Many People Have Nothing To Celebrate On The Economic Front In 2021

One might think animal spirits had gripped the Australian economy as a flurry of better-than-expected economic figures hit the newsstands before Christmas.

But Australians cannot let the political and bureaucratic class off scot-free for the devastation they have caused in 2020, or for their unwillingness to engage in serious reform which will underpin our future prosperity.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' November labour force numbers showed that 90,000 Australians had secured work in the previous month, bringing the number of employed people one step closer to the pre-lockdown level Australians are desperate to return to.

And the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook brought further good news.

Australia's economic recovery is going much better than expected only two months prior when the 2020-21 budget was released, and the federal budget deficit will be around $16 billion smaller than first thought.

The MYEFO is like a mini budget, usually released halfway between the annual federal ­budget, and provides an update on government revenue and ­expenditure.

It also contained improved outlooks for the unemployment rate and economic growth going forward.

For Australia's political elites, Christmas had come early.

After plunging the country into its first recession in almost 30 years, negatively impacting six million jobs, forcing children to stay home from school and away from friends, and keeping families separated by inane hard border policies, they're hoping that mainstream Australians will be content with the good news and reward them politically for "keeping us safe".

But don't be fooled. Australia has a long and tedious path back to economic prosperity, and current policy settings and an unwillingness to ­engage in necessary reform will only hold Australians back. For the 942,100 Australians still out of work, and the additional 1.3 million who cannot get enough hours, premature financial fanfare is insensitive.

And for the business owners who have been crippled by lockdowns, there's nothing to celebrate.

Australia's premiers have engaged in a reckless and devastating act of economic, cultural, and social self-harm.

While major lockdown measures have finally been lifted for the most part, they are likely to be reimposed if a few cases of coronavirus emerge, as in South Australia last month, presenting a real threat to the economic recovery.

Quite simply, businesses can't make plans to invest in new equipment or hire and train new staff if they might be forced to close shop at any moment.

That's why new private sector business investment is now at the second lowest level ever recorded at 10.3 per cent of GDP, according to the ABS.

But to Australia's political and bureaucratic rulers, this doesn't matter.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted that we were “all in this together”, a phrase that became the unofficial slogan for those insisting that Australia should lock down. But as Institute of Public Affairs research shows, between March and September 607,000 private sector workers lost their job while almost 20,000 new bureaucrats were hired.

Politicians and bureaucrats are completely detached from the real economy which their edicts effect.

When they forced businesses to close back in March, they immediately put hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work, and forced millions more to take pay cuts.

But they refused to demonstrate any shared sacrifice, ignoring an IPA poll which showed 74 per cent of Australians wanted politicians and senior public servants earning more than $150,000 a year to take a 20 per cent pay cut.

There is little hope for an economic recovery based on structural reform that will turbocharge the economy because political and bureaucratic elites have no skin in the game.

The private business investment statistic quoted above is dire for working Australians. Business investment is the key to productivity gains, which ultimately underpin wage growth.

Without making Australia a more attractive place to do business, it will be impossible to arrest the decline in private sector business investment, which is in the longest-running structural decline on record.

Australia's corporate tax rate is the equal second highest among the 37 countries in the OECD, and the minimum wage is the highest in the world.

According to the World Economic Forum's 2019 Global Competitiveness Report, Australia ranks 80th out of 141 countries for the burden of red tape and 111th for hiring and firing practices.

These issues can only be addressed through structural reform, which was necessary before coronavirus came but is now vital considering the ­carnage lockdowns inflicted on ­Australians.

Good news found in the MYEFO and labour force numbers must not overwhelm the effort to hold politicians and bureaucrats accountable for the damage they have done.

And it should especially not let politicians off the hook for engaging in the structural reforms needed to ensure that all Australians can experience the dignity of work and the prosperity they deserve.

Wishing ''Happy Holidays'' Part Of A Weird Controlling Desire

You may have noticed in the days leading up to Christmas that many businesses are now wishing you a very politically correct "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas".

This import from the USA has become ubiquitous, and is emblazoned all over our banks, supermarkets and even our Christmas cards.

"Happy Holidays" is both meaningless and completely out of touch with what the majority of Australian want.

In a poll recently undertaken by marketing research firm Dynata, 79 per cent of Australians believe that "Merry Christmas" is an inclusive phrase which all Australian can relate to, with only 7 per cent disagreeing.

What is more, 69 per cent of Australians feel that Australia has become too politically correct, with just 11 peer cent believing that it is not.

Yet, every year, like clockwork, a noisy minority of Australian tells us that we are no longer able to wish each other "Merry Christmas".  Instead, we must use a non-specific "Happy Holidays" which could, quite frankly, refer to any period where people are taking a break from work.

This ongoing war on Christmas is being waged on the majority of Australians by a radical minority who promote the false idea that saying "Merry Christmas" causes offence to non-Christians.

Last year, the Diversity Council of Australia told workplaces that when December rolls around, bosses should refrain from mentioning Christmas and use the flaccid "holiday greetings" instead.

The problem the Diversity Council has with Christmas is clearly the "Christ" part.  Those who enforce the use of the term "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" seek to censor a Christian holiday in a way that they would not attempt with any other religious holiday.

This is not the first time in the history of the West that a group of elites have waged war on Christmas.

When England was in the middle of tearing itself apart during the English Civil War in the 17th Century, Oliver Cromwell and his fellow puritans who were running England, were so offended by people daring to sing Christmas carols that they passed an act of Parliament to ban the practice.

Three years later, they decided to abolish Christmas altogether.

But despite Cromwell's best efforts, the people ignored him, and continued to hold clandestine religious services, as well as to sing their favourite Christmas carols.

So it was earlier this year when a Twitter activist tried to close down the family-owned Colonial Brewing Co, claiming that the name caused harm to Indigenous Australians because of its associations with colonisation.

A liquor chain, Blackhearts & Sparrows, jumped on the bandwagon and boycotted the produce.

The truth is that the colonisation part of the name refers to the colonisation of the wine region of Margaret River with the first craft breweries, not the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense which mainstream Australians thoroughly reject.  While corporate affairs teams and the media like to wallow around in Twitter, thousands of mainstream Australians posted photographs of themselves on Facebook with bottles of Colonial Brewing Co. beer and completely rubbished Blackhearts & Sparrows.

Political correctness is being foisted on mainstream Australians against their will, whether it be from governments, councils or sporting codes.  In the middle of the pandemic, staff working at the NSW Treasury were told that they were to avoid using words like "wife" and "husband" so that non-heterosexual people were not offended

Instead of using "ladies and gentlemen" they were to greet everyone in the room with "welcome folks".

Another poll undertaken by marketing research firm Dynata earlier this year found that the majority of Australians believe that the sporting codes of AFL and NRL have become too politically correct.  They don't want every round to be devoted to a particular level of the identity politics pyramid each time they sit down to watch a match.

When the outrage mob came after Israel Folau for expressing his religious beliefs, he received broad support from Australians who donated towards his legal fees to a GoFundMe fundraiser.

The website, however, buckled to the outcry of activists in media outlets and on Twitter, and it shut down the account.

Australians are sick and tired of being told what they can and can't say by a noisy elite.  In a poll conducted by social demographer Mark McCrindle and Mainstreet Insights, 65 per cent of Australians said they believe that cancel culture has affected when and with whom they can share honest opinions.

