from Taiwan's success.

Mr Hastie said the WHO's failure to control coronavirus was an example of a global organisation being unable to look out for its member states.

'The reality for Aussies is that only our government will act in our sovereign interest to preserve our prosperity and security,' he said.

SOURCE  






George Pell’s case exposes Victoria’s biased criminal justice system

Bettina Arndt

News earlier this week was dominated by the decision by the High Court to free Cardinal George Pell after overturning his conviction for historic child sex offences.

One of the most intriguing questions raised by this important case is how Victoria’s criminal justice system allowed the case against Cardinal Pell to proceed so far on evidence which, according to the unanimous view of all seven High Court judges, could not support a guilty verdict.

As many lawyers are pointing out, from the start of the case very few dispassionate observers thought the charges against Pell could stick. Greg Craven, professor of law and vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, writing in The Australian, explained that despite the implausible evidence, many people “hated Pell so much they did not care, said he certainly was guilty of other crimes anyway or that he was the right person to be punished for the general crimes of Catholic clergy.”

Legal affairs editor at The Australian, Chris Merritt, made very telling points about the outcome of this case in exposing the “institutional flaws in Victoria that will tarnish Australian justice in the eyes of the world.”

Flaws that include special rules in sexual assault cases which allow evidence to be withheld that could have helped exonerate the accused – as happened with George Pell.

Merritt explained: “The Pell jury was never told that the complainant had a history of psychological problems that required treatment. Nor were they told that Pell’s legal team was rebuffed in court — in the absence of the jury — when they attempted to gain access to records showing the extent of this man’s psychological problems.” Merritt pointed out that this episode is outlined in the special leave application that was filed in the High Court by Pell’s legal team. During the trial, it would have been a contempt of court for anyone to reveal this incident.

This is only one example of changes to criminal law in Victoria introduced with the admirable goal of protecting complainants in sexual assault cases, changes which have resulted in the state becoming “one of the world’s most gender-biased and anti-male jurisdictions in the world,” according to a retired associate professor of law from Deakin University,  Kenneth Arenson.

In 2016 I wrote an article quoting Arenson’s description of the way Victorian rape law had been influenced by a feminist law professor, resulting in all sorts of “pernicious reforms”  including  “rape shield laws limiting a defendant’s long-­entrenched common-law right to put before a court all legally ­admissible evidence that helps to show they are not guilty of the ­alleged crime.”

These laws not only were influential in George Pell’s wrongful conviction but put in jeopardy the legal rights of every man accused of sexual assault in Victoria.

Those of you with a legal background or scholarly bent might like to look at two extremely detailed papers Arensen put together outlining what he sees as this unfair corruption of the Victorian legal system. The Demise of Equality Before the Law and When Some People are More Equal Than Others.

It’s not just powerful men like George Pell whose liberty is at risk when equality before the law no longer matters

Email from Bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au






Independent schools told to reopen or lose funding as National Cabinet discusses coronavirus impacts on education

The Federal Government has threatened to withdraw funding from independent schools if they do not open on a limited basis for the second school term.

The demand makes it clear that schools' funding is contingent upon them opening their doors to students who need to attend.

"We want all schools to be offering that learning environment for those parents who have to work, and for those children where it's safer to be in the classroom," Mr Tehan said. "As part of the funding requirement you have to be offering this to parents whose children you're educating."

Mr Tehan said his concerns were related to a small number of schools he believed were not offering the face-to-face teaching options that public schools were.  "What we want is a nationally consistent approach," he said.

"What we want to do is ensure that when it comes to independent schools, and Catholic schools as well, that they're also providing that learning environment.

"There were some independent schools that weren't offering — for parents who had to work at all year levels — that opportunity for those students to get that safe learning environment."

The Government's health advice has remained that it is safe to send children to school, however that message has been implemented differently across the states and territories.

In-person attendance remains an option in public schools across the country, particularly for parents who cannot keep their children at home.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






9 April, 2020

Scott Morrison promises relief for struggling tenants amid coronavirus pandemic

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has revealed a new mandatory code of conduct will help protect commercial leases during the pandemic.

In a press conference this afternoon, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the idea behind Australia’s “hibernation strategy” was to allow us to “preserve as much of the foundations and pillars of the economy through this time” to enable us to “rebuild and regrow on the other side”.

“That means keeping jobs, keeping businesses, keeping tenancies in place, keeping loans in place and credit lines open … so on the other side of this crisis, the economy is able to rebound again,” he said.

Mr Morrison said preserving commercial tenancies was an important part of the wider economic strategy, and that as a result, a mandatory code had been agreed upon.

He said it would be “legislated and regulated as appropriate” in each state or territory’s jurisdiction.

The code will apply to either landlords or tenants who have experienced financial hardship of a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and who are eligible for the JobKeeper program.

It will apply to companies with a turnover of $50 million or less, meaning the code is mainly designed to protect small to medium enterprises.

Under the code, “good faith leasing principles” will ensure landlords “must not terminate the lease” for a tenant or draw on securities, and on the flip side, tenants “must honour lease requirements”.

To achieve that, there could be “waivers of rent” or “deferrals of rent” over the course of the pandemic period, and rent must be reduced in proportion to the lost revenue of the business.

A binding mediation process will also be introduced, with landlords and tenants required to “sit down and work it out”.

Mr Morrison said the burden “must be shared” and that banks must also “come to the table”, including “international banks” which must “provide the same levels of support and co-operation we are seeing from Australian banks”.

He said the measures would help to preserve leases and the relationship between landlord and tenant, which would keep tenants in properties.

“This is seen as proactive, constructive co-operation between landlords and tenants – we will see this through together.”

But Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) president Adrian Kelly said it was disappointing that a uniform approach had not been agreed to for all Australians.

“We now face the potential situation where Australians will be treated differently depending on where they reside,” Mr Kelly said.

“This will add to the confusion and most likely there will be the misinterpretation of messaging.”

And Mr Kelly also called for greater clarity for residential tenants who had not been mentioned by the Prime Minister.

“For residential it is a social as well as economic impact – after all we all live in dwellings and not all of us either own or lease commercial property,” Mr Kelly said.

“REIA requests that further consideration be given to a national approach to residential real estate.”

SOURCE  





The Morrison government has waived therapeutic goods registration requirements for anti-malarial drugs touted by Donald Trump as a potential cure for Covid-19

On Thursday, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was exempted from a requirement to be listed on the Australian register of therapeutic goods, which is generally the only way medicine can be lawfully supplied in Australia.

Similar exemptions were also granted to Remdesivir, Lopinavir and Ritonavir, which are all anti-viral drugs currently being investigated for the potential to combat Covid-19.

According to the Therapeutic Goods Act, exemptions can only be granted so that medicines may be stockpiled for a current or future health risk or “can be made available urgently in Australia in order to deal with an actual threat to public health caused by an emergency that has occurred”.

Caroline Edwards, the health department’s acting secretary, made the exemption on the condition the drugs can only be imported, manufactured or supplied by a person with a contract or arrangement with the health department.

“The specified therapeutic goods must only be supplied in Australia for the prevention, treatment or alleviation of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) following advice from the Australian government department of health,” the exemption said.

The Australian government supports two trials involving hydroxychloroquine, which is an anti-malarial drug also used to treat autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

The first, by the University of Queensland, is looking at whether a hydroxychloroquine and an HIV drug used either in combination or on their own can reduce severity and length of Covid-19 if given to patients with the virus early after diagnosis.

The second trial, being conducted by Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and which Hunt said had “the potential for possible prevention” of the virus, will focus on giving 2,250 health workers around Australia given hydroxychloroquine preemptively before and while they are exposed to patients with the virus.

Hunt has said hydroxychloroquine may have potential in minimising the impact of and hasten the recovery from Covid-19.

On 25 March Hunt said there had been “some promising research so far” and on 23 March he said the drug is “associated with the potential to reduce the impact of coronavirus and speed the body’s capacity to recover from it”. However, he also said he was “cautiously” hopeful.

Trump has claimed the use of hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin, an antibiotic, could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” – only to be immediately contradicted by public health experts including his own top infectious diseases adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, who warned that there was only “anecdotal evidence” that the drugs could be helpful.

Dr Gaetan Burgio, from the John Curtin School of Medical research at the Australian National University, had said “recent results from clinical trials indicated a possible improvement in shortening the duration of the infection”.

“However the results are disputed and the clinical trials are inconclusive,” he said. “To date there are no clear indications that chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine are a treatment option.”

The Therapeutic Goods Administration [TGA], which regulates drugs in Australia, has placed tight new restrictions on doctors who are authorised to write new prescriptions for the drug, limiting it to a small group of clinical specialties.

The TGA warned of increased off-label prescription of medicines containing hydroxychloroquine, citing a “a potential shortage of this product in Australia” and the medicine’s “well-known serious risks to patients including cardiac toxicity (potentially leading to sudden heart attacks), irreversible eye damage and severe depletion of blood sugar (potentially leading to coma)“.

The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia wrote to members urging them to “refuse the dispensing of hydroxychloroquine if there is not a genuine need”.

A health department spokesperson said the legislative changes “allow the importation and supply of a medicine including hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to deal with the threat to public health by the Covid-19 emergency without a requirement to be included in the Australian register of therapeutic goods”.

The spokesperson noted safeguards including that a patient information leaflet must be supplied with the medicine.

Peter Collignon, a professor of infectious diseases, described the move as sensible as long as the drug was only given to approved providers and, in the first instance, used in clinical trials being undertaken by those providers. He gave the example of the antibiotic penicillin, which Australia almost ran out of several years ago due to issues with the supplier. Even though there were equivalent drugs in other countries, Australia was unable to import these to fill the gap because those specific brands had not been approved by the TGA, a process that can take a year or more.

Collignon said the changes to the Therapeutic Goods Act meant bureaucratic red-tape had been removed, which he said was reasonable given shortages of hydroxychloroquine in Australia which meant patients who needed it for severe and painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis are struggling to get scripts filled.

“This does not mean, however, that any hydroxychloroquine in the stockpile should be given to Australians more widely before clinical trials are done,” he said. “I would hope it is used for the trials being done in Australia first and foremost.

SOURCE  





Coronavirus crisis has cut our tolerance for the usual spin

By Neil Mitchell, 3AW Presenter

OPINION: The longer I am in lockdown the more frustrated I become by the parade of experts assessing the virus as anything from an apocalypse to a mild flu. The fact is, they don't where we are headed. Nobody does. It is the nature of what is unfolding. How can anybody predict the unpredictable and intelligently assess the unprecedented?

So, what follows are not the words of an expert, but the thoughts of a person who has professionally observed life and politics for nearly 50 years. These may be perceptive words, or stupid. I don't know. But perhaps they will provoke some discussion behind the locked doors:

In a crisis like this we need direct answers, honest answers, and none of the usual glib self-congratulation we have come to expect and accept

I think and hope that as we emerge from this in a year, or whenever, that Australia will enter a new era of politics.
Because I believe this crisis and focus on our own mortality has cut our tolerance for the usual spin, political salesmanship and self-justification which has previously masqueraded as leadership.

It surfaced in several interviews I did last week. Politicians were dodging and spinning and waffling as is their way. Normally I might tolerate that and then try to bring them to the point. Last week, there was no room for tolerance, and I said so. It was an insult to the audience.

Victorian learner driver fined more than $1600 for "non-essential" travel during COVID-19 shutdown
In a crisis like this we need direct answers, honest answers, and none of the usual glib self-congratulation we have come to expect and accept.

If a politician is not up to that, then get out. If they can't identify that now is the time to treat the public decently and like adults, rather than children to be conned, dump them.

At times, the Prime Minister has struggled with directness. In fairness he is massively tired and must feel almost crushed by the responsibility. He is not only mapping the destiny of the country but his own place in history. He will be remembered kindly or otherwise in the way we view a war time prime minister.

Daniel Andrews, the Victorian premier, has been more direct and blunt in his language. But again, to be fair, he has done that hours after we heard the details of national cabinet decisions from the PM. And he has still found time for a little political one-upmanship.

Perhaps it is lockdown delusion, but I see hope we will emerge with a breed of politicians understanding that the best way to deal with the public is to be yourself, be direct, and don't spin.

Public tolerance for the old methods of political trickery will be very low. And there will be much painful work to be done as we build economic recovery. Budgets will be cut and lobbyists will scream.

I believe the public will require and demand a new political discourse, a new trust and an understanding that they must not be treated as fools.

A politician will eventually identify that and embrace it. And that person may deserve the title "leader"

SOURCE  






Schools in term 2 to go online amid coronavirus outbreak

Term two in Victoria will start next Wednesday but Premier Daniel Andrews is urging parents to keep their children at home if possible. “School is going to look very different in term two – if you can learn from home, you must learn from home,” Mr Andrews said. “If you can’t learn from home, then schools will be open, and we will run the same courses. We don’t want kids disadvantaged because of circumstances beyond their own control.”

Mr Andrews says schools will always be open for children of essential workers – from shelf stackers at Coles and Woolies to nurses and police.

“We’ve got about a million students enrolled in government and non-government schools,” he said. “We cannot have a million students moving around the Victorian community every day. All that will do is spread the virus and undermine the really significant progress that we’ve made.”

On the Victorian Certificate of Education, Mr Andrews says the intention is for students to complete it this year. “There are a number of weeks at the end of the year so, it may be a longer year where we need to make up some lost time. We may need to catch up,” he said.

Mr Andrews says state and federal governments are working “very, very hard” in partnership with the university and TAFE sector to come up with a solution for year 12s. “An awful lot of work is being done to get our year 12s through – we’re not about year 13 or people repeating,” he said.

“We think that we can get this done. As soon as we can provide more detail to our year 12 cohort, and indeed all students and their families, of course we will. But the rest of year 12, just like school for every student on day one of term two, is going to be different. It’s going to look different, it’s going to unfold in a different way. That can’t be helped.”

