Hurry Up And Then Stop

Australia is not following the science.  The decision to dither on the Covid-19 vaccines will not delay the economic recovery but could risk lives and undermine faith in immunisation.

Last week the United Kingdom became the first country on the planet to approve the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine.  This week rollout began.  The United States is expected to do the same in the coming days.

This is a momentous occasion for humanity ― from new disease to safe and effective vaccine in less than a year.  Millions of lives will be saved.

The Australian government has responded by painting our friends in Old Blighty as reckless.  Australia's Therapeutic Goods Agency (TGA) will wait until at least late January, if not February, for approval.

Distribution will begin in March.  "Well, I wouldn't want to use the word guinea pigs with the UK," John Skerritt, the head of the TGA said last week.

Skerritt did, nevertheless, talk up waiting for "the real world experience of several hundred thousand people having had the vaccine".

Australia's vaccine urgency is obviously not the same as elsewhere.  The border-first strategy and effective testing and tracing has kept cases extremely low.

Nevertheless, a slow vaccination rollout has real consequences.

On the health front, the government announced in September that Australia would have early access to 3.8 million doses of the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine available in January and February.

This would have allowed for the potentially life-saving immunisation of aged care residents and healthcare workers before the risk of spread grows again in winter.  These doses now appear to have fallen out of the equation.

On the economic front, Australia is a small, outward-looking trading nation that depends on people.  University and tourism sectors are already on their knees.

Australia's unemployment rate is now higher than many countries hit harder by the virus, including the US and the UK.  Meanwhile, as relations with China sour, building new links is paramount — and it takes face-to-face meetings to build trust for those multi-billion dollar deals.

The sooner we begin vaccinating, the sooner the risk to human life decreases, borders can reopen and the economy can fully recover.  Manufacturing, distributing and vaccinating millions of people, across two appointments, will take many, many months.  The quicker Australia begins this process the faster it will be over.

Trust must also be built.  The government has rightly said the vaccine will be voluntary.  People will therefore have to be persuaded it is safe and effective.

The insinuation that the UK has rushed approval risks sowing the seeds of doubt.  But Britain's regulators have not cut corners.

Their speed is explained by undertaking the usual rigorous steps in parallel, as new information was received, rather than at the end.

The vaccine itself was developed so quickly because scientists adapted existing technologies, designed to tackle other diseases, including coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.

Sarah Gilbert from Oxford has explained that "it's not breakthroughs.  We know what to do and we do it, and everything has worked out as expected."

There was also a singular global focus on developing a vaccine and big investments in trials, manufacturing, and distribution.  Never in human history have so many scientists, companies and governments been so focused on a single goal.

Also, the pharmaceutical multinationals, many of which are household names, have an extraordinary incentive to provide a safe vaccine.

The vaccines did not cause any serious side effects in tens of thousands of people after many months.  This is very reassuring.  Side effects typically appear straight away.

We won't know anything about longer term effects before Australian regulators look next month.  If we are waiting for that unknowable and unlikely long term side effect to suddenly materialise the vaccine will never be approved.

The clearest excuse for Australia's tardiness is the lack of emergency approval mechanism like the US and the UK.  This is worrying.

If Australia did have a large outbreak there would be no legal way to immediately start providing vaccination.  The same applies to other breakthrough medicines.

The Covid-19 vaccines represent a revolutionary shift in medicine.  The mRNA technology behind the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can also be used to beat cancer, influenza, malaria, HIV, and much more.  There are also many other medical innovations on the horizon.

If Australians are to benefit sooner rather than later, it will take a new patient-centric approach to medicines regulation.

Australia should recognise approvals by the European Union, United Kingdom and United States.  Their regulators are robust and are stuffed full of the top global experts.

Australia's forthcoming trade deal with the United Kingdom should also use the idea of mutual recognition of product standards to facilitate much easier trade.

Australia also needs Right to Try legislation:  those with terminal diseases should be free to use any experimental drug from anywhere in the world.  There will be immense risks, but between death and potential survival the choice is obvious.

Approval delays are a deadly business.  Australia can do better.

Warts And All Memorial

As its name makes clear, the Australian War Memorial exists to memorialise the service and sacrifice of Australians in war, as a reflection of our shared commitment to our country and each other.  It does not exist to denigrate our national character nor to pander to the worst kinds of elite self-hatred so lamentably prominent across our national institutions.  Yet there is a danger now that this place of honour might be turned to these subversive ends.

In the wake of the Brereton report on alleged war crimes committed by Australian SAS troops in Afghanistan, there have been calls for the War Memorial to immediately reflect the allegations in its exhibitions.  Memorial director Matt Anderson has suggested that curators will indeed do just that.  Similarly, former Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie has suggested that the SAS exhibit be removed altogether.  The prime minister has responded meekly, saying only that all such changes will need to be approved by the War Memorial's board.

But it should be clear that it would not fit the purpose of the War Memorial to foreground the bad acts of a few soldiers.  Of course, wherever criminality is proved, it should be punished to the fullest extent, and if this comes to pass, no one would suggest that it be whitewashed from the history of Australia's war in Afghanistan.  Yet it would not be, and should not be presented as, the sum total, or even the most important part, of that history.  Nor should the war in Afghanistan, despite its unprecedented length, be allowed to overshadow Australia's larger military history.

The War Memorial's curators are charged with telling the full story of Australians at war.  That story is overwhelmingly a story of courage, discipline, loyalty and other virtues, demonstrated in defence of our home, our values and our traditional liberties.  Australians have fought honourably from the Sommes to Kokoda to Long Tan and beyond, including in Afghanistan.

This is the truth to which the War Memorial is dedicated.  Undue emphasis on the bad acts of a few at the expense of this larger story would not be truthful.  It would, in fact, be deeply misleading.

Getting this larger story wrong is unfair to service members and veterans and their families.  Tens of thousands of Australians have served in Afghanistan.  Hundreds of thousands have served our country.  They should not be tarred with guilt by association.

Moreover, allowing these allegations to overshadow the true story of Australia's military history is unfair to civilians as well.  The story that the War Memorial and its curators exist to tell, they hold in trust for the Australian people, as a source of strength and meaning for all of us.  The pride and fellow feeling engendered by contemplating the sacrifices of men and women down the generations is integral to our identity and democracy.

It has been claimed that notice can be given to these allegations in a way that avoids denigrating the longer tradition.  Perhaps.  But Admiral Barrie's suggestion that a significant piece of Australia's military history simply be erased does not inspire confidence.  More broadly, we should be suspicious given the turn taken by so many of our other cultural bodies.  Because just as the War Memorial is now implying that in the telling of our military history, "warts and all" means mostly warts, the truth about our country is now regularly and widely misrepresented

Australia's cultural bodies now routinely see it as their mission to subject our nation, history and traditions to relentless critique.  The ABC, the universities and the bureaucracy all now insist that Australia must atone for its various sins, which together constitute, we are told, historic and systemic injustice.  The institutions of Australia, and the customs that support them, are held in contempt and this contempt has been forcefully injected into mainstream culture.

This is why every national event, from Australia Day to sporting matches, is accompanied by some attempt to demoralise us.  Not even the national anthem is safe.  The point is to wear us down and prepare us for revolution.

Meanwhile, the real story of Australia is left untold or is actively suppressed.

The truth is this:  Australia is a great democracy that has provided peace and prosperity for people from all over the world.  More so than perhaps any other nation, Australia was founded on the idea that our rules and institutions should be dedicated to improving the lives of the common people, not to shoring up the fortunes of a few or implementing some grand ideological project.  In this task, we have been astonishingly successful and Australians have generally enjoyed a standard of living unimaginable to our various ancestors.  Our history is not, of course, an unbroken string of successes.  But our failures are recognisable only as exceptions, and the proper way to think about resolving them is by drawing on our past, not by abandoning it.