Australians no longer think that they have the freedom to say what they truly think.  This is a sad state of affairs.

If you really want to wish someone Merry Christmas in 2020, don't let the politically correct Christmas Grinches stop you.

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.

Unprecedented Panic Over Bushfire Impact

The word "unprecedented" is often applied to des­tructive climate-related events, as though they could not have been predicted, and have never happened before.  Last summer's bushfires were no different.  But were they really unprecedented?

This narrative creates anxiety because it follows that there really is a climate emergency and that we have pushed nature out of ­balance.

Appearing as a witness to the Royal Commission into bushfires earlier this year, Andrew Johnson, the head of the Bureau of Meteorology stated confidently that parts of Australia had experienced a rapid decline in rainfall.  He used this to state "unequivocal" and "there's no doubt" that climate change was having some sort of an impact on Australia's bushfire seasons.

One can assume he was referring to the southeast of Australia because vast areas of eucalyptus forest burnt in the southeast last summer.  Yet you only have to look at the official statistics from the Bureau of Meteorology's own website for this region to see that annual rainfall is variable, and while the 1950s and 1970s were wetter than recent years, there is no evidence of long-term decline in rainfall.

Whichever way the statistics are scrutinised, there is no evidence of a long-term decline in rainfall in the southeast of Australia for the summer period just past, or even considering the data for all of Australia for all months since 1900.

The wildfires that burnt so much of Australia during the summer of 2019-20 have been repeatedly described as unprecedented and blamed on climate change.  But without supporting statistics.

In reality, areas as extensive and fires as ferocious have burnt Australia since at least 1851.

Rainfall data indicates it is getting wetter (not drier) in southeastern Australia, the region worst hit by the recent fires.  While the official statistics show unambiguously that summer rainfall has been increasing, not decreasing as claimed in the mainstream media, it is difficult to know if air temperatures are increasing, or not, because of all the changes to how Australia's Bureau of Meteorology measures temperature.

The change from mercury thermometers to electronic probes in 1996, and the more recent change from numerical averaging to just taking one-second spot readings since 2012, makes it impossible to construct meaningful continuous historical temperature series.  In other parts of the world where electronic probes are used to measure air temperature, the instantaneous one-second readings are averaged over at least one minute, and in the US over five minutes.

Vast areas of open eucalyptus forests did burn in southeast Australia this last summer.

These wildfires incinerated millions of hectares of important habitat for rare and endangered animal ­species, and koalas in East Gippsland.  The impact on local human communities has also been devastating, with so many lives lost and so much property destroyed.

As much as 5.4 million hectares burned in NSW this past summer.  This was used to claim the fires were unprecedented in extent and further proved the climate change link.  Except that somewhere in the vicinity of 7.2 million hectares burned during the summer of 1951-52.

A CSIRO report titled the "Bushfire History of the south coast Study Area" details fires at Bega, Nowra, Mt Dromelly and other parts of southern NSW in 1951.

Fires consumed that same coastal strip again in 1994.  So rather than ­unprecedented, regular in occur­rence would be a more accurate way of ­describing bushfire events in ­Australia.

Severe bushfires like the fires ­experienced this past summer are weather-related, in that they are usually preceded by high temperatures, low relative humidity, strong winds and a rainfall deficit.  But a key fact often forgotten at places like the ABC is that there must also be critically high fuel loads for fires to take hold.

Fuel is live and dead vegetation ­accumulates over time.  When fuel loads are kept low though regular hazard reduction burning, fires are unlikely to kill all the understorey plant species or the tree layer.

The area of forest in the southeast of Australia has been expanding even as public support for the necessary hazard reduction burning has been waning.

Support has been waning because hazard reduction burning involves ­active management, which is generally considered incompatible with wilderness values.  The concept of wilderness derives from the idea of a balance of nature, which does not actually have a basis in the ecological sciences.  It is a myth:  a widely held but possibly false belief or idea.

Excluding appropriate fire regimes from open eucalyptus forests will not keep them in their current state, ­rather it can have the effect of simply making them more prone to severe fires that will eventually destroy them.

Across Australia, a better understanding of traditional Aboriginal burning methods, and the types of vegetation that existed before European settlement, could result in more support for the active management of wilderness areas, including for more hazard reduction burning.

A focus on hazard reduction burning to keep landscapes generally more open and thus safer for people and wildlife, would be more useful than blaming climate change — at least until there is better quality ­assurance of actual temperature measurements.

Those pushing the line that our ­recent bushfires have been unprecedented should check the facts.

Getting It All Arts-About

At a time when Australia has fallen into its first recession in 30 years, you would hope that the Federal government would be spending the public's money wisely and exercising some vigilance on the behalf of the Australian taxpayer.

Unfortunately, this does not appear to be happening.  The Australia Council for the Arts is the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body.  It says its focus increasing the visibility of Australia's vibrant arts and culture, and recognising the evolving way that Australians make and experience art.

Since April, the Australia Council for the Arts has handed out over $7 million in taxpayers' money to 1,101 individuals and organisations under a new grant scheme called "The 2020 Resilience Fund" in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Council, the new fund is "designed to provide emergency relief to support the livelihoods, practice and operations of Australian artists, groups and organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic".

It goes on to explain that although "the arts and cultural industries, along with all Australians and communities around the world, have experienced incomparable disruption from the impacts of COVID-19, we have never lost sight of the enormous public value of the arts for all Australians".

It seems however, that the Australia Council for the Arts has well and truly lost sight of what is of value to Australians, and what is not.

Take Sydney-based artist Julie Vulcan for example who has been awarded a generous $10,000.  In one of her recent "performance instillations" called "DarkBody", Vulcan inveigled gallery visitors to lie down next three giant mounds she had made from a combination of mushrooms and dirt, and then proceeded to cover their eyes with bags of soil so that they could experience "the daily activities enacted in the dark around us, are an intricate ecology that are essential to our ongoing-ness within a multi-species world".

In another work called "Taking the Mickey Bliss" Vulcan spent two nights in a glass cube in order to make a statement about "current political mileage built around conservative ideologies, are vexed problems for artists and free thinkers at large".  Taking the mickey indeed.

Giselle Stanborough, another Sydney-based artist who, in her own words, is "trapped as a digital apparition at the bottom of the well" has been given $2000 which she might use to create multi-platform artwork to raise questions "about the colonisation of our social activities by large corporations and the way social media and dating apps are changing our intimate relationships".

In the meantime, Mudgee-based feminist weaver, Kelly Leonard, who claims she has shunned traditional galleries for the great outdoors, was awarded $10,000.  Leonard makes giants scarves and stitched texts which she places in various bush locations to "deliver messages" about coal mining and climate change.

In Victoria, $10,000 has been awarded to artist Claire Bridge who describes herself as "Queer Feminist interdisciplinary artist of Anglo-Indian and culturally Deaf Australian" and whose "work responds to issues of ancestral transmissions, gendered violence, intergenerational trauma and the confluence of these concerns with the environment and queer ecologies".

Meanwhile, down in Tasmanian artist Willoh S. Weiland is "concerned with creating epic impossible ideas and trying to fulfil them, working with non-artists, the possibilities of liveness and destroying the white male patriarchy".  She might use some of the $10,000 awarded to her by the Council to continue to "explore the relationship between art and infinity by sending artworks into outer space".

