Category Archives: Politics – Australian

The worst premier in Australian history

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Daniel Andrews is good at wasting money on over-priced infrastructure projects. He had already bankrupted the State even before the Chinese Flu came along. But here is the psychology of what then occurred. Although he is quite stupid, he thinks of himself as a genius. And what he has found out is that his stupidity is now recognised by all, other than the dwindling number of our fellow citizens caught up in the toxic virus of the Melbourne Syndrome. And along with his low grade intelligence, he has a ridiculously high level of self-regard. As a result, the incessant level of bungling has led to his refusing to admit that even a single one of his decisions has been at the centre of the problems in dealing with Covid. Look at this from The Oz today:

Josh Frydenberg, the nation’s most senior Victorian federal minister, has pleaded with Daