27/06/2021
Notice: Undefined index: hide_archive_titles in /home/chesterf/public_html/wp-content/themes/modern-business/includes/theme-functions.php on line 233
Author: Arthur Chesterfield-Evans
27/06/2021
NSW Govt tries to Blame Limousine Driver for New Sydney COVID Outbreak
26 June 2021
The pathetic efforts of Gladys Berejeklian to blame the limousine driver for the latest COVID outbreak, which has now caused a city-wide lockdown and an increasing number of cases needs to be judged on its demerits. Obviously there should have been regulations that anyone on the front line had to be vaccinated, and surely driving a limo from the airport to the quarantine hotel is ‘front line’.
She said that she ‘could not control the subcontractor of the subcontractor.’ Actually, she could have. Now she has the regulation that she should have had months ago- front line staff have to be vaccinated.
Of course, the reason for the spread of the virus from the Melbourne quarantine hotels months ago was the fact that the support staff had many jobs, because they were not permanent and had shifts everywhere. The same problem occurred with transmission in Victorian Nursing homes- casual shifts. Now it is Sydney drivers.
The farmers are moaning that they will not be able to pick the fruit without the visas for backpackers, foreign students and Pacific Islanders. Skilled migrants? I do not think so. It is about sub award wages and poor conditions. If Australia is a rich country we need also to remember our roots as the country of a ‘fair go’. If top wage are high by world standards, so they should be at the bottom. If wages were high enough Aussies would pick the fruit, and cleaners and limousine drivers would have regular jobs and award wages.
But here was the NSW Government trying to blame the limo driver for the outbreak. But today’s Sun Herald has the Police Commissioner saying that the driver had committed no crime. Neither has the NSW Government- they are just incompetent, but no one seems to blame them.
www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-17/nsw-quarantine-worker-may-have-breached-health-order/100223120
12/06/2021
71% of Australians say religion is not important to them.
11 June 2021
But it seems the religion lobby wants the ‘Religious Freedom’ bill.Atheists need to be active to stop this attack on equality, equal opportunity and often science. We need to stop the subsidies and tax exemption that keep religion having the excessive influence that they have had since the Middle Ages, which seems to be reviving because of the political activism of the religious minority.
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/11/australians-are-very-skeptical-michael-kirby-warns-against-excessive-protection-of-religious-freedoms?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR0DTQlobEQrou8BBmfOjdjMBZyzw9qbjKWhpHstpNBo8QZ4uXSis1VmISw
10/06/2021
NDIS= Privatisation of Welfare
10 June 2021
It seems that the most sacred duty of corporations is to make as much profit as possible in the framework that they are in. So unless the framework restricts what they can charge and make, why would anyone expect them to behave differently?
It seems that the ‘not-for-profit’ sector is drawing from the same managerial pool, with the same ethos and expensive tastes.
My view is that a strong home support system with community nurses as its major foot-soldiers would be in the best position to assess need and relative need and bring in extra services as required.
The current top-heavy, privatised, hands-off NDIS model with ‘experts’ who do not know the people dropped in a short notice to dispense individualised packages rather than an overall programme is a sure recipe for rip-offs or resource misallocation.
Expect more examples of rip-offs until the model is changed.
www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-10/is-ndis-provider-putting-growth-above-disability-care/100199988
30/05/2021
Australia Passes Illegal Laws
30 May 2021
The Federal Government has passed laws to allow the Australian government to detain refugees indefinitely.
Australians were horrified at the idea of Gulags or exile in Russian Siberia, and what totalitarian states could do. The Treaty of Rome that upholds human rights makes indefinite detention illegal, yet we tolerate Naury, Manus Island, and Christmas Island detention and now this. It is not illegal to flee as a refugee and try to reach a country of safety for asylum. Yet only Andrew Wilkie, the independent MP, spoke against this law, and it was passed by both Liberal and Labor. The Australian government, seeking to scare off refugees arrivals, is willing to break international treaties on human rights. And no one even notices!
www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2021/05/29/australian-government-legalises-crime-against-humanity/162221040011765#hrd
28/05/2021
CTP Insurers Pay 6.3% of Premiums to Injured People. They keep the rest.