If artists feel that they need to express their disdain for conservative ideologies by sitting in a cube, smash the patriarchy by sending things into outer space, or use needlework to protest about coal mining they are perfectly free to do so.  However, on no account should the hard-working taxpayer account be picking up the bill for them to do it.  Not by any stretch of the imagination can these projects be deemed necessary for emergency funding in the middle of a pandemic.

Worse still, some of the recipients are not even in Australia, with $72K going to artists who are living in the US, the UK and Europe.

The very existence of the "Resilience Fund", through which millions of dollars have been siphoned from the taxpayer by the federal government to fund an array of nonsensical and quite frankly, risible projects, shows that we now live in a divided nation.

There are currently 1 million Australians unemployed and approximately 1.7 million jobs are at risk of being lost over the next three months due to the lockdown restrictions which remain in place across Australia.  We have millions of small businesses in Australia which desperately trying to stay afloat, with people losing everything, yet we are funding "artists" to literally send works into outer space.

This is both wrong and immoral.

In 2015, the Abbott government cut funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and diverted around $105 million to a new fund which saw grants decided by the federal Arts Minister.  This meant that a democratically elected government could have more say about what was funded, rather than handing out a blank cheque for this nonsense.

Unfortunately, the Turnbull government returned the funding to the Council, which is now run at arms' length by the arts community elite, which because of the "peer" review process, means that public money is being dished out by the few to fund political and identity politics obsession.

Australia is facing an economic crisis of epic proportions.  This is no time for mainstream Australians to be paying for self-indulgent and ludicrous projects which will do nothing to benefit them in any way whatsoever.

Stop Indoctrinating Kids

The news that some schools in NSW are bringing in extra teachers to help 6000 Year 12 students meet minimum standards in reading, writing and numeracy skills to pass their HSC should ring very loud alarm bells for parents.

Much of fault lies with the current NSW curriculum.

One of the most problematic elements of the curriculum is the existence of "cross-curriculum priorities" ― "Sustainability", "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures" and "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia", which were taken directly from the National Curriculum.

The first major problem with these priorities is that they are ideologically driven.

It is true that the curriculum will always be ideological in some way or another because in the basic sense, an ideology is the lens through which we understand the world, the fact is that by calling "Sustainability", "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures", and "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia", priorities, they are being consciously prioritised over everything else in the curriculum.

When the insisting that these three current themes be embedded into all subjects, relevant or not, this means that ideology is being prioritised over knowledge.

When the original authors of the priorities invented the themes in 2011, they did so with the full understanding that this ideology would come to dominate and define Australian education.

They were in fact, deliberately imposing a political agenda on generations of impressionable Australian schoolchildren at a time in their lives where they are at their most vulnerable, and when their understanding of society, environment and politics is shaped by what they hear in the classroom.

The second major problem with these priorities is that they serve no other purpose than to overcrowd an already crowded curriculum, as they are embedded into every subject with complete disregard for whether they are relevant to the subject or not.

Take English for example.

We are told by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) that in learning English, "students have the opportunity to engage with texts that give them experience of the beliefs and value systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples".  NESA also tells us that "English provides learning opportunities for students to explore and appreciate the rich tradition of texts from and about the peoples and countries of Asia, including texts written by Asian authors".

And when it comes to 'Sustainability', the study of English "provides students with the skill required to investigate and understand issues of environmental and social sustainability, to communicate information about sustainability, and to advocate action to improve sustainability".

An examination of the mathematics K-10 course descriptions reveals what can only be described as a tokenistic and artificial shoehorning of the "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures" cross curriculum priority.

In the section on how to work out mass, students are asked to "investigate the use of hefting in practical situations, eg the practice used by Aboriginal people of hefting duck eggs to determine whether ducklings will be male or female", while in addition and subtracting students are told that they should "investigate different methods of adding and subtracting used in various cultures, eg. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander methods involving special patterns and reason, Asian counting tools such as the abacus."

NESA believes that the "cross-curriculum priorities enable students to develop an understanding about and address the contemporary issues they face".

These are highly ambitious claims indeed, but unfortunately, they have shown to be patently wrong.

The cross-curriculum priorities are not needed in the classroom, either for content or for teaching.  There is absolutely no reason for the themes to be repeated in every subject.

The addition of these extra elements into the lessons detracts from the acquisition of real skills, such as literacy and numeracy, which are the fundamental building blocks of education.

This has been proven over the last 18 years, during which time standards in reading, science, and mathematics across every socio-economic quartile — and in government, Catholic and independent schools — have been falling in NSW.

In response to the falling standards, the NSW government has commissioned a review of the curriculum from education expert Professor Geoff Masters.

In his review, Masters concluded that there is too much clutter in most syllabuses and that some students are not getting the solid foundations in English and maths that they need and deserve.

However, he fails to mention the single most obvious solution to the problem ― get rid of the cross-curriculum priorities.

Not once in the 24 recommendations made to the government does Masters even mention cross-curriculum priorities.  The only conclusion you can reach is that his silence on the matter means that he must believe in the ideology behind them and wants them to remain embedded into all learning areas.

The government plans to have a new curriculum ready by 2024, claiming that it will prepare students to "meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century".  This is all very well and good, but they will not be able to meet these challenges if they are unable to read or write.

The ideology-driven cross-curriculum priorities need to go once and for all.  Until this happens, students in NSW will find themselves woefully under prepared for the real world.

Australia Has Returned To Being A Convict Nation

It must be nice to be Shane Warne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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.

Don't Know Much About …

Yesterday Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that university students will now be paying up to $14,500 per year to study the humanities, an increase of over 110 per cent.

On all likelihood, the fee hike will mean a larger bill for the Australian taxpayer as many humanities students leave university without the skills needed to get a job and start to pay back their HECS debt.

This news has of course been greeted with outrage and anger from the National Union of Students as well as the National Tertiary Education Union.

National President of the NUS Molly Willmott, for example, said "These degrees are important.  The jobs that come out of them are important.  These students deserve better from the government."

This is very true.  Students studying the humanities do indeed deserve better.  They deserve much, much better.  This is because Australian undergraduates who have been enrolled to study degrees in the humanities have not in any way been getting their money's worth.

Students are, in short, being swindled by their institutions.

The idea behind studying the humanities used to be so that students were equipped with the tools to try make sense of and understand the world through the Western tradition of art, culture and philosophy.  This is no longer the case.  If you think Australian undergraduates are getting Plato or Socrates, Shakespeare or Dante, think again.

Instead, students have been getting fed a very depressing and thoroughly predictable diet of "new humanities" subjects based entirely around the postmodern theory of identity politics.

All subjects, whether it be history, literature, art or geography, must be shoe-horned into the idea that everything in the world is simply a societal power struggle of class, race and gender.

For the entire duration of their university careers, students have the same thing drummed into them repeatedly, by ideologically driven academics who present this single world view to undergraduates.

Let's have a look at some of the courses which have been on offer.

At the University of Western Australia, students have been taking Community, Power and the Common Good in which they have, "explored the community engagement and community empowerment through … social justice, power, equality and inequality, ethical public behaviour (and) theories of community building".