Most Australian students will complete term two online as education ministers thrash out a plan for those in their final year of school.

Medical experts insist schools are still safe but parents are being urged to keep their kids home if they can.  “For the majority of children it will be online learning for term two,” federal Education Minister Dan Tehan told ABC radio.

Year 12 exams are expected to be postponed until at least December and universities will likely be asked to delay the start of the 2021 academic year.

However, Mr Tehan has effectively ruled out an extra year of school for year 12 students. “Every state and territory education minister – and it’s my strong view as well – do not want to see that,” he said. “We want to make sure that we can get as many students through this year as we possibly can.”

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here







8 April, 2020

Great Barrier Reef: Same old same old scares

Every couple of years we get the whines we read below:  The reef is being destroyed by global warming and farming.  But the reef is still there.  The prophecies of doom don't eventuate.

One should in fact gravely doubt the findings below.  Peter Ridd has shown that the JCU people routinely exaggerate reef damage.  There are always bare spots on the reef and these are attributed to global warming. 

But that is not so. It is the Crown of Thorns starfish that is responsible for most reef damage.  But from an aircraft you can't see starfish so the damage is all put down to global warming.  What you read below is therefore a travesty of science.  No effort was made to exclude competing explanations -- which is utterly basic in science.  They are propagandists, not scientists.


In another sad blow for the Australian environment, it has now been confirmed that once again climate change has taken its toll on one of its greatest natural wonders - the Great Barrier Reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, home to some 600 species of coral.

But a recent aerial study has confirmed scientists' worst fears, concluding that the reef is experiencing its third large-scale bleaching event in five years.

Coral bleaching is the direct result of warming sea temperatures, which causes corals to become stressed. In this situation, coral expels the symbiotic algae which lives within its tissues, which is responsible for its bright colour.

Usually bright and colourful jewels among the reef, bleaching leaves a stripped-bare skeleton of the coral behind.

Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, led a team of researchers to assess the extent of coral bleaching across the reef.

Professor Hughes said: “We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Barrier Reef region.

“For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors."

Aerial surveys concluded that while some areas of the reef have remained unscathed, large swathes in other regions have been severely bleached, casting ominous doubt over the reef's future.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has described the phenomenon as a “matter of huge concern”.

So in order to preserve and protect the Great Barrier Reef for years to come, what is the solution?

How can the Great Barrier Reef recover?

Dr Mark Eakin, Coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, said while people “continue to spew carbon dioxide” the current phenomenon will become a much more common occurrence.

He said: “This is the third widespread, severe coral bleaching in less than five years.

“As long as we continue to spew carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, corals will continue to bleach and die.

“Local efforts to reduce pollution on the reef and to restore reefs piecemeal help keep corals alive.

“If we want to save the Great Barrier Reef and other reefs around the world, we have to move off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

According to Dr Richard K.F. Unsworth, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology at Swansea University, farming practices needs a significant overhaul in order for the reef to survive.

He said: “Although climate change is the primary cause of bleaching, the capacity of the reef to recover after bleaching events is improved when the water quality is high.

“This means low levels of nutrients, sediments and contaminants such as herbicides.

“The water quality in many areas of the inshore Great Barrier reef remains poor principally because of poor farming practices, reducing the capacity of the reef to recover after bleaching.”

Dr Unsworth added: “For the reef to have any chance of survival in the long-term, the water quality of the Great Barrier Reef region needs to improve through better farming practices, and global carbon dioxide emissions need to reduce rapidly.

Phil North at Dive Worldwide said some divers fear it “is not what it once was”, but all is not lost for the reef yet.

He added: “This having been said, the reef is vast. It is the largest living structure on earth that can be viewed from space.

“Not all of it is destroyed and there are some parts that are still quite beautiful.”

While the current bleaching event is undoubtedly a setback for the reef, Great Barrier Reef Foundation Managing Director Anna Marsden said the reef is a “resilient ecosystem” which can still recover.

She added: “We know that on mildly or moderately bleached reefs, there is a good chance most bleached corals will recover and survive.

“It’s heartening to hear that some of the key tourism reefs in the north and central areas are amongst those likely to bounce back from lesser levels of bleaching.”

SOURCE  





Hooray!  His Eminence has been cleared

Cleared unanimously by seven judges! I said from the beginning that his conviction was a travesty.  It was only hatred of his church that kept him in jail



Cardinal George Pell will walk free from jail today after the High Court quashed his conviction for sexually abusing two choirboys. 

Australia's most senior Catholic was convicted in 2018 of performing sex acts on the boys in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.

The decision overturns an earlier ruling by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, Justice Anne Ferguson, president of the Court of Appeal Justice Chris Maxwell, and Justice Mark Weinberg.

It had taken them nine weeks to come to their decision. It took the High Court a little under four to reverse it.

Cardinal Pell was not in the court room in Brisbane for the hearing and will be told the news over the phone by his lawyer.

The court ruled that the trial's jury 'ought to have entertained a doubt' that Cardinal Pell may not have been guilty.

Much of Cardinal Pell's case centred on whether he had an opportunity to commit the offences at all.

Cardinal Pell's barristers had long argued it was not possible for him to be alone in the sacristies only a few minutes after the end of Mass.

Numerous witnesses took to the witness box at his trial to back the notion the crimes could not have been committed. 

In a summary of the decision handed down by the High Court on Tuesday, it stated the Supreme Court judges' analysis at his original appeal 'failed to engage with the question of whether there remained a reasonable possibility that the offending had not taken place, such that there ought to have been a reasonable doubt as to the applicant's guilt'.

Cardinal Pell's successful appeal is likely to bring an end to the ongoing saga, which has dragged on for years across four court jurisdictions.

A vindicated Cardinal Pell issued a statement to the media shortly after the ruling was made. 'I have consistently maintained my innocence while suffering from a serious injustice,' he said. 'This has been remedied today with the High Court’s unanimous decision. I look forward to reading the Judgment and reasons for the decision in detail.'

Cardinal Pell said he held no ill will to his accuser. 'I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough,' he said.

'However, my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of paedophilia in the Church. 'The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not.'

Victoria Police issued a statement on Tuesday declaring it respected the decision of the High Court and praised the the 'tireless work' on the case by its Taskforce Sano, which brought the case against Cardinal Pell.

The jury in the original trial found Cardinal Pell guilty of sexually abusing two boys in the priests' sacristy at Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral after presiding over one of his first Sunday masses as archbishop in the 1990s.

The jury further accepted he abused one of the boys a second time in a corridor at the rear of the cathedral after another Sunday mass.

Cardinal Pell was jailed in March last year for six years with a non-parole period of three years and eight months.

Since then, he has been caged predominantly at Melbourne Assessment Prison in the heart of the city, but was recently moved to Barwon Prison, which houses some of the nation's vilest criminals.

There he has spent his days locked in isolation away from the jail population which no doubt would have treated him as a prize scalp.

SOURCE  







Coronavirus: If there were ever a time for a liberal approach, it is now

It is two weeks since Jacinda Ardern closed New Zealand for non-essential business, claiming that a hard, early lockdown was the surest way to defeat the coronavirus. On Friday the country’s Chief Medical Officer signed an order that classed sexual intimacy as non-essential. Gardening or home decorating is out, since hardware stores and garden centres are closed to the public, if not yet to tradesmen. Home delivery of takeaway food has been stopped.

“The lockdown is the best way to stop the virus and it is also the best thing for our economy by making the pain as short as possible,” the NZ Prime Minister declared on Sunday.

NZ and Australia have adopted radically different strategies to beat COVID-19. Ardern’s sledgehammer is the tool many have been urging Scott Morrison to adopt. The Australian Prime Minister has resisted, preferring social-distancing laws that mini­mise restrictions on economic activity.

“Now, if you ask me who is an essential worker?” he told a press conference the day before the NZ lockdown came into force. “Someone who has a job. Everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker. And that means they will need to continue to be able to send their children to school.”

It may be some time before Morrison’s critics will acknowledge that he has handled the COVID-19 pandemic somewhat better than they predicted. A little over a fortnight ago, University of NSW dean of medicine Vlado Perkovic predicted the number of confirmed Australian cases could reach 8000 within two weeks and 32,000 in three. On Saturday the number of confirmed cases was 5548 and the rate of increase slowing. It is three months since Australia’s first known carrier landed in Sydney, 17 days before the first confirmed arrival of the virus in Italy. Yet the death rate from COVID-19 in Australia stands at just 1.2 per million people while in Italy it is 256.

The different paths chosen by Ardern and Morrison reflect their philosophies. Arden puts her faith in the paternalistic state. The grown-ups command and the economy obeys.

Morrison, on the other hand, has chosen the liberal approach with its inclination to make incremental steps towards a goal rather than heroic leaps into the unknown. If there were ever a time for the liberal approach, it is now. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a wicked policy challenge riddled with variables, imperfect information and no determinable end point.

The tension between public health goals and economic objectives cries out for a compromise, yet the two are inseparable. Social distancing and isolation put the brakes on the economy. Taking the restrictions away could swamp our health service.

The idea that we can bring business activity to an abrupt halt and wait for the virus to clear ignores the knock-on effects and the increasingly complex web of interdependency between businesses. It ignores the risk that businesses won’t restart.

Allowing normal economic free movement, on the other hand, means the virus also will run free, putting the elderly and sick at risk. Lifting the current restrictions, too, would send the wrong signal to the country, which is largely obeying the guidelines.

The Prime Minister began to navigate the gentle curve from pessimism to optimism on Friday when he hinted that the health modelling showed signs of the curve flattening to a level the country can manage until a medical solution arrives. The government is tilting towards a more targeted response to the virus, supplementing the social-distancing rules with extra measures to protect the elderly and the sick.

By saving someone in their 80s from contracting the virus, you are probably 20 times more likely to save a life than if you keep a backpacker on Bondi Beach virus-free. One way or another, commercial activity has to resume to as close to normal as possible. Independent modelling not yet finalised shows an economic loss of more than $500bn and a 1.2 million rise in unemployment if the current measures stay in place for six to nine months.

It is also showing that the effects of an NZ lockdown would be considerably worse, creating more economic damage in the short term from which it would take longer to recover.

Prolonged community isolation is to be avoided for reasons other than economic. Higher rates of domestic violence, mental health issues and suicide are some of the consequences we can expect. Panic and uncertainty put their own constraints on economic activity, lowering business and consumer confidence and delaying non-essential spending.

When asked by Roy Morgan pollsters last week if things would get worse before they got better, 85 per cent said yes.

On the current trend, they are almost certainly wrong, as least when it comes to the virus. The economy, however, is another thing altogether.

SOURCE  





Coronavirus: Experts slam calls for lockdown to be reversed in Australia, but loosening some restrictions may be possible

An Australian think tank has been slammed after calling for an end to Australia’s lockdown but experts believe it’s time to relax restrictions.

A video from the Institute of Public Affairs calling for an end to lockdowns is being mocked on social media but there is a growing call for Australia to reconsider its current restrictions.

In the footage, posted to the conservative think tank’s social media accounts, policy director Gideon Rozner calls for the “sensible” reopening of churches, restaurants, cafes, bars and community sport.

“Our response to the coronavirus outbreak has decimated our society, ruined thousands of lives, turned Australia into a police state and, worst of all, put hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work,” Rozner says.

He says it is time for state and federal governments to come up with a plan on how to win the lockdown and let people rebuild their lives.

“Do it safely with appropriate social distancing measures in place, but do it now, not in six months, not in one month. Now, because Australians were not meant to live like this, and we cannot allow this to go on any longer,” he says. “Enough is enough. It is time to begin to end this lockdown now.”

Many have condemned the footage from the free-market group, saying it would endanger people’s lives.

“Are you are satirical performer of some kind? Or just a complete imbecile? Shut up, and stop endangering lives, you clown. In a suit,” actor Sam Neill tweeted.

Sydney law professor Tim Stephens said Twitter should remove the post as it jeopardised public health.

The IPA is not the only group sceptical about whether Australia’s restrictions should be relaxed. In an opinion piece on the weekend, The Australian’s commercial editor Steve Waterson also questioned the “ridiculous restraints” being implemented by “hysterical” governments.

Australian National University infectious diseases physician Peter Collignon also believes the restrictions in NSW and Victoria have gone too far. “Not letting people go outside and sit on a park bench, for instance; how will that stop transmission?” he told the ABC this morning.

However, Prof Collignon doesn’t think Australia should reopen pubs, clubs, bars or dine-in restaurants until September or October at least.

You only need to look at what’s happening in Italy or New York to understand why. Italy, which has a population more than double Australia’s, saw its health system overwhelmed after the virus spread through its community. It has recorded about 124,000 cases so far and 15,000 deaths. Hundreds of people are still dying every day even after a months-long lockdown.

In comparison, Australia has recorded about 5700 cases and 40 deaths, with the number of new cases declining.

In New York State, home to about 20 million people — less than Australia’s population of 25 million — there have been nearly 4200 deaths.

“If we just open the doors and went back to normal it would be an ugly zone,” University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely told news.com.au. “We would be in Italy’s zone and New York’s zone where their health resources are overstretched. It’s a dumb idea.”

Letting the coronavirus spread among the community is dangerous because there is no immunity within the population so more people are likely to get sick. This drives up the death rate because hospitals become overwhelmed with patients and there are not enough ventilators or intensive care unit beds.

“I can’t see us opening pubs and cafes again until we get a vaccine (in about 18 months),” Prof Blakely said. “I can’t quite see that working but I could be wrong.”

However, Prof Blakely said he wasn’t surprised by the IPA’s push for an end to the lockdown. “These are extraordinary times and the government has been taking action without parliamentary oversight because they needed to move fast,” he said.

He said public health officials, the public and government should be congratulated for the response and the speed at which it has brought down new cases, but the new question was “now what?”.

Prof Blakely believes it is time to think about Australia’s response to the coronavirus now that new infections seemed to be under control.

