The Prime Minister has been caught out making up stories once again. He claimed he’d been going into pharmacies to get rapid antigen testing kits. But, questioned, he said his wife got them. Turns out he hasn’t ever picked one up.
Just fanciful story telling – again.
This as Australia’s Omicron wave hits more than 60,000 infected every day.
Today Scott Morrison says he doesn’t know how many tests he’s personally paid for: “(Jenny is) the one that goes and gets them.” 22 Dec: he describes going himself to get a test from a pharmacy in Terrigal. “I went, I got a covid test from the local pharmacy… picked one up.” pic.twitter.com/3jvK4WUBJG
So how does the battling, low income family get Rapid Antigen Test kits ? The family who’ll struggle to buy this year’s school shoes or pay the power bill ? Morrison doesn’t know, and doesn’t give a flying fuck. pic.twitter.com/Z6A2cwft1L
In times of crisis lies opportunity. Recovery shows us how we can build back better after COVID-19. Read an edited extract.
What we’ve learnt during the pandemic
The pandemic has provided us with many insights, and it’s important we remember these as and when we enter our recovery. Many of the insights are not new. We have learnt – and subsequently forgotten – these lessons before, as we’ve recovered from past crises. The fact that these are old truths should make them more powerful, as if we’ve been able to tap into some long-lost wisdom. But it is extra important that we don’t lose sight of the lessons this time around.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us – again – that we’re all connected. Health is a not just a private matter, of concern only to an individual and their family. Health is a public concern. What happens in the community impacts all of us. All the private health insurance in the world can’t protect us if the public health system is not up to the task of containing the virus, or if significant numbers of people fail to comply with public health directions.
The importance of public health was revealed starkly during the Spanish flu. Yet it was soon forgotten, as medicine became obsessed with a focus on individualised treatments. When we move on from COVID-19, our challenge will be to remember that health is a public concern, not just a matter for individuals, and that investment in a strong healthcare system needs to be sustained. We’ve also learnt that what happens around the world impacts us at home. The virus might have originated in China, but the extent to which the virus was allowed to grow exponentially and spread around the world was a function of how other countries responded. It’s likely that only when most of the world’s population is vaccinated will we be able to truly say that the pandemic is over.
How well we cooperate at a global level is critically important – whether through the sharing of early intelligence on emerging infectious diseases, developed nations lending support for global vaccination or even sharing approaches to post-conflict reconstruction in places such as Syria. Getting it right at the global scale benefits us all.
Might we take this lesson and draw parallels with other global crises, such as climate change? We all breathe the same air; a warming earth impacts us all. No matter what action we take at home, in the absence of a global response climate change will continue to worsen. It’s in everyone’s interest that each country makes a bold and constructive contribution to the global response. As we scoured the supermarket shelves searching for toilet paper that wasn’t there, it no doubt occurred to many us that some parts of our existence are more fragile than we thought, more vulnerable to shocks. While globalisation has contributed to enormous economic growth and price reductions, it has been accompanied by long and complex supply chains, with components being shipped back and forth across the globe. A ‘just in time’ approach means that only small quantities of stock are stored in warehouses. Consequently, disruption to air and sea freight movements means that shortages in even one component can disrupt supply. In many countries, stockpiles of essential medical equipment were inadequate, and there were shortages of masks.
In Australia, there was no shortage of food, but disruptions to imported packaging meant many products could not be supplied to consumers. At times, it was hard to find a bag of rice or a jar of pasta sauce.
We’ve also experienced the consequences of the inequality that pervades our society. Precarious and underpaid work served only to exacerbate the pandemic. Lacking sick leave and needing to feed their families, some attended work while sick. Factory labourers took second jobs as Uber drivers. Multiple generations of the same family could not keep their distance in overcrowded housing. All of these factors create opportunities for the virus to spread to vulnerable groups. All crises expose the fault lines in society, and this pandemic has been no different.
We’ve learnt that at times like this, it’s actually quite important to have a competent government. Competent government is perhaps a boring concept and is largely invisible much of the time.
We understand its value most clearly when it is absent. Countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States have been characterised by flip-flops in public health advice, botched test and trace regimes, and chaotic and ever-changing lockdown arrangements. Furthermore, certain US leaders catered to populist sentiment and opposed the mask mandates recommended by experts.
