Doctor and activist


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Category: Government

COVID Day 4- a non-PCR Day

5 January 2022

I did nothing today- it just took longer than usual.

I felt much the same, a sore throat, not much energy, a bit of a headache and bouts of a dry cough. I did not feel like exercise and I thought that I had better try to get a PCR test and some Rapid Antigen tests in case we needed to prove we were not infectious, or had other people who were concerned contacts.

I researched online where the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests were being done. The site I used 2 weeks ago, a 4Cyte drive through test that had taken an hour to do and 3 days and 16 hours to get results from was closed Wed-Friday. It was not clear why this was but the Laverty Pathology group at 60 Waterloo Rd near Macquarie Centre was open till 4pm. I took a novel in case of a long wait and drove there.

As I approached from the google direction cars in the left lane were not moving from the major intersection as far as one could see to the next hill. Many of them had their tail lights on, so I reflected that they were sitting in a line with the engines on. Bad for the environment, but it at least told me that his was the queue. I turned off the engine and started to read. After a while I was wondering why no progress at all was being made, and I thought I might ask if I was under some misapprehension. As I looked up, a pleasant looking woman in her mid-30s got out of the small car ahead, and went to her boot.

I called to her out the window, ‘Is this the PCR test queue?

‘Reckon so’, she said, ‘I’ve brought some snacks to get through it’. She took some biscuits, grapes and a drink and got back in.

We advanced glacially slowly, and I noticed that there was a side road a little way down the queue. Space had been left so cars could go in and out of this side road, but cars had also started to queue there, and of course the two queues merged at the intersection. I had not thought of this until I was nearly at the corner, and I suppose the woman in the car hadn’t either. Some on the side road were shouting abuse or tooting as if we were somehow pushing in to their queue. There were no signs, no guides and nothing online, so it seemed that the only fair thing to do was to take alternate cars. My young friend had recognised this before I had and moved her car across the middle of the side road, so that cars exiting or entering could go in front or behind her, but she could be sure that the side road queued cards did not just push in. There was a cacophony of abuse from the side street.

The queue moved forward a few cars, so I followed her closely, letting one car in as seemed fair. A large 4WD with a man screaming obscenities at me tried to push in, but I kept him out. I wondered if he would get out and make trouble but he did not. The passenger in the car I had let ahead of me had got out and was remonstrating with the woman who had been in front of me. It was tense. I was very glad we were not in America with some people having guns.

We continued our glacial advance, then a car coming in the other direction stopped. The driver stuck his head our and was shouting something to those in the queue ahead of me. I could not hear him, but he did not seem abusive, so as he passed I called to him to ask what he had said. He said, ‘They have closed early; I was second in the queue and they told me to go away’. It seemed likely that he was right, but most people had waited so long that they were not willing to drive off, so we moved quite slowly till everyone had driven past the ‘Closed’ sign that had appeared in the driveway. It was 2pm. The testing site was advertised to be open till 4.

No test and a couple of hours wasted. I have COVID. It is not recorded in the system. It seems that I will recover. Will I waste another few hours tomorrow? And if I do will I have PCR results anyway? I am scheduled to see my patients again 9 days after the onset of symptoms- presumably I will be non-infectious. Luckily I got some RAT kits.

It is not hard to see where anger and frustration comes in all of this.

‘Personal responsibility’ has a very Darwinian edge.

Thank God I am not very sick.

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The Chinese Way

4 January 2022

Everyone want to criticise China as an authoritarian state, but if you stand back and look at how they tackle challenges that we have, there may be lessons to be learned.

There was an interesting show on ABC TV last night hosted by Hamish Macdonald ‘The China Century’, Part 1 of 5.  It looked at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and their ruthless repression.  But next week it will look at how they have combined capitalism and strong state control.

Competition increase efficiency when it lowers prices, but note in the late stage of ‘laissez faire’ monopolies allow supernormal profits and their political influence puts them above the law.  Sometimes the loss of central control may also mean that a fragmented industry cannot produce state of the art products.  I read some time ago that the US is having a problem producing good fighter planes because the intellectual property is now spread over a number of competing companies, so no one company can be state of the art on all aspects.  A single body controlling the situation would not have this problem.

The other aspect is that the Chinese can write the rules for its industries and not simply assume that whatever makes the most profit in the immediate term is the best place to consume resources.