He said those who were advocating for a return to normal as soon as possible deserved to be heard as the economic and health implications of a drawn-out lockdown would be severe.

Prof Blakely believes there are three options Australia could consider but none of them were easy.

First, it could still try to achieve a full elimination of the virus but this would involve even stricter lockdown restrictions being enforced for between six weeks to three months, and Prof Blakely is sceptical it could be achieved.

The second option is to “squash the curve”, which means the community lives with social distancing restrictions, similar to what we have now, until a vaccine is developed, which could be 18 months or longer away.

Prof Blakely believes the quickest way for Australians to get back to their old way of living was to adopt option three: flatten the curve to herd immunity.

This option would still take about six months to achieve, depending on how risky governments were prepared to be. It would involve allowing people to slowly get infected until about 60 per cent of the population had coronavirus, at which point there would be “herd immunity” and it would be much harder for the virus to spread.

This option would see more people die but Prof Blakely said if certain measures were taken to protect the vulnerable, the number of deaths could be brought down to about 30,000, which is only 50 per cent greater than the number of tobacco-related deaths each year.

Prof Blakely believes it is time for a public discussion on the path Australia should take and this should involve not just politicians but also epidemiologists, economists, philosophers and ethicists.

Modelling the Federal Government is using to inform its decision making is due to be released tomorrow. Prof Blakely said this would be critical in understanding the implications of the different options and what would happen if certain restrictions were eased.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





7 April, 2020

Joe Hildebrand on the week’s most ‘disgraceful’ coronavirus ban

Anyone under the age of 29 in this country has never lived through a recession, let alone a war. Their parents were the last generation to face the prospect of being sent to war and they protested endlessly against it until the threat was removed. The World War II generation is now all but gone – there were only 13,000 living veterans this time last year. The generation before that had to live through the triple horror of the Great War, the Spanish flu and the Great Depression.

In short, we live in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity and almost all of us have known nothing but. Our mistake was to assume it was normal.

Little wonder then that the coronavirus outbreak has caused such panic in Australia and triggered such an astonishing government response – an oddly dissonant mix of extreme restrictions on movement and socialisation by the states combined with apparently limitless rivers of money and relief from the commonwealth.

It’s a bit like being treated by two doctors at once: One who chops your legs off and another who provides the prosthetics.

Of course, I completely understand and support the need to manage the rise in coronavirus cases to stop the hospital system from being overrun. If that should happen, we will go from the unhappy tally of inevitable deaths to the more tragic count of avoidable ones.

And like most people I am abiding by the social restrictions and putting my faith in both levels of government acting on the sum of expert advice.

But it remains a deeply cynical faith – if such a thing can logically exist – and one that is tested daily.

It is bone-chilling, for example, that Victoria thought it acceptable to ban people in a relationship from seeing each other if they did not live in the same house. It is hard to think of a creepier government overreach into people’s personal lives.

And the fact that the ban was quickly lifted only makes it more troubling: Was this deadly practice for five minutes and totally fine a few hours later?

Obviously not, which raises the question of how any public leader in a liberal democracy could think this level of control over people’s private lives was ever acceptable.

It is disturbing – no, disgraceful – that a state could even contemplate let alone enact a rule whose only conceivable precedent is the criminalisation of homosexuality.

The cost of fighting coronavirus must always be measured against costs we do not yet know. It is now clear some in government are prepared not just to break the economy but to break hearts. I would say life without love is hardly worth living, but maybe I’m just a romantic.

As for the more seasoned and cynical in the world, they might say wiping out the entire global economy – with all the future deaths and misery that will inevitably follow – is perhaps an overreaction to a virus that is bad and deadly but far from the worst or deadliest thing facing the world at the moment.

By way of example, the death rate of corona at the time of writing was over 50,000. By contrast, almost 10 million people die of cancer each year – 70 per cent in low- to middle-income countries – according to the World Health Organisation. Heart disease kills 18 million.

And the vast majority of coronavirus deaths are people already suffering from cancer or heart disease or some other medical condition. In many cases it is actually this condition that is the major contributing factor to their death, even though it is counted as a coronavirus fatality. And in Italy, the worst hit country, the average age of death is almost 80.

None of this is to say we should just let people die but it is important to remember that people do die, often at a far younger age and in far greater numbers than from the disease we are stopping the world to fight.

It is also vital to remember that the aim of our strategy is not to save every soul but to save our hospitals. The major concern is that if hospital beds are overrun then those who could recover will be denied the care and equipment they need. And if the hospitals are full with corona patients it makes it even harder to treat everybody else. Likewise it is important for at-risk people to get a flu vaccine so they are not taking up beds that could be used for corona patients.

In other words, this is not a moral crusade, it is a numbers game. People compare the fight against corona to a war but we are not trying to wipe out the enemy, we are trying to manage it.

As US General Omar Bradley said, in war only amateurs worry about strategy – professionals worry about logistics. The most important number in this fight is the difference between the number of victims and the number of ventilators.

And yet there seems to be an evangelical zeal in the imposition of ever-increasing restrictions, even as the curve appears to be flattening and the battle appears to be turning as a result of measures taken days and weeks ago.

And some of these crackdowns seem to be based far more on public and political panic than calm and considered advice. One wonders what the medical opinion is on banning couples from bonking in Victoria or fining someone $1000 for eating a kebab on a bench in NSW or using drones to disperse parkgoers in WA.

Even more perplexing are those who are openly calling for the government to place even harsher restrictions on them – as though they have some kind of political bondage fetish.

Already we have become a housebound nation. We have become so fearful for our lives we have forsaken our freedom and outsourced our free will.

We might be able to tolerate this deprivation of liberty but we should never embrace it. And there must be constant pressure on the state to restore what it has taken at the first possible opportunity, not as a last resort.

After all, the only just wars are waged for freedom. If we lose that then there is not much left to fight for.

SOURCE  





National coronavirus hysteria will lead to disproportionate suffering

If you’re in an aged-care facility you’re not waiting to be discharged and sent home in a few weeks. You’re on your way out, and the exit’s probably not that far away. Coronavirus is speeding up the process, and it must feel overwhelming to the medical staff on the frontline. Which is precisely why they shouldn’t be making the decisions.

The health of a nation is not the sum of the health of its citizens. We require doctors and nurses to focus on their patients, but politicians need to take a broader view of the myriad components of a functioning, worthwhile society.

Sarcasm aside, when did life move from being precious to priceless? We lost 20 people to the disease in March. In the same month we lost another 13,000 or so to other ailments and accidents, but let’s not worry about them.

As more facts emerge about the virus, it looks as though it does most harm to the chronically sick or the elderly, as do most respiratory diseases. And when old age is combined with a pre-existing serious illness, you’re in real danger. So the high-risk group would be wise to take all precautions, withdraw from society if they wish, and resurface when there’s a vaccine. We could devote enormous resources to looking after them.

Instead, we are asking the healthy, most of whom will be no more than inconvenienced by this latest strain of flu, to sacrifice or cripple themselves, their livelihoods, their children’s future, to preserve people whose own future is already precarious and limited. Has anyone checked with the elderly, who tend to have a more sanguine outlook, to see if this eco­nomic suicide is what they want?

As individuals it’s excruciating to assign a value to human life, and happily few of us are obliged to do so; but as a society we make those calculations all the time. Our highway speed limit is 110km/h; we could reduce that to 20km/h and watch the fatalities tumble, but the inconvenience would be intolerable. We let people swim and surf (at least we used to) from wild, unpatrolled beaches, and sadly accept some of them will drown, measuring the pleasure of millions against the misfortune of a few.

We are always managing risk, but suddenly in this panic no risk, to anyone, is acceptable.

Even news organisations have adopted this position, their HR departments issuing earnest communiques that declare “the health and wellbeing of our employees is our paramount priority”. Sorry, since when? As part of my job I have been sent, and sent others, to war zones — yes, with bombs and bullets — to bring our readers the news. That’s what I thought our priority was as journalists. Now half my colleagues in the media have emerged as trembling amateur epidemiologists, scouring the online world to find the youngest and healthiest victim to ramp up the terror and prove this disease attacks anyone, not just the old and sick, when that’s manifestly not the case.

As Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, said last week, “people with no comorbidities can relax; you may feel funny but the mortality is incredibly low. The wider question is how we best manage people with comorbidities and keep them safe and out of hospital.” So far our leaders’ answer is to paralyse the country and the prospects of everyone in it.

In Sweden, never thought of as a nation of daredevils (they’re so safe they gave us ABBA and Volvos), the vulnerable are sequestered and cared for. They might have to sit things out until a vaccine is developed, while the rest of the people are visiting restaurants and bars, more or less as usual. So far it seems to be working.

No such luck here, though. Our reckless, hysterical governments tumble over each other to impose ever more ridiculous constraints on our liberty, supported by police forces that interpret their authority in a fashion sinister and absurd at the same time. And they have the audacity to quote “the Anzac spirit” as they order fit young men to cower in their trenches.

Some of us are not surprised that our elected leaders and their unelected enforcers have been found wanting, but what really shakes your faith in society is how meekly their ludicrous commands have been obeyed. Did anyone real­ly think more than 500 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach represent a threat? And if so, why the same 500 limit around the corner at Tamarama’s beach, a fraction of the size? And why a zero limit now? Why can’t a solo sunbaker lie on the grass in a park without a police car moving him on? Why can’t a boat owner take a run up the coast? Why can I only buy “essential” goods? Will PC Plod soon be inspecting my shopping bags for truffles and Toblerone?

Save your comments; I know there will be plenty of people rushing to justify any extreme measure that “saves someone’s life”. The curtain-twitchers are busy in Britain, dobbing in neighbours who leave their houses twice a day or have their girlfriend over. They’ve adapted to their police state very comfortably. Fortunate, perhaps, that Churchill’s World War II promise that “we will fight them on the beaches” was never tested.

The driver of this madness is that the data we are working with, as has been pointed out by many epidemiologists, is fundamentally flawed. If we don’t know how many people have been infected, we don’t know the mortality rate. One of our panic-stricken pollies was on the radio on Monday warning people that even if they felt fine, they could be walking around spreading the disease. A disease with no symptoms that doesn’t make you ill? Terrifying.

But those symptom-free people will never be counted, just as all the people who have avoided burdening the hospital system with their minor coughs and sore throats will never be counted, so the mortality rate is inflated. So too in Italy and Spain, where everyone who dies with the disease is recorded as dying from it, no matter whether they have been wiping their feet on death’s doormat for months.

You don’t need to be good at maths or medically trained to realise all these numbers are wickedly inaccurate. If the infection can manifest itself with mild symptoms or none, how on earth can we declare how many are infected? How many run-of-the-mill flu infections go uncounted each year? I’ve never been sufficiently troubled by a cold or flu to go to the doctor, so I’ve never featured in any statistics. Perhaps I’m freakishly lucky, but I doubt it.

Instead we have a simple division sum, but one where the denominator may be out by a factor of a hundred, or a thousand. If one in every 12 people infected dies, that’s a nightmare. One in every 1200, with 99 per cent of them already gravely ill and of advanced age, it’s not so frightening. And are the millions thrown out of work a price worth paying?

John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University in the US, believes if we hadn’t counted and tested this new COVID-19 separately from ordinary colds and flu (and the scary sci-fi name doesn’t help), “we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average”.

He may be wrong, but what is certain is that for many of our fellow citizens, this will be the year everything they’ve worked so hard for — their businesses, their savings, their jobs and dignity, their marriages, their sanity, their hopes and dreams and joy — evaporated.

One day we’ll emerge blinking into the economic wasteland we have wilfully created, but next year winter will come around again, and with it more flu, no doubt with another horror mutation.

So what will we do then? You can only kill yourself once.

SOURCE  






Don't worry about kids missing school, says university boss

Sydney University vice-chancellor Michael Spence has urged parents not to worry about children missing school, saying the education system is adaptable and teachers would get children back on track when the COVID-19 crisis is over.

Dr Spence, who has eight children ranging in age from babies to adults, said families could have faith that Australian educators would be able to identify and fill gaps in children's learning when classroom teaching resumed.
Dr Michael Spence with his sons Theodore and Hugo

Dr Michael Spence with his sons Theodore and HugoCredit:Louise Kennerley

His comments come as parents - particularly those with children in primary school - say they have been overwhelmed with the stress of working from home, and fighting to hold onto vulnerable jobs, while supervising their children's lessons.

"I'm not saying education is not important, but I think we can act sometimes as if the education of a young person is a process of jumping through hoops, where every hoop has to be jumped through in the right order at the right height," Dr Spence told the Herald and The Age.

"The school system is really adaptable, and teachers are terrific professionals. When this all picks up again, part of what they are going to be doing is making sure people are back on the curve, in one way or another."

Dr Spence said schools had proven their adaptability by responding so quickly to the crisis.

"In a matter of weeks, the whole model for teaching in many schools was turned on its head, and teachers responded to that challenge," he said.

"I don't think the schools are expecting parents to become teachers. They are setting formal work, saying, 'Get through as much as you can, and trust us that, when it's all over, we will be able to sort things out.' "

Dr Spence said his children had attended many different types of schools, ranging from a British school that was threatened with closure by the government to tiny Christian schools, NSW state schools and expensive private schools.

As long as you talk to children about ideas, read to them and discuss what's going on in the world, "they find their own way", he said. Some children did not have access to those things at home, but "they are not the kids whose parents are anxious".

"The education system doesn't do a bad job of identifying those kids' educational needs, too."

Dr Spence said he was not worried about students entering first year university next year without the same level of teaching as their predecessors because of the disruption to learning, saying universities always had students with different levels of preparation.

"A big part of what we do in first year is identify where people have learning needs and learning strengths, and try to make sure that everybody is able to be brought on to a point where they are ready for the second year," he said.

"That's what educators do for a living."

SOURCE  






It’s time to stop fake political correctness and artificial harmony

The good intentions of political correctness have today stifled curiosity, understanding and our ability to empathise. It’s also a movement that needs to be curbed, according to Sarah Liu.

