Dan Vs Democracy

When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says that it is "foreseeable" that a state of emergency could last beyond another 12 months, Australians would not be out of place in wondering if that means until or beyond the next state election due in November 2022.  Australians would also not be out of place in wondering what expectations Mr Andrews is trying to manage when he says "I hope we are wrong in predicting this [the virus] will still need rules in 12 months.  Hopefully we have got a vaccine by then."

Perhaps Brett Sutton, Victoria's Chief Health Officer, will declare voting in person a public health risk, and only electronic or postal voting would be allowed.  Or perhaps only those who wear a mask, have a contact tracing application on their phone, or who have received a vaccine if it should be available by then will be given permission to vote in person.

These are heady thoughts, but these are heady times and our freedoms, our democracy and our very way of life are too important for us not to start contemplating them.  Similar issues confront the American electorate ahead of November's presidential election, with Democrats' pushing for postal voting and Republicans preferring the more democratic in person voting due to concerns over the validity of postal ballots.

Of course, Mr Andrews can only use the absence of a vaccine as an excuse for a near-perpetual state of emergency because Scott Morrison has all but confirmed normality won't return until a vaccine is here.  And Mr Andrews knows that the federal government will simply pick up the tab for the economic and humanitarian destruction wrought by the brutal lockdown measures through, for example, extending JobKeeper or JobSeeker payments.

A state of emergency was first declared under Victoria's Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 on 16 March and can be extended by four-week increments up to a six-month limit.  This means that the state of emergency must end at 11:59pm on 13 September.  Mr Andrews wants to circumvent this constraint on his power either by introducing amendments to the Act or through a different legislative mechanism.  The Age is reporting that "A third, radical solution would be for the government to invoke an extraordinary power it already has to suspend the six-month limit without the approval of parliament."  This could potentially mean that the state of disaster powers, which were declared on 2 August, could be used to override the six-month limit on the state of emergency powers.

But Victorians and Australians would do well to remember just what these emergency declarations have achieved.  Nearly all agree that a state of emergency was valid and necessary back in March.  Governments did not know what they were dealing with and the consequences of getting it wrong in terms of an overwhelmed and underprepared hospital system were disastrous.  But it quickly became obvious to many by mid-April that the virus needed to be contained without jeopardising the economy.  Alas, we were ignored and instead, the trust and confidence that Australians placed in their premiers has been egregiously abused.  And nowhere more so than in Victoria.

Mr Andrews covered up the Covid cluster which emanated from the Cedar Meats abattoir ― a company which also happened to be a donor to the Labor party.  Then came the hotel quarantine fiasco, responsible for more than 99 per cent of cases genomically tested in Victoria and therefore responsible for the stage-4 lockdown restrictions Victorians are suffering under.  There were also the obnoxious double standards whereby Black Lives Matter protesters were exempt from Covid restrictions.

The lockdowns were petty and excessive, with activities like surfing alone in the ocean vigorously stamped out.  Worse, they were ineffective.  Victoria has had the strictest lockdowns in the nation, but the worst results in terms of rising case numbers and deaths.  Victorians have lost their jobs, livelihoods and freedoms and are now living in a state of perpetual anxiety and panic disproportionate to the public health risk.  Mr Andrews' latest power grab means they are at risk of losing their democratic rights, too.

Mr Andrews claims the state of emergency declaration is the "legal instrument that allows rules about face masks, about Covid-safe work plans in workplaces large and small, [and] density limits in pubs and cafes and restaurants."  This is simply false.  Such requirements, if considered necessary, can be made via Acts of Parliament, rather than through emergency declarations.  But that would mean Mr Andrews would have to face the scrutiny of the Victorian public via the lower house ― the people's house ― sitting as normal again, which is something he wishes to avoid at all costs.

This is no longer about epidemiology or public health.  This is Daniel Andrews versus democracy.

Dan's Divine Rule Betrays Our History

Most Victorians wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about if you said Premier Daniel Andrews was acting like King Charles I.

Coronavirus or not, the government of the state of Victoria ― with its arbitrary police arrests, the locking of people in their homes and the bankrupting of their businesses by executive decree, and the suspension of Parliament to avoid any measure of public scrutiny of the government's actions ― now has more in common with rule exercised by the imagined authority of the divine right of kings rather than with any notion of liberal democracy.

Because so much of the Melbourne establishment ― including its business elites, its cultural leaders, and particularly the legal profession ― as well as Victoria's media have supported Andrews for as long as they have, they're reluctant to acknowledge this truth.

Paul Keating famously declared the upper house of the Federal Parliament to be "unrepresentative swill", but when Parliament isn't there, you notice it ― which is the situation now in Victoria.

This week, when Andrews, after spending the last six months trying to shut down the State Parliament, said he wanted to recall Parliament so his emergency powers could be extended for 12 months, it started to finally dawn on Victorians that enough was enough.  In a poll of 1000 Victorians, 60 per cent of participants said the Victorian Parliament should continue to sit during the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 per cent said it should not, and 28 per cent had no opinion.