In Australia, our economy is totally out of whack because the tax concession of negative gearing has meant that everyone has simply invested in real estate as a ‘no brainer’ way of making money. But the rise in prices is in a sense arbitrary.  If a house goes up in price from $100k to a million, it is still the same house.  The difference is that the person who now buys it has $million debt.  The ‘profit’ is someone else’s borrowing.  So at a national level, we have the second highest level of private debt in the world (after Switzerland) and just pay interest to foreign banks.  We also have no money to invest in our productive export industries, or even think about them as real estate is so easy.  We note that developers distort the electoral process and do dodgy deals to get their approvals through, but once it is all done, we wring our hands- nothing can be done. The building stands, and it will all happen again next time.

We watch askance as our regulatory systems fail.  The Banking Royal Commission was initiated by a whistle-blower not the regulator, and nothing much has changed; one banker resignation, no one charged. We saw the Aged Care inquiry, the Casino Inquiry were both whistle-blower initiated as well.  We are up to 4 inquiries into iCare and nothing changes.  We hope that our buildings are OK, as the regulatory system has not been working too well there for about 25 years. 

We note that our rich are getting much richer and our poor poorer, but our government does not want to do much about that.  Hey if you can’t afford a Rapid Antigen Test, you can always wait and see if get sick.  ‘Universal health care’ is a good slogan.

We see our kids getting fatter and more addicted to computer games, but there is not much we can do about that. We are moving to high rise schools as so many were sold off in the 1980s and now there is no space for recreation, and we also saved on sport teachers and made serious exercise optional.

We worry that our electoral system is influenced by fake news, trolls and data analysis companies. We understand that the social media concentrates on putting like people together so they will stay logged in and be available to advertise to. We understand that a shock headline also attracts more interest and controversy, so we are hyper stimulated until we ignore what is important.  Advertising always affected media content towards making people more receptive to the ads and purchasing; social media has now put it on steroids.

The Chinese have taken all this on.  They have put a super tax on rich people and made statements about everyone having a decent life. They have tried to lessen kids times on computers and to increase their exercise. They have taken on social media, and most recently forced a major developer to demolish high rise building because the building permit was illegally obtained.  The developer is a major one, and already in danger of going broke.  Can anyone image this happening in Australia or the US? 

Many problems  in the world are universal, and watching what a truly authoritarian government can do is interesting. We have the contrast of our governments, that seem to want to be as small as possible and not even acknowledge problems, and theirs which seems to testing the limits of power.  We may not want to do it ourselves, but if we ever decide to do anything, it will be helpful to have information on the outcome of the range of possible actions.

Here is an article about Evergrande, the Chinese property developer which is going broke and now had to demolish significant assets.  It was in the SMH, from Bloomberg. 

Next Monday on ABC TV at 8.30pm the second article on China, considering its use of the combination of capitalism and central control.

China’s Evergrande halts trading after ordered to tear down apartments

By Jan Dahinten

January 3, 2022 — 3.29pm

Chinese developer shares tumbled following local media reports that China Evergrande Group has been ordered to tear down apartment blocks in a development in Hainan province. Evergrande halted trading in its shares.

An index of Chinese developer shares slumped 2.8 per cent as of 11.37 a.m. local time, with Sunac China Holdings and Shimao Group Holdings plunging more than 10 per cent. A local government in Hainan told Evergrande to demolish 39 buildings in 10 days because the building permit was illegally obtained, news wire Cailian reported on Saturday.

Evergrande gave no details on the trading suspension other than saying it would make an announcement containing inside information.

The government of Danzhou, a prefecture-level city in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, asked Evergrande to tear down 39 illegal buildings in 10 days, Cailian reported on Sunday, citing a document from the local government.

The report cited the document, which was dated December 30, as saying that the Danzhou government said an illegally obtained permit for the buildings had been revoked so the buildings need to be dismantled.

Evergrande didn’t immediately respond to a request seeking comment and calls to Danzhou authorities went unanswered on a public holiday in China on Monday.

The company on Friday dialed back payment plans on billions of dollars of overdue wealth management products as its liquidity crisis showed little sign of easing.

Property firms have mounting bills to pay in January and shrinking options to raise necessary funds. The industry will need to find at least $US197 billion ($271 billion) to cover maturing bonds, coupons, trust products and deferred wages to millions of migrant workers, according to Bloomberg calculations and analyst estimates.

Beijing has urged builders like China Evergrande Group to meet payrolls by month-end in order to avoid the risk of social unrest.