Political correctness has been around for half a century and throughout that time the world has witnessed many great changes; the end of apartheid, Australia’s first female Prime Minister and the passing of the same-sex marriage bill.

The term describes an avoidance of actions and language that offends or marginalises groups, particularly those that have historically been discriminated against.

The problem with political correctness.  Yes, political correctness has a powerful place in society, but in our increasingly diverse workplaces, PC culture has stifled curiosity, understanding, and our ability to empathise.

Australia is a proudly multicultural nation. Because of this, many believe our diversity rates and inclusive behaviours are ahead of the pack. In reality, we are not as progressive as we think. Working with global organisations from Shanghai, Japan, Pakistan, Malaysia and Silicon Valley taught me that Australia’s relationship with diversity and inclusion is fraught – and no-one wants to talk about why they’re uncomfortable.

The smile-and-nod mentality is futile; on the surface workplaces are agreeing, while deep-down they’re not buying in. There is an artificial harmony between the politically correct way to embrace diversity and inclusion, and the real feelings, concerns and questions we have about the practical implications of change.

We must do better, and if that means being politically incorrect for the greater good of true progress, then so be it.

Political incorrectness is the real answer

Humans are organically wired to be exclusive creatures; we gravitate towards similarity and comfort, and often we find that in reflections of ourselves. When asked to not only support, but prioritise difference, it’s a common reaction to feel uncomfortable or threatened.

This needs to be acknowledged, and that begins by proactively inviting dissent. Everyone has a bias – be that unconscious or otherwise – that informs their understanding of what diversity and inclusion is.

Of all groups, rarely do we encounter anyone that wants to openly discriminate, rather it’s misinformation that fosters resistance.

Creating psychologically safe spaces to be politically incorrect and ask taboo questions without fear of judgement is the way to having honest and effective conversations.

The ‘one size fits all’ approach – rigid workplace policies or lectures on the issue – only moralises workers, rather than actively engaging them in what they think diversity and inclusion means. This has the potential to create a culture of blind acceptance by suppressing curiosity and real understanding.

Acknowledging resistance is the first step to dropping the false pretence of artificial harmony. We are often told about the benefits of diversity and inclusion; the increased performance results; diversified skill sets; expanded talent pool; increased innovation – the list goes on. But little attention is paid to the myths and challenges associated with implementing change.

Hidden myths of implementing change

A common myth is that women and minority groups are promoted or given special treatment over men, sparking all sorts of heated debate around the role of meritocracy. In reality, diversity and inclusion is not about superiorising women and minorities, it’s about adopting and learning an alternate view of what success, skills, experience and potential looks like when it encompasses a greater portion of society.

Another common misconception is that all people want to be treated equally, that the goal of diversity and inclusion is to see no distinction between men, women, and minority groups. But the dream is not equality; it’s equity.

Focus on the power of equity instead

Treating everyone with equity is part of the reason why diversity and inclusion is challenging, not only to implement but to maintain.

As a leader, it takes more money, time, resources and work to authentically manage individualism. Yet within many organisations, there’s a sense that once the right boxes are ticked, the job is done.

Diversity and inclusion create friction that can proactively encourage dissent, but the belief that creating change is easy discourages the hard work behind progress and the benefits that come with it.

It’s politically incorrect to openly acknowledge the difficulties of diversity and inclusion, but until we start to accept that it’s okay to imperfectly participate in conversation and be honest about the complexities that making real progress brings, we will continue to cultivate artificial harmony by wavering on the precipice of change.

SOURCE

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





6 April, 2020

For reference







Fantasy meets reality







Building industry shutdown would be devastating

Building employers and unions have warned the state government to expect economic devastation if the industry shuts down due to coronavirus.

In an unprecedented double act, Master Builders Victoria and the CFMEU have written to Premier Daniel Andrews pleading for construction to continue.

The industrial enemies also want state and federal governments to ensure that contractors are not punished with liquidated damages if projects are delayed due to the virus.

Last week, the City of Melbourne announced extended construction times for the inner city on weekdays and weekends to help compensate for social distancing measures on work sites. But the industry is clearly concerned it could be forced to shut down if government lockdowns are extended.

A group of industry associations and unions have co-operated to create a 20-page document of guidelines for employers and workers to deal with potential COVID-19 threats.

MBV chief executive Rebecca Casson and CFMEU state secretary John Setka have urged Mr Andrews to work inside the National Cabinet to ensure the building industry was kept open.

“We are firmly of the view that if our industry shuts down, the economic knock-on effects would be devastating on a scale that would dwarf what we have seen to date,” their letter said.

“As you will know, our industry accounts for 12.7 per cent of gross state product and 45 per cent of our state’s tax revenue (and we need you) to assist our economy now and to make sure it is ready to ramp up quickly as we hit recovery mode.”

Ms Casson and Mr Setka said social distancing on sites was slowing work down.

SOURCE  





Beautiful One Day, Police State The Next

To control the spread of a dangerous virus that as yet has taken 24 lives in this country, 25 million Australians have been placed under indefinite house arrest, children’s playgrounds are locked and patrolled by security guards, and the police fly drones over beaches and parks.

To control a virus that as yet has infected 5000 Australians, the response of doctors and politicians to this serious health crisis was to create also a humanitarian and an economic crisis. In the years to come Australians will quite rightly question whether there could have been a better way.

Future generations will ask why the public was so quick to accept the opinions of those experts who presented the worst-case scenarios rather than listen to other experts, no less qualified to offer a judgment, but who suggested less draconian solutions than those that came to be implemented.

Those future generations will also ponder how in 2020 it was that so many Australians could have become so completely disengaged and removed from what happens in the economy that they could advocate policies that would have shut down practically all economic activity in the country.

This is the position of the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, who said: “The government has a responsibility to deal with this health emergency. That is the first priority. Then, it needs to deal with the economic consequences of the health emergency and the appropriate response. It needs to be done in that order.”

Sadly, Albanese seems not to understand that the economic emergency Australia faces involves people’s lives in exactly the same way as does the health emergency.

Australians like to joke about how the country’s second-most populous state has become “The People’s Socialist Republic of Victoria”. But it is no laughing matter that in the space of just a few weeks Victoria became a police state, as its government made laws and then enforced those laws, in ways not very different from how the worst socialist regimes operate. The New South Wales government (‘liberal’ in name only) has been quick to follow Victoria’s lead.

Passed without scrutiny

In Victoria, the most extreme house arrest laws in the country were enacted without parliamentary authority and without any form of public or democratic scrutiny. They were simply made under an enabling act that allows the government do anything it “considers is reasonably necessary to protect public health”. Using this power, Victoria has enacted house arrest laws that are arbitrary, unpredictable, and that are changed, literally, hour by hour at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats.

On Wednesday morning the Victorian Premier declared that it was against the law for anyone to leave their home for any non-essential purpose, including couples who lived apart visiting each other. Just before 5pm that day, following a community backlash, the government announced couples would be exempt from the law.

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, police officers harass people sitting alone on park benches. In 1984, Big Brother at least allowed Winston Smith to go outside.

Jonathan Sumption, a former judge on the UK Supreme Court, gave an interview to the BBC on Monday in which he warned of the consequences of untrammelled power in the hands of politicians and the police. Everything he said applies to Australia. Of police operating in the UK in the same way as they are in Victoria and New South Wales, Sumption said: “That is what a police state is like. It’s a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes.”

It is significant that despite all the coverage it has devoted to the current crisis, the mainstream media in Australia has made no reference to the interview. It might be that the answer to Sumption’s question is too uncomfortable.

“Yes this is serious and yes it’s understandable that people cry out to the government,’’ Sumption said.

“But the real question is: Is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress…”

SOURCE  





Exam shake-up to ensure year 12s not disadvantaged

Year 12 students could have their subject scores artificially boosted to reflect the disruption from coronavirus with the Victorian Government backing a plan that no student should repeat their final year.

State and territory ministers could rubberstamp the year 12 plan as early as Tuesday when they meet for the National Education Council amid concerns large numbers of students repeating their final year would clog up the system.

Victorian Education Minister James Merlino is expected to back any federal push for year 12s not to repeat the year.

With travel restrictions hurting the tertiary sector, universities have pleaded with the government to ensure a new cohort of domestic students enrol in courses next year.

Parents and principals have raised concerns about the impact coronavirus will have on the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) results, which determine which courses students are accepted into.

Late last month, federal Education Minister Dan Tehan met state and territory counterparts to discuss the possibility of adjusting university admission processes to reflect the impact of the virus.

The Sunday Herald Sun understands the proposal has widespread support from the states and territories.

Under the plan, all students’ subject scores would be lifted by the same amount so top- performing students would still get top marks, even if they performed worse than students in previous years.

A similar system is now in place for students whose study is interrupted by ill health, allowing teachers to give an estimate based on year 11 results.

Education Minister Dan Tehan said he didn’t want year 12 students to miss out on starting university, vocational education or work next year.

“We want year 12 to go ahead and to get as many year 12s through, in whatever shape or form,” Mr Tehan said.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here






5 April, 2020

Australian news: stories you may have missed during the coronavirus crisis

Here are the stories you may have missed over the past week.
Pell verdict on Tuesday

The high court will hand down its judgment in George Pell’s final appeal on Tuesday in Brisbane.

The final arguments from both sides finished up in March, and we will find out at 10am on Tuesday whether his conviction on five counts of child sexual abuse will be upheld or overturned.

XPT train was doing 100km/h in a 15km/h zone

The Sydney to Melbourne train that derailed in February, killing two people, was travelling at more than 100km/h in a section limited to 15km/h.

That section was part of a diversion, introduced that afternoon, from the normal route with a speed limit of 130km/h, according to the preliminary report on the crash, which came out on Friday.

Chris Dawson formally pleaded not guilty on Friday to murdering his then wife on Sydney’s northern beaches nearly 40 years ago.

The former teacher and Newtown Jets rugby league player has repeatedly claimed that Lynette Dawson is still alive and several people have seen her since her disappearance in January 1982. The matter is scheduled to return to court on Wednesday.

Earliest known Homo erectus skull discovered

The oldest known skull of Homo erectus was discovered by Australian researchers on Friday. The fossil has been dated at two million years old – 200,000 years older than the previous record.

Victoria renews logging

Late on Wednesday night, the federal and Victorian governments decided to extend five regional forest agreements that exempt the logging industry from conservation laws.

Environmental groups immediately criticised the move, given the summer’s devastating bushfires will already have deforested large swathes and impacted wildlife.

Nine days in North Korean detention

You may remember Alek Sigley, the Australian student (and lover of Korean literature) who was arrested in North Korea over nine harrowing days in 2019. After days of diplomatic wrangling, he was released, but wouldn’t share the details of what happened.

Now, writing for Guardian Australia, he has.

    I saw the black Mercedes-Benz, which had a black plastic bag covering its licence plate. ‘Fuck, you’re in deep shit now,’ I thought to myself.

Big polluters increased emissions

One in five of Australia’s biggest polluting sites actually increased their greenhouse gas emissions last year, above the government limit.

Under the safeguard mechanism, companies that breach their limit have to buy carbon credits or pay a penalty. But the Australian Conservation Foundation found that 729,000 tonnes of emissions went unpunished.

Queensland panel recommends legal voluntary euthanasia

A year-long inquiry has concluded that Queensland should legalise voluntary assisted dying. On Tuesday, the state’s health committee found a majority of Queenslanders are in favour of voluntary euthanasia for terminally-ill adults.

Water flows into Menindee

In good news, water has flowed into the drought-stricken Menindee Lakes, the site of infamous mass fish kills last year.

For the first time in years, significant flows and water releases are under way, meaning the lower Darling River will finally reconnect with the Murray.

Government allows coalmining under Sydney reservoir

The New South Wales government has approved the extension of coalmining under the Woronora reservoir.

It’s the first approval in two decades for coalmining directly beneath one of greater Sydney’s reservoirs, and environment groups say it could affect the quality of drinking water.

Death in custody

An Aboriginal man, aged 30, died in Victoria last week after he was arrested and taken to a regional police station.

Police said the man was arrested on Thursday last week in Horsham. When he was taken to the police station, his “condition deteriorated”, and he died in hospital on Sunday.

2019 was the century’s worst year for the environment in Australia

The annual Australia’s Environment report came out on Monday, finally confirming something we may have already seen coming.

Unprecedented bushfires, record heat, record low river inflows, dry soil, low vegetation growth and the 40 new species that were added to the threatened species list meant that 2019 was the worst year since 2000.

In other environmental news, land-clearing approvals in NSW increased 13-fold since the Coalition government changed laws in 2016, according to a secret report provided to the state cabinet.

$550m to be refunded from robodebt

In an exclusive obtained by reporter Luke Henriques-Gomes, we revealed the government will refund hundreds of millions of dollars under the botched robodebt scheme.

Confidential government advice obtained by Guardian Australia revealed that the government has already privately admitted that 400,000 welfare debts worth $550m were wrongly issued.

Christchurch shooter pleads guilty

Last Thursday, the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre suddenly changed his plea from not guilty to guilty, after being charged with the murder of 51 people.

The shock announcement meant that Australian Brenton Tarrant was immediately convicted of all charges. He had originally been set for trial on 2 June, but that has now been called off. He will be sentenced later this year.

SOURCE  







The shutdown will be deadlier than the virus

We are in the midst of the strangest event of our lives. Societies have shut down. Families and whole nations face financial ruin. Walking the streets is now a crime from Paris to Sydney to Mumbai. And all of this has occurred not despite the will of the people but because of it.

The reasons are well known. There is a virus on the loose. It is transmitted by humans and is killing tens of thousands. It is an existential threat at which all resources must be thrown and all energy expended.

This is the popular mantra. And if true it would justify the incredible events we are witnessing. The problem is that it appears not to be true, a fact few are willing to entertain amid the hysteria that prevails. Yet its falsity is indicated on a cursory review of the best available data.