That's an overwhelming result.  But if Australians took their parliamentary democracy more seriously, the poll result might have been even more overwhelming.

Taking the country's parliamentary democracy more seriously requires, for a start, knowing where it comes from.  And that is a topic almost entirely absent from Australia's education system.

Practically every aspect of the Westminster-style parliamentary democracy of the Australian Commonwealth and of the states derives from the English Civil War and its consequences.

Yet in the Australian national curriculum ― which is compulsory for all schools, government and non-government, to teach ― there is no reference to the English Civil War.  There are many mentions of Gandhi, Rosa Parks and Eddie Mabo ― but none of Charles I, or Cromwell, let alone Pym or Hampden.  (It's sometimes forgotten that dead white European males did have some role in the creation of Australia's democracy.)

LACK OF HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING

Today the average Australian 16-year-old would be shocked to discover that British history is responsible for something other than colonialism and slavery.

The absence of the origins of our parliamentary system from the education of young Australians is not an accident.  One of the authors of the national curriculum notoriously dismissed the relevance of the English Civil War to this country by claiming it was "arguably just a series of confused and confusing localised squabbles that may have a special significance for UK history, but not for anybody else (unless they like dressing up in period costume)".

Comments such as this betray precisely the same lack of historical understanding being bequeathed to Australian students.

There's another reason too why the English Civil War has no place in the nation's classrooms.

It has come to be profoundly unfashionable to argue that democratic rights are not the gift of the governments and the United Nations, but are instead inalienable to a country's citizens.  (As is to be expected, under the national curriculum Australian students are taught a lot about the UN.)

The situation is no better in our universities.  In 2017, I surveyed all 746 history subjects that were taught in the 35 Australian universities that offered history programs.  There were 41 subjects that taught the history of cinema and film, while 69 subjects examined the history of gender.  Seventeen subjects covered British history, and of those only seven dealt in any way with the English Civil War.

In other words, only 1 per cent of all history subjects offered by Australian universities dealt with the period of British history from which our parliamentary democracy was derived.

One of the benefits of that parliamentary democracy is that, compared with the fate that befell Charles I, elections are a better way of dealing with overmighty rulers.

You Don't Need To Like Clive Palmer To Dislike His Arbitrary Treatment

The Western Australian government's draconian legislation passed this month to extinguish the legal rights of Clive Palmer and his flagship company, Minerology, is the kind of thing that would not be out of place in a third world autocracy.

A foundational principle of a free and just society is that the law that governs all Australians is not arbitrary, applies prospectively, that court proceedings are fair and government decisions be subject to review or appeal.

These are the principles known as the rule of law and it is these principles that the WA government has thrown aside with its petty legislation rushed through parliament last week.

The background to this extraordinary legislation is that Minerology and the WA government voluntarily entered into a State Agreement in 2002 for the exploration and development of the Balmoral South Iron Ore Project.

When the Barnett government in 2012 rejected a project proposal from Minerology it violated the state agreement that imposed an obligation on the state to at least assess proposals before making a decision.  The dispute came before former High Court judge Michael McHugh QC for independent arbitration who delivered two arbitration awards in 2014 and 2019, finding that the state government was liable for breaches under the State Agreement.

Rather than challenge or appeal the arbitration decisions, WA Attorney-General John Quiggin instead introduced into the parliament a bill seeking to retrospectively nullify the arbitration decisions entirely.  Clause 12 of the Bill provides that decisions or actions in relation to the government's 2012 decision cannot be appealed or reviewed.

It adds that "The Rules known as the rules of natural justice (including any duty of procedural fairness) do not apply to;  or in relation to, any conduct of the State that is, or is connected with, a disputed matter."  The Bill also seeks to make documents connected to a "disputed matter" exempt from freedom of information laws and grants criminal immunity to the states and its agents.

In this scenario, the rights under the arbitration awards gave Minerology a proprietary right to claim damages from the state.  The state, by negating the awards, has effectively expropriated a proprietary interest held by Minerology.

Expropriation of property is a hallmark of tyrannical governments.  Property rights are inextricably tied to individual liberty and limited government.  As United States founding father and second president, John Adams, famously said:  "Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist."  This is because an economic system that respects the right to own property and enforce property rights against others tends to strengthen individual autonomy and independence from the state.

The government's move is without justification.  The arguments in favour of the Bill have been to suggest that schools would be shut and nurses put out of work to pay a damages bill of $30 billion.  But Palmer himself asserts that he has not claimed that amount and the hearing to determine damages was scheduled to take place in November 2020.

Premier Mark McGowan has declared the state is "in a war" with Palmer, who has been branded an "enemy of the state".  This is the kind of language that might be applied to a person who is accused of treason.  But Palmer's only crime has been to raise a challenge to the WA border closure rules.