Instead of celebrating our way of life, a small, self-appointed, unaccountable and heavily-subsidised cultural elite is making a concerted effort to disestablish Australian values ― to separate our every institution, ranging from the smallest custom to the apparatus of state itself, from our traditional notions of the good, the true and the right and to rebuild them in the image of an ideology that is foreign to our nation and its history.  The central question is which values should rule;  those of this social justice ideology or those of mainstream Australians?  The values that make us weak or those that have made us strong?

For a long time, the Australian military has managed to avoid being dragged into this culture war.  Given the importance of Anzac and our military history to the nation, it would be an unthinkable loss were the War Memorial to become just another Australian institution alienated from mainstream values and undermining its own mission.  To put it bluntly, it must not be allowed to happen.

Modern Labor's Forgotten Workers

What ACTU boss Sally McManus said about blue-collar workers at the National Press Club a few days ago doesn't quite compare with Hillary Clinton describing Donald Trump's supporters as a "basket of deplorables".

But the comments from McManus, nonetheless, provide an insight into the priorities of the ACTU and show how far removed from the opinion of mainstream Australians the union movement has become.

The ACTU used to help Labor get elected to government.  In 2007 the ACTU's campaign against WorkChoices was pivotal to Kevin Rudd's electoral success.  Today unions might still provide Labor with the money and the arms and legs for election campaigns, but the policy preoccupations of the unions' leadership increasingly reflect the concerns of a far-from-representative cohort of the Australian population.

To be fair, McManus was not talking about blue-collar workers as such, for in the context of the debate about the Labor Party's policy on climate change, McManus described the focus of the as-yet-undeclared Labor leadership aspirant, Joel Fitzgibbon on the employment of blue-collar workers as "narrow" and "old-fashioned".

McManus said "Climate change is not an issue that affects just one group of workers ... In many different ways, a whole lot of industries like our tourism industry and others, are going to be affected by climate change.  So whenever we narrow our thinking and we have some idea, old-fashioned idea actually, of blue-collar workers, we are really narrowing who are talking about because climate change affects everyone."

McManus might think the idea of "blue-collar workers" is old-fashioned, but there's at least one million Australians employed in blue-collar jobs.

It's difficult to imagine Scott Morrison talking of blue-collar work as "old-fashioned", which goes some way to explaining the extraordinary result of an opinion survey reported in these pages on Monday.

In a poll in eight Labor-held seats in suburban and inner-regional areas in Queensland, NSW, Tasmania and Western Australia when voters were asked which party was represents "working Australians" 46 per cent of voters said the ALP and 38 per cent the Liberal Party.  That's not an overwhelming outcome for Labor, given it regards itself as the party of the workers.

There was another interesting survey reported this week.  A poll of 1000 Australians conducted by JWS Research showed that Labor's climate change wars are fascinating to party insiders but not very relevant to anyone else.

When people were asked to name three issues that personally interested them and that the Australian government should focus on only 19 per cent of those surveyed replied "the environment-climate change".  Or put another way, climate change is not one of the three most important issues to 81 per cent of Australians.  That is hardly the sort of finding one would expect given the media attention devoted to the topic.

Hospitals, health care and ageing, the economy and finances, and employment and wages are the issues Australians are focused on and will be for sometime yet.

The Morrison government is not one for enacting sweeping philosophical ambitions or developing grand narratives of political economy.  However survey results such as these demonstrate the scope for the Coalition next year and beyond to reshape the country's political and policy landscape.

The development of an agenda for industrial relations reform that's presented, not as a productivity-enhancing measure as was WorkChoices, but as a way to get more Australians into work should not be beyond the capacity of the Coalition.

Similarly, if the Coalition does decide, as it should, to try to repeal the legislated increases in the superannuation guarantee, it will face a ferocious onslaught from the Labor Party, the ACTU and the superannuation industry ― but it's a fight the Coalition can win if it is presented as a necessary response in a post-COVID world.

While Labor spends its time talking to itself about climate change and to the 19 per cent of Australians concerned about the issue, the Coalition is talking about jobs.

In all likelihood if Australians were surveyed and asked to name one economic policy of the ALP they would say opposition to tax cuts.  The reality is that at the moment, as Labor MPs such as Fitzgibbon, and Chris Bowen have basically acknowledged, Labor has nothing much to say to the workers of Australia, whether they're blue collar or not.

Quarantine Diary

I am now halfway into my 14-day internment in the Howard Springs Quarantine Facility, located in the Top End, a mere 25km from Darwin.  The complex, complete with pool, theatre, tavern, and tennis courts, was built by a Japanese energy company in 2012.  After it completed the $55 billion gas plant on Darwin Harbour in 2018, it simply shut the gates, handed the keys to the NT government, and disappeared back to Japan with not so much as a sayonara.  Since then, the compound has become a very costly millstone around the government's neck.  That is, until the arrival of Coronavirus and the ensuing border closures.  Someone sitting at a desk in Darwin twigged that the mining camp could be reborn as a quarantine facility for displaced Australians.  Fifteen minutes into the journey from Darwin Airport to Howard Springs aboard a rustic bus which brought back happy memories of school excursions, we received the following text message:  "Dear Resident.  Please be aware that there has been an increase of snake sightings.  Take note of your surroundings."  Since having arrived here, I have heeded this warning, taking great note of my surroundings at all times.  Rather disappointingly, I am yet to sight a snake.  I have however, sighted a number of skinks, a pair of biblically-proportioned grasshoppers getting up to no good on the hot footpath and a large, screeching owl, which just after dusk, swooped down the middle of the road on the other side of the fence.  I am interned in the Orange Zone, cellblock L5 with my mother and two friends.  We each have our own room with a single bed, air-conditioning which cuts through the 40-degree heat and bright orange cupboards in which to store our few possessions.  The showers are extremely powerful, presumably designed to remove the grease from very dirty miners after a long day on the job.  Police patrol the area a few times a day with a hello and a friendly wave.  What a contrast to Victoria that is.  The law here dictates that as long as you are on your veranda, you can be gloriously muzzle free.  All other times require the wearing of mask, otherwise you are slapped with a whopping $5,000 fine.  We are officially permitted 40 minutes of "yard" time per day, but this is not altogether adhered to.  If you complete a full circuit of the Orange Zone's footpaths which loop around the cabins, you can cover a good 2kms.

Time "inside" is turning out to be considerably easier than expected.  Having spent the last nine months in Melbourne, I am used to a complete loss of freedom, mandatory mask wearing and oppressive police enforcement, neatly topped off with disproportionate fines.  I suppose that this conditioning is one thing I can thank Dan Andrews for.  Mealtimes are sometimes a highlight, but most often a lowlight.  A furtive knock on the door, or sound of a large trolley rumbling by, indicates that our food has arrived, and we emerge from our rooms to snatch up the morning's offerings.  The same routine for lunch, which usually arrives while we are still recovering from the assaults of the breakfast baked beans, omelette, and sausage.  Dinner is anybody's guess, and we are becoming very adept at keeping edible lunch salads for when the kitchen staff have decided to resort to inedible meat loaf or grey slices of lamb for the evening meal.  We have been so very fortunate with our neighbours.  On Day Two, we discovered that the cabins next to ours are inhabited by musicians Joe Camilleri and Claude Carranza.  They are members of the Australian band The Black Sorrows and are on their way to tour New South Wales and South Australiaa.  It took a while to coax them out of their rooms to practise on their veranda within earshot of others, but after a few nights, they came alive again after months of being isolated from each other.  Soon, practice turned into a full show complete with banter for a highly appreciative, and in the truest sense of the word, captive audience.  Their music filled the camp with joy.  Gradually, the nightly concerts began to attract more and more residents of the Orange Zone, until one night, the set went on just a little bit too long and the crowd became just a little bit too big.  The police shut the whole thing down.  Joe told us afterwards that they had not really wanted to, but that they had a job to do.  Such is life.