That data is provided by Italy, an early epicentre of the virus with many deaths recorded.

On March 26, the country’s peak health organisation — the National Institute of Health — published a report with details of the 6801 deaths the country had recorded to that point. This is a considerable sample size, and the figures are revealing.

The first statistics of note are those about the average age of casualties, which is 78. The median is 79. A little more than 95 per cent of victims were over 60, and zero deaths were recorded for people under the age of 30.

Then there is the method of designating the virus as the cause of death, which includes anyone who had tested positive for it before dying. In other words, many were said to have died from the virus when in truth they merely died with it.

Third, 98 per cent of casualties of a random sample of patients had a pre-existing chronic illness, or comorbidity, at their time of death. About 21 per cent suffered from a single comorbidity, 26 per cent from two, 51 per cent from three and just 2 per cent with none.

Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s Health Minister, recent­ly reported: “On re-evalua­tion by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.”

The overwhelming majority of Italy’s deaths involved chronically ill and elderly patients.

This is not to diminish these tragedies. But the questions arise: why are we surrendering our hard-won civil liberties and committing economic suicide when this virus poses a danger to only a small portion of our society? Why do we not pour all of our resources into protecting the vulnerable?

The answer is that a 24-hour news cycle, with its morbid tallying of deaths, images of corpses and sensationalist reporting of outlier cases has whipped the public into a frenzy that politicians have had to take extreme measures to appease.

And anyone who questions the collective unreason is denounced on social media as a bloodthirsty mercenary who favours the economy over human life.

History shows time and again the reaction to a perceived crisis becomes the true catastrophe. Like the execution of witches until the mid-18th century or the scapegoating of Jews for poisoning wells during the Black Plague, evidence and logic are of no use to us now. There is an existential threat, and anyone who denies it is not just a denier but the cause.

None of this is to say this virus is not dangerous. It is. But the level of threat it poses is being exaggerated, and the response to it exaggerated as a result.

This is especially true in Australia, where infection rates appear to be relatively low and the government containment methods are among the most draconian worldwide.

If the government has compelling data to support this strategy, it should release it. But there seems to be no correlation between the scale of the threat and the economic and social damage we will suffer responding to it.

There is a disaster afoot. But it is not the COVID-19 virus. It is the putative remedy, a fact we will not appreciate until it’s too late.

SOURCE  






Coronavirus and homeschooling: How the tables have turned

I have four at home underfoot, ranging from a uni student, one in Year 12 attempting final year studies, one diving into the huge adventure that’s Year 7 and one in Year 3 trying to learn his tables.

Eight and eight went to the store, to buy Nintendo 64. 56 = 7 x 8 because it’s 5, 6, 7 and 8. Stop! Stop right there! Because we’re no longer meant to learn these natty little short cuts to times tables, we’re not meant to teach our children this way. The current mode of thinking is that kids need to understand the concepts behind the sums, rather than just reeling off the answers by rhyme or rote.

But these ditties are extremely handy in unprecedented times. I have four at home underfoot, ranging from a uni student, one in Year 12 attempting final year studies, one diving into the huge adventure that’s Year 7 and one in Year 3 trying to learn his tables. Let’s just say I begin this whole exercise every morning feeling like Snow White, crisp and clean and contained, trilling away with imaginary bluebirds flying around my head, but end up every afternoon feeling like a combination of Tom (as in Jerry), Oscar (from The Odd Couple) and Cinderella (pre-ball). God I admire teachers, always have, but now … they are my superheroes. This is hard.

So, times tables. The current mode of thinking is that kids need to understand the concepts behind the sums, rather than just reeling off the answers by rote; and through the example of my three older kids I know that schools no longer teach them the old way. I know mine – they were drilled into us every morning, stopwatch hovering, to get us into the correct state of mental alertness for the day. But do our eight-year-old children know theirs? I have primary school memories of the times table grid fresh on the blackboard first thing, to limber us up. Numbers across the top and down the left hand side aaaaaand … go! It was mental arithmetic, it was a race, and it embedded the sums that would be used in some form for the rest of my life.

Through four kids in various schools across two western countries I’ve wondered again and again who’s actually teaching these dear little sums anymore. Is this situation, gulp, actually up to us, the parents? How does it work in all those Asian countries with their amazing PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores? Discipline, structure and sheer grit, I suspect. In 2018, Australian 15-year-olds lagged 3.5 years behind their Chinese counterparts in maths, and we’re now in long-term decline.

So how to raise mathematical standards in Australian kids? Parents, dive in, because I suspect it’s the only way for the time being, and of course some of us have so much free time on our hands now to do this. I asked the school of my Year 3 son what age kids are meant to know their times tables by. End of Year 4, I’m cheerily told, and it’s not necessarily up to teachers alone. The more tigerish parents around me talk of charts on bedroom walls and times tables CDs playing in cars. I panic. I was that mother once. Long ago. God help Child Number Four.

But Aussie maths guru Eddie Woo says it’s essential that all students lock down times tables, because they’re a key form of mathematical fluency. “They’re the bedrock for students to become confident in dealing with fractions: the former is about multiplication and the latter is about division, making them natural partners. Children who struggle with times tables will often find fractions, decimals and percentages very difficult to comprehend … you can see how a child’s difficulties with mathematics may have been sown many years in the past.”

Righto. A few years back the British schools minister declared all pupils should have instant recall of times tables by age nine. And our Aussie kids? I don’t think so. “Six times 6 is 36, now go outside to pick up sticks.” Literally, so Oscar from The Odd Couple can transform into Snow White again.

SOURCE  






Murdoch to shutter 60 newspapers in Australia

The coronavirus is hitting the newspaper industry hard Down Under. Rupert Murdoch’s Australian flagship media group News Corp announced on Wednesday it would stop printing around 60 regional newspapers, as the troubled sector received a fresh blow from a Covid-19 advertising downturn, The Global Times reported.

News Corp said papers in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia would cease printing and move online, the report said.

“We have not taken this decision lightly,” News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller was quoted as saying by the group’s Australian newspaper title.

“The coronavirus crisis has created unprecedented economic pressures and we are doing everything we can to preserve as many jobs as possible.”

“The suspension of our community print editions has been forced on us by the rapid decline in advertising revenues following the restrictions placed on real estate auctions and home inspections, the forced closure of event venues and dine-in restaurants in the wake of the coronavirus emergency,” he added.

Many Australian media groups had already been shifting focus to online content before the pandemic began, the report said.

The announcement follows a series of media closure statements, including national wire AAP, which is due to cease work later this year, the report said.

The move has echoed a global trend.

The largest US newspaper publisher, Gannett, said on Monday it was making unspecified furloughs and pay cuts for its staff, the report said.

Falling readerships and the rise of Google and Facebook as dominant players in advertising has made news organizations less profitable.

Meanwhile, UK print newspaper sales have fallen by as much as 30% since the start of the government-ordered coronavirus lockdown, according to industry sources, with journalists at many local newspapers placed on leave and warnings that hundreds of reporters could be left without jobs as the advertising market collapses, The Guardian reported.

Thousands of independent newsagents have closed, commuter traffic is non-existent, and supermarkets are expected to cut the numbers of copies they take from next week because of reduced footfall, the report said.

With many readers also self-isolating, one of the British news industry’s main sources of revenue has taken a heavy hit.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here








4 April, 2020

Greenie investors trying to stop gas mining

Santos has defended shareholders' criticism of its controversial coal seam gas proposal for the NSW town of Narrabri during its annual general meeting.

Investors on Friday expressed environmental and risk concerns about the project, which if approved, would allow Santos to drill 850 gas wells and provide energy for up to half of NSW.

Some shareholders said the project had failed to win community support, and carried the risk of environmental damage.

Opponents say extracting methane from the coal seam will contaminate groundwater, and have filed complaints to the NSW government's Independent Planning Commission, which will decide the project's fate.

However chairman Keith Spence claimed most opponents lived outside Narrabri.

He said Santos had a long history of operating assets safely and sustainably. "We're confident in the support we have for the project and expect it to proceed," he told the meeting.

A number of shareholder activist groups posed questions to management. Environmental impact was a recurring theme.

"It's clear climate change is a very important issue for our shareholders, and it is for me," Mr Spence said.

Santos is investigating carbon capture and storage at its Moomba gas plant in South Australia.

The aim is to capture 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide separated from natural gas and store it in the Cooper Basin.

Earlier at the meeting, environmentally-minded shareholders failed to impose carbon emission reductions.

Shareholders representing the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility proposed reduction targets aligned with the international Paris Agreement on climate change of 2016.

However only six per cent of shareholders voted for the first of these proposals - which would have allowed shareholders more power in questioning management.

The result meant the votes on the remaining proposals carried no power.

However, these decisions were more contentious. Results show the proposals - more closely related to reduction targets - had 43 and 46 per cent support respectively.

Shareholders were not allowed to attend the meeting, which was webcast from Adelaide, due to precautions about the coronavirus.

SOURCE  





Labor warns some universities face collapse as international enrolments plummet

Tanya Plibersek has called on the Morrison government to provide low-cost loans and guarantee universities’ funding, warning some are at risk of collapse due to falls in international enrolments during the Covid-19 crisis.

Ahead of the education minister, Dan Tehan, taking a support package to cabinet to be announced as early as next week, Plibersek told Guardian Australia that there are “now serious concerns that without federal government action some leading institutions could collapse”.

Universities, many of which rely on international students for more than a third of their revenue, are currently engaged in cost-cutting including asking staff to use up leave and instituting hiring freezes.

But representatives of the sector have played down the risk, with Universities Australia chief executive, Catriona Jackson, insisting they are “not asking for a bailout” from government, only “support to help us weather the period ahead”.

Labor wants the government to provide universities with certainty by guaranteeing “proper funding for Australian students”, including paying at least the commonwealth grant scheme funding for the next three years based on projected student numbers before the 2019 budget.

Plibersek also proposes “low or no-cost loans to provide stability in coming months”.

“Australian universities are under immense pressure,” she said. “For years, universities have used income from international education to help fund their world-leading research.

“The Covid-19 pandemic, and global travel restrictions, have led to a crisis in this funding model, with income from international students plummeting over recent months.

“Australia cannot afford to let our universities fall off a cliff. The federal government must act now to shore up our universities.”

In addition to employing almost 260,000 people, Plibersek cited universities’ role in developing new treatments, cures and equipment and educating doctors, nurses and health experts, as reasons to support them.

“They are absolutely critical to dealing with this urgent health crisis – and will be just as critical to our recovery in the years to come,” she said.

“If the federal government fails to act now, some universities could collapse, which would see vital research cut, thousands of jobs lost, and leave students hanging in the middle of degrees.”

Group of Eight universities tend to derive the most revenue from international students, although are considered very unlikely to fail due to their large asset bases. The greater concern is smaller regional universities that also derive a large proportion of revenue from international sources, such as Federation and Central Queensland universities.

Jackson said that Universities Australia has “been talking with government since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic about ways to best support university students and staff, research and teaching, and have greatly appreciated the collaborative approach”.

“Universities are not asking for a bailout,” she told Guardian Australia. “Rather we are seeking government support to help us weather the period ahead, and come out the other side able to play our part in economic and community recovery.”

Luke Sheehy, executive director of the Australian Technology Network group of universities, said he “anticipates the government will consider additional funding for [the sector], and that would be welcome”.

“We hope that it will allow us to look after students and staff, and continue to conduct vital research including to combat Covid-19.”

Sheehy noted universities would feel the greatest impact in the second semester, when international students from the northern hemisphere begin studies in Australia.

Guardian Australia contacted the Group of Eight universities, Regional Universities Network, Federation and Central Queensland universities for comment.

SOURCE  





Free childcare for ALL workers

Working parents across Australia will be entitled to free childcare while the country battles the coronavirus pandemic. 

The government on Thursday declared childcare centres an essential service that will continue to operate to help support parents who still have jobs in the current economy.

The new plan is expected to help one million Australian families over the next six months. 

Free childcare will be available to all parents regardless of their jobs or whether they are full-time or part-time workers. 

The prime minister said any mother or father who has a job is considered an 'essential worker' and therefore qualifies for the government-funded program.

Education Minister Dan Tehan said it would apply to 'anyone from a truck driver through to a doctor to a nurse.'

'Anyone with a job right now is doing something essential for someone who would rely on that business's service, and that would include the public service as well. 'So, they will be first cabs off the rank,' Mr Tehan explained.

The government will waive the gap fee - the difference between what is charged by the childcare centre and the childcare subsidy - from March 23.

* Free child care starting next week, as the nation grapples with the coronavirus

* The scheme, which will last for at least three months, will cost $1.6 billion and will benefit around 1million families

* Parents still working will be prioritised, or for children who are vulnerable and need to be cared for

* The government will pay half the reasonable fee cap for the next six months

* The funding will be based on the number of children in care during the fortnight before March 2

* In order to receive the money, centres must stay open and not charge parents any fees

* The amount will be paid fortnightly

* It amounts to about $1.6 billion over three months

* The plan aims to keep the nation's 13,000 childcare centres open

* It completely reshapes the childcare fee scheme, with means and activity testing dropped.

The prime minister, however, has warned that the new plan is not a 'convenience measure' and that those who are home with their children will be accommodated last.

Parents who work in the healthcare sector, such as doctors and nurses, will be given priority as well as those of vulnerable children who need to be cared for.

Funding will go into effect from Sunday, April 6, across 13,00 childcare centres in the country.

The program will cover enrolments as they stood in the fortnight leading up to March 2 - before people started pulling their kids out of care en masse due to losing their jobs or out of health fears.

The fee revenue payments will be paid fortnightly from April 6 and will replace the Child Care (CCS) and Additional Child Care Subsidy payments.

The scheme will be reviewed after three months and may be extended for a further three months. After the pandemic, the system will revert back to normal.

Mr Tehan said the aim was to make sure parents won't have to worry about trying to find new care for their children.