Competent governments rely on the existence of institutions that have the capacity and authority to do things properly. These institutions need to have the staff, expertise, resources and powers to respond to complex situations. To be effective, they also need to be supported with a legal and political culture that is committed to public administration. Political leaders that value public administration have been critical during our most recent crisis.
Smaller units of government have proven to be particularly important during the crisis. Many smaller jurisdictions – such as New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland and Australia – have been remarkably successful in containing the virus. In federations, state and provincial governments have played an important leadership role.
Small nations and state governments have often been more agile than their larger counterparts, better equipped to develop a rapid policy response. New Zealand, for example, moved quickly to close its borders in March 2020 and implemented snap lockdowns when cases were detected. Iceland has used science to contain the virus. From the first days of the pandemic, it has tracked the health of every person who tested positive for COVID-19 and sequenced the genetic material of each positive test. Governments and citizens have a symbiotic relationship.
During a crisis, people need to trust experts, governments and one another. In the absence of trust, governments find it much more challenging to respond competently. But the incompetence of government is likely to further undermine trust, leading to a downward spiral of declining trust and poorly functioning government. Trust and capable public sectors are national assets that need to be nurtured over many years.
The pandemic has shown us what can happen when they are left to wither.
Andrew Wear is a senior Australian public servant with degrees in politics, law, economics and public policy. A graduate of the Senior Executive Fellows Program at Harvard Kennedy School and a Victorian Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia, he is also a director of Ardoch Ltd, a children’s education charity. His first book, Solved! How other countries have cracked the world’s biggest problems and we can too, was published in countries across the world.
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It sounds blunt, but it’s the truth. Everyone is going to be exposed to COVID.
If vaxxed, you’ll most likely not even get ill. If not, you’ll likely get sick, may be hospitalized, stand a much greater chance of ending up in I tensive care, dying.
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Latest data from the US shows how the unvaccinated are filling the hospital wards – while the fully vaccinated are barely present. Lower numbers of fully vaccinated Covid patients than flu patients.
The vaccine campaigns are actually proving to be more effective than promised.
Covid is a real threat to unvaccinated workforces
The radical anti-vaxxers don’t want compulsory vaccination on work sites – but as these figures show, a Covid outbreak could decimate a workforce, closing down a worksite. Even without lockdowns!
All employers will want their workforces and customers to be fully vaccinated.
It is just common sense.
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Like the US, Australia has a Federal system and that means lots of politicians hunting for headlines. The Feds botched the vaccine rollout, it is only gathering momentum now.
But our pandemic death rate is amongst the lowest in the world – our total death toll (for the whole pandemic) is less than one day’s death toll in the US.
From Down Under, the US, the UK, Brazil, the EU, look like slaughter houses. So many dead, so much misery. And let’s not forget about India, Indonesia, Peru and so many other hard hit countries.
Oz is fine: our economy is growing, we have some lockdowns, but overall we’re doing OK. Most important – we’re keeping the number of deaths down.
Australia’s deadly Olive sea snakes, one of the most feared inhabitants of northern waters, have been attacking more and more scuba divers.
Now university researchers have found the reason – the snakes are mistaking the scuba divers for possible sexual partners.
Olive Sea snakes – Deadly sexual partners.
By looking into the behavior of male olive sea snakes near tropical coral reefs, scientists at three Australian universities found in their joint research that the highly-aroused creatures may, because of their terrible eyesight, be confusing divers for female snakes or potential rivals.
Olive sea snakes are found in Australian tropical waters and in smaller habitats off Indonesia, New Caledonia, and Papua New Guinea, particularly in reefs around 30 to 130 feet beneath the surface.
The researchers discovered that male olive sea snakes, in particular, are displaying “misdirected courtship responses” like spending loads of time with divers and coiling around their limbs and diving fins.
Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland have been included in a list of the top ten ‘safest’ cities produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The EIU’s biennial Safe Cities Index, for the first time included environmental security metrics.
In a study of five pillars of urban security — digital, health, infrastructure, personal and environmental — Copenhagen topped the charts, scoring 82.4 points out of 100.
The EIU’s Safe Cities Index this year ranked 60 cities across 76 indicators of security, to get a better picture of global urban safety.