Contracted sales for 31 listed developers fell 26 per cent in December from a year earlier, according to Citigroup Inc. analysts. Evergrande’s sales dropped 99 per cent, the analysts wrote in a note dated Sunday.

Bloomberg

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It is Hard to get COVID tests and likely to get Harder

1 January 2022

The numbers of COVID cases are rising dramatically, many of the clinics have closed for Christmas, and Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) have sold out from most chemists. You might wonder why this wasn’t anticipated, but it seems that the strategy of ‘Let ‘er Rip’ was meant to stimulate the economy as everyone assumed that either COVID was over, or that the Omicron variant did not matter, (not that Delta had actually gone away).

In fact the people have been mostly quite sensible and are not going out and are wearing masks and isolating, which of course means two things.

1. The ‘Let ‘er Rip’ strategy is not getting the economy back to normal and

2. The government can say that it is not their fault if people choose not to go out and spend, so they don’t need to support business or anyone else.

Here is an explanation of the PCR test unavailability from Kim Hatton:

‘Some people today have been wondering why the Feds are pushing so strongly to reduce PCR testing for COVID and shift to RAT. Yes of course the path labs are overloaded but there’s more to the story than that. Currently Medicare pays $110 for a PCR test, split between the path lab and whoever is collecting the sample. With tests reaching 270,000 a day that’s basically $30million per day out of fed budget.

The plan is to reduce PCR tests down to around 50,000 a day saving $24 million a day.To fill the gap the plan is to use Rapid Antigen Tests which cost around $10 in bulk. The Feds will fund 50% of whatever the states buy. In theory the states would buy enough to bridge the gap ie 220,000 per day costing them $1.1 million and the Feds the same. Meaning fed expenditure drops from $30m per day to $7million.

However that assumes the states buy enough which they haven’t. NSW has placed an order for 2 million which won’t even last 2 weeks assuming infection rates don’t increase – which of course they will.In practice what is more likely to happen is the the public will fund the majority of RATests themselves saving the Govt at least another million a day.

That million a day then becomes part of the economy which comes out as economic growth the federal government has achieved and will use to argue how good a job they’ve done.’ End Quote

This seems quite plausible to me- I will chase the source.

The other aspect is that if you do not have a PCR test and do not go to hospital, you are not recorded as a COVID case, so the statistics look better.

I personally had a contact and did a PCR at about midday on Friday 24th and got a text with a negative result at 4am on Tuesday 27th- 3 days and 16 hours later. If this blows out much more the test is virtually useless, as you would have had to isolate anyway.

It seems if we do not have a PCR test, and/or everyone does their own Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) and then monitors their own health with or without a $20 oximeter to make sure that their oxygen saturation is normal and over 95%, the whole epidemic can be ignored except for the ones so sick as to go to hospital.

This seems to be the effect of the new guidelines as in the SMH. Here is the ‘Do It Yourself’ article from the SMH:

More COVID cases told to manage themselves at home as tests hit ‘bottleneck’

By Mary WardSydney Morning Herald December 28, 2021 — 6.38pm

Private pathology companies have warned that NSW’s rising coronavirus cases are creating a “bottleneck” in the testing system as more people who catch COVID-19 are being directed to manage their infections from home.

On Tuesday, NSW Health updated its advice for people who are COVID-positive, directing that most people aged 65 and under are considered able to recover from the virus without medical involvement.

Under the new rules, people in this age group who have had two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, do not suffer from any chronic conditions and are not pregnant are considered able to safely manage an infection at home.

Previously, this was only the case for people aged under 50.Of the 42,600 COVID-19 cases reported in the state over the past seven days, fewer than 7 per cent of infections were in people aged 60 and older. About 3400 were aged in their 50s.

Those managing an infection at home should also not expect to be “cleared” from isolation by NSW Health. Instead, they may leave after day 10 of their isolation, even if they do not hear from NSW Health in a text message on this date, provided they have not experienced symptoms in the previous 72 hours.

NSW Health advice for managing common COVID-19 symptoms at home

• Cough: Breathe in steam and sip on fluids. Avoid lying on your back. If you are coughing up mucous, it is important to continue to do this as it reduces risk of a chest infection.

• Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea: Eat plain, low fibre foods. Have six smaller meals instead of three. Do not drink alcohol or caffeine. Stay hydrated.