Unsurprisingly, most people here are refugees from Victoria.  After swapping stories, I realised to my horror that we had only just made it out.  At Tullamarine airport, the government had recruited a number of officious-looking women, given them hi-vis jackets, clipboards, pens and seemingly untrammelled power.  They were waiting for us at airport security, doing their utmost to prevent anyone from leaving.  Some passengers were given formal cautions but allowed through, trembling at the treatment they had received on the way.  Others were unable to produce the correct documentation and were summarily sent back home.  One or two made it onto the plane, only to be exposed as non-compliant, and were forcibly disembarked, along with their luggage.  Thankfully we managed to talk our way through without having to show any paperwork.  We didn't even know that it would be required.  Everyone I have chatted with could not stand another minute of Dan Andrews' dictatorship, the police state he has created and the economic and social devastation he has wrought on the place.  The distrust and loathing are palpable.  A great many families have packed up their belongings and are seeking a new life in other states.  The atmosphere, however, is one of relief offset by cheerfulness and optimism because we are once again masters of our own destiny.  Everyone has decided to take back control of their lives from unelected bureaucrats, "experts" and government overreach.  Many say that they will only return once Andrews is no longer in power because they have no faith that he will not hesitate to lock them up again as soon as there is a resurgence of the virus.  It will be very interesting to see the migration statistics when they are released in December.  I suspect that this is just the beginning of the exodus from Victoria.

America Is Losing Its Wall Against The Authoritarians

A few days ago Alexander Downer wrote on these pages that if he were American he would have voted for Donald Trump ― but through gritted teeth.

My view is different from Downer.  I would have voted for Trump eagerly and enthusiastically.  You could argue that in 2016 there were arguments for both Clinton and Trump.  Not this time.  In 2020, the case for Trump was overwhelming ― although based on the likely election result, it looks like a majority of the American electorate didn't have quite the same assessment.

Usually when people complain about Trump's personality it's because they refuse to acknowledge the success of his policies.  In October last year, unemployment in the United States was at its lowest level in 50 years.  Trump did more for the job opportunities and economic empowerment of minorities in America than any president since Reagan.  At this election, it appears Trump won a greater share of the minority vote than any previous Republican.

Critics complain about Trump's rhetoric on China but they never explain what they would do differently in the face of an authoritarian and imperialist power.

The suggestion that Trump is some sort of vandal of constitutional propriety is a meme of a media that refuses to countenance that the Democrats might mean what they say and attempt to stack the US Supreme Court.

However, the main reason why I'd have voted for Trump was not because of economics, it was because of cultural values.  Trump offered an alternative to the ideology that started on college campuses and is now engulfing the country that defines individuals according to their race, that regards the democratic political process as a tool of oppression, and uses violence to shut down freedom of speech.

American historian Anne Applebaum in a thoughtful article a week ago in The Atlantic titled 'The Answer to Extremism Isn't More Extremism' asked why 'educated conservatives', who knew Trump's faults would still vote for him.  As she correctly noted, many conservatives, 'educated' or not, are deeply concerned by intellectual trends such as 'an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty'.

Many conservatives believed that re-electing Trump while not a complete answer to all of this, would have been a start.

According to Applebaum:  "Anyone who actually cares about academic freedom, or the future of objective reporting, or the ideas behind the statues built to honor American democrats in the country's public squares, must hope that Trump loses.  If he win a second term, extremism on the left will not be stopped."

As one of the world's leading historians of authoritarianism and communism, it's perplexing that Applebaum would advocate a form of cultural appeasement.

"I hope that educated conservatives think hard about what will happen if Biden's moderate-left campaign fails:  It is extremely unlike that its adherents and spokespeople will shrug their shoulders and decide that, yes, Trump is right after all.  They are much more likely to move further to the extremes.  Americans will witness the radicalization of the Democratic Party, as well as the radicalization of the powerful and influential intellectual, academic, and cultural left, in a manner that we have never before seen."

It's interesting to speculate whether before the election there was anyone in America urging 'educated progressives' to vote for Trump to avoid the radicalisation of the Republican Party and the intellectual, academic, and cultural right.  Probably not.

Yet for all the potential consequences Applebaum describes of a Trump victory, 68 million Americans nevertheless voted for him;  72 million Americans voted for Biden.

Many commentators before and now after the election have spoken about how deeply divided is America.  That's true.

But many 'educated conservatives' would respond that a country or a community or a family is only as divided as it wants to be.

An 'educated conservative' who voted for Donald Trump would ask what side of politics it was sowing the seeds of division.

The interest of an Australian in the culture wars of America's universities, sports fields, and boardrooms is that inevitably what begins in Berkeley, California ends up in Ultimo, Sydney.

We Need To Put Corruption Watchdogs On Short Leash

Labor's push for a so-called federal anti-corruption body would be an undemocratic and illiberal forum for legalised defamation to be weaponised against political opponents.

The most recent call for a federal Independent Commission Against Corruption comes on the heels of last week's revelations that the CEO of Australia Post and the chairman of the Australian Securities & Investments Commission had both been stood aside pending investigations.

The first related to the awarding of luxury watches to Australia Post senior managers in late 2018, and the second to payments made by the corporate regulator for the ASIC chairman's tax advice.

These events have been exposed and are being investigated within the existing regulatory framework.  The enthusiasm for a special-purpose anti-corruption body to deal with these kinds of issues deserves greater scrutiny.

The risks of wide-ranging anti-corruption agencies are not insignificant.  Tackling corruption is a virtuous mission but agencies committed to this are prone to becoming kangaroo courts running show trials where the rule of law and respecting the legal rights of individuals caught up in their investigations are ignored.

In NSW, the Independent Commission Against Corruption has left a trail of destruction in its wake since its establishment in 1988.  It has proved more effective at destroying lives and careers than it has at tackling genuine wrongdoing.

ICAC also has shown a tendency to exceed its legislated authority, as the NSW Court of Appeal found in the commission's pursuits of former NSW premier Nick Greiner in 1994, and the High Court found in its pursuit of former crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen in 2015.

An explanation for why the political class would be so enthusiastic to take a chance on a federal ICAC is the opportunity to weaponise it to target political enemies.

A federal ICAC would operate as a forum for legalised defamation.  As the NSW ICAC has demonstrated over three decades, being referred to ICAC carries a high political cost that can be enough to end careers.

The fact that these bodies are protected from defamation law is deeply concerning.  Once they have these powers, defamatory and slanderous claims can be stated as fact, with no legal recourse for the accused.

Federal Labor is an enthusiastic supporter of replicating the NSW ICAC at the commonwealth level.  Labor and shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus have overseen no fewer than 10 referrals of Coalition MPs to law enforcement bodies since 2015.  None has resulted in any charges.

Although in opposition, in 2019 my freedom-of-information request revealed that Dreyfus personally directed the bureaucrats in the Attorney-General's department administering the Foreign Interference and Transparency Scheme to target conservative activists speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney.  Conference organiser Andrew Cooper received a letter from the department to produce information and correspondence related to the conference within 14 days or risk being jailed for six months.