The addition of the new environmental security pillar reflects the increased importance of sustainability issues and climate adaptation measures following the coronavirus pandemic. Toronto and Copenhagen performed noticeably better in the new environmental security pillar than did any of the top-three cities from earlier years.
Covid-19 hurts global safety
Indeed, alongside health security, the coronavirus had an impact across all security metrics, the report’s authors noted.
Digital security, for instance, has become a higher priority as work and commerce have moved online, while infrastructure safety has had to adjust due to changes in travel and utility consumption.
Elsewhere, personal safety has been impacted by a shift in crime patterns during lockdowns, and environmental safety has come to the fore as the pandemic served as a stark warning of unexpected crisis.
Among the least safe of the 60 cities measured were Lagos, Cairo, Caracas, Karachi and Yangon.
Anti-vaxxers and stirrers are all over social media, frightening already scared and vulnerable people with claims that Covid-19 vaccines violate the Nuremberg Code.
Tested, safe vaccines.
This argument can be found all over social media — and it’s not just wrong, it is wilfully misleading, and manipulative.
The Nuremberg Code was written in 1947 during the trials of Nazis in Nuremberg, Germany. The doctors on trial were accused of, and eventually convicted (and executed) for conducting medical experiments on unwilling and uninformed concentration camp inmates.
There were approximately 7,000 documented cases cited at the Nuremberg trials.
Nazi doctors, inluding the infamous Josef Mengele (The Angel of Death) tested ways to improve the chances of survival for Nazi soldiers in the field. They experimented with a variety of novel – and often fatal – medical procedures and drugs.
Many of their experiments were based on fake science – on the loaded and now discredited racist theories of eugenics.
All these experiments were done without the consent of the subjects.
That’s what the Nuremberg Code addressed — the treatment of human subjects in medical experiments.
People receiving the COVID-19 vaccines at this point are not taking part in a medical experiment, because the vaccines already have gone through clinical trials and have received emergency approval.
And so the Nuremberg Code does not apply.
Nuremberg Code Addresses Experimentation, Not Vaccines
FactCheck.org
The Nuremberg Code
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
What Constitutes Voluntary Consent?
A legal concept – defined by lawyers.
People who volunteer to take part in medical experiments – as did many in the clinical testing phase of vaccine development, must be able to give their consent.
“This means they must have the legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him (or her!) to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.”
The pandemic has now been underway for 16, 17 months – and despite overwhelming evidence, some still argue for non-vaccine ‘cures’. Some of these claims are driven by commercial interests – they want to sell their drugs.
But many are driven by a crazed, conspiratorial worldview. Lots of far right conspiracy nuts have bought it – but that’s to be expected. As are a range of fringe Christian cults who reject modern medicine in all its forms. In their interpretation of the bible, if we get sick we have to accept it. It is, for them, God’s Will. With capitals/
No thanks.
But add to those fringe thinks the 80s natural cure fruitcakes and the hippy dippy refuseniks who want nothing to do with the modern commercial world: Et voila! A potent mix of misfits, angry thugs and self righteous religious types.
Vaccines are highly effective in reducing deaths, quite effective in reducing hospitalizations and partially effective in reducing contagion. They’re not perfect, but they’re damn good.
And, they’re the only way we have of ending the lockdowns, getting back to normal life.
This boy has been in the gym too long. Perhaps over-use of steroids has made him hyper-aggressive, savage. Punching a horse in the face is likely an effective tactic.
Also despicable.
He’s been arrested, claimed he didn’t punch, just pushed the horse’s head away. Semantics.
The thugs of the far right are now, hypocritically, claiming to be ‘free speech’ supporters.
They are not – as anyone who has ever dared to debate them will attest. They are violent, aggressive, abusive.
Crazed English z-grade celebrity and Covid-denier Katie Hopkins is being kicked out of Straya.
Time for more neurosurgery?
The headline grabbing self promoter was in Oz to appear in a TV reality program.
Tripping herself up with a crazed video in which she claimed Covid-19 was ‘the greatest hoax in history’, Hopkins outraged Oz opinion and was swiftly kicked by headline grabbing Oz politicians.
Enter Barnaby Joyce.
Barnaby inventing new words
‘Pack your bongo and go home’ – Joyce
In many ways a sad case, Hopkins has suffered brain damaged due to neurosurgery – on Britain’s free NHS.