• Fever: Take paracetemol. Put a cool, damp washcloth on your forehead. Wipe your arms and body with a cool cloth.

Source: NSW Health

“It is important that this information is provided to people who are at lower risk of severe illness to allow NSW Health to focus on those who have the greatest risk of poor outcomes, this includes people over the age of 65,” a NSW Health spokesperson said.

“Regardless of age, people are also provided clear advice about what to do if they start to feel worse or in the case of a medical emergency.

”People who have a chronic condition – such as obesity, a severe, chronic or complex medical condition, diabetes – are immunocompromised, have severe mental illness or are pregnant are urged to contact the COVID-19 Care at Home Support Line on 1800 960 933 if they return a positive PCR test to receive further medical assistance.

Last week, Australian Medical Association NSW president Danielle McMullen warned that doctors would struggle to cope with thousands of patients needing virtual care as health authorities flagged they would increasingly rely on the GP network to manage COVID-19.

Tuesday’s public holiday again meant some testing clinics were forced to shut within hours of opening, as wait times for PCR results blew out to more than four days despite the system processing fewer tests than it had previously.

There were 93,581 COVID-19 tests processed in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday, down from the previous day’s total of 97,241 and nowhere near upwards of 150,000 tests done in September. NSW Health’s Christine Selvey said testing in the state was “under enormous pressure”, urging people to only have a PCR test if they had symptoms, were a household contact of a case or had been advised by NSW Health about attending a high transmission venue.

Premier Dominic Perrottet said he believed up to 30 per cent of tests were for interstate travel, as he and Health Minister Brad Hazzard urged the Queensland government to ease requirements for people to return a negative PCR test before crossing the border, after it scrapped a day five test for people who had already travelled to the state due to pressure on its own system.

“If we can move that PCR requirement to a rapid antigen test requirement that will significantly alleviate some of the pressure on the testing over summer,” Mr Perrottet said.Mr Hazzard said he had asked NSW Health and the federal government to reconsider whether two tests completed by returned international travellers who come through Sydney Airport needed to be PCRs, in light of the delays.

He also asked the ministry to look into recommending rapid antigen tests were used to screen pregnant women ahead of birth after the Herald revealed women had been queueing for tests every 72 hours on the advice of some hospitals.

But while private pathology labs said so-called “tourism testing” did account for some of delay, a higher volume of positive tests was also to blame. More than 6 per cent of tests reported on Tuesday were positive, up from about 2 per cent the previous week.

Greg Granger, director of strategic operations at Histopath, said the proportion of tests which were positive had created “one of the biggest bottlenecks” in the system.

Mr Granger said the method of PCR testing large volumes of samples – where samples are pooled and tested in groups – worked well when fewer than 1 per cent of tests were positive and most “pools” of tests could be cleared as negative.

“When there’s a positive in the pool every single time, you essentially have to double or triple test the samples,” he said, noting laboratories were now needing to figure out, with their available instruments, what a more efficient method would be.

“Obviously in an ideal world, you don’t pool at all. But with these sheer numbers you just can’t … it’s about finding where the balance is.

”A spokesperson for St Vincent’s Hospital, which operates the SydPath clinics, agreed positive tests took longer to confirm in its laboratory than negative ones.

They said the process of reporting a positive case to NSW Health was also “more significant” than the administration needed for a negative test.Despite the high demand, SydPath clinics will operate at reduced hours “in order to maintain the quality of [its] testing”, after more than 800 people were incorrectly sent negative test results over the weekend due to human error. The provider asked people to not attend its clinics, including the Bondi Beach drive-through, seeking a test for interstate travel.

Australian National University infectious diseases expert Associate Professor Sanjaya Senanayake said the state’s high positivity rate meant it was likely more infections were being missed by testing. However, he said, an upside of this was that the hospitalisation rate of Sydney’s Omicron wave was likely even lower than reported.

“At this stage, it does seem like the current infections are resulting in significantly fewer hospitalisations than we saw with Delta,” he said.

There were 557 COVID-19 patients in NSW hospitals on Tuesday, including 60 in intensive care, compared to 168 in hospital a fortnight ago. NSW’s COVID-19 hospitalisations reached a peak of 1266 in mid-September, including 244 in intensive care.

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Scientific Fraud

29 December 2021

I have friends who campaign for various things, sometimes quite alone for many years.