Over at the University of South Australia, undergraduates have been learning about the "social construct of whiteness and representations of whiteness in contemporary Australia" in a unit called Identity and Representation.  Those same students, enrolled in Gender, Sexuality and Representation have been spending their days considering "ways in which cultural artefacts reinforce or challenge dominant beliefs about gender and sexuality".

Students studying history have been getting an especially raw deal.

At least if you sign up for a degree in gender studies, you expect a generous dose of feminist studies and Queer Theory.  However, students studying both world and Australian history have been finishing their degrees with a completely distorted view of the world in which the past is viewed as a contest between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Australian history especially, has been repackaged and relabelled as a social and political commentary on contemporary issues rather than a study of actual history.

At Monash University, those enrolled in Australian Stories:  People, Place, History explored "crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, the environment, family (and) race relations", while students at the University of New South Wales taking Inequality in Australia were asked to consider "how was inequality influenced by race, gender, sexuality, age and disability?" and "when and why did it become a political issue?"

It is clear that Australian taxpayers have been funding the creation of a social warrior underclass of disaffected young Australians who emerge from universities with a particular view of Australia's history which colours their view on Australian society.

It is no wonder that these Australians have been taking to the streets decrying "racism" and wanting to expunge our history by tearing down monuments and statues.

Rather than more technocratic tinkering with university fees, the government should simply cease providing taxpayer support to any organisation that attacks and undermines Australian values.

This not only means ending funding for humanities departments, but also for our national broadcaster, the ABC, which has been a cheerleader of division through its relentless editorialising based on identity politics.

And it means no more funding for government and quasi-government organisations, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, which spends its days soliciting complaints from Australians about how racist this country supposedly is and censoring freedom of speech.

The main dividing line of our time is not left or right, but identity politics versus mainstream Australian values.

Mainstream Australians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or background value our egalitarian way of life, liberal democratic institutions, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, hard work, small business, home ownership, and seek a better life for themselves and their children.

There is far more that unites than divides us as a country.  The humanities departments at universities must stop their relentless attack on the Australian way of life or lose their funding altogether.

The Problem With 'Topple The Racists'

Last weekend, a mob tied a rope to a statue of a 17th century Bristol merchant, philanthropist and slave trader called Edward Colston, pulled it off its pedestal, dragged it through the streets and then threw in the river.

In London, two bronzes of Winston Churchill were defaced, one of them daubed with the words "racist".  In Leeds, a statue of Queen Victoria was graffitied with the words "racist", "murder" and "slave owner".

Meanwhile, over in the US, statues of Christopher Columbus have been either toppled or beheaded.

It was only a matter of time until radical activists in this country would want to start imitating the wanton destruction and vandalism taking place in other parts of the world.

In the last few days, disparate voices on social media platforms are calling for the wholesale destruction of all monuments to Australia's early settlers, explorers and colonial administrators on the grounds that each and every individual who has been immortalised in stone, marble or bronze was a racist.

While it has yet to play out in our cities, like their counterparts in the UK, the proponents for "Topple the Racists" have already come up with a hit list.  One of their targets is Charles Cameron Kingston, who was the 20th Premier of South Australia between 1893 and 1899.  Their problem with Kingston is that he was one of the proponents of the White Australia policy.  However, what they fail to mention is that Kingston was also responsible for electoral reform which gave votes to women in Australia.  He also had working class Australians in mind when he pushed to extend workers' compensation.

In this bizarre world of statue identity politics, race clearly trumps both gender and class.

Another individual on the hit list is Captain James Cook, whose statue in Hyde Park was graffitied three years ago with the slogans "Change the date" ― a reference to change the data of Australia Day ― and "No pride in genocide".

It is one thing to conflate history out of ignorance, but it is another to retrospectively attribute the unspeakable crime of mass murder to the son of Scottish Farmer who died before the First Fleet had even arrived on the shores of Botany Bay in 1788.

These kinds of historical facts are of course totally irrelevant to the mob.  This is because members of this movement believe the false narrative that the modern state of Australia is a travesty which was brought into existence through violence, genocide, and dispossession.  For them, the removal of statues has become a form of atonement for guilt and self-loathing.  It is an expression of a moral revulsion at the supposed racism and ideas of cultural superiority displayed by our forebears.

We cannot divorce these characters from our history because without them, the modern state of Australia as it stands today would simply not exist.

We are going down a very dangerous path if we cave into the demand of the few because no one can tell when it will end.

Every Labor Prime Minister supported the White Australia policy until it was declared dead by the Whitlam government in 1973, which has solicited not so much as a whimper from the "Topple the Racists".  And speaking of Gough Whitlam, I doubt the mob will destroy his statue because he closed the door on Vietnamese refugees.

The movement is indicative of a deep rift which exists in Australian society between a minority of radicals who hate Australia, and the majority of Australians who love Australia.

Every year, around Australia Day, they attempt to berate, belittle, and bully mainstream Australians into being ashamed of their country and into joining them in an act of self-flagellation.

Their efforts, however, remain futile and even counter-productive, because the more they tell Australians that they should hate this country the more Australians love this country.

Every year, I commission a survey of 1000 Australians in advance of 26 January, and every year, the results come back the same.  This year, 71 per cent of Australians are proud of their history, and 85 per cent are proud of being Australian.

It is worth reminding the mob that they are perfectly free to protest about racism, and free to voice their opinions about this nations' past without reprisals or punishment, because of the civilisation brought here by the very men and women they wish to erase from history.

They also need to remember that the institutions of Western Civilisation do not give them the freedoms to commit acts of untrammelled vandalism, violence, and anarchy on Australian streets.

Everywhere you go in Australia, no matter the size of the town, you encounter a variety of plaques, statues, and memorials which have been erected by the community, for the community.

These monuments and memories reflect both individual contributions and the values of the community at the time.  If we are going to have a conversation about what statues mean to society, perhaps we need to ask the community at large what it wants, rather than leaving it up to the mob.

Not A Very Class Act

Despite the health advice consistently provided by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee which says that teachers can and should go back to school, teachers' unions across the country are continuing to dig their heels in and are doing their level best to make sure that this doesn't happen.

The message to the teachers from the Federal Government could not be clearer:  it is safe to go back to doing your job with appropriate measures in place.

The recommendation from the National Cabinet is that "on current evidence, schools can be fully open" and that "attendance at a school campus for education represents a very low health risk to students".

The advice also notes that "appropriate practices must be employed at schools, like at other workplaces, to provide a safe working environment for school staff, including teachers".

However, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said that "we're concerned that our governments are keeping schools closed not from a health recommendation but almost because of parental fear and some reaction in local governments."

It is no coincidence that the politicians who are most opposed to reopening schools are in those states which have the most militant teachers' unions.  Daniel Andrews and his cabinet seem to be in the pockets of the Victorian teachers' unions.

This week, the Victorian Education Minister James Merlino even went so far to say that a Melbourne principal's decision to bring back half of the school students next week is "reckless".

The Education Minister's portfolio is to ensure that Victorian children receive the best education possible.  He should be working to re-open schools as quickly and as safely as possible.  Instead, he is doing his best to ensure that they stay shut.

In NSW, the union is not even prepared to consider implementing Gladys Berejiklian's plan for students to go back from May 11 in a staggered rate so that the schools are ready for full-time schooling to start in July.

In South Australia, the chief public health Officer Dr Nicola Spurrier wrote a twitter message to parents saying that schools were safe to re-open, which the AEU decided to emblazon with the words "Seriously, Spurrier?"