'What we want to do by doing this is ensure that your childcare centre will remain open, so that you know where you normally take your child to get cared, that that will be there for you, so you are not looking to have to go to a new centre,' he said.

It's also expected the childcare sector will be able to access some $1 billion in the JobKeeper wage subsidy payments.

Wages account for more than 60 per cent of a centre's expenses. 

SOURCE  




'Coronavirus can't be allowed to destroy democracy': Alan Jones slams social distancing rules which threaten Australians  with jail or harsh fines

Radio broadcaster Alan Jones has slammed strict new social distancing laws as undemocratic and un-Australian.  

The recent New South Wales health order tackles the spread of COVID-19 by stopping people from going outside without good reason and enforcing severe penalties.

Speaking on 2GB, Mr Jones argued that the coronavirus measures were too harsh.

The health order dictated that there were now only 16 'reasonable excuses' for a person to leave their home.

These included exercise, shopping for essentials, seeking medical care, providing care or travelling to work.

Any person found breaching these rules could face six months in jail or a fine of up to $11,000.

Mr Jones said that he disagreed with the way the measures were implemented.

'The rules were implemented via regulation in NSW, not legislation, which means they were not debated in parliament and they were not subject to possibly sensible amendments,' he said. 

Mr Jones also argued that the strict measures were confusing and unfair.

'This order in NSW, by a Liberal government, should never have been gazetted. It's badly thought out, it's undemocratic, it's hopelessly un-Australian, it treats us as if we're all either completely stupid or servants of the state,' Mr Jones said.

Gatherings of more than two people, apart from immediate family, are also banned in NSW as are all non-essential activities. 

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said the new social isolation rules would last for 90 days and hopefully not longer.

'It is 90 days. People will have gotten the message by then, hopefully,' he said on Thursday.

'We won't be talking about the powers, we'll be talking about what does it look like coming out of this.'

The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in NSW has reached 2,298.

The state's death toll sits at 10 - almost half of the country's tally of 23 deaths.  

Positive coronavirus cases across Australia have risen to 5,103.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





3 April, 2020

Why you mostly can't buy rice in the supermarket

Because most irrigation has ceased for lack of water -- while dam water is allowed to flow out to sea for "environmental" purposes

Panic buying is adding to the pressure on rice supplies at a time when drought and water reform have led to one of the smallest crops in the industry's 70-year history in Australia.

The grower-led company SunRice will produce about 5 per cent of its average rice production this year, and is relying on overseas product to meet demand domestically and for export markets.

Chief executive officer Rob Gordon said panic buying of rice had put enormous strain on the company's facilities. "We've got orders for 250 per cent of normal and obviously we don't have the spare capacity to be able to produce that, but we are flexing our supply chains," Mr Gordon said.

"We are importing rice from different parts of the world for the Australian market even though we normally sell Australian rice here. "Clearly that will be very clearly labelled so consumers can understand that we've had to source rice from somewhere else."

Mr Gordon said the company would secure enough rice from overseas suppliers to satisfy demand for an estimated 1.2 million tonnes in sales to about 50 countries this year.

This will be further complicated by the Vietnamese Government announcing that all rice exports will be banned from May 31 to protect its domestic supply, affecting the company's milling operations in that country.

Fewer than 70 Australian growers will harvest crops in the coming weeks, out of close to 800 producers in a good season.

Prolonged drought and water reform is likely to see production fall below last year's 54,000 tonnes, the second lowest crop on record.

In a good year, SunRice injects up to $500 million into the New South Wales economy in wages and payments to growers and local suppliers.

This year the company laid off 250 workers, and the impact of that reduced economic activity has hit the Riverina region hard.

The Mayor of Leeton, Paul Maytom, said governments needed to understand that the value of rice to local communities extended far beyond its farm-gate return.

"It should not be about who can pay the highest price for water; it should be about what will it cost our communities if we cannot sustain that diversity of irrigated agriculture that we have, which then moves into the value-added side, which then moves into employment and then sustains our whole community," Mr Maytom said.

Under water reforms, the environment and permanent crops, such as almonds, grapes and citrus, get water allocated before annual crops such as rice, cotton and cereals.

SunRice chairman Laurie Arthur said annual crop irrigators felt under siege.

About 500 have joined a $1.5-billion class action against the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, but he is urging calm.

Mr Arthur is one of the state's biggest rice growers and a former national water commissioner.

He said he understood grower frustration, but hoped state and commonwealth governments would make more water available for low-security irrigation.

"One of the reasons the irrigation community supported the reform process was the concept of property rights, transparency of process and a framework of water entitlements that give the sector confidence to invest to world's best practise," he said.

"Some of those have been delivered and some have demonstrably not been delivered.

"The government now holds 28 per cent of all the allocations in the Basin, so they are enormous users, and I believe they have the ability to correct the situation."

There are a number of big reports on water reform policy due in the coming months.

SOURCE  






Queensland looks set to legalise voluntary assisted dying for terminally ill adults

Queensland should legalise voluntary assisted dying for terminally ill adults, the government's health committee has found.

An investigation to gauge public opinion on voluntary euthanasia has determined most Queenslanders are in favour of it.

Currently, there's no option for terminally ill Queenslanders to get help to die.

The committee found that every four days in Queensland, a terminally-ill person takes their own life.

'This must stop,' committee chair and Labor MP Aaron Harper wrote in a report tabled in parliament on Tuesday.

'Suicide should never be the only option for Queenslanders suffering at end of life.

'This is just one of the many reasons the majority of our committee chose to support a recommendation for more choice for people suffering from an advanced progressive or neurodegenerative condition, through access to a voluntary assisted dying scheme.'

A sample bill has already been draft by Queensland University of Technology Professors Ben White and Lindy Wilmot.

The committee of parliamentarians recommended euthanasia be limited to Australian citizens or permanent residents in Queensland with the capacity to make decisions.

To be eligible, patients must be diagnosed with an advanced or progressively terminal chronic or neurodegenerative condition that cannot be eased.

Those with a mental health illness should not be ruled out, so long as they can make decisions.

Time frames for a person's assisted death should not be proposed, the committee recommended, in recognition of the complex, subjective and unpredictable nature of terminal illnesses.

A sample bill has already been drafted by Queensland University of Technology Professors Ben White and Lindy Wilmot.

'It's an excellent bill,' Dying with Dignity Queensland president Jos Hall said.

Advocates want to see voluntary assisted dying legislated before October's state election, but understand the response to COVID-19 takes priority.

'It needs to be dealt with as a matter of priority at the first available opportunity,' Ms Hall said.

'Knowing that over 80 per cent of Queenslanders support voluntary assisted dying, regardless of who forms the next government, we would like to see this dealt with.

'We would be pleased to work with whichever party forms government if this is not dealt in this parliamentary term.'

SOURCE  






Queensland sugar industry provides large amount of ethanol to make sanitizers


QUEENSLAND'S multi-billion dollar sugar industry is playing a vital role in the fight against coronavirus. Sugar giant Wilmar says it has doubled production in recent weeks of ethanol, a by-product of sugar molasses, for use in sanitisers and cleaners.

Wilmar BioEthanol executive director Shayne Rutherford said the COV1D-19 outbreak had triggered an unprecedented demand for ethanol and it was working hard to meet the needs of its customers in the cleaning and pharmaceutical sectors.

Cleaning products manufacturers including Ormeau-based OzKleen says they can't obtain enough ethanol to meet demand as the coronavirus epidemic spreads.

Mr Rutherford said the company's North Queensland ethanol distillery produces about 60 million litres of ethanol a year for the renewable fuel (E10) and industrial markets. "In recent weeks, we have maximised our production of higher-grade ethanol suitable for use in sanitisers and surface cleaners," said Mr Rutherford.

The company had provided more than 370,000 additional litres of ethanol to Australian pharmaceutical customers in the year to date, an increase of about 60 per cent. It also had shipped more than 380,000 additional litres of ethanol to Australian cleaning product customers - an increase of more than 280 per cent. -"This represents a doubling of the ethanol volumes we've supplied to Australian pharmaceutical and cleaning product customers so far this year, compared to the first quarter of 2019,"

He said the company's Sarina distillery employs about 50 people directly and Operates 24 hours a day. At its Yarraville operation the 15 people employed there are working extended hours to meet the current spike in demand.

Wilmar is one of the major Australian producers of ethanol products, supplying over half of the domestic food and beverage and industrial market as well as supplying the rapidly growing fuel market in Australia.

Rum distilleries in Queensland also have quickly adapted to surging demand for ethanol and are rolling out hand sanitiser from their factories. Minister for State Development Cameron Dick said Beenleigh Rum Distillery and Bundaberg Rum Distillery would focus on the production of ethanol for hand sanitiser immediately, using existing production lines and staff.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 28 March, 2020





The coronavirus lockdown has Australia's domestic violence shelters fearing for migrant women

At one domestic and family violence service in a multicultural area of Melbourne, the number of calls for assistance is significantly down. But it’s the lines going quiet that is the worry.

CEO of South East Community Links Rhonda Cumberland told SBS News she is concerned women wanting to leave their abusive partners are now at more risk as Australia tackles the coronavirus crisis by imposing lockdown measures.

And for those who have migrated to Australia from a different country, they may be without a wide network of support.

“Family violence generally has gone quiet in terms of any reporting, but for migrant women, in particular, you can imagine with all of the violence being contained in the home without any outlets available [it would be] just totally compressed into the home,” she said. 

Her organisation works to provide settlement and other support services to the diverse areas surrounding Dandenong in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, where roughly 70 per cent of residents come from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Ms Cumberland said without any access to public space due to the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, coercion experienced by women at home was likely getting worse, and many may feel they now have no outlet to escape or seek help through.

“They have very few opportunities to make phone calls, to be in touch with friends who might support them, or go anywhere to engage in any type of community space,” Ms Cumberland said.

“The entrapment is real. It will last quite a long time. It’s very hard to reach these women at the best of times, but in these conditions, it’s just so much more difficult.”

'People are very scared'

It’s a sentiment echoed by Annabelle Daniel, CEO of Women’s Community Shelters, a network of seven shelters across New South Wales for women who have experienced family and domestic violence.

As Google reports seeing the highest magnitude of searches for domestic violence help that they have seen in the past five years, with an increase of 75 per cent, Ms Daniel said her organisation has received a 30 per cent spike in the number of calls for information about what help is available. But that hasn’t been translated into the intake at the shelters.

“What that says to us is people are very scared for the potential for lockdown increasing the intensity of domestic or family abuse they might already be experiencing,” she said.

“What a lockdown environment creates is a situation where you might be around someone who is abusive 24/7. What that does is it increases the potential for surveillance, monitoring phone and internet use, for listening in on conversations, to basically have eyes on someone all the time."

“One thing we do know about domestic and family abuse is that controlling behaviours that go on can absolutely be amplified in an isolation setting,”.

Family and domestic violence shelters are considered essential services and remain open to the public.

Ms Daniel said it was important for women to know there are places available in shelters and there is support on hand for those who need it.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





2 April, 2020

Coronavirus: Centre-right in need of new narrative

Rubbish!  All the recent events show is that big government interventions lead to more big government interventions.  The interventions in Sweden were mild and did not kill the economy.  That seems to have worked well, with less than one death per capita

The government’s massive fiscal intervention in the Australian economy, entirely justified by the gravity of the COVID-19 crisis, will change centre-right politics in this country forever.

You cannot make the need for small government, free markets and less state intervention your chief political narrative if you have just used government on a scale never before imagined to rescue the nation from a desperate health emergency.

Federal and state governments are introducing immense changes to the way Australians are governed in this warlike mobilisation. Many of them, such as restrictions on civil liberties, will surely be strictly temporary. They must be.

The Morrison government, like centre-right governments around the world, has to work out what kind of society, what kind of economy, it wants to emerge from this crisis. The centre-right will need to craft a new narrative on the role of government.

It needs to find a way to use the immense authority and power government will accrue to shape a society with values and practices that accord with its own philosophy, and that work for Australians in the long term.

The $130bn wage subsidy scheme is the biggest fiscal intervention in Australian history. It takes the three economic support packages, as the government deftly labelled them, to $214bn. When you add fiscal and monetary support together, you get to $320bn, or more than 16 per cent of GDP.

If coming out of the crisis in a few months’ time the government simply says these were wartime-like emergency measures so now we go back to our mantra about small government, they risk repeating exactly the post-war political transition that took place in Britain in 1945.

A grateful nation thanked Winston Churchill and the Conservatives Party for getting them through World War II. Then they elected Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, which they saw as the natural heirs of big government, the folks who would use the new ­powers of government to improve their lives.

A strong government to build a strong nation need not mean anything like socialism. But that is a danger.

A real possibility, if we come out of this crisis intact, is we end up with an Australian version of ­Eurosclerosis — an affluent nation crippled by debt, big welfare and transfer programs, wide government involvement in the economy, yet still low on productive capacity.

Inevitably there will be competing narratives as this crisis one day ebbs. One big narrative will centre on: is our health system adequate?

Another will pivot on a different question: how do we get Australia moving again economically?

The purity of free-market doctrines on aspects of trade and industry policy will have to give way to central considerations of ­national capacity.

South Australian Premier Steve Marshall is right to insist that we must have the ability to manufacture surgical masks and all elements of protective medical gear in Australia. For there is no reason to think that COVID-19 is the last or only pandemic we will ever face.

It is surely scandalous that as the 13th-largest economy in the world, and one of the richest societies, even now, four months into the coronavirus crisis, we cannot manufacture ventilators.

Australians will want these critical shortfalls addressed. They will be addressed either by a pro-growth centre-right government or a pro-redistribution centre-left government.

Saddled as we will be with such debt, there will be a huge imperative for government to find creative ways to finance key infrastructure and other projects.

You can neither leave it all to the market nor leave it all to the federal Treasury.

This will be even more challenging, given the necessity of diversifying away from our trade, services and supply line over dependency on China.