One proposal has been introduced to parliament this week.  Known as the Australian Federal Integrity Commission and introduced by federal independent MP Helen Haines on Monday, it would allow public hearings to take place when it is in the public interest and allow any member of the public to make complaints.

Public interest is an ambiguous concept that would ultimately only be determined by the commission itself.  In other words, it would have the power to run inquiries and hearings at any time and into any matter it chooses at its discretion.  Allowing any member of the public to make complaints will be used most of all by the political class.

Like the NSW ICAC, the body proposed by Haines would be empowered to make findings of fact.  In a court of law, allegations of facts are fiercely tested and proceedings are governed by the rules of evidence and the presumption of innocence.  This is not the case at ICAC.

Over centuries the institution of parliament has developed the traditions and practices, based on intense partisanship and its adversarial structure, to scrutinise its members and hold members of the government to account.

Many modern politicians would prefer to outsource this and have anti-corruption agencies do their work as parliamentary opposition for them.

The federal government is in a no-win position.  Since it committed to introducing some kind of anti-corruption body in 2018, it has tried to thread the needle on a proposal that would avoid the excesses of NSW ICAC.  Every instance of delay opens it to criticism that it is weak on corruption.

Government wrongdoing and shortcomings in integrity are inevitable consequences when bureaucrats and politicians have vast powers and opportunities to squander taxpayer money.  The fact that the preferred solution of so many is to grant more powers to more bureaucrats is indicative that improved governance and management of taxpayer money is not on the agenda.

Danger Across The Ditch As Incompetent Leader Ardern Wins Office

Nobody skewered Barack Obama during his presidency like legendary comedian Dennis Miller.  "It's not all that dramatic with me and Obama," Miller once told his audience.  "It's not racist, it's not classist, it's not ideological.  It's just that he's an inept civil servant.  He's the guy at the toll booth who's constantly giving out the wrong change."

The same could be said about New Zealand Prime Minister ­Jacinda Ardern.  She's a brilliant politician, but has been a grossly incompetent administrator.  And with her seismic re-election on Saturday, New Zealand is in for a dangerous three years.

"There is a distinct chance that if we don't sort out our economic challenges quickly, New Zealand could end up a failed state," says Oliver Hartwich, executive director of leading think tank the New Zealand Initiative.

Hartwich is right to be worried.  New Zealand has been hit particularly hard by the Ardern government's heavy-handed coronavirus response.  Before COVID-19, tourism was New Zealand's largest export industry, employing 8.4 per cent of its workforce and bringing in over one fifth of the country's foreign exchange earnings.  With corona, this key plank of the NZ economy has been shut down for the foreseeable future.

Fundamental economic indicators are even more concerning.  According to the OECD, New Zealand's GDP could fall by 10 per cent in 2020.  Likewise, unemployment is tipped to rise to just under 9 per cent in 2021 as New Zealand's $14bn corona wage subsidy program ends.  Public debt will soar from 19 per cent of GDP in 2019 to 56 per cent in 2026.

Jacinda Ardern is perhaps the worst person to lead New Zealand through this economic turbulence.  Her first term has been marked by political triumphs but public policy disasters.  Ardern's empathic — even admirable — responses to events like the Christchurch massacre and the White Island volcano have masked a damning suite of failures in government.

Ardern squeaked into office in 2017 promising to deliver 100,000 homes within a decade, but ultimately built just over 500.  Other projects, like a rail link from Auckland airport to the CBD and a new hospital for Dunedin were attempted, but quickly abandoned.  The $3bn Provincial Growth Fund — extracted by Winston Peters in coalition negotiations — has created more jobs in Wellington than it has in the regions.  Labour came to government promising to drive down carbon emissions, homelessness and child poverty;  all three have risen.

As for what Ardern has planned for a second term, the details are patchy.  Labour ran something of a "small target" strategy during the election, relying on the Prime Minister's star power and perceived success in warding off the coronavirus.

But from what we do know about their "policy-lite" platform, Labour will likely exacerbate New Zealand's economic woes.  Hiking income tax, re-regulating the industrial relations system and a bloodcurdling plan for 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030 could turn the corona-induced economic shock into a permanent state of impoverishment for thousands of Kiwis.  Worse-still is the possibility — still not ruled out at time of writing — that Ardern will go into coalition with the Green Party, with their plans for a new "wealth tax" and climate change evangelism on par with the Greens' Australian counterparts.

The great shame is that just three years ago, we could look to New Zealand as a beacon of good government and sensible economic and social reforms.

Over their nine years, the National Party governments of John Key and Bill English cut income and company taxes, brought the budget back to surplus, reformed the labour market and privatised state assets.

The hefty economic windfall was deployed towards a revamped welfare system inspired by what Key and English called "social ­investment".  The leaner but substantially better-targeted spend led to dramatic improvements in everything from welfare dependency and school attendance to crime rates.

But sadly, the National Party that submitted itself to the people on Saturday night was a shell of its old self in government.  It put forward a mixed bag of policies — some decent, like repealing planning laws and temporary tax cuts to kickstart the economy, and some just silly, like introducing a target for electric vehicles.  In any event, the opposition failed to put forward a clear, coherent alternative to Labour.

Throw in the spectacle of having three leaders in five months, constant infighting, and a $4bn hole in its pre-election costings, the Nationals were clearly nowhere near "match fit" in 2020.  They got the shellacking they deserved.

But the surge in support for the libertarian ACT party — which went from 0.5 per cent of the vote to 8 per cent — shows that there is still a constituency for lower taxes and smaller government.  In other words, many were looking for an alternative to Labour's agenda, but the Nationals just didn't offer it.

The end result should be familiar to Australians.  Alarmingly, there are strong parallels between the political dynamics in New Zealand and the state of Victoria:  A first-term Labour government that has steamrolled a weak and divided opposition, a popular leader with a big mandate and a hard-left political temperament, a degraded and politicised public sector, and a largely uncritical and compliant media.

The only hope for New Zealand now is that, whatever horrifying plans that Labour has in store, Jacinda Ardern is just as hopeless at actually implementing them in her second term as she was in her first.

Australia's Travel Strategy ― Imprisoning Its People Until A Vaccine Arrives ― Is Illiberal And Naive

If you were thinking of seeing friends and family from Australia next year, think again.

Maybe after living under Boris Johnson's restrictions for the next six months, you'd want to get as far away from your house as possible.  Or maybe Australians ― some of whom haven't been able to leave the house for more than two hours since July ― wanted to visit you.

But our federal government won't let you.

And it is hard to be optimistic when you read two key assumptions Frydenberg made about the budget when speaking to the National Press Club on Wednesday:  "International travel, including by tourists and international students, is assumed to remain largely closed off until late next year and then gradually return over time, and a vaccine to be available around the end of 2021 is one of the assumptions in the budget."

The vaccine assumption is naivety.  The travel assumption is economically catastrophic and hurts the freedoms of Australians and those who want to visit our country.  Frankly, that anyone facing 60 years of debt would cut off a major revenue stream, especially when there are safe alternatives, is astounding.

International travel is vital to the Australian economy.  In 2019, there were 9.4 million international visitors ― 344,000 of those from the UK ― and the tourism industry employed 666,000 people ― 5.2% of total employment, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

And as of 2019, international students brought $34.9 billion a year to Australia.

Australia cannot afford to lose this money for another full year.  And potentially more years to come.

Because that's the reality of waiting for a vaccine.  No one knows when a vaccine will be available.  And even when one does become available, there are now doubts about whether it will be effective.