In Queensland, the union is also defying medical consensus by treating to not only close schools if too many children turn up or they run out of cleaning products, but it is also telling no doubt stressed parents that they will have to homeschool until the end of June.

Like everyone else, teachers would have been to the shops, done the groceries, gone for walks, shopped at Bunnings and lined up at Dan Murphy's.  However, according to the unions, going to school presents a higher risk.

In WWII, the unions refused to unload cargo.

The wharfies deliberately sabotaged the war effort by destroying vehicles and equipment, stealing food being loaded for soldiers, holding snap strikes and demanding "danger money" for loading biscuits.

Now the unions are depriving children of an education, and at the same time refusing to give much needed relief to millions of parents who are facing an everyday struggle to work from home and educate their children at the same time.  Perhaps a solution would be to pay those parents the teachers' salaries while the schools remain closed.

Teachers are not being asked to go to the front line of contagion.

During the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, school teachers were seen to be the best source of essential workers, and were asked to volunteer to become the nucleus of an organisation to establish District Emergency Relief Depots which were designed to assist people disadvantaged by the pandemic.

This meant that teachers went directly to the houses of the very sick and the unemployed.

Most teachers who are sitting at home want to get back to work and to see their students again.  They relish the face-to-face interaction with their pupils — after all, teaching is a vocation.  Most of them see online teaching as wasteful, inadequate and boring.  The unions speak with the voice of the minority.

Teachers' unions are unique because they mostly involve government jobs.  Rather than negotiating with an employer for higher shares of the profits, they instead negotiate for more of our tax dollars.

In a free market, teacher performance and compensation go hand-in-hand, but teachers' unions rely on coercion to increase pay, and they seek to restrict competition through political means.

This may help the teachers' unions, but it is harmful towards children and their parents who pay taxes.

The unions are responsible for many problems in our education system.

Unions do not like competition, so they require teachers to get a university degree because that way they can control what the teachers are being taught.

They demotivate teachers and punish ambition because they are against performance-based pay.  It's almost impossible to sack a bad teacher, and for good teachers ambition and excellence are punished.

They undermine other forms of education, other than online learning, such as homeschooling.

Is it any wonder why Australian schoolchildren are behind in literacy and numeracy?

Teachers' unions say they care about children.  But their actions during the last month or so has sent a loud and clear message, which is that their primary concern is about themselves.

Some Stimulating Ideas

Rather than engaging in a shortsighted and reckless cash splash, the federal government should seize the opportunity created by the economic fallout from the coronavirus to cut red tape, reduce taxes, and deliver reforms that will save the Australian economy from recession and form the basis for prosperity for decades to come.

The Morrison government is expected to announce today an economic stimulus package to offset the economic impacts of the coronavirus expected to be worth up to $20 billion.  In a similar style to the Rudd government's failed stimulus during the global financial crisis, pensioners and Newstart recipients are expected to receive one-off cash payments of around $500.  This is on top of a $2.4 billion package to deal with the health impacts of coronavirus.

It is likely the Australian economy will go backwards in the coming months and may enter a recession.  But this downturn is being primarily driven by disrupted supply chains and cashflow issues facing businesses in the wake of the coronavirus, not lower consumer spending.  A big government cash splash is not the answer.

Granted, people are staying home, large public events have been cancelled, and fewer tourists and international students are coming to Australia.

But receiving a government cheque will not mitigate the risk of going to the movies or a restaurant and potentially contracting the coronavirus.  The availability of money is not an issue, people's willingness to spend it is.

An effective response requires a focus on the supply side of the economy to keep businesses open and allow them to keep their staff employed.

A cash splash will only add to the $546 billion government debt, all of which must be repaid by our children and grandchildren.  Here are five more effective ideas.

Firstly, cut red tape.  I estimate that red tape costs the Australian economy $176 billion every year in lost economic output.  This is the equivalent to approximately 10 per cent of GDP, which makes red tape Australia's biggest industry.

Every minute and every dollar a small business owner must dedicate to filling out forms brings them a minute and a dollar closer to laying off staff or reducing their wages.  This is dangerous, as small businesses account for about half of all private sector employment.

Secondly, reduce the corporate tax rate.  At 30 per cent for businesses with an annual turnover of $50 million or more, Australia has one of the highest business tax rates in the world, one which is well above the OECD average of 23.9 per cent.

The US and the UK have significantly reduced their business tax rates in recent years, to just 21 per cent in the US and 19 per cent in the UK.

To assist Australian businesses, the corporate tax rate must be reduced to a competitive rate below 20 per cent for all companies.  This will ease cashflow pressures and enable businesses to invest in machinery and workers.  Additionally, it will attract overseas businesses and investment bringing more jobs, higher wages, and greater economic prosperity.

Thirdly, expand the Instant Asset Write-Off.  The IAWO improves cash flow and makes investments more affordable by allowing for a higher, immediate tax deduction on new capital investment.  Under the IAWO a painter buying a new van for $27,000, for example, can deduct the full cost immediately, rather than carrying the deductions over five years.  This leaves them $21,600 better-off today, allowing them to hire new workers, pay higher wages, or make other investments.

The IAWO is currently available to businesses with an annual turnover under $50 million and on investments worth up to $30,000.  By uncapping the turnover threshold and increasing the investment threshold to $1 million, the IAWO will immediately increase cash flow and facilitate new investment, creating more jobs.

Some reports suggest the government will attempt to stimulate demand, with certain groups advocating for measures targeted at particular subsets of the population.  For example, on 9th March Charmaine Crowe of the Australian Council of Social Service argued on Sky News that "the best way to (boost household expenditure) would be to increase Newstart."

If the government wants to increase demand, they should reduce taxes rather than increase spending.

This means, as a fourth measure, bringing forward the personal income tax cuts introduced in the 2019-20 Budget to take effect immediately.  The full tax cuts will mean some 94 per cent of wage-earners would face a top marginal tax rate of 30 per cent or less.  This will provide a significant boost to take-home pay, allowing Australians to keep more of their hard-earned money.  However, the full effect of the tax cuts aren't due to take effect until 2024-25.  The government should instead make them effective immediately.

Similarly, and finally, the government should consider a temporary pause in compulsory superannuation, allowing workers to receive the missing 9.5 per cent of their pay and give them the benefits of higher wages without adding to government debt.

Rather than engaging in another reckless cash splash, the government should respond to the coronavirus challenge by delivering the greatest economic reform agenda seen in a generation.  This will save the Australian economy from recession and set the nation up for decades of prosperity and success.

A Tale Of Two Malcolms

When it comes to that ugly chapter in Australian political history that was Malcolm Turnbull, we always knew what we were getting.  It was always — always — about Malcolm.  For some, it was endearing.  For most, it was exhausting.  And ever since Turnbull was blasted out of the Lodge — with his outlandish streams of revisionist history — it's been downright sad.

But in capitalising on this summer's bushfires, Turnbull has gone from bitter and twisted to positively ghoulish.  As hundreds of Australians lost their homes and, tragically, their lives, Turnbull has wedged a callous "I Told You So" into the media cycle at every opportunity.

But what would the climate crusader of the present make of the ghost of Turnbull past?  Well, when you look at his past comments, it looks like Prime Minister Turnbull would be guilty of the very same "denialism" that Citizen Turnbull bemoans today.