Undoubtedly Clive Palmer has his critics, but he is an Australian and is entitled to argue that the Australian Constitution should be applied, and to raise a challenge if he has standing to do so.  The WA government should respect this basic entitlement of Australian citizenship, not make a declaration of war.

The WA government's excessively petty response is incredibly dangerous.  The confirmation that the government is prepared to legislate away its liabilities presents a very real risk to any business who is considering investing in the state.  This is the definition of sovereign risk.

Scaring away capital and investment is the last thing Western Australia needs as the country crawls out of depressed economic conditions imposed in response to COVID-19.  But this is what the government is risking by pulling away at the threads of the rule of law.

The rule of law is the basic principle the separates the West from the rest of the world.  In the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index 2020, 8 of the top 10 best performers for the rule of law were in Europe, while number 7 and 9 were New Zealand and Canada respectively.  Australia ranked 11th, above the United States and the United Kingdom.

Australia's political and legal system has a good reputation but this requires a commitment to uphold the rule of law.  Decisions like those of the WA government, as well as the arbitrary nature of the lockdowns imposed nationwide this year, demonstrates a recent failure to meet these basic standards of lawmaking.

While no government can claim to have a perfect record the WA government's response in its dispute with Minerology is a shameful betrayal of a core Australian legal tradition.

Australia Has Returned To Being A Convict Nation

It must be nice to be Shane Warne.

Shane was one of the 22,640 citizens The Australian Border Force granted permission to leave the country between March 25 and July 31.

The 69,310 people who were denied permission in this time are people like Donna Burton, an Australian woman who was forced to forfeit her $2,000 (£1,100) airfare to London and not see her only daughter be married after the government did not approve her exemption to travel overseas.

Perhaps if Donna were a better cricket commentator, she'd have been allowed to leave the country.

That's the relationship Australians have with the government right now concerning how we can travel abroad.  It is not an open choice, as citizens of the UK have.  We must apply for permission, and three out of every four applications are rejected.

These travel bans puts Australia on par with Belarus, Namibia and the Ivory Coast for restrictions on international travel.  Even New Zealand, famous for its draconian lockdown at the outset of coronavirus in a single-minded elimination strategy, only goes as far as advising New Zealanders not to travel.

The message is clear, the Australian government knows the right decision for its citizens, far more than they do.

It's not just overseas travel that is banned, but internal travel too, and it is destroying our tourism and airline industries.

Restrictions have hurt Australians in every industry, of course.  Well, except for the public service.  My analysis shows that while more than 604,000 private sector jobs were destroyed between March 14 and July 25, nearly 14,000 jobs were added to the public service.

But the border closures present a unique challenge to the tourism industry, one of the nation's highest employers.

Western Australia is the worst culprit, passing the rule that you cannot enter the state from any other part of the nation unless you are granted an exemption.  There is no timetable for the border to reopen.

As of Monday this week, there are no active cases of coronavirus in the Northern Territory.  There hasn't been one for over a week.  Yet for the safety of its citizens Western Australia has closed the borders to Northern Territorians.

Queensland has closed its borders to anyone who has been in any part of Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory 14 days prior to coming to Queensland.  South Australia has said even its own citizens cannot return from Victoria freely, nor will any traveller from New South Wales be allowed in without a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine.

The Northern Territory ― home to Uluru ― has declared its borders will not return to normal for 18 months.  Melburnians aren't allowed to travel within their own state ― in fact, they cannot travel further than three miles from their house.

This situation reached its comedic zenith when Victorian sheep producer Shirly Sprenger found that she would have to put her 40 sheep on a plane to get them to a New South Wales saleyard to get through border closures.

Laugh while you can, because the realisation is scary.  In the view of the New South Wales government, permission to fly in a plane is extended to sheep before people.

States are pursuing these polices on the idea that elimination of coronavirus is possible, and they can keep their states safe until a vaccine is found.

This is, at best, naivety.  Elimination strategies have not worked ― New Zealand saw one of its largest cities return to lockdown after months of keeping the virus at bay.  And last weekend the United Kingdom's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said there was unlikely to be any vaccine before the end of 2021.

So what has this hope for a cure cost Australia's tourism industry?  Everything.

In 2019, Austrade released figures showing that one in 13 of Australia's workforce were employed in tourism, and tourist spending was $143 billion (£78.4bn) a year.  Tourism is now virtually non-existent, and Australians who are keen to help the dying industry are prohibited from being able to do so.

In Western Australia alone, there are 4,500 small businesses selling or providing a tourism product, according to the state government;  1,138 have already applied for handouts from the state's Tourism Recovery Fund.  How many more are going to have to do the same as the closures continue into next year?