28 May 2021
This is a huge corporate scam. Why do people think that only little people are rip-off scammers? Also the idea that most people claims are ‘accepted’ is a nonsense. Insurers accept the claim, which means that they pay for a few GP visits and some physio. But they refuse to pay for scans that might find diagnoses. Then they refuse to pay for referrals to specialists who might need to operate. Then they refuse to pay for recommended operations. Then they use tame doctors (IMEs = Independent Medical Examiners) who either say that the condition does not need the treatment or that the problem was there before the accident so the insurer is not liable.
So the government introduced the PIC (Personal Injury Commission) to arbitrate all the claims that the insurers had refused. Now the waiting time for the PIC is over a year, which suits the insurers fine as the doctors and patients will use Medicare or private heath insurance to get the treatments and the insurers will either pay less or not have to pay at all.
If you thought the banks were bad, you have not dealt with insurers. NRMA refuses a considerably higher percentage of treatments than anyone else in my statistics, and SIRA declines to keep statistics on the ‘industry’ as a whole, and no insurer has ever been prosecuted for refusing a treatment.
This is why we need Medicare- a single, just, efficient, universal health insurance scheme.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp8R856f7cM
27/05/2021
NSW Politics- the Upper Hunter Farce Continues.
27 May 2021
I was going to write about the farce of the Upper Hunter by-Election, as there was plenty to say about that, so I will start there, but now there is more!
The first thing to say is that the National Party vote fell 2.8% to 31%, which is less than a third of primary votes, yet they claimed a victory! They claimed that this was because they supported coal mining, yet a lot of farmers and those no directly depended non coal though that this was a bad idea, and it is not clear that this overblown endorsement of coal is justified. Labor lost 7.5% to get 21.2% and are now tearing themselves apart- see below for more. The Shooters lost 10.1%, but this may because One Nation entered the race and got 12.3%. Independents did quite well with a total of 16.8%, with Kirsty O’Connell who was anti-coal being endorsed by Malcolm Turnbull and getting 8.8%. These are all primary votes, because almost two thirds of voters did not give preferences, being encouraged to ‘Just Vote 1’ which means that effectively the Primary vote will determine the outcome, creating a massive advantage to the major parties, which translates into a NSW gerrymander where the Major parties get a much higher percentage of the seat than they got of the primary votes. It makes a farce of democracy .
Labor should have benefited from the fact that the by-election was rendered necessary by the incumbent Michael Johnsen being accused of raping a sex worker in Parliament House and denying it but still resigning! But Labor looked very weak because it sits on the fence with coal mining, wanting the current coal miners vote, but also pretending to be the party of progress against climate change. Their sitting on the fence which was disastrous in Queensland in the last Federal election was disastrous again. They should have had a plan to transition out of coal with environmental jobs plan, but they seem incapable of such a strategy. Arguably the State was punished for the Federal deficiency, but NSW State Labor has plenty of incompetence of its own.
Labor, having lost in a by-election where they are supposed to increase their vote seems keen to do a lot of blood-letting. After the years of domination by Obeid and the Right and a history of corruption and nepotism there is a very shallow talent pool. The colourless Jodi Mckay seems to have had no impact on Gladys Berejeklian, despite scandals about sex and asset misallocation, and personal deliberate ignorance. McKay had apparently cobbled together the numbers to survive, and people moved against her. The plausible Chris Minns looked likely to be standing up, but John Barilaro, himself no stranger to questionable land deals in Queanbeyan, released a ‘dirt file’ to stop Minns’ ascent. The file was called ‘Why Chris Minns and Jamie Clements can never run the NSW Labor Party’. Jamie Clements was accused of sexual assault by a former staffer, and of taking improper donations from a Chinese property developer, Mr Huang. Presumably there was also something in the file of substance about Minns also, as he resigned from Shadow Cabinet. It might be noted that he was Shadow Transport Minister yet has not had his voice heard despite the fact that the Liberal strategy of funding underground freeways and selling them as monopolies to the private sector seems to have come from the Los Angeles town planners of the 1960s who recommended getting rid of trams to have private cars as the main means of transport, with a dash of Thatcherite privatisation thrown in.
Labor’s corruption scandals have sapped their talent and seemingly discouraged good people. Carmel Tebbutt, John Watkins and Graham West were very good people who resigned before they might have been expected to.