Take his rant in TIME magazine last week.  "These fires show that the wicked, self-destructive idiocy of climate denialism must stop," Turnbull wrote.

But as Prime Minister, Turnbull was rightly more circumspect about invoking bushfires in the so-called "climate wars".  As has been reported this week, Turnbull was asked in 2018 about similar comments from the Greens.  "Look, I'm disappointed that the Greens would try to politicise an event like this," the then-PM replied.  "You can't attribute any particular event, whether it's a flood or fire or a drought or a storm, to climate change".

Today's Turnbull has also joined the chorus of climate evangelists demanding steeper emissions cuts.  "The world must drastically cut its greenhouse gas emissions," Turnbull says, adding that "Australians no longer need to sacrifice economic growth to reduce emissions".

But again, Turnbull was much more averse to emissions targets in October 2017, when answering a question in Parliament from fellow Liberal Julia Banks.  "We know that, were Labor to implement its policy of a 45 per cent cut in emissions by 2030, a 50 per cent renewable energy target would add nearly $200 a year to household energy bills," Turnbull bellowed.

Which brings us to Turnbull's newfound embrace of renewables and vendetta against coal, which is so extreme that one almost expects to see the one-time PM glued to a Brisbane road sometime soon.

Writing for the Guardian, Turnbull has said that "above all we need to face this fact:  Coal is on the way out.  It is a matter of life and death.  The world must, and I believe will, stop burning coal if we are to avoid the worst consequences of global warming".

Did Turnbull think that we'd all forget the time he chuckled along when Scott Morrison brought a lump of coal into Question Time?  Or when he admonished Bill Shorten for "turning his back on all of those coalminers" and being in an "ideological trap set for him by the Greens"?

There's plenty more where that came from, floating around Hansard and Turnbull's own website.  But you get the idea.

Of course, Turnbull's few remaining defenders will put all of that down to "extremists" in the Coalition.  Turnbull wanted "real" climate policy, they will all say, but he was sabotaged by conservative "wreckers" in the party room.

It's a cop-out as cowardly as it is convenient.  And besides which, it's wrong.  De facto conservative leader Peter Dutton was loyal to Turnbull for almost all of his term as PM, emerging as a leadership contender only when it became clear that Turnbull's political skills were so woefully inept that the Coalition was headed for electoral wipe-out.

And yes, there were a handful of MPs who — for many good reasons — would have crossed the floor to vote against the NEG.  But that would have been a footnote of history had Turnbull not whittled the Coalition's majority down to one at the 2016 election.

Turnbull's recent appearances appear to have nothing to do with climate change or energy policy or the future of the planet.  They are presumably about Turnbull's need to rationalise and soothe the disappointment of his overhyped rise, and the humiliation of his spectacular fall.

In these bushfires, Turnbull has found his post-politics raison d'etre.  The Akubra and check shirt are long gone, and the leather jacket is out of mothballs.  Malcolm the climate warrior is back, with — quite literally — a vengeance.

And what about the ordinary Australians over whom Turnbull once governed?  The coal miners and exporters and small businesses and farmers and families and pensioners who will lose out if Australia takes the extreme and destructive "climate action" that Turnbull and his ilk are clamouring for?  The millions of Australians whose living standards will be tanked by the economic vandalism that will cost millions of jobs and jeopardise entire industries?

Well, they're probably just collateral damage.  Because as always, it's all about Malcolm.

Celebrate A Day Of Unity

This year, the bushfires have well and truly dulled the usual noise around Australia Day.  There has been a notable absence of activist voices either calling to change the date of Australia Day or stop celebrating it altogether.

The extraordinary response of the Australian public to the devastation has brought to the fore a strong sense of community, a sense of belonging and a deep sense of patriotism.

The last few weeks have shown that those of us who are ashamed of being Australian are few and far between.  They have shown that that Australians are not in the slightest bit ashamed of being Australian, and in fact feel the opposite.

In new polls of over 1,000 Australians conducted by Dynata, 85% of respondents said that they were proud to be Australian.  This is the same across all age groups, with the polls finding that 82% of all 18-24 year-olds feel the same way.  This lays to rest the media narrative that somehow younger Australians are disillusioned, pessimistic and unpatriotic.

The polls also reveal that 71% of us are proud of our history, while only a tiny 5% disagree.  This highlights that Australians do not share the negative view of our history as taught in our universities and propagated in the media.  In fact, 83% agreed that "Australia Day should be an opportunity to respect the contribution that everyone has, and can, make to Australia".

Australians acknowledge our shared history, and wholeheartedly reject the repetitiveness of the grievance industry.  71% of us want to continue to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January and only 11% think the date should be changed.  The same percentage believe that "Australia Day is an authentic way for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to celebrate being Australian" — only 12% disagree.

Australians are tired of the same old debate fuelled by strident activists who say that we must be ashamed of our country and that we should not celebrate our success.  The polls also reveal that 70% believe that there should be less political agreement about Australia Day, while only 11% disagree.

There is a yawning gulf that exists between what the liberal elite, the media and academics like to tell us what we should think about ourselves, and the reality of what we actually think about ourselves.  This is epitomised in the tweets of Walkley award winner and novelist Jane Caro AM, who regularly takes to twitter to tell everyone how deeply and utterly ashamed of Australia she is.  "I'm so ashamed of my country" she tweets.  "So ashamed of NSW";  "It makes me ashamed to be Australian";  "I'm ashamed of Aussie politics";  "I am ashamed of those of my country men and women";  "Ashamed of its leaders";  "Ashamed and shocked".  And so on.

The way in which Australians have rallied together over last two months is hardly indicative of a country full of self-loathing and unpatriotic men and women.

Modern Australia has been historically successful.  It is the home of a diverse nation with a proud history.  Australia has an inheritance which extends both into the ancient past through Indigenous Australia and across the world to the United Kingdom from where we draw our political system and to all the other countries from which our people have arrived.

The complexity and depth of our history has produced a political culture bound by particular values that are adaptive to the way we live and the aspirations we have for our families and our communities.

The fires have not only united Australians as a nation, but they have also done much to refocus our minds on what is to be Australian, and what Australian values actually are.  These values are immortalised at the Isurava battle site on the Kokoda Track where the words "courage, endurance, mateship and sacrifice" have been etched into four stone pillars.  And although though "mateship" is quite difficult to define as a concept, it has long since summed up what it means to be Australian.

These values are time tested, providing the opportunities for all Australians to live good and successful lives.  This is what Australians will be celebrating on 26 January.

Movement Of The People

Boris Johnson's landslide election victory provides Australia with a unique opportunity to strengthen ties with our oldest and one of our closest allies.

To take full advantage of this once in a generation opportunity, the Morrison government must aim for much more than a bare-bones FTA.  It should use the existing Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (CER) as a blueprint for a comprehensive agreement complete with reciprocal work rights for Australian and UK citizens.

Boris Johnson has previously supported such a proposal, and when UK trade secretary Liz Truss visited Australia in September she said freedom of movement was "certainly something that we will be looking at as part of our free-trade negotiations".

High Commissioner to the UK George Brandis has also hinted at a relaxation on visa arrangements, stating "there are different visa categories and different visa restrictions that it would be good to see relaxed".