In New South Wales, the closed border to Victoria is costing $73 million (£40m) per week in lost tourism spending according to NSW Treasury.  In Queensland, the Australia Tourism Industry says the decision to close borders is destroying 173 jobs every day and costing the state $21 million (£11.5m) daily.

Qantas recorded a loss of $1.97 billion (£1.08bn) and has cut 6,000 jobs, and CEO Alan Joyce believes that international flights won't reopen until mid-2021.  Australia's second largest domestic carrier, Virgin Airlines, this month cut 3,000 of its 9,000 jobs.

This is completely devastating, and the effects will be felt for years to come.  Jobs are gone, businesses have closed to never reopen.

Australia's beauty is incredible.  It has amazed tourists for decades, as millions every year came to see landmarks such as The Great Barrier Reef, Uluru and, for reasons beyond comprehension, Ramsay St.

We now face the prospect of possessing these fantastic sights and not having the ability to share our country with the world, once the total effects of lost jobs in the tourism industry is felt.  What state governments are doing to tourism will be one of the lasting tragedies of this virus.

Australians cannot travel within their own nation without the government's permission, and if we want to go overseas to recall what it is to live with civil liberties, the majority of us are denied from doing that too.

The Brits have always made fun of Australia as being a convict nation.  It seems 200 years later we're back where we started.

Double Standard At Play As PM Stays Silent On Andrews

If Daniel Andrews were a bank chief executive instead of a state premier, he would have been forced to resign weeks ago.  And the person leading the demands for Andrews' resignation would have been the Prime Minister himself, Scott Morrison.

In 2018 when he was treasurer, Morrison called for, as described at the time, "heads to roll" at Commonwealth Bank after the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority released a report on the failures of the bank's anti-money laundering procedures.  Morrison labelled APRA's findings as "very damning".

In February last year, Morrison called on both the CEO and chairman of National Australia Bank to "consider their positions" following criticism of them by the banking royal commission.

Morrison said:  "Commissioner [Kenneth] Hayne was pretty sharp in his assessment and I think that gives them a lot to reflect on.  I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest [they should resign], but I think Commissioner Hayne was pretty sharp."  Within days, NAB's CEO and chairman had resigned.

Then in November last year, Morrison said the board of Westpac should reflect "very deeply" on the future of its chief executive, after the bank allegedly broke anti-money laundering laws.  Again within days, the Westpac CEO had resigned.

Many Victorians wish the Prime Minister would utter the magic words about Andrews.  Why Morrison hasn't yet, and why he probably won't, is worth reflecting on.  The single most critical thing Morrison has said about Victoria is his acknowledgment of the obvious, which is that the state is experiencing some challenges

It is not as though Andrews' catastrophic failure is not now obvious, not only for all Victorians and Australians to see, but also for the whole world to witness.  Describing what's happened in the state as the greatest public policy disaster in the country's history, if anything, understates the situation.

It's easy for prime ministers to give free advice to bank board members.  Politicians are forever telling CEOs and boards how they can run their companies better.  It's interesting, given how much politicians think they know about private enterprise, that so few of them ever make a successful transition to careers in the productive economy.

And, of course, business bosses never tire of telling politicians how to run the country.  But few of those bosses trouble themselves standing for election to political office.

COMMENTS HASTENED DEPARTURES

Politicians telling CEOs what to do, and vice versa, is a favourite pastime of both because neither is accountable for what they're saying.

While the Prime Minister's comments might have helped hasten the departure of the NAB and Westpac CEOs, no one would assume Morrison had then somehow taken responsibility for running those companies.  Ultimately, it is with the companies' boards of directors, representing the interests of the owners of the company, that responsibility for the operation of the company rests.

It might be that one of the reasons why the Prime Minister is so reluctant to utter a word of criticism of Andrews is that as soon as he does, Victoria's problems become Canberra's.

The lack of scrutiny, up until the past few days, of what has occurred in Victoria is part of the reason for the debacle engulfing the state.

The Prime Minister and his ministers have said practically nothing about Victoria, and the state's metropolitan media have largely toed the Andrews government line.

Meanwhile, the operations of the Victorian Parliament's lower house are suspended at the behest of the government, while in the upper house, which Andrews tried to shut down too but couldn't because he didn't have a majority, his ministers appear but refuse to answer any questions.

Some commentators have claimed about Victoria "now is the not the time for criticism ― we must be constructive" and "there'll be plenty of time later to allocate the blame".

The point is though that, at least in democracies, holding a government to account for its actions, while it is doing them ― and subjecting the government to scrutiny all of the time, not just some of the time ― ensures not only that the government will make better decisions into the future, but the public will have trust in those decisions and respect them.

Which is precisely what's not happening in Victoria at the moment.

Checked Out: When Activism Quarantines Common Sense

If you want to know what is going wrong in Victoria, all you need do is look at a job being advertised on Seek by the state's Department of Justice and Community Safety.  The department wishes to hire a "director, inclusion and intersectionality", for which it is offering a generous salary of $192,800-$249,700 plus superannuation.