The Oxford University vaccine, which Australians have thought of as our saviour, needed to be paused after a participant experienced an adverse reaction.  Clearly, we're still a long way from a cure.

These are only the economic problems with this ban on travel, but there is bigger picture here ― a liberal democratic government is stopping citizens from leaving its country, and preventing our friends and family from overseas visiting us.

Between March 25 and July 31, 69,310 Australians were prevented by the government from leaving the country, and only 22,640 were granted permission.  Among those was Shane Warne, who was allowed to leave to the UK commentate cricket.  Among those prevented was Donna Burton, who couldn't see her only daughter get married and had to forfeit her £1,100 air fare to London.

These numbers have improved as Australians find ways to increase their chances of the governments accepting their application ― such as moving to another country for three months as opposed to the traditional length of "however long you would like".  Yet still 13,311 applications to travel overseas have been outright rejected, over 10% of applications.

This banning means Australia joins Belarus, Namibia and the Ivory Coast as countries that have stopped its residents travelling overseas, even though they can quarantine themselves on their return.  New Zealand, famous for its aggressive eradication strategy, never even went that far.

And 27,000 Australians have registered to return home from overseas, some have been waiting months.  They will have to wait longer.

For Brits, and the rest of the world, the border is closed.  As Frydenberg says, it will be until late next year, assuming a vaccine is found.

Britain has a much worse problem with coronavirus infections than Australia.  There are less than 250 active cases in Australia, and keeping its citizens safe is one of the most fundamental roles of government.

That does not mean a ban on Brits travelling here is the right response.  There are safe ways in which the government can stop coronavirus spreading rapidly while also keeping key freedoms alive and money coming in.

Outside of Victoria, most of Australia has done well with installing mandatory hotel quarantine for international arrivals and keeping the virus out of the community.  Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently praised how well home quarantining worked at the start of the virus as well for returning travellers from China.

But the plan can't be locking down until a vaccine is found.  Eradication has not been achieved anywhere in the world, and if the Australian government continue down this path, no cases will mean no hope for the 666,000 people employed in tourism last year and no hope for the thousands cut off from their friends and families by Australia's border closure.

The Australian government, like all governments, must learn to live with this virus and keep us a part of the world.

The ABC Has Just Moved Further From The Mainstream

Perhaps the staff at the ABC voted themselves a pay rise so they could donate the extra money to the 606,000 Australians who have lost their job in the private sector since March because of the lockdowns the public broadcaster has been amongst the loudest in cheerleading.

Or perhaps ABC staff simply think they are better and more deserving of a pay rise than mainstream Australians who are self-employed or work for small businesses.

In April the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister, the Hon Ben Morton asked the Australian Public Service Commissioner (APSC) to write to non-Australian Public Service agencies, informing them of the government's expectations that they implement a six-month deferral of pay increases.

That request has been largely agreed to by non-APS agencies, except for the tin-eared pay increases voted for by staff at ASIC and the Australian Deep Space Communication Complex.

This week, ABC staff voted to accept a 2% pay increase over sensibly freezing their pay for 6 months in line with the government's public service wage freeze policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Community and Public Sector Union called on ABC staff to reject the pay freeze, advising members they deserve the $5 million worth of pay rises.

This is further proof that the ABC, despite their insistence to the contrary, are not a part of Australia's cultural fabric but are completely removed from mainstream Australia.

My analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data found that jobs in the private sector decreased by 5% between 14 March and 5 September, while they increased by 2.4% in the public sector.  This represents around 606,000 jobs lost in the private sector and 19,700 gained in the public sector.

The ABC staffs decision to grant themselves a pay increase in defiance of government and APSC advice is further evidence of Australia's "K-shaped recession" where the private sector is languishing while the public sector and the ABC are shielded from the real-world impacts of the lockdowns and recession.

In May Communications Minister Paul Fletcher wrote to ABC Chair Ita Buttrose advising that he expects the ABC to comply with the six-month wage freeze, saying that it would be a "highly appropriate gesture of solidarity with journalists in the commercial media" who have been smashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  He is right.

Paul Murphy, the Chief Executive of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, argued Minister Fletcher's intervention was an issue of ABC independence.

Given his apparent concern for independence, Paul Murphy will presumably be investigating the extent to which ABC journalistic integrity was compromised by payments it received from news site The New Daily which is funded by Industry Super.

One of the ABC's key editorial standards it to "Ensure that editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by political, sectional, commercial or personal interests".  ABC advocates often cite its complete independence from commercial interests as being vital for balanced journalism in the national interest.

Yet many journalists at the national broadcaster, along with those at The Guardian, have called for the ABC to get access to the Federal Government and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's planned digital platforms reform which would see advertising revenue from Google and Facebook syphoned off to commercial media.

If the ABC were to gain access to this questionable revenue stream, then a key part of the ABC balance sheet would be directly linked to the commercial success of Google and Facebook.  So much for independence from commercial interests.

Surely a better outcome both for the ABC, and taxpayers, would be privatisation, or at the very least, to allow the ABC to air commercials since they are so keen on a slice of advertising revenue in the first place.

Detachment from commercial interests causes independence issues too.  The ABC continues to run a pro-COVID elimination, pro-lockdown narrative, while it remains almost untouched by the pandemic.

While the rest of the media is being smashed as advertising revenue dries up, ABC staff have opted for an incredibly tone-deaf pay rise.

Staff members at our national broadcaster now consider themselves morally superior and more worthy of a 2% pay rise than staff at Services Australia, Centrelink, the Department of Health and the Department of Social Services, who have all been on the front line of the response to this pandemic and have all taken a six-month pay freeze.

This self-indulgent pay rise, though, is merely the consequence of a deliberate strategy of ABC staff to further remove the organisation from the mainstream.  Last November the ABC altered its editorial policies and asked staff to stop using unifying words such as "us" and "our values".

Not being all in this together is official ABC policy.

Danandrewstan And The Death Of Melbourne, Explained

It was the image that shocked Australia and soon went global.  A pregnant woman, handcuffed in her own kitchen, in front of her children, as police officers seized every computer, tablet and cell phone in the house before frog-marching her off to the station.

It's the treatment that Australians are used to seeing meted out to drug traffickers, suspected terrorists and child pornography rings.  But in Zoe Lee Buhler's case, her "crime" was a Facebook post.

Zoe had tried to organise a protest against coronavirus restrictions in place in the state of Victoria.  For this, she was charged with "incitement", and now faces a sentence of up to 15 years.  She has been released on bail, and will go to court in January.

The most remarkable thing, though, is it's taken until now for some sort of protest movement to emerge.  Melbourne — Victoria's capital city — has been under some form of lockdown since March.  When the coronavirus first hit, the premiers governing Australia's eight states and territories descended into a kind of unspoken competition to see who could take the "toughest action" against the virus — that is, which leader could close the most businesses, destroy the most jobs, and stifle the most liberties in the name of being seen to be "doing something" about the virus.

It was a contest that hard-left Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews won by a mile.  Almost six months later, Melbourne is still under what is by far the strictest lockdown in Australia, and probably the world.  At time of writing, a city-wide curfew applies between 8 pm and 5 am.  Melburnians are permitted to leave the house for exercise for an hour a day and in groups of no more than two.  You're allowed to go out to get food as well, but only by yourself, and only once a day.  The increasingly few people with jobs must carry a government-issued permit indicating that they're allowed to go to work — and even then only if your job is deemed "essential".