She has built a career on rubbing the self-righteous woke crowd the wrong way. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Trouble is, she now seems to believe her own ever wilder and crazed claims. Like David Icke, the ur-conspiracy lunatic, Hopkins has bought into the idea that the world is run by a tight knit cabal. Like all conspiracy theories in the last thousand years the latest version is focused on the blood of infants (the innocents) and its consumption by a ‘blood sucking’ elite.
Jews for the Nazis, plutocrats for the communists, now intergalactic lizards who assume human form. (Seriously.)
Can you imagine, that in their crazed world view, the 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth is actually a rapacious blood drinking intergalactic lizard.
Go Lizzie!
How much is she taking home?
Hopkins was under contract to Seven’s Celebrity Big Brother.
Now, booted out Oz, she can claim most, if not all, of the money she would have earned by appearing on the show.
Rumoured to be in the region of $275,000.
Back in the UK she can write months of whining columns blaming ‘the elites’ for oppressing her in Oz.
Was this her tactic from the get go? She knows how authoritarian Australian officials can be. By acting outrageously – stripping naked to receive meals, etc – she knew she would prove official anger.
Now she can cash in, while getting rid of the odious and boring weeks in the Big Brother house.
Take the Money And Run.
Worth many millions, Hopkins has branded herself as “Britain’s most controversial columnist” for the last decade.
After attending university as a trainee soldier (Intelligence Corps), she attended Sandhurst Military Academy (Prince Harry’s finishing school) before abandoning military life for the Big Apple and a consultancy gig.
By 2007 she was back in the UK as a ‘ global brand consultant’on £90,000 a year by 2007.
In 2007 she launched herself into reality television, creating a sensation on the UK version of The Apprentice by quitting before Alan Sugar could fire her.
Hopkins sold that story to the red tops (the tabloids) and then retreated to some BBC outlets for a period of rest and quiet.
That didn’t last long and she then built up a reputation as a guest on a range of London television shows, everything from 8 Out of 10 Cats and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! to Loose Women and Reality Bites.
She landed a column in Rupert Murdoch’s tabloide, The Sun in 2013 – where she gained the ‘most controversial columnist’ moniker. She took that brand and went to the Daily Mail’s Mail Online in 2015.
Merely being a columnist’ didn’t slake her appetite for celebrity and she joined the 2015 version of Celebrity Big Brother. The same year, appearing on My Fat Story, she gained and lost about 19 kg, her argent being that fat people could lose weight.
When 10 million tuned into that show her career took off. Her next effort was modestly titled If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World.
For 15 years China has been the largest creator of man made emissions.
Beijing talks Green but doesn’t walk the talk.
The current five year plan calls for a rapid expansion of the world’s largest concentration of coal fired power generating plants.
If that is achieved – and China has a track record of meeting its targets – it will be a catastrophe. Not just for China’s heavily polluted air, but for the global climate.
It’s time Beijing was confronted. The lunacy of it’s growth obsessions need to be highlighted. It cannot continue on this self destructive path.
Along with soaring emissions from coal fired electricity generation, coal fire steel production is increasing every year.
China dominates global steel production
Last year President Xi Jinping said China would be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2060.
Can that be done? Forty years is a long time and the climate is already changing, much faster than most expected.
For China to become carbon neutral some existing industries, like coal, would have to be closed down – almost entirely. Other industries, such as renewables and the trend toward greater electrification would have to be expanded dramtically.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of electricity, outpacing the United States.
Four fifths – 80%! – of China’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels. Moreover demand is climbing fast.
For China to become carbon neutral, 86% will have to come from renewables and other low or non carbon technologies. And the market is going to be more than double the current size!
The Morrison government’s cack-handed roll out of Covid 19 vaccines has left Australia dangerously exposed to a new wave of infections, deaths, and economically crippling lockdowns.
On Friday, with more than half the country under strict lockdown, and after 15 pandemic months, Morrison said the plan was for Australia to transition from lockdowns to managing COVID-19 as an infectious disease like any other.
A four phase plan – but with no deadlines or performance metrics, it consists of four parts, ‘vaccinate, prepare and pilot’ (current), then a ‘Post Vaccination Phase”, a ‘Consolidation Phase’ and a ‘Final Phase’.
Aussie Arts & Letters 
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