Consider this: in three weeks, the Morrison government could mobilise more than $320bn for a national crisis but it took the Adani group eight years to get a licence for a coalmine that both sides of federal politics always believed served the national economic and security interest.

Across the government, key ministers are identifying priority projects and priority reforms needed to get the economy into ­recovery.

This involves infrastructure such as dams, roads, resources projects and much else. Senior ministers are determined to cut through “green lawfare” that has paralysed so much development.

These projects will have to involve the private sector as the government will not have enough money, although one big danger will be people drawing the wrong conclusion that government money is limitless if you really need it.

There will be serious opportunities for Australian super funds with their trillions of dollars under management.

Right now, the priority is rightly entirely on dealing with the health crisis. But a shattered economy, and a stressed society, will need rebuilding. It’s not too early to think seriously about the shape that rebuilding takes.

SOURCE  





Coronavirus: ‘Not the time for fun’, but this police state tone is deeply worrying

In Sydney’s harbourside Rushcutters Bay Park, police cars with flashing lights dispersed people getting some fresh air and sunshine, in Perth, encouraged by Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan, police flew drones over parks warning people to go home. In Victoria and New South Wales the governments and police forces are warning of $10,000 fines for people who leave home for reasons not covered by prescriptive lists.

In Queensland there are similar threats from police and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk explained that now is “not the time for fun.”

I don’t think anyone is having fun. But this police state tone is deeply worrying.

On the medical front we are entitled to be encouraged. We have curbed the overall level of new infections because we have cut the number of cases coming in from overseas.

We must listen to the expert medical advice that says there is a long way to go, that community infections are the real concern and they could take a fortnight or more to show up. We understand that the worst is likely yet to come, and that it why rules are tightening rather than relaxing.

But we are entitled to reflect that border closures, compulsory quarantine, an extensive and growing testing regime, shutdowns of travel, tourism and hospitality businesses, and physical distancing rules and practices have enabled this country to make some tangible progress. We have reduced the growth in new infections, despite testing going up.

We have had an activist media, driven by the inanities of social media, pushing state and federal governments for what they like to call a full lockdown. They have paid scant regard to the human toll of even more draconian measures.

Governments are wary about being accused of not doing enough – especially after the often illogical and hysterical criticism of governments over the summer of bushfires. We also have activist academics and medical representatives, many with political agendas, prodding and bullying governments and ministers over their responses.

The strident calls have continued for weeks; shut everything down, shut down society, shut down schools, shut down businesses and shut down the economy. We have had continued high-level medical advice that schools should be a safe option; a place to keep kids organised and focused, coached on hygiene demands, away from vulnerable people and continuing with their education.

Yet our schools are as good as closed, students are actively discouraged from attending and those that do turn up are minded rather than taught.

We have citizens being threatened with heavy fines if they leave home. We have people being abused and threatened with legal action if they go to the beach.

We have police putting drones into the sky to check that no more than two of us are out in public together. Is this proportionate?

Is this reasonable given we live in an educated, sensible, liberal and egalitarian society? Is this the way we should operate when we confront a community challenge?

This is not a government project; this is not a police operation; it is not even a medical task. This is a challenge for society; this is a time when citizens deliver the outcome.

It is citizens who provide the medical care, run the pathology test, make the deliveries, clean the bathrooms, stack the shelves and prepare the food. We are all in this together, for each other.

Governments and other authorities need to make difficult decisions, they need to enforce new laws, provide information so people can take reasonable precautions for their own sake and the sake of others.

But the penalties, policing and political messages run the risk of being over the top and counter-productive. It is no good assuaging the shrill voices of Twitter (not the real world) if you infantilise and antagonise mainstream Australians.

We know there will be idiots and scumbags – we’ve had people allegedly spit at police, and illegally open bars – and we would expect the book to be thrown at them. But threatening all Australians isn’t really on.

Please tone it down.

There is not a citizen in the country who doesn’t understand what is at stake. But fair go – except in the most egregious and obnoxious examples, governments shouldn’t be threatening people about leaving home, or spying on them with police drones at the park.

We all need to play our role to slow the spread and protect the vulnerable; most of us have elderly family and friends, so we are apprehended by the danger. Australian citizens, who are doing the heavy lifting in this crisis, do not deserve to be treated like delinquents.

They are the ones who are suffering from this pandemic, losing their jobs, their businesses, their schooling and their social interactions. They are also the ones who are combating it, running the hospitals, providing the essentials, staying home, schooling their kids, and offering state and federal governments, police and other authorities the appropriate support.

Those authorities should reciprocate by treating people like adults, recognising they are doing this in partnership with us, not against us. We fight the virus with community co-operation, not police sirens.

Whether you are a government minister, medico, teacher or policeman, we appreciate your work, we appreciate the pressure you are under and we support your aims; we are all in this together.

Rather than tackle a horrible health and economic crisis with some version of a police state, our leaders must try to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”. Because that is what will work; by maintaining social cohesion and ensuring we don’t lose our national character just when we need it most.

SOURCE  






Victoria’s real estate industry has welcomed the moratorium on evictions to help tenants struggling through the crisis, but says further details and support for landlords are urgently needed

Recent government announcements should take some stress off Australian renters.

Victoria’s real estate industry has welcomed the moratorium on evictions to help tenants struggling through the coronavirus crisis, but says further details and support for landlords are urgently needed.

Both Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Premier Dan Andrews have confirmed evictions will be frozen for six months for residential and commercial renters “experiencing financial distress” due to the impact of COVID-19.

But details surrounding how the moratorium will work, when it will kick in and how landlords will be supported are scarce, with the National Cabinet agreeing to “consider advice from treasurers” at its next meeting this Friday, April 3.

The state government said it was “working through the legislative changes needed to bring this into effect”.

When Mr Morrison announced the move on Sunday night, he urged landlords and tenants to “sit down, talk to each other and work this out”, while Mr Andrews posted on Facebook: “From hospo to retail, if you’re struggling to get by due to coronavirus, you won’t be evicted just because you can’t pay the rent.”

Leading tenancy legal service Tenants Victoria praised the moratorium, but chief executive Jennifer Beveridge said government urgently needed to provide details to the public.

“Every day, we are hearing stories of renters who are being told to leave their homes … of renters being reminded that no tolerance will be shown for people who fall behind in the rent, even if they have lost their jobs because of coronavirus,” Ms Beveridge said. “We are even hearing people having their rent increased in the middle of this public health emergency.

“We understand some of the details are still being worked out. I would ask the Premier, … at his next press conference, to tell the Victorian community that as of last Sunday, no residential evictions for rent arrears can proceed.”

She added it was impossible for people without a home to “maintain social distance and follow the government’s health advice”.

Real Estate Institute of Victoria president Leah Calnan said a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work when it came to supporting landlords who were also experiencing financial hardship.

She said different measures were needed for mum and dad investors with mortgages, self-funded retirees who relied on rental income, and those with larger property portfolios.

“While I’m as anxious as everyone to have a resolution, I’m very aware of the complex nature of trying to formulate the appropriate support package for everyone,” Ms Calnan said.

“There needs to be some rental relief as well. I would encourage the government to ensure those funds are delivered to (property management) agencies to ensure the appropriate distribution.”

University of South Australia property and investment researcher Peter Koulizos also urged immediate rental assistance for tenants so landlords didn’t experience flow-on impacts to their own mortgages or income.

“(Government) is overlooking the impact on landlords, many of whom need to pay mortgages, or rely on rental income as self-funded retirees,” Mr Koulizos said.

Banks offering six-month mortgage payment referrals was helpful, UniSA’s Reza Bradrania added. But it was problematic that mortgages continued to accrue interest, adding to the overall expense.

The Victorian Council of Social Services labelled the moratorium “a good thing … the community sector has been calling for”.

But it said government urgently needed to determine the kinds of evictions that won’t be banned, which might include cases where the property owners needed to move into their investment property or if a tenants was a danger to themselves or others.

Other key questions to answer included: Would rental arrears simply be forgiven and forgotten at the end of the eviction ban, or would tenants be expected to pay up? What happens if tenants and landlords can’t come to an agreement? What about tenants experiencing financial distress that’s not a direct result of COVID-19?

Major real estate agencies Harcourts and Ray White have both encouraged the federal government to use the existing Centrepay system to offer rental assistance to residential tenants under rental stress during the pandemic.

SOURCE  






Melbourne wharfies stood down after refusing to unload Chinese ship

Typical wharfie bloodymindedness

Melbourne wharfies are refusing to unload cargo from a fully laden ship from China carrying toilet paper, surgical masks and tinned food due to fears they could catch coronavirus.

In the largest dispute to hit the Port of Melbourne since the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 60 dock workers have been stood down by stevedores DP World in the past 24 hours over their refusal to unload the Xin Da Lian, which left a Taiwanese port less than 14 days ago.

The ship sailed from mainland China on March 17, continued on to Koashiung in Taiwan and then headed to Melbourne two days later.

The Xin Da Lian docked in Melbourne at Swanson Dock on Tuesday. A group of wharfies refused to unload the cargo on Tuesday night as the ship had arrived before the end of the 14-day coronavirus quarantine period.

Twenty two workers were stood down amid the stand-off between the Maritime Union of Australia and the stevedore on Tuesday and another 40 were stood down on Wednesday.

DP World argued the Australian Border Force deemed the vessel compliant and the 14-day rule only applies to ships from mainland China, the Republic of Korea, Italy and Iran.

The company said chemicals for soap and detergent manufacturing, medical supplies, surgical masks, gloves surgical gowns, lab coats and hair nets are aboard the ship now sitting idle at the port. Tinned foods for supermarkets and whitegoods were also being transported.

DP World's chief operating officer Andrew Adam said the vessel had been cleared to berth at DP World by the Australian Border Force and the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment’s Biosecurity.

“The directions are very clear, and we don’t make the rules, these are defined by Australian Border Force. Any crew members aboard a vessel that has been to mainland China, must have been at sea for 14 days before they are allowed to dock in Australia," Mr Adam said.

"The vessel left Shanghai in China on March 17 and arrived in Melbourne on March 31. It has been out of sea for 14 days. The union is not allowed to unilaterally declare a vessel unsafe: they are not allowed to create their own set of rules.”
The Chinese ship arrived at the Port of Melbourne on Tuesday.

But Warren Smith, the union's assistant national secretary, said all vessels should be quarantined for a 14-day period if they arrive from an overseas port and it was wrong to stand down workers who were trying to prevent the spread of the virus.

"It is ridiculous that these workers have been stood down and had their livelihoods threatened for standing up and doing the right thing," Mr Smith said.

"Waterside workers need to be protected to the absolute maximum extent possible so the supply chains into the supermarkets can be maintained ... the workers are simply saying we want some protections here."

SOURCE  




Australian Islamic school shortchanges its teachers

Members of the Independent Education Union NSW/ACT Branch in the Islamic School of Canberra have today won the right to take industrial action, as long running enterprise agreement negotiations continue to stall.

The IEU has been calling for school management to pay salaries and conditions in line with those received by teachers in other schools in the ACT and other Islamic schools in NSW.

The union has been in negotiations with the School Board for a new enterprise agreement since 2016, after the previous agreement expired in 2013. The school was sold in 2018 by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils to Islamic Practice and Dawah Circle Inc.

Initial discussions with the new school management were cordial, but negotiations stalled at the end of 2019 when the employer applied to terminate the enterprise agreement. The IEU notified a dispute to the Fair Work Commission about the school’s failure to bargain in good faith and applied for a Protected Action Ballot Order on behalf of its members.

“Staff employed at the school are an extremely dedicated group of employees who have stuck it out for their students during a very difficult period,” said IEU organiser Lyn Caton.

The teachers have today confirmed their concern and dissatisfaction by returning unanimous support for taking industrial action.

IEUA NSW/ACT Branch Secretary Mark Northam says he has “nothing but praise for the members at the Islamic School of Canberra, who have collectively indicated their desire to achieve parity with like schools.”

“Members at this school have the full support of the union in their ongoing struggle to achieve fair wages and conditions.”

Valuing teachers and support staff is a responsibility of all school employers.

Via email

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here





1 April, 2020

The Big Brother Purge of Conservative Christians in Australia

A number of them are/were doctors or medical professionals who had become the targets of the Medical Board of Australia. Specifically, the MBA has now actively pursued six different doctors (that we know of) over the last three years all because of their views on things like abortion and/or the homosexual agenda.

Basically, they all have been persecuted for the simple reason that they dare to think independently, and they express their views in their own time on their own social media pages and the like. For having the gall to not run with the PC version of events concerning things like abortion, homosexuality and the trans agenda, they have all fallen afoul of the MBA; several are receiving severe punishments, including mandatory re-education, suspension of their livelihood, etc.

Very much like the recent Israel Folau case, the powers that be have become judge and executioner, punishing those who actually think for themselves and believe they should have the freedom to express their views on their own time on their own social media outlets.

As with any dictatorial or fascist regime, the ruling powers have effectively threatened and blackmailed these individuals, telling them in no uncertain terms that if they want their jobs, they must censor themselves, not speak out, and remove all of their ‘offending’ posts and pages.

This of course is the stuff of North Korea, or Cuba, or Saudi Arabia. We did not expect this was how things operated in the free West. But it sure is. What we not too long ago sent our sons to fight and die for – freedom – is now severely at risk here in Australia.

Let me highlight just one of these appalling cases. A doctor with a wife and two young children has been suspended by the MBA, and has been out of work for nearly eight months now. His crime? Was he caught raping a patient, or stealing medicines, or fiddling with the books?

No, he did something much, much worse in the eyes of the MBA: he dared to post his point of view on his own private Facebook page, and even worse, he actually posted comments on my website, CultureWatch. Yes, several hundred of his comments appeared on my site over the past decade or so.

He said things which we are no longer able to say in Australia it seems, things like: marriage is between a man and a woman; doctors should be saving life, not killing; children have a right to be raised by their own mother and father; and radical political Islam is something we must take seriously.