If this shatters your idea of Australia as a rugged, relaxed, irreverent wonderland, then I apologise.  That Australia died long ago, to the extent it ever really existed at all.  Australia has no First Amendment, and its political culture is closer to continental Europe than the U.S.  Fundamental freedoms have been largely left to conventions inherited from the British.  They have proved fragile, though nobody ever imagined that they would be this fragile.

The fact that Melbourne has allowed itself to be decimated in the name of the coronavirus is as predictable as it is heartbreaking.  It's a city a bit like San Francisco or Seattle — A beautiful, vibrant, dynamic metropolis that until now had among the best food, culture and nightlife in the world.  But like America's coastal cities, left-wing politics is a package deal — street art in aid of one asinine cause or another almost becomes part of the scenery.

Daniel Andrews knows this and exploits it.  Somewhere along the way, he picked up the playbook of Democrats who preside over dysfunction, poverty, crime and thinly-veiled corruption, and make up for it all by wheeling out some woke gimmick every so often — almost always involving vast sums of public money.  The coronavirus has given him the best talking point of all:  "The economy versus human life".

It's the recurring theme in Andrews' interminable press conferences — daily sermons that are so theatrical and dishonest they would make Andrew Cuomo blush.  Behind him always, a purple banner with the state government's Orwellian coronavirus slogan, which can also be found plastered on billboards all over the city:  Staying Apart Keeps Us Together.

The media response is — with a few exceptions — fawning and uncritical, but it's the only real check or balance they have:  The state parliament has barely sat since March, and coronavirus restrictions have been made by executive fiat under dubious "emergency powers".

All that said, Andrews' hitherto insurmountable hold on power is slipping.  The lockdown has wrought enough joblessness, business closures and outright despair that people are starting to take notice.  Even in the People's Republic of Victoria, the mood is turning against the man now widely derided as "Chairman Dan".

But in the meantime, Melbourne's lockdowns continue.  Andrews sought an extension for his emergency powers, which the parliament inexplicably gave him.  And over the weekend, he announced a convoluted "roadmap to reopening" which basically means that Melburnians will enter Australia's sweltering summer under house arrest, and will be holding their Christmas dinners via Zoom.

It's a cautionary tale, and then some.  For the sake of a nasty strain of viral pneumonia, Victorians eagerly cashed in their freedoms for the promise of safety.  In so doing, they have turned one of the greatest cities in the world to a dystopian hellscape with no end in sight.

Living In Trumpland

If Donald Trump was looking a bit wobbly in the last few months, he certainly isn't anymore.  Not after the triumph of political communication that was the Republican National Convention last week.  It was a slam dunk, a masterpiece ― there is no other way to describe it.

Political conventions were always going to be a challenge this year.  The old format was off limits.  Both the major parties had to go virtual.

The Democrats embraced 'the new normal', stitching together a meandering, performative mess that ended up looking like a cross between an interminable Zoom meeting and the evening line-up on Channel 31.  It was a ham-fisted ploy to exploit Trump's supposed electoral vulnerability on the coronavirus.  But it backfired, putting a pathologically confused Joe Biden in front of technology with which he was cringe-inducingly uncomfortable.

The Republicans didn't bother with all that epidemiological virtue-signalling.  They just made a brilliant go of a bad situation, preserving the best of American political pageantry while turning the TV-only format to their advantage.  Orchestral strains, cinematic-quality videos, crisp shots of the White House and Capitol building, soaring addresses in front of Roman columns and enormous American flags ― Covid had given the incumbent party lemons and they made margaritas.

It was Trumpian by design.  Achievements were recited in quick succession.  Perceived weaknesses were flipped and used to exploit opponents.  It attacked and never defended.  It welcomed disillusioned Democrats with open arms.  It hammered the weaknesses of the opponent over and over and over again.  It floated like a butterfly and stung like a hydrogen bomb.

And it was a format clearly designed for their number one electoral asset.  The party managed to use every advantage of incumbency while staying true to Trump's outsider persona ― all the gravitas of the Oval Office with the production values of The Apprentice.  It took the president's star power, amplified it, and sent it rocketing out into middle America.

And Trump brought his A-game.  He worked the cameras, cracked jokes, indulged in the odd cheeky jab but stayed well out of the gutter.  But he also had some serious backup.  Mike Pence brought his understated statesmanship.  Mike Pompeo beamed in with the old city of Jerusalem as a backdrop.  African-American politicians from both parties lined up to assure Biden that, whatever he might believe, they were, in fact, black.

Covington kid-cum-defo millionaire Nicholas Sandmann fronted a slick video about his ordeal.  Gun-toting Missourians Mark and Patricia McCloskey gave a pre-recorded message from the house they defended from a horde of protesters.  Cuban refugee turned gasoline magnate Maximo Alvarez choked up as he equated the millennial socialism of the Democrats with the bastardry of Fidel Castro.

Small-business owners lined up with success stories from Trump's tax and red-tape cuts.  Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng spoke in support of the President's handling of Xi Jinping.  Clergymen of every denomination rejoiced in Trump's protection of religious freedom.

There were football coaches, war veterans, factory workers, lobster fishermen and Indian chiefs.  Real stories ― American stories ― each with their own reason for supporting Donald Trump.  For all the Left's talk about 'coalition-building', Trump had gone and done it.  Bigly.

As for the speeches themselves, none of them missed ― not one.  The vision was coherent.  There was a narrative:  freedom, the inherent dignity of the individual, personal choice  life, liberty and keeping America great.  Pence drew together the threads when he said that "the Democrats' agenda is based on government control, ours on freedom".

Other speakers didn't hold back.  They dropped truth bombs like a political Dresden.  The Democrats were the racists, because they fixated on race.  They were the oppressors, because of their love of taxes, speech codes, attacks on religion and seizure of private property.  They were the risk, because a political veteran of 47 years and sidekick to the most ineffectual and underwhelming president since Jimmy Carter would be a step backwards.  And as for policy, all the Democrats had to offer was a confused grab bag of esoteric grievances, stitched together with voodoo economics, cultural nihilism and fear and loathing of the incumbent.

If all of this sounds like a glowing endorsement of the Trump administration, it isn't necessarily meant to be.  It's not like we don't have our disappointments with Trump.  I have a few:  social media regulation is probably well-intentioned but will have serious unintended consequences;  the deficit is still high (though to be fair, Trump's budget cuts have been rejected by Congress);  it wasn't right to leave the Kurds high and dry in Syria and Turkey;  he has a protectionist streak ― though nowhere near as much as is often claimed.

All that said, overall Trump has done a great job and deserves to be re-elected, but that's not the point.  This isn't about who should win, but about who will win.

He may have his foibles, but Trump has us hooked.  He's made our values come alive in a way they haven't in a generation, belted out with the showmanship of a billionaire TV star.  He praises our heroes, he fights the bad guys.  He says what most can't even say in the tea room at work, let alone to an audience of millions.

We live in Trumpland now, all of us.  The Left are obsessed with him to the point of outright insanity.  Those on the right fall somewhere between evangelical devotion and begrudging admiration on a handful of issues.  And by November, a fair chunk of the middle will gravitate towards the president too.

For all the imagery of Trump as a bumbling oaf, he's the best political performer America has seen since Abraham Lincoln.  And yeah, he fumbles, but he keeps going and in any event, he doesn't seem to care.  And he's ubiquitous:  he's on our TV screens, our smart phones and our Twitter feeds.

It's the best show in town.  And if the last episode is anything to go by, it's probably about to be renewed for four more seasons.

The WHO Has Let The Cat Out Of The Bag: COVID-19 Is Now More About Politics Than Public Health

The World Health Organisation's Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last Friday that "we will not ― we cannot ― go back to the way things were … the pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change".