One of my friends is Polish.  He was part of the dissident movement when Solidarity was trying to end the Communist system.  While the Government was forced to negotiate with Lech Walesa, the Secret Police were busy and the second tier of activists and sympathisers simply disappeared overnight, so he spent quite a lot of time moving around.  He learned English and studied industrial hygiene, the safe use of chemicals in industry, so that he would have a qualification that was useful and recognised when he escaped to the West, which he eventually did. 

But he retained an interest in Poland and noted that some of the researchers there simply translated English papers, changed them very marginally, passed off the plagiarism as their original work, and became professors based on their great advances.  When the various academies were informed, they did not really want to know, as it disturbed their internal structures and was also something of an insult to national pride.

So he has spent years campaigning against scientific fraud, both there and here. 

There are other problems that grossly distort research.  No one really wants to publish negative findings; new discoveries are much more exciting than finding that stuff was wrong.  Also private research is much more interested in funding work that will produce a marketable product, and research that shows a drug works or is better than another.  The government has got into this mode also, wanting ‘partnerships with the private sector’ that will allow them to defray the research costs. This has arguably meant that the private sector tends to have a lot of say in what is studied, gets the government to pay for areas that it might not have bothered with, and can also grab lucrative patents early.  In this competitive environment, researchers have to find funding, and there is not much money in repeating experiments to disprove them.

Some research needs thousands of subjects to see which investigations or drugs are the most useful so that treatment protocols can be developed. Naturally these require huge coordination between many hospitals, health authorities and clinicians.  They require huge budgets. They offer big rewards if a certain investigation or treatment is shown to be beneficial and is included in the final recommendation of a huge trial.  The lead authors will travel the world for years as the definitive experts in that field with all the prestige that that entails.  Yet, as clinicians tied up with clinical work and often departments to administer, they cannot personally manage the logistics or the data and usually rely on ghost writers to put the drafts together.  Who funds that you might ask?  And what are the consequences if the funding company’s products do not work so well?  Will the professor who said it did not work get funding next time?

There is even a whole scam industry of dodgy or even non-existent  journals where you pay to be published or to be a supposed reviewer of papers.

So the pure idea that scientists are only interested in the truth and have no personal or financial interest was never true and has been under even more stress of late. 

Just as self-regulation in banking, aged care, casinos, building, advertising and many other industries has been shown to be inadequate, now scientific publishing is coming under the public spotlight.

The world of academia is more poorly set up than most industries to act as policeman. Evidence is evaluated in good faith.  Universities are expected to fund their courses from fees and donations so they are less in a position to take action that may be expensive and may damage their reputations.

Now, at last, the Australian Academy of Sciences has asked for a research integrity watchdog. This will help with deliberate individual fraud.

How much it can affect the other biasing factors in research remains to be seen.  The political and economic factors are likely to remain in the ‘too hard basket’.  It is still hard to know what the truth is.  Gut feelings about plausibility are of course ‘unscientific’ and what you ‘believe’ at a point of time is supposed to relate to what the ‘facts’ are.  And all this without social media even considered.

On the bright side, my Polish friend will see a significant step for his campaign, and if regulatory oversight replaces one lot of self-regulation there is hope that it will spread to other industries.

www.smh.com.au/national/macquarie-university-considers-investigating-suspected-research-fraud-20211214-p59hfr.html

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Pork Barrelling Works- it probably determined the 2019 Federal Election .

December 28 2021

There has been a lot of publicity lately about pork-barrelling by the Liberal party prior to the last election.

This is based on some excellent research by Shane Wright and Katina Curtis of the SMH (16/12/21), who went through grants that were at Minister’s discretion. They were worth $2.8 billion;  $1.9 billion went to Liberal electorates and $530 million to Labor.  The numbers do not add up exactly as some grants were hard to classify, being given to organisations that spanned different electorates. 

But if you take the money that has clear electorates, it is $1.9 v.$0.53 billion, which means that Liberal: Labor is 78% to 22%.  But it is even worse than that because $58.5 million and $55.2 million (21% of Labor’s national total) went to Lyons and Corangamite, which were seats the Liberals hoped to win. 

Lindsay, the NSW seat around Penrith got $23.1 million and was the only seat in NSW won by the Libs from Labor in the 2019 election. That number did not even count the $55 million in promised commuter car parks. The adjacent 3 Labor-held seats Chifley, McMahon and Werriwa with similar demographics got $5.9 million between them.

In Melbourne 4 Labor seats received less than $1million, while 3 vulnerable Liberal sears received an average of over $15 million each.