According to the ad, the incumbent "will be responsible for providing authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality to justice ministers, DJCS executives and other senior stakeholders".

Furthermore, they "will be able to demonstrate an extensive knowledge of inclusion, intersectionality and society and understanding of historical and contemporary issues".

This ad epitomises everything that is wrong with the Victorian government.  In a single job description, it explains the reason the government is incapable of running a quarantine program or looking after the elderly.  Instead of doing what it should be doing, which is governing, it is putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.

We are now watching as Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, fails the Australian public.  This is because they have put identity politics, and the concept of diversity and inclusion, before the health of the people, with deadly consequences.

This has come to light in the past few days with revelations that the DHHS farmed out its responsibilities to the DJPR by putting it in charge of the hotel quarantine program.  As revealed in The Age newspaper, the DJPR and its international trade agency, Global Victoria, were responsible for engaging private security firms for hotel quarantine.  The reason for selecting Unified Security, an indigenous-owned security company that was not on the government's preferred panel of security suppliers, was supposedly driven by an attempt to provide jobs under "social inclusion" policies.

The bureaucratic elite in Victoria clearly did not see a problem in selecting a company for hotel quarantine based on where it ranked on the intersectionality pyramid.  This should have been a strict police or military operation.

According to the DJPR's secretary, who states in the department's Aboriginal Recruitment and Career Strategy 2020-23, "diversity in the workplace is not just a nice thing to have" ... It is "the foundation of good business principles and will ensure the department is best placed to deliver on its purpose".

Under no circumstance would we want the pilot of our A380 or the surgeon performing open-heart surgery on a family member to be selected on the basis of diversity and inclusion rather than merit.  Those in charge of the hotel quarantine approached the job at hand as if it were a lavish junket.  They even made a self-congratulatory video in which they referred to the task as "one massive inbound super trade mission which keeps rolling ... which has been a really exciting project" rather than a serious quarantine operation in which there was so much at stake.

It is not difficult to see where priorities lie for these Victorian departments.

Two years ago, the DHHS enforced "They Day" for all staff, which mandated that every first Wednesday of the month, its 10,000 employees were to use gender neutral pronouns such as "they" and "them" rather than he and she.  Former Victorian deputy chief health officer Annaliese Van Diemen revealed her ideological leanings when she compared COVID-19 to James Cook with her ill-informed and notorious tweet.

The DJPR even has its own deputy secretary for inclusion, which is extraordinary given that the main purpose of the department appears to be the promotion of business and trade.  It clearly adheres to the utopian intellectual elite theory that the workforce of the private sector economy can and should be controlled by government.

Victoria, indeed Australia, would not be in today's predicament had these departments spent time and resources on real issues, not activism.  We know from reports that the contact tracing and pandemic team in the DHHS was severely under-resourced.

The government of Daniel Andrews appears to be operating in a different kind of reality in which it is blatantly more concerned with social engineering than it is healthcare.  This is because most of the government departments are staffed and run by individuals who have spent years in the humanities departments of our universities, which, of course, are mired in identity politics, social justice, postmodernism and pseudo-Marxism.

According the DHHS cultural and diversity plan, it not only has 18 diversity "deliverables" but it also claims that its commitment to diversity is "central to our goal of achieving better outcomes to all Victorians".

Tell this to the people of Victoria who are now living under the most draconian measures imposed on an Australian population since days of the penal colony, thanks to the hotel quarantine fiasco.  Tell this to the thousands of Victorians who have lost their jobs — perhaps even family members.

The real crisis we are facing is not being caused by COVID-19 but by the elite's stubborn attachment to identity politics, which is obscuring the real problems and jeopardising the lives and livelihoods of mainstream Australians.

Cutting Red Tape In Project Approvals Can Boost WA Jobs

Western Australia's prospects of becoming the fastest-growing, highest-potential state in Australia after the coronavirus recession was boosted by the commitment of the Commonwealth and McGowan governments to slash red tape for WA's resources sector.

Yesterday, the Commonwealth government confirmed its intention to enter into a bilateral approval agreement with WA under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

This would put the WA state government solely in charge of the environmental approvals process, removing unnecessary Commonwealth duplication.

Commonwealth government approvals for big projects currently average 1013 days, or almost three years.  The bilateral agreement could reduce the approval time up to six months, and would help unlock more than $100 billion of development.

This latest initiative builds on momentum developed by the state government to cut red tape.  In 2018, the McGowan government launched a whole of government red tape reduction initiative called Streamline WA.

The initiative has already produced tangible results, such as the establishment of risk-based statutory guidelines for mining proposals and mine closure plans.

The EPBC Act, and green tape more generally, impose significant costs on the Australian economy.