For saying verboten things like that, the MBA has decided that he is now public enemy No. 1, and he MUST be punished severely. And keep in mind the details of this shocking case. No complaints were ever made by any of his patients or by his colleagues. He was fully professional in his work, and he treated all of his patients with dignity and respect.

But some militant(s) had been trawling both Facebook and my site, and discovered his unforgiveable remarks. This guy (or girl) made a stink, and the MBA immediately started the inquisition. They hired lawyers (and wasted a lot of money to do so) to go through every single one of my articles on my website, coming up with thousands of pages of printed documents with any and all comment he had made. What num nums: I could have given them all that free of charge if they wanted!

Since this doctor’s case is now in the public domain, I refer to Melbourne doctor Jereth Kok. The complaints made against him have been all by anonymous complainants. He does not know how many were made, or who made them, or why. They do not seem to be from any of his patients.

Indeed, as mentioned, he has had no complaints at all in terms of his work, his professionalism, and his ability to deliver quality health care. He seems to have been loved and respected by all his patients. However, for nine months the MBA was investigating Dr Kok, without even telling him! When they finally did tell him, they sent him a ‘please explain’ letter.

As mentioned, they simply trawled through his posts on Facebook and on my website, including issues such as the vote ‘no’ campaign on homosexual marriage. For that the MBA has treated him like a pariah, someone who is no longer able to treat patients!

His views are instead totally verboten. As a result, since August 19, 2019, he has been without work. His wife is a fulltime mother looking after their young children. So they have had no income during this entire period: income that they needed to feed the family and pay the bills.

And a couple hundred regular patients who all had Dr Kok as their preferred doctor are now without his expertise and services. Most of these patients had become quite attached to Dr. Kok. But now they have been left hanging, forced to look for alternate doctors and arrangements.

Again, all this has happened because he has dared to offer his points of view on the public issues of the day. Something that everyone else does all the time. Something that is part of living in a free society. But it seems like we are now no longer very free at all.

When groups like the MBA can destroy the career of a terrific, conscientious and hard-working doctor who has committed no malpractice whatsoever, then you know freedom has been smashed underfoot, and Big Brother groupthink is now in action.

And of course there are so many other bodies and organisations just like this, be they Rugby Australia or most of our major corporations. They have all conspired against freedom of speech, freedom of thought, religious freedom, and independent thinking. That is very scary indeed.

And with people like Dr Kok we have a very real human face to put to all this. This is not just theoretical. Real people with real careers are losing everything, all because secular left thought is now the only accepted form of opinion in so much of Australia.

SOURCE  





Private hospitals have signed on to a landmark deal with the federal government to boost the nation’s intensive care capacity

Health Minister Greg Hunt has announced the federal government had guaranteed the viability of all 657 private hospitals nationwide, meaning a further 34,000 beds and chairs will be made available.

The deal, hatched between hospitals and state and territory governments and the federal government, is based on the assurance that the hospitals will be flexible and retain their staff during the pandemic.

One third of the country’s ICU beds are in private hospitals and they will all now be available to help with COVID-19 cases.

“Today is about, in particular, securing and expanding that capacity,” Mr Hunt said.

“A partnership between the Australian Government, the states and the private hospitals that will bring over 30,000 beds within the hospital system.

“It will bring over 105,000 full and part-time hospital staff, including 57,000 of our amazing nurses and midwives.

“It guarantees them their future and their support, both during the crisis and beyond, but most importantly it brings their resources to the fight against coronavirus, COVID-19, in Australia.”

He said as of 6am this morning, there were 4359 cases of COVID-19 in Australia and 19 deaths.

Cases in ICU total 50, down from 55 yesterday, with 20 of those are on ventilators.

Mr Hunt said the figures, coupled with the fact that more than 230,000 tests have been completed, indicate “we are at the global forefront”.

“That is the lives lost – and each one is an agonising loss – are below one per cent then that is indicative that the testing regime is capturing the significant reflective data for the country,” he said.

“If those within ICUs, and in particular with ventilators, in the low numbers that we see – and all of these numbers, we know, will climb – but they are reflective again of the numbers.

“And it presents a very different picture to some other countries, where the lives lost represent not 0.5 per cent but 10 per cent of the cases. It means that the case numbers there are not fully reflective of the situation.”

SOURCE  






Why ventilators are so crucial in Australia's COVID-19 fight

The Australian Medical Association hopes the Federal Government has "their ducks lined up" as the demand for life-saving ventilators in Australia becomes increasingly urgent.

Like other governments around the world battling the COVID-19 pandemic, Canberra is rushing to double its number of ventilator units, from 2000 to 4000.

But the South Australian AMA president, Dr Chris Moy, has warned ventilators are "just one part of the puzzle" and "it will be a major problem" if Australia is not prepared with robust plans and supplies.

"The bottom line is we need ventilators," Dr Moy said.
"They are going to be critical if the peak happens and intensive care units are deluged."

Dr Moy hoped the government had "geared up" sufficiently for the expected oncoming wave of ICU admissions. "Have they got their ducks lined up?" Dr Moy asked.

"You need the ventilators but you also need other equipment.
"You need personal protective equipment (PPE) and trained staff who can run the machines and monitor patients."

Without ventilators, the lungs of some COVID-19 sufferers fill with pus and patients can die, after a "cascading flow of life-threatening pressures" hits the heart and other vital organs. It is thought 15 to 20 percent of those with coronavirus can fall seriously ill.

Dr Moy said he had held personal discussions with Australia's Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy, where the issue of ventilators and PPE shortages was addressed.

"I am aware they have got teams on this," he said. "I have no visibility over government orders or stocks or supply lines … but I am hoping the government has got this right. "Because if they haven't, it will be a major problem for us."

Dr Moy said masks, gowns, goggles, hair covers and gloves were in desperately short supply. His GP clinic, staffed by 25 doctors, was recently down to its final box of 50 masks.

Nine.com.au has previously reported on a major Australian medical supplier running out of PPE and some doctors in Perth hospitals in operating rooms with no masks.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt last month said there was a standing capacity of 2000 ventilators in Australia. "We are looking to double that, using existing arrangements and stock currently available, to 4000," Mr Hunt said.

Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel was in the early stages of scoping out local manufacturers to build 5000 additional respiratory and ventilator units, Mr Hunt said.

In normal circumstances Australia could look to other countries for help with ventilators but all nations need the machines now.

Dr Moy said health authorities in Australia were looking at repurposing old machines, some which had even found their way into veterinary clinics. "My understanding is a lot of the older ones could be incredibly useful because they were built to last."

Why you may need a ventilator if you have COVID-19

Around 15 to 20 per cent of people with COVID-19 will develop a very specific type of pneumonia. With pneumonia, pus will fill your lungs and your lungs will stop working.

When you can't absorb enough oxygen, incredible strain is placed on your heart and other organs. There is a domino effect on your body, and the impact may be so catastrophic it kills you.

A ventilator gets oxygen into your lungs, when you are too tired to breathe. At a certain point your lungs cannot suck in enough oxygen and your body will tire. You'll also suffer dehydration because you are puffing so hard. But the ventilator will breathe for you, pumping high levels of oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.

SOURCE 





The provision of early childhood education and care in Australia is broken and the Coronavirus has revealed the extent to which the system is flawed.  The sector is on the brink of collapse

Consider this.

For several weeks there has been uncertainty about how school should be delivered. Will they close? Should students attend? Are teachers safe?

There has been no uncertainty, however, about whether teachers or schools are needed. It’s understood both are, obviously, critical. The manner in which education is to be facilitated, in the short term at least, has been up for discussion but its existence is assured. As it should be.

When it comes to early childhood education & care the questions are the same but the answers are very different. Childcare centres aren’t government-funded like schools. Parents receive subsidies from the government that are passed on to centres and they pay any gap between the subsidy and the daily rate. Those subsidies and fees support the wages of the educators and all the associated operating costs.

But as Lisa Bryant wrote in The Guardian Australia on Monday, parents are currently withdrawing their children from childcare “in droves”.

“They are doing it because they are concerned for their children and because they are told to keep children home if possible. But mostly they are doing it because childcare is expensive. When families lose their income, childcare is an obvious place to cut.”

In these circumstances it isn’t surprising but the impact is potentially devastating. It means that unlike primary and secondary school teachers, who haven’t all been dismissed because students aren’t coming, many early childhood educators have already been let go.

Last week Goodstart Early Learning, one of Australia’s largest providers, had to lay off 4,000 casual educators. These are among the lowest-paid workers in the country so the idea of them being financially equipped to withstand this unexpected job loss is ridiculous.

It is also crushing to consider that, like primary and secondary teachers, educators and carers have been thrust unwillingly on to the front line of a highly contagious virus for weeks.

Centres and preschools haven’t been closed and while most other Australians have been told the safest thing to do is stay home, these employees have been told to keep turning up to work. Usually for a very basic wage with no loading for the health risk (or the value provided).

At least primary and secondary teachers haven’t needed to fret over their employment status while also panicking about the virus: early childhood educators and carers should be so lucky.

To lose their jobs after weeks of putting themselves at risk is incredibly insulting. As well as highly problematic.

Many childcare centres and operators in Australia may close for good because of the Coronavirus. That will be a disaster. For children, for educators and for parents.

When health workers can’t turn up to their jobs because they have no one to look after their children there will be an uproar - but it’ll be too late

Whatever happens now school won’t collapse, that much is clear. Early education and care shouldn’t either. It’s a critical function in society: it is a fundamental part of a child’s education and development and the best investment any country can make in its future.

And, yes, it is also important in an economic sense in that it facilitates the combination of paid work with family responsibilities.

There are, literally, millions of reasons that a nation cannot function without an early education system.

If there was ever definitive proof that Australia’s early childhood education and care system was broken, the idea that a virus could bring this vital sector totally to its knees is it.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here









Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.





Most academics are lockstep Leftists so readers do sometimes doubt that I have the qualifications mentioned above. Photocopies of my academic and military certificates are however all viewable here


For overseas readers: The "ALP" is the Australian Labor Party -- Australia's major Leftist party. The "Liberal" party is Australia's major conservative political party.


In most Australian States there are two conservative political parties, the city-based Liberal party and the rural-based National party. But in Queensland those two parties are amalgamated as the LNP.


Again for overseas readers: Like the USA, Germany and India, Australia has State governments as well as the Federal government. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


For American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security


"Digger" is an honorific term for an Australian soldier


Another lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here


Another bit of Australian: Any bad writing or messy anything was once often described as being "like a pakapoo ticket". In origin this phrase refers to a ticket written with Chinese characters - and thus inscrutably confusing to Western eyes. These tickets were part of a Chinese gambling game called "pakapoo".


Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?



My son Joe


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.


The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies or mining companies


Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.


The Rt. Rev. Phil Case (Moderator of the Presbyterian church in Queensland) is a Pharisee, a hypocrite, an abomination and a "whited sepulchre".


English-born Australian novellist, Patrick White was a great favourite in literary circles. He even won a Nobel prize. But I and many others I have spoken to find his novels very turgid and boring. Despite my interest in history, I could only get through about a third of his historical novel Voss before I gave up. So why has he been so popular in literary circles? Easy. He was a miserable old Leftist coot, and, incidentally, a homosexual. And literary people are mostly Leftists with similar levels of anger and alienation from mainstream society. They enjoy his jaundiced outlook, his dissatisfaction, rage and anger.


A delightful story about a great Australian conservative


Would you believe that there once was a politician whose nickname was "Honest"?

"Honest" Frank Nicklin M.M. was a war hero, a banana farmer and later the conservative Premier of my home State of Queensland in the '60s. He was even popular with the bureaucracy and gave the State a remarkably tranquil 10 years during his time in office. Sad that there are so few like him.


A great Australian wit exemplified



An Australian Mona Lisa (Nikki Gogan)


Bureaucracy: "One of the constant laments of doctors and nurses working with NSW Health is the incredible and increasing bureaucracy," she said. "It is completely obstructive to providing a service."


Revered Labour Party leader Gough Whitlam was a very erudite man so he cannot have been unaware of the similarities of his famous phrase “the Party, the platform, the people” with an earlier slogan: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer". It's basically the same slogan in reverse order.


Australia's original inhabitants were a race of pygmies, some of whom survived into modern times in the mountainous regions of the Atherton tableland in far North Queensland. See also here. Below is a picture of one of them taken in 2007, when she was 105 years old and 3'7" tall




Julia Gillard, a failed feminist flop. She was given the job of Prime Minister of Australia but her feminist preaching was so unpopular that she was booted out of the job by her own Leftist party. Her signature "achievements" were the carbon tax and the mining tax, both of which were repealed by the next government.


The "White Australia Policy: "The Immigration Restriction Act was not about white supremacy, racism, or the belief that whites were higher up the evolutionary tree than the coloured races. Rather, it was designed to STOP the racist exploitation of non-whites (all of whom would have been illiterate peasants practicing religions and cultures anathema to progressive democracy) being conscripted into a life of semi-slavery in a coolie-worked plantation economy for the benefit of the absolute monarchs, hereditary aristocracy and the super-wealthy companies and share-holders of the northern hemisphere.


A great little kid



In November 2007, a four-year-old boy was found playing in a croc-infested Territory creek after sneaking off pig hunting alone with four dogs and a puppy. The toddler was found five-and-a-half hours after he set off from his parents' house playing in a creek with the puppy. Amazingly, Daniel Woditj also swam two creeks known to be inhabited by crocs during his adventurous romp. Mr Knight said that after walking for several kilometres, Daniel came to a creek and swam across it. Four of his dogs "bailed up" at the creek but the youngster continued on undaunted with his puppy to a second creek. Mr Knight said Daniel swam the second croc-infested creek and walked on for several more kilometres. "Captain is a hard bushman and Daniel is following in his footsteps. They breed them tough out bush."


A great Australian: His eminence George Pell. Pictured in devout company before his elevation to Rome





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