Tedros also said, "the pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be:  cleaner skies and rivers".

It is noteworthy that in an address ostensibly about COVID-19 Tedros spent more time talking about the use of coal in the UK than about the loss of democracy, freedom, jobs, and livelihoods across the world due to lockdown restrictions.  Perhaps as the head of an unelected and unaccountable global bureaucracy, such matters don't concern Tedros.

These remarks are significant because they are the first time someone from the global political class has said out loud what many have been thinking:  the COVID-19 pandemic appears now to be more about politics and agendas than public health.

And for those wondering what the connection is between COVID-19 and climate change ― both come from China, but apparently require extraordinary government powers to deal with, and neither are over until the elites say so.

The remarks also give the public the first hint that the political class want to turn the tools of the pandemic, that is, border closures, lockdowns, state of emergency powers, to climate change.

How far Australia's political elite will follow the guidance of the WHO we cannot yet say.

What we do know is that the goalposts over when the lockdown measures are to end have been repeatedly moved, and so the political class have form in misleading the public.

Originally Australians were told that we could return to some recognisably normal way of life once a high degree of confidence was attained that the hospital system would not be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients.

This was the logic behind "flattening the curve".

On the most generous reading of the data, the curve was flattened by the end of April as the reproduction rate of the virus dropped below one in all states, meaning it would eventually die out.

It rose above one in Victoria recently because of the failure of Daniel Andrews with hotel quarantining.

Horror predictions by the Department of Health that under the best case scenario which included "quarantine plus isolation plus social distancing" a peak of 5,000 intensive care units would be required never came to pass.  They were out by around a factor of 50.

Rather than fessing up to their over-reactions, governments changed their tune from shifting the curve to suppression, to elimination, and then to the need for a vaccine before life can go on as was.

But the goalposts are again shifting.

In his same address last Friday, Tedros also said:  "even if we do have a vaccine, it won't end the pandemic on its own".

The public is being primed to not only let this drag on until 2021, but potentially for much longer.

This is fine for the political class and well connected.

Not only do they get more power and relatively higher incomes as all the jobs being destroyed are in the private sector not in the bureaucracy

The rules that they make also don't apply to themselves, only to everyone else.

Shane Warne can leave the nation to commentate cricket in the UK, but regular Australians who want to go to their mother's funeral are being denied permission.

Black Lives Matter protestors took over city streets across the nation with the explicit permission of those in authority while mainstream Australians couldn't go to work.

It is apparently easier to get into South Australia if you are a foreign student with a lot of money than an Australian citizen from Victoria.

Professional AFL and NRL footballers went back to playing football in June and May respectively, while suburban football was banned.

Presumably, Tedros would approve of Daniel Andrews attempted power grab in Victoria.  Both are, after all, in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party.  Tedros through the funding the CCP provides to the WHO and Andrews through his signing onto the One Belt One Road scheme.

Australians need to understand that their patience and goodwill to those in power reflected in positive approval polls is being taken advantage of.  Tedros is just the first to say so out loud.

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.

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.

Information Commissioner To Investigate SBS Over Deleted Bushfires Article

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has looked at my submission and decided to commence a review into the rejection of my Freedom of Information request seeking information from SBS as to why they deleted an old Australian Associated Press article from their website titled:  "Fires not due to climate change:  expert — covered here back in March.

The 2013 article resurfaced in November 2019 and was shared around social media by many Australians in the wake of opportunistic alarmism from the green politicians and left wing media that the bushfires at the time were the result of climate change.  But on November 12, it was inexplicably taken down from the SBS website.

The article featured the considered opinion of retired Monash University researcher and former CSIRO scientist David Packham OAM, who said linking bushfires to climate change is "absolute nonsense" and reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush is urgently needed to reduce the intensity of bushfires.  

A day or two later, after media scrutiny as to why it was deleted, the SBS put the article back online but featured a new preamble.  The substance of the new paragraphs was to confirm that Packham still held the same views then as he did in 2013.  In response, Packham said "The most important (factor) is the dryness of the fuel, which comes from hot dry weather ... the theory is as solid as the universal theory of gravitation." 

One could be mistaken for thinking that the SBS felt that the link between climate change and bushfires was now unimpeachable and that this update would discredit Packham. 

A manual search I conducted found that SBS had never before updated old AAP articles on its website.

Public broadcasters have an extra duty of care to be impartial.  Taking down an old article, not even authored by them, because it doesn't fit the established groupthink, appears to be an act of bias worth investigating.

It is interesting to note the SBS is a member of the 'Your Right to Know' campaign, which argues for "A suite of changes to FOI law to reduce and restrict the significant delays, obstacles, cost and exemptions that allow government agencies to prevent disclosure." 

These are the very tools the SBS has been employing to avoid oversight in regards to this issue.  It advocates for the very kind of transparency and accountability in areas of government that it will not accept for itself.

A detailed legal reasoning behind my appeal to the OAIC is available here.

The Rage Of The Economics Establishment

An article on these pages last weekend by this newspaper's economics correspondent, Matthew Cranston, titled "We need reform like we've never seen before" revealed everything that's wrong with what Australians are told about economics.  And it reveals why many people were apoplectic when Treasurer Josh Frydenberg dared suggest there were lessons to be learnt from the success of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Cranston discussed the opinions of prominent current and former advisers to government about what was required to improve the country's economic performance.  One of the people whose views Cranston referred to was Bernie Fraser.

As secretary of the federal Department of the Treasury for five years and then governor of the Reserve Bank for seven years, Fraser sat at the pinnacle of economic policy decision-making.  After his retirement from the public service, Fraser joined the board of two large industry superannuation funds.  If there's a doyen of economic policy in Australia, it's probably Bernie Fraser.  (If there were two such doyens it would be Fraser and Ross Garnaut.)  If there's was an "Economics Establishment" in Australia, Fraser would be its president.

It would not be unreasonable therefore to assume Fraser's opinions are not unrepresentative of many, if not the majority of, public servants advising the government on economic policy think.  It would also not be unreasonable to assume Fraser's opinions are not dissimilar to those of many academic and business economists.

Cranston introduced Fraser's remarks with the following:  "He [Fraser] says previous governments have certainly had their chance to reform in the past few decades but have blown it."

And then Fraser himself says the following:  "Howard and Costello had a golden opportunity to use the revenues to invest in productive infrastructure ― some of it went to the Future Fund ― but really they spent it on tax cuts.  They pissed it up the wall even when the economy was building up steam."

If you're someone who thinks, as Fraser does, that the government allowing taxpayers to keep more of their own money is "pissing it up the wall" then of course you're going to be overwrought at the slightest mention of Thatcher or Reagan.  In Reagan's first budget his 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act cut the top marginal rate of federal personal income tax from 70 per cent to 50 per cent and the lowest rate from 14 per cent to 11 per cent.

The biggest problem with Fraser's way of thinking about the economy and the role of government is his belief that when the government is cutting taxes the government is "spending" money.  No, it isn't.  Only someone who has spent basically their entire working life working for the government could believe that.  But this is how government and how people working for the government now think, and it's an attitude that pervades practically every aspect of economic management and regulation in this country.  ASIC officials, for example, are particularly fond of telling taxpayers how fortunate they are to be allowed to manage their own superannuation.

The belief that taxpayers' money is the government's money is an idea that's been around a lot longer than Bernie Fraser.  It's exactly such a belief that Thatcher and Reagan rebelled against.  And they also had no truck with the implication of Fraser's remark that part of the solution to a country's problems is for the government to spend more money on infrastructure.  Maybe sometimes the government should, but more often than not it shouldn't.  No one knows for sure how much the NBN has cost already, and is still yet to cost ― it's a figure somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion.  Today only Kevin Rudd would argue it was money well spent, and to this day it's never been established that such "productive infrastructure" could not have been implemented quicker and more cheaply by the private sector.