My research released this year found that regulation under the Act has increased by 445% since the year 2000.  With 4,820 individual regulatory restrictions, the Act provides one of the most significant regulatory burdens to WA's most important industry, the resources industry.

According to a recent survey by the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of WA, the resources sector contributed $102 billion of value to WA's economy, including by paying $45.6 billion in wages, in the 2018-19 financial year.

Additionally, the sector directly and indirectly supported 452,229 full-time equivalent jobs in the state ― that's just over a third of total employment in WA.

The resources sector is central to WA in emerging from the COVID-19 lockdown-induced recession.

By reducing the green tape that holds this sector back, Premier Mark McGowan can ensure that WA has the best-performing economy in Australia.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 73,000 West Australians have lost their job since March and an additional 98,600 people are working fewer hours than usual because there is no work, not enough work, or they have been stood down.

These job losses are both an economic and social tragedy that will have a lasting negative impact on people's lives, from worse mental health to increased likelihood of alcoholism and drug dependency.

The experience from past recessions has demonstrated that the longer people are out of work the harder it is for them to get a job.

While West Australians should be encouraged by the latest move to cut red tape, it is up to the McGowan government to hold its Commonwealth counterparts to their word.

The WA and Commonwealth governments originally finalised a bilateral agreement way back December 2014.

The draft agreement sat in the bottom draw of a bureaucrat's desk until November last year when Mr McGowan revived interest in it, saying that "we need to do everything we can to speed up approvals and bring on these new jobs as a matter of urgency."

Indeed, we do.  But doing so means moving beyond "confirming an intention" to enter into the bilateral agreement, to actually signing that agreement.

We're Not All In This Together

As Victoria is plunged back into lockdowns, with those in greater Melbourne facing unprecedented restrictions on their every move, the difference between the two Australias has never been so stark.

Since March, the elites have been out of touch with ordinary Australians.  Over four months ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told us that "we're all in this together", a slogan repeated by the political class ever since.  Meanwhile, while almost one million Australians have been forced out of work and countless small businesses have shut down, the Victorian government gave its employees a 2% pay rise plus an additional "mobility payment" worth between $757 and $2,800 each.

Many mainstream Australians have accepted pay cuts to keep their jobs.  According to a poll published in May 60% of 18-24 year olds had either lost their job or had their pay or hours cut in the previous six weeks.  For those aged 25-34, this rose to 63%.

The public sector has been completely insulated from the experience of mainstream Australians.  My analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data published earlier this year found that between 14 March and 2 May the rate of job losses in the private sector was 4.5 times higher than the in the public sector.

Victoria is now the epitome of this divide between mainstream Australians and the elites.  The Minister for Health, Jenny Mikakos, refused to answer questions in parliament on Tuesday 4 August, clearly unhappy that she had to show up for work.  In April, Ms Mikonos argued that politicians were "working incredibly hard" and that she recognised that "many in our community are doing it tough".  It appears she lost her work ethic, along with any semblance of empathy, after receiving per 11.8% pay rise earlier this year, making her salary of $352,057 the equivalent of just over 7 times the median salary.

In another spurn of mainstream Australians, the Andrews government, without any proper scrutiny in the parliament, has imposed severe lockdown measures on the approximately 5 million residents of greater Melbourne.  I have estimated that these restrictions will cost the Victorian economy $3.17 billion each week, a 37% drop on the usual output of $8.58 billion a week in the state.  This is based on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's estimate of equivalent stage four restrictions imposed in New Zealand.

For those who have been arguing for severe lockdowns all along, this cost means nothing.  To them, lives matter more than "the economy", and any cost is acceptable if it means preventing deaths from COVID-19.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the economy is.  The economy is lives.  It's the infinitely complex interdependencies between individual people, their families and their communities.  The $3.17 billion of missing economic activity is not an abstraction.  As NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet put it in a refreshing opinion article in the Daily Telegraph at the end of July, "In human terms, that's ... wages not being earned, bills not being paid, sales not being made, goods and services not being produced, all affecting the welfare of millions of people."

Mainstream Australians are the ones who will bear the costs of the Victorian lockdown.  The missing $3.17 billion won't be coming from the pockets of Dan Andrews and Jenny Mikakos, but from the pockets of hard-working tradies, students who work part-time in cafes, and the distribution centre workers who keep the essentials flowing to the rapidly-stripped shelves of supermarkets.

Ordinary Australians know that there has been no equality of sacrifice in this crisis.  That's why 74% of them think that politicians and senior public servants earning over $150,000 a year should take a 20% pay cut, according to a poll published at the end of April.

The new Victorian lockdown is going to amplify the harm inflicted on ordinary Australians, and the divide between them and the political elites will only grow.  By mid-July 170,000 Victorians had been forced out of work and an additional 80,900 were technically employed but working zero hours because there was no work, not enough work, or they had been stood down.