In my own electorate, which is safe Liberal against Labor, but had independent Ted Mack for some years, our local ‘moderate’ Trent Zimmermann still always votes on the Party line, just like the most rabid right wingers. He produces a lot of brochures with his ‘electoral allowance’ (which you paid for) and mentions many small organisations and the grants to them that he was responsible for. So even if we don’t like ‘pork-barrelling’ we can be glad that our local member is doing a great job. The idea is that we have a disconnect between criticising pork-barrelling at a general level, and voting Liberal at a local level; smart eh?

It si extremely likely that this degree of pork-barrelling determined the 2019 election, which the Liberals won by one seat, so we have corruption at a very significant level.  It is interesting that the Nine Group, SMH and Age, have produced this material more than 2 years after the election and as we look to the next election.  Had this been available immediately after the 2019 election perhaps Labor would have had another reason for their loss and not blamed it all on stating some policies, and then responding by having no policies that could be criticised since.

No doubt the same pork-barrel literature will keep coming in our electorate where the ‘Voices of North Sydney’ Independent, Kylea Tink may threaten Trent Zimmerman.

The only solution is to have a strong public service that is given transparent guidelines as to where money should be spent, and that their recommendations should be made public and not subject to any ministerial discretion.  It won’t happen without a lot of public interest and pressure.  

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Closure of Circus Oz a ‘Management Decision’

24 December 2012

I must admit I was surprised and disappointed by the news that Circus Oz was to close.  I assumed that the lack of support for the Arts during COVID was the main factor. Circus Oz is one of the great icons of Australian culture- world quality circus gymnastics with a unique Australian irreverence.  It will be a great loss.  They also gave rise to the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, which was kids doing the same sort of thing, or as they called it, ‘Ordinary Kids doing extraordinary things’.

It was world quality like the Sydney, Melbourne or Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, but like the Australian Ballet and Bangara Dance, it had a more distinctly Australian flavour.

So it was a shock to read that he artists did not want it shut down, and Management did it without asking them.  Can we assume that the Australia Council and Creative Victoria demanded the management changes that were not delivered, or was Circus Oz management merely obdurate in their relations with the staff?  The latter seems more likely.

Hopefully Circus Oz can survive, but it is not looking likely.  The only other question is whether their ideological stance offended the government.  Nothing was usually said, but the irreverence had an anti-Establishment flavour that some of us liked, and perhaps some did not?

www.artshub.com.au/news/news/circus-oz-company-members-respond-2521930/?fbclid=IwAR0BzMqHjGbimsukMRzo23yTjDJA6YH8_5VKjZ7Uy_U63z7C3iBnfr0xj8o

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‘Government Responsibility’ is needed, not just ‘Personal Responsibility’.

22 December 2021

The huge, systemic and ongoing cop-out approach of the Federal and now the NSW State governments seems to be based on the hubristic belief that governments can set the agenda and influence the media to the extent of creating a perceived reality conducive to their interest. This is often successful, as the news becomes ‘What Mr Morrison did or said today.’

The narrative is changed slightly, so unless you are watching carefully, it always seems OK.

As in Animal Farm, ‘You may not sleep in a bed with sheets’. People did not remember the ‘with sheets’ bit of the slogan, but, hey, you do forget things.

But neoliberalism likes to stress individual responsibility. It allows small government, which advantages bigger players who can move into monopoly positions in an unregulated situation. It allows governments to have the perks and trappings without having to do too much as not much is expected these days.

The Federal public service is actually too small to do much except tell the States what they should do, and even this function is increasingly left to the politicians and their minders, those ambitious political science (or mainly art-law) graduates (with no scientific expertise). Hence the need for the Army when anything actually needs to be done.

But the key aspects of the current policy of getting rid of masks, social distancing restrictions, QR codes, and limits on people numbers in groups is a foolish populism and an assumption that business will do better if commerce returns to normal. This is right out of the IPA playbook.  ‘Let ‘er rip and if a few oldies and sickies die off, that is the price of society continuing’.

It also has the advantage that nothing is the government’s fault any more. If the omicron variant gets out of control, that is obviously because it is so infectious and out of the Government’s control. If the population choose not to go out to protect themselves and the businesses go broke, that is not their fault, they opened everything up (and also saved a motza by not having any more pesky jobkeeper or jobseeker payments).