The point to remember about Thatcher and Reagan is not only the one Frydenberg made:  that their policies were successful.  What's often forgotten about what they did is that cutting taxes was just as unpopular with the Economics Establishment in the UK and the US in the 1980s as it is with the Economics Establishment in Australia in 2020.

No Excuse For Shutting Parliament In The Digital Age

There has never been a time since the end of World War II when it has been more important to scrutinise government and hold politicians to account.  There are monumental issues for the federal Parliament to debate.  The future of JobKeeper, suppression v elimination strategies for COVID-19, and the billions of dollars that are flying out of Treasury at the moment.

Parliament is the only way for these debates to be had and decisions to be adequately scrutinised.

Our elected politicians have been asking businesses and schools to change what they are doing to become "COVID-safe" workplaces.  Anything a politician asks a business owner to do, MPs should do also.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said:  "Everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker.  Every single job that is being done in our economy with these severe restrictions that are taking place is essential."

On Saturday Morrison announced that Parliament's next sitting fortnight, due to begin on August 4, has been cancelled due to medical advice.  He said he did not believe it would be right to exclude parliamentarians from Victoria from the Parliament.

The federal Parliament sat during World War 1 and WWII.  During the blitz, Winston Churchill ensured the British Parliament still sat.

Federal Parliament has been called off next month after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was warned it was too high risk for Victorians to attend.

If what we have is a COVID-suppression strategy, where breakouts are inevitable, the PM and premiers have rightly said we cannot keep opening and shutting down the economy.  Shutting down Parliament seems to go against that advice.

In Britain, even at the height of the pandemic crisis, the Parliament was able to come together remotely.  On April 21, it approved a motion that would allow members to participate either virtually or physically in the chamber.  MPs could take part remotely over the course of any "hybrid proceedings".

Why is this too difficult in Australia?  Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said it was "not practical" for Parliament to run via video-conferencing.

Yet there is no legal or constitutional barrier to holding virtual sittings of Parliament.  Standing orders could be altered or legislation passed here, as in Britain, to allow for members and senators to participate in parliamentary sittings virtually.  Our politicians are already doing as much for parliamentary committees.

It is important in a parliamentary democracy that our leaders can still come together via reasonable modern means, during a pandemic, to make decisions on behalf of the people who elected them to serve.

There is an important principle at stake here.  In Victoria, the state that is the origin of the latest outbreak, the Andrews Labor government has blocked all attempts to scrutinise decisions through the parliamentary accounts and estimates committee and it has suspended Parliament indefinitely.  This is a terrible precedent for the federal government to follow.

Scott Morrison said earlier this year that MPs have a bigger job to do in their communities than in Canberra.  Which is absurd.  The job of an MP and senator is to represent the communities in Parliament, so their concerns are taken up by the government.

Parliament is where the decisions that politicians make are explained to the public.  The community still does not know whether governments are pursuing a strategy of suppression or elimination.  The goalposts are constantly changing and the Parliament is where those decisions can be debated and scrutinised.

"We're all in this together."  That's the phrase the Prime Minister has led with.

At his National Press Club address last month, upon receiving a question from Channel Ten's Peter van Onselen, Morrison declined to follow the lead of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and cut the pay of politicians and senior public servants by 20 per cent, to match the pain going on in the private sector.  The cancelling of Parliament is just another reason that we are not all in this together.

‘Eliminating’ The Virus Is Suppressing Truth

Recent calls for an "elimination strategy" to defeat the coronavirus pandemic are misguided, and may not even work.  Why?  Because pursuing elimination would mean longer and harder lockdowns.  That would mean more jobs lost, more businesses shuttered for good, more livelihoods destroyed, more families plunged into poverty, more lives ruined forever.

And even with that, there would be no guarantee of success.  An elimination strategy would also break from the goal broadly adopted by the Morrison government and National Cabinet, which is suppression.  But suppression and elimination are hugely different strategies, with vastly different practical consequences.

Under a suppression strategy, restrictions are loosened when there is a low and manageable level of community transmission.  Elimination requires stringent restrictions to remain in place until there is no community transmission whatsoever.  The idea is that if transmission is stopped for long enough, the disease will disappear.

But that is at best wishful thinking.  Countries that kept infection rates low, like Singapore and Israel, saw cases surge when restrictions were lifted.  Even in New Zealand, where a "stage four" lockdown was imposed on 25 March and transmissions have been effectively at zero for weeks, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has indicated that the government is bracing itself for the possibility of another outbreak.

The futile "elimination" debate is part of a wider problem with Australia's coronavirus response.  Politicians and health bureaucrats have shifted the goalposts so much that they don't even seem to know what the actual endgame is, much less explaining it to the Australian people.

Initially, the goal was clear and reasonable:  Keep infection rates as low as possible ― that is, "flatten the curve" ― to give our health system time to prepare without being swamped with cases.  Since that time, billions have been spent on intensive care beds, masks and ventilators.  By any measure, our hospitals are now well-equipped.  If there was ever a justification for heavy-handed lockdowns, there isn't one anymore.

Still, the idea of an "elimination strategy" is finding disturbing favour among everyone from the Grattan Institute to the ABC's resident prophet of doom, Norman Swan.  The latest push comes from Daniel Andrews' hand-picked Chief Health Officer, the hapless Brett Sutton, who has plunged the state of Victoria into a second lockdown after the first one, incidentally the most heavy-handed anywhere in Australia, failed spectacularly.  Frankly, it beggars belief that the Victorian government feels entitled to lecture anyone about anything.

To be sure, public health experts are approaching the coronavirus with the sole aim of keeping infections at zero.  It's an understandable objective, but it comes with enormous human costs, and the terrible toll taken by lockdowns must at least be a part of the debate.

The most obvious casualty is jobs.  The official unemployment rate has soared from 5.2 per cent in March to 7.1 per cent in June, but my research suggests that this a gross underestimate, and the real rate is close to 12 per cent.  Young people have been the hardest hit:  Almost one in three Australians between 15 and 24 are now neither working nor studying.  All in all, 815,000 jobs been snuffed out since lockdowns began, and many more will go as they drag on.

The serious consequences of lockdowns are almost always reduced to a tawdry debate about "money versus human life" (largely by those who are insulated by the economic carnage by a safe, lucrative job in the public service or academia).  But the misery and deprivation of this 21st century Great Depression are not about abstract notions of "the economy", but very real human costs.

Already, there are warnings that Australia's suicide rate could surge by up to 50 per cent.  Lifeline is taking one call every thirty seconds related to the coronavirus crisis.  The fact that health experts ― of all people ― are dismissive of these ugly realities is callous in the extreme.

Remember, also, that these are the same "experts" who have gotten so much wrong.  These are the "experts" who told us that Australia would run out of ICU beds no matter what we did, who advised us that masks were ineffective and then changed their mind, and who told us that sitting on a park bench or playing golf was dangerous and deadly, but deliberately ignored the risk of having 10,000 protesters stage a "mass gathering" in the centre of Melbourne.

If Daniel Andrews or any other premier is foolish enough to pursue an "elimination strategy", they must come clean and tell us how many more jobs they are prepared to destroy, and how much anguish they are willing to inflict on their own people.

Until then, they would be well advised to follow the lead of Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian, who have made the politically difficult but highly commendable admission that further lockdowns would make the state-imposed "cure" far outweigh the disease.