The Andrews government expects around 250,000 more people to be stood down as a result of lockdown 2.0.  The number is likely to be much higher, with The Australian on Friday 7 August reporting that Victoria's unemployment rate will reach almost 19%, meaning that approximately one in five Victorians will be out of work.  If the lockdown lasts even a few days longer than the anticipated six weeks this figure will be even higher.

The number one priority of governments across the country has to be getting Australians back into work.  For every additional week someone is unemployed, their mental and physical health deteriorate, and their chances of ever finding a job again diminish.

By refusing to acknowledge the suffering that mainstream Australians are experiencing, the elites, led by the likes of Andrews and Mikakos, are compounding the differences between the two Australias.

The Economic Crisis Is Still To Come

It is pretty clear what Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews wants:  the overwhelming majority of Victorians to remain in their homes for, at least, 23 hours a day.  Go out for exercise, and shopping, if you must.  Don't go out between 8pm and 5am at all.  If you don't know, the answer is "no".  Stay at home is the very clear message.

Business is shell-shocked.  The problem being that everyone who can work from home, is working from home.  Those who can't have mostly been stood down.  Nationwide the federal government estimates "effective unemployment" to be about 11 per cent.  When JobKeeper goes many of those people will never work again.  Many businesses will not reopen.

Yet the Victorian government wants still less economic activity.

The economy is already broken.  Devastated.  The economic crisis is still to come.  Realise this:  in 2008-09 the government spent tens of billions of dollars keeping the economy going.  In 2020 the government has already spent hundreds of billions of dollars to stall the economy.  We haven't begun restarting the economy.

Victorians are panic buying.  Again.  Who can blame them when the Premier keeps saying you'll be able to buy what you "need" ― whatever that means ― not necessarily what you "want".  He is trying to be reassuring;  but everyone knows that government has a poor track record in providing what people need, let alone what they want.  The Victorian government is trying to micromanage supply chains and distribution.  This is not going to end well.  It never does.

It gets worse.  Both state and federal government are in denial.  They seem to think that this is a "business-as-usual" crisis.  That somehow when they give the all-clear that we'll emerge ― as if from hibernation ― from our homes, squeeze into our work clothes, give up our day-drinking, and go back to work.  This is the snap-back view.  Similarly many economic commentators seem to think that a good dose of government spending and tax increases will restore our prosperity.

Well, no.  Reflect on the fact that the federal budget never recovered from the global financial crisis.  At best, the federal government was going to deliver a $5 billion surplus in 2019-20.  That forecast surplus is now a $85.8 billion deficit.  This financial year ― before the second Victorian lockdown ― the federal deficit is forecast to be $184.5 billion.

Economies are not about businesses, and unions, and shops, and goods and services.  The economy is about people;  their plans, their expectations, their relationships.  For all the talk about competition, the economy is about co-operation.  The economy is not a machine that can be switched off and on at will.  The interrelated web of co-operative relationships that was the February 2020 economy is gone forever.  The economy that now exists is a lot smaller than what it was just six months ago.  The problem now being that we can't be sure which part of it will revive and which part of it won't.

What we can be sure of is that monetary and fiscal policy will play a small role in recovery ― perhaps no role.  The RBA has been trying to ignite "animal spirits" with low interest rates for a decade.  The government has already borrowed so much money that our grandchildren will be paying it off.  Not that I'm being overly critical ― that spending was necessary to maintain the fabric of our society.  The point being that we have already spent a lot of money just to stall the economy.

I do not want to suggest that debt and deficit don't matter ― that somehow the RBA could just print money to finance our spending.  Modern Monetary Theory is to economics what hydroxychloroquine is to COVID treatment.

Warren Hogan of University of Technology Sydney has suggested that two decades of sustained economic growth will be necessary to pay off the debt.  I agree.

We are going to have to work our way back to prosperity.  Job creation is going to have to be the number-one policy objective for the next generation.  Not make-work job creation that government excels at, but rather private sector jobs.  Not more road building projects, but rather private sector entrepreneurship and innovation.  That means trade and open borders.  There is going to be a lot more technology use, too.

Serious microeconomic reform is needed.  Australia has done it before.  We could have been a banana republic.

There is no excuse why Australia cannot be a wealthy and prosperous nation.  Healthy, kind and caring too.

We have also become used to the trappings of prosperity.  We are going to have to give up some luxuries.  Like the massive regulatory state that has evolved over the past generation.  We can no longer afford to have government agencies suing companies on a whim.  Or have competition authorities making the world safe for incumbents.  To be fair, government has already undertaken some deregulation and instituted some tax cuts, even repaid taxes.

That is a good start.  Going forward cutting more taxes, cutting red tape, green tape, and beige tape will be a priority.  Getting people into jobs and keeping them in jobs will secure our prosperity.