This is one of the key benefits of the Australia-New Zealand CER agreement.  In addition to be being one of the world's most comprehensive free trade agreements — which is based on mutual recognition of standards, rather than the regulatory harmonisation approach favoured by the EU — the CER agreement includes generous rights for Australians and New Zealanders to live and work in their respective countries.

Unfortunately, Morrison has previously rejected the idea of CER agreement as a basis for an Australia-UK FTA, saying "the New Zealand arrangement is quite unique and it's not one we would probably ever contemplate".  This must be re-evaluated.

Australia and the UK share deep institutional, cultural and historical ties dating back centuries.

When the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788, they brought with them the institutions of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.  They brought a culture that valued enlightenment principles like freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech — even though they sometimes failed to live up to them.

Over the past 232 years the institutions we inherited have taken on some unique Australian characteristics, such as the American principles added to our Westminster parliamentary system.  Our culture has likewise been shaped by successive waves of immigration, as well our relations — both good and bad — with our indigenous communities.

But the culture and the institutions we inherited remain distinctly recognisable.  And our ties with the UK have been strengthened by everything from the wars we've fought together to the sports we play against each other.

This explains why the UK is the second largest source of foreign investment in Australia.  It's why almost 1.2 million Australians were born in the UK — more than any other foreign country.  And it's why living in London has been a rite of passage for many young Australians.

Unfortunately, this rite of passage has been made much more difficult in recent years.  Faced with rising discontent over the level of EU immigration, Theresa May, then the Home Secretary under the Cameron government, responded by attempting to make it more difficult for non-EU citizens to get visas (as restricting EU immigration was not an option).

May's "hostile environment policy" created a major scandal over the deportation of some legal migrants who had been in the country almost their entire lives.

But May's reforms also made it more difficult for Australians wanting to work in the UK, with the number of visas granted to Australians falling from 37,375 in 2005 to 19,134 in 2017 (according to figures compiled by the Adam Smith Institute).

Correcting this ought to be a priority when negotiating an Australia-UK FTA.

Opponents of reciprocal work rights may point out that Brexit was, at least in part, motivated by opposition to the EU's freedom of movement.  This is true.  But in 2018 a poll published by Canzuk International showed no such hostility exists to freedom of movement between Australia and the UK.

The poll asked 13,600 people in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK whether they supported freedom of movement between the four countries.  Large majorities in all countries were in favour;  the proposal 73 per cent support in Australia and 68 per cent in the UK.  Only 17 per cent of Australians and 19 per cent of UK citizens were opposed.

This highlights the ongoing strength of the institutional, historical and cultural ties between the core Anglosphere countries.  But another factor is that all four countries have similar levels of economic development and standards of living.  This reduces risk of a country being overwhelmed by the number of immigrants, which can occur when freedom of movement exists between developed and relatively undeveloped, or relatively unstable nations.

The Morrison government must cease the opportunity that Boris Johnson's election victory provides and sign a wide-ranging FTA complete with reciprocal work rights for Australian and UK citizens.  The already existing CER agreement between Australia and New Zealand provides a blueprint for the type of agreement we should be aiming for.

If there's one thing that's clear, it's that an Australia-UK FTA that lacks improved visa arrangements will be a massive missed opportunity.

The Great Realignment

Britain's General Election — the results of which will, hopefully, be seen by the end of today (Sydney time) — is the most consequential in a generation.  It pits avid socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn against Brexit-backing Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Corbyn would cripple Britain's economy, associate with terrorist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA, and wants to have a second referendum on the European Union to undermine the largest democratic vote in the country's history.  His campaign has been marred by charges of anti-Semitism, with almost half of Britain's Jews saying they would consider leaving the country if he wins.

The past six weeks have focused on Brexit, public services, and leadership.  But something bigger is happening below the surface.  The earthquake reshaping politics across Western democracies will define this election result.

In 1960, leading political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that "for most of the 20th century, working-class voters in developed countries generally supported Left-oriented parties, while middle- and upper-class voters supported Right-oriented parties".

This is no longer true.  Working-class voters are increasingly moving to the right.  Progressive middle-class voters are moving to the left.  This realignment is defying expectations, changing party positioning and redefining left and right.  We saw this all at play in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory and Scott Morrison's surprise 2019 election result.

Now the latest YouGov poll for Great Britain has the Conservatives at an extraordinary 17-point lead among the lower middle-class and working-class voters, known as the "C2DE".  By comparison, the Conservatives lead the middle-class "ABC1" grouping by a narrow five points.

The United Kingdom is having an election because of the Remain-majority parliament's repeated failure to deliver Brexit.

Johnson's strategy is to break the so-called "Red Wall" of working-class traditionally Labour seats in the Midlands and North of England that voted Leave — but in the process sacrifice some Remain supporting areas that have voted Conservative in the past.  This is why he has spent much of the campaign wearing high-vis standing next to adoring workers.  He wants to win Britain's equivalent to Scott Morrison's "Quiet Australians", who swept the Liberals to an unexpected victory by winning outer suburban and regional voters.

These are the people who are alienated by Corbyn's London-centric elitism.  They are unlikely to have a university education, are not ashamed to be British and value stability, safety and unity.  They live in places like Bishop Auckland, a constituency in the northeast of England that has never in its 130-year history, been held by a Conservative.  But with a narrow 502 vote Labour majority, and with over 60 percent of residents voting for Brexit, it is widely forecast to change hands.

Corbyn claims to care about "workers", but his strongest support comes from progressive middle-class Remain voters in London and university towns like Oxford and Cambridge.

Labour was ahead 16 points in the final London poll from YouGov.  These are the sort of people comfortable with change and diversity, who like the cosmopolitan ideals of the European Union, and are supportive of immigration and action on climate change.

My book, Democracy in a Divided Australia, argues that major parties which developed along traditional left-right class divides can struggle to handle this new dynamic.  The main parties now depend on a coalition of voters from a mixture of both backgrounds.  If they go too much in one direction they can alienate from the other side, as Morrison found when he got a lower vote in inner-suburban areas that were historically Liberal strongholds, such as Tony Abbott losing his seat of Warringah to an independent.

The Conservatives are similarly at risk of losing seats in London and the southeast that voted to Remain.  This includes Esher and Walton held by foreign secretary Dominic Raab and leafy Richmond Park held by minister Zac Goldsmith.  If too many of these sorts of seats are lost at this election, or in future, it could spell electoral defeat for the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, in the hope of winning over traditionally Labour-supporting Brexiteers, Boris has moved to the left on economics.  He has promised more spending and state intervention to help failing businesses, albeit much less than Corbyn.  This strategy, which has echoes of Trump's approach to trade and manufacturing, is not risk-free.  It gives credence to many of Corbyn's economic arguments.

Even if, as predicted, the Conservatives win, this is not the end of tumultuous times, Politics remains very much in flux, in Britain and throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.

Cut Red Tape, Get In Black

If Scott Morrison and his government want to deliver an economic boom, they should follow the highly successful template of President Trump in the US and cut red tape.

New research released today by the Institute of Public Affairs finds that President Trump has overseen a $45.6 billion ($31 billion USD) reduction to the cost of red tape since 2017.  That is the equivalent to around 20 new hospitals, 15 years work of Gonski 2.0 education funding, or four years' worth for funding for the NDIS.