To say that this non-strategy will not work is to understate the situation. We managed to control the situation when there was no vaccine. Now that there is, the governments wants to throw away all public health norms for infectious disease and rely on vaccination alone. This has conspicuously not worked in Europe.  Look at the Daily Case histograms (see link below) for Denmark, the UK, France, Spain and Italy. It seems that Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have managed to begin to turn around the latest spike, but I have not researched their latest policy changes. Israel, largely triple-vaxxed is doing better. The US has a rising spike- it will be interesting what happens with their poorly vaccinated population.

But there is no need to look overseas.  The Australian graph is already rocketing up with new highs reached every weekday.  We are not triple-vaxxed and now there is another vaccine shortage.  NSW yesterday was responsible for 3763 of the national total of 5724 (66%) and the percentage is rising.  So Perrottet is as bad as Morrison.  (Figures from covid19data.com.au).

Individuals cannot protect themselves when the virus is everywhere unless they become hermits, and even then they will have trouble getting fed.  It needs mass action. It is a public health problem that needs government action. This is so obvious that it is extraordinary that it should even need to be stated.  But our governments have reached such a low level of effectiveness that we are in grave danger.  The Lucky Country is about to squander its advantages yet again.  We can only hope that the National Cabinet meeting is the platform for a national about face. 

Please protect yourselves and try to get the governments to see reason.

May be a cartoon of ‎one or more people, people standing, suit and ‎text that says "‎We're هll about taking personal responsibility And if this approach turns out to be disaster? Then you'll have only yourselves to blame. wikak‎"‎‎
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Kerry O’Brien Speaks for Julian Assange

24 December 2021

Kerry O’Brien, who was for a long time host of ABC’s 7.30 Report took the opportunity at the Walkley Awards on 29 November to call for Julian Assange to be released. Hear what he said on the link below.

It seems to me that as an Australia, not living in the USA, Julian Assange was in no way subject to their laws, but it seems the US wants to charge him under their laws, then demand that countries with extradition treaties simply hand him over, effectively making their laws world laws.  This might be OK for most murders and frauds etc, but for political crimes, it is a different matter.

Another significant fact that is deliberately overlooked is that Assange was not the first to release all the Wikileaks information.  He had spent a lot of time with major media journalists and they had their front pages ready to roll.  He was advised that if he released the information, he could be solely liable and they would merely be republishing material that was already public.  So he delayed his release. The major media called him and demanded that he release the material, but he did not. They could not stop their front pages, so put it out before he did.  They may accuse him of bad faith by not taking all the risk himself, but technically in a legal sense, these huge outlets did it before he did.  And the US government, rather than target the major media who actually did it before he did, have given them impunity and are targeting Assange only.  The lack of support from the major media is perhaps because they could be targeted; presumably that is the US government’s message, ‘See what happens to him- you would not like it to happen to you’.

Our government has no commitment to freedom of the press, and simply manipulates the media as much as it can, that is no news to anyone. Assange must be freed.  We can only hope that Labor gets the courage to do something if they are elected.  Don’t hold your breath.

www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/kerry-obrien-press-freedom-walkley-awards-julian-assange/11748198

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Morrison’s Character Analysed

11 November 2021

Sean Kelly, the SMH journalist has written a book on Scott Morrison, ‘The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison’. 

As an example he analyses Morrison’s first (maiden) speech.  These speeches are always studied as they are when a new politician states their values and objectives, hopefully unsullied by the political pressures that will come later. 

Morrison is from the Kurnell electorate, where Cook first landed.  His first speech was the day after Prime Minister Rudd had apologised to the Aboriginals. Though Morrison says ‘sorry’ to the Aboriginals, he then makes it a regret that Aboriginal children are currently disadvantaged, and says that invasions were the colonial mistake was made by every powerful nation at that time.  So effectively, the word ‘sorry’ is cheapened and the apology not worth much.  As Kelly points out, the first impression is that it is an apology, but later everyone can find something to agree with.  All powerful countries did it, so we are not guilty, and we have much to be proud of etc.  The words are crafted to appear to mean something, but overall there is no policy and ambiguous meaning.

The question now is whether the crafted releases which dominate the news will overcome the silent record of Morrison’s Prime Ministership; stoking fear of Labor, pork-barrelling and not doing much that is useful or permanent.

www.smh.com.au/culture/books/on-policy-there-s-less-to-morrison-s-words-than-meets-the-eye-20211026-p593b3.html

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