‘Sonic Anti-Colonialism’ Sounds A Bit Off

Last week, Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that the government will be dishing out $90.5 million worth of taxpayers' money to 100 of the 690 applicants who applied to the Australian Research Council for a Future Fellowship grant.  A perusal of the project descriptions reveals that the vast majority are extremely worthy ventures which will undoubtedly make a positive and indelible impact on both Australia and Australians' lives.

Predictably however, there is an interesting selection of humanities projects which, for reasons only known to the selection committee, have managed to make the cut.  The University of Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, which appears to be staffed entirely by individuals who have devoted their lives to deconstructing knowledge and language while fighting the invisible systems of power, has done pretty well.

Megan Mackenzie, who is Professor of a discipline called "Gender and War" in the Department of Government and International Relations has been awarded $1,052,328 for a project entitled "Eliminating Sexual Violence Within the Military".  According to Professor Mackenzie, "Military sexual violence, or sexual violence that occurs within national militaries" is "a complex and gendered international problem".  Meanwhile her colleague, Associate Professor Sarah Phillips has been promised $1,006,500 so that she can conduct interviews with people in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia to see how they feel about having to live under the yoke of such terrorists groups as al-Qa'eda, Isis, the Pakistani Taleban and al-Shabaab.  I would be willing to wager that they do not feel all that great about it.

While Professor Philips is busy talking to Yemenites in Yemen, anthropologist Associate Professor Holly High will be chatting with Laotians in Laos about socialism and reproduction, as the ARC has thought it prudent to support "Cultural values, birth and parenting.  Reproductive Health and Lao socialism" with a generous gift of $922,400.  Among other things, the project claims that "anticipated benefits include advanced understandings of Lao culture and society, socialism as it articulates with international health and economic agendas, and the anthropology of human flourishing."

It is of course, not just the folk at the University of Sydney who have received grants.  The University of New South Wales has been given $1,011,852 for "A Sonic Approach to Anti-colonialism in Interwar India" which will "apply the methods of Sound Studies to the history of anti-colonialism in India.  Extending on earlier work which draws extensively on visual archives to construct historical narratives, this project aims to explicitly trace the reverberations of sound ― especially mediated speech, slogans and song ― in anti-colonial mobilisation in the interwar period."  A researcher ensconced at the University of the Sunshine Coast has been awarded $1,014,155 for "Saving Lies:  Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBITQ + creative artists".  This project will entail "Using queer and critical race theories and a positively charged mapping of complex identities found in art and art-making."

While this latest funding announcement has been very good news for these academics and their particular pursuits, especially given the extremely precarious state of the Australian university in 2020, it is very bad news for the Australian taxpayer.  This is because the Australian taxpayer is paying for a movement whose aim is to obliterate the Australian way of life.  As they go about their daily business trying to earn a living in these increasingly difficult times, Australians, through no fault of their own, are funding the very people who are engaged in a culture war which seeks to destroy the values and institutions of Western Civilisation.

Let us take Megan Mackenzie, who has long been generously funded by the taxpayer, as an example.  In 2014, she received an Australian Research Council Grant worth $434,692 to fund a project entitled "Women in Combat:  a comparative analysis of removing the combat exclusion".  Last year, she wrote an article for the taxpayer-funded ABC in which she proposed that masculinity is the biggest obstacle to climate action.  While Mackenzie has clearly bought into the notion of white supremacy and the patriarchy, she should be reminded that large numbers of Australian taxpayers who are funding her research are white men.  It is both ethically and morally wrong for researchers such as Mackenzie to continue to take money from hard-working Australians who they consistently deride in the public forum.

If academics such as these were to attempt to make a living from propounding identity politics, radical race and gender theory, they would not survive in this world.  This is because there is no market among the general populace who naturally have little desire to pay to be insulted or told that they are racist.  The harsh reality for those employed in the humanities is that without funding via other people's money, they would struggle to earn their keep.  We are in the middle of a very real crisis, yet these academics are still convinced that the most pressing issues of the day are patriarchy, heteronormativity and white supremacy.

The government needs to remember that it is spending the public's money.

Two years ago, Minister Tehan announced the introduction of a National Interest Test (NIT) in which applicants would be asked "the extent to which the research contributes to Australia's national interest through its potential to have economic, commercial, environmental, social or cultural benefits to the Australian community."

According to Minster Tehan, the NIT would give the minister of the day the confidence to look the Australian voter in the eye and say, "your money is being spent wisely".  It would certainly take someone of an exceptionally steely disposition to be able look the taxpayer in the eye and tell them that projects about "Lao socialism", "Indigenous LGBITQ + creative artists" or "A Sonic Approach to Anti-colonialism in Interwar India" is their money wisely spent.

By continuing to fund academics obsessed with Marxism and identity politics, the Coalition is supporting a divisive progressive ideology which is contrary to tradition and contrary to what mainstream Australians know is right and true.  As long as it keeps financing left-wing institutions, it will continue to lose the culture war.