The new research, titled The Trump Administration's Red Tape Reduction Agenda, finds that the key to Trump's success has been a one-in-two-out requirement where two regulations must be repealed for every new regulation introduced.  This requirement imposes a binding restraint on the bureaucracy to consider the costs of the new rules they impose by introducing a trade-off into the equation.  If bureaucrats consider that a new rule is of such importance then they can introduce it.  But they have to find two existing rules to get rid of first.

The outcome of the red tape reduction agenda, along with corporate tax cuts and liberalisation of domestic energy production, has been a once-in-a-generation economic boom.

The unemployment in the US fell to just 3.5 per cent in September, which is the lowest rate since 1968.  The unemployment rate in Australia, by contrast, is 5.3 per cent.  New private sector business investment is above its 40-year average.  There has been an increase to average quarterly business applications (a good indicator of new business formation) from 650,000 in 2016 to 826,000 in 2019.  And a net increase of 422,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector since 2016.  Try impeaching a President with that economic record, Democrats.

Importantly, the bounty of this economic boom has been widely shared across the US.  The unemployment rate for African Americans is at a record low 5.4 per cent, which is down from eight per cent when Trump took office.  And the Hispanic unemployment rate dipped to below four per cent for the first time on record in September this year.

To be sure, not all of this success can be attributed to Trump's economic policies.  There has been a long-term structural improvement to the US labour market following the GFC in 2010.

But Trump's red tape cuts have supercharged the economy by making it easier and less expensive to do business in the United States.  Indeed, while business investment into the US is booming, it is stagnating in Australia.  New Private sector business investment in Australia is just over 11 per cent of GDP, which is lower than during the economically-hostile Whitlam years.

While not yet at Trumpian levels, the Morrison government have cottoned on to the fact that red tape reduction is the key to economic growth.  In a speech to the Business Council of Australia last week, the Prime Minister outlined a number of important reforms including simplifying Australia's employment laws system and speeding up approvals for major projects.

In addition, government's red tape reform efforts are being driven by the highly capable Ben Morton, who is the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister.  Just yesterday Morton outlined important changes to the policy-making process that will require departments to provide more rigorous analysis to justify new regulations.

This is a welcome start.  But much more work needs to be done.

To start with, the government must take the scissors to the mountain of green tape which is holding up projects across the country from dams and mines in Queensland to logging projects in Tasmania.

As reported in these pages on October 23, there has been a 80-fold increase in green laws since the first federal environmental department was set up in 1971.  Much of this increase is duplication — and triplication in some cases — between local, state, and federal laws.  At a minimum the government should remove areas of duplication by removing the federal government from regulating any areas that state governments or local councils are already involved with.

Most importantly, though, the government must hold the bureaucrats to account.  Every year, more bureaucrats are employed by state and federal governments and, inevitably, look for more work to do.  Unfortunately, more work for bureaucrats typically means more regulation for everyone else.

Imposing a regulatory budget on all federal government departments will bring them to heal.  Such a budget could take a one-in-two-out form, such as with President Trump.  Or it could be a numerical target of, say, a 10 per cent reduction to red tape each year.  Either way, the bureaucracy would finally have some skin in the game and would feel the pinch of the ever-expanding array of regulations.

Morrison and Morton should build on a good start to cutting red tape in Australia by applying the highly successful approach of Trump.  They too might just find it will produce a once-in-a-generation economic boom.

Australia Must Withdraw From Paris Agreement

President Trump is keeping a promise he made during the 2016 election campaign to get the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement.  Australia must do the same.

In a speech to the Lowy Institute in October, Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned of the dangers of "negative" globalism;  which "coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community."  "And worse still", Morrison added, "an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy."

The Paris Climate Agreement is an exemplar of this "negative globalism."

The Paris Agreement is a global agreement between 188 nations, which mandates greenhouse gas emissions reductions.  It is littered with neo-pagan earth-worship neologisms like "Mother Earth" — with a capital "M" and capital "E" — "climate justice", and "international equality".  This could have easily have been penned by the great unwashed of Extension Rebellion in between spells of gluing their hands to footpaths, or spitting on passers-by as they make their way to work.

Seriously, do any Ministers read these agreements before they sign them?

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is forced to reduce its emissions by 28 per cent by 2030 on 2005 levels.  These are the deepest cuts imposed on any nation on a per capita basis.

While Australia must cut its emissions, China — the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses — is able to increase its emissions by 150 per cent.

The world's second largest emitter, the United States, has now issued formal notice that it will be exiting the agreement.

Not one of the nations of the European Union — collectively the third largest emitters — are on target to meet their emission reduction obligations.

And India, the fourth largest emitter, will meet its emission reduction requirements under the business as usual scenario, meaning the Paris Agreement has no effect.

So while the Greta Thunberg's and Bob Brown's of the world may want to stop Adani, they are curiously silent about the fact that China has some 1,032 coal-fired power stations currently in operation, and a further 126 under construction.  Or that has India 291 coal plants and 33 more on the way.

Much of China and India's coal plants are fuelled using Australian coal.  Yet Australia has just 20 coal-fired power plants in operation and a grant total of zero in construction.  Apparently, Australian coal is good enough to be exported around the world, but cannot be used to deliver affordable and reliable energy at home.  Australia first?  More like Australia last.

You might be wondering which nations are actually meeting their Paris Agreement obligations.

The Climate Action Tracker, a consortium of three research organisations, tracks the progress of 32 nations in meeting their Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets.  These 32 nations account for 80 per cent of total emissions — so they provide a good baseline for how the agreement is faring.  The tracker finds that only Morocco has policies which are "Paris Agreement compatible".  Morocco might be an economic powerhouse, but it accounts for just 0.6 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Put simply, Australia is being taken advantage of by the rest of the world.  The negotiators from Brussels, Beijing, and Mumbai, have out-played Australia's inept and incompetent foreign policy and economic establishment.

All the nations failing to follow the agreement are able to obtain a competitive economic advantage against Australia.  Low electricity prices mean more investment, jobs, and economic growth.

It would be a comedy if it weren't so tragic.

My research has estimated that the Paris Agreement will increase the cost of generating electricity in Australia by $52 billion, or $8,566 per family.  This $52 billion could provide funding for 22 new hospitals, two decades' worth of the Gonski 2.0 education funding, or over four years' worth of funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

For families, $8,566 would provide funding for five years' worth of schooling at a local government school, paying down entire credit card debt, or four years' worth of electricity bills.

For all of this economic self-harm, there will be no noticeable environmental benefit.  Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have estimated that the Paris Agreement will only produce a two-tenths of one-degree Celsius reduction in global warming by the year 2100.

In other words, instead of the temperature reaching 42 degrees on a hot summer's day, it will be just 41.8 degrees — so don't throw away your air-conditioner just yet.

This economic self-harm is even more foolish when you consider the fact that Australia accounts for just 1.3 per cent of the global emissions caused by human activity, and human activity accounts for just three per cent of total emissions.  Even Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel said the complete cessation of all emissions from Australia would do "virtually nothing" to the global climate.

President Trump is putting America first and the globalists last by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Scott Morrison and the Coalition would do well to remember that they were elected by the Australian people to represent the voters of Penrith and Parramatta, not Paris.  An agreement which imposes significant and irreparable economic damage without delivering a discernible environmental benefit is the very definition of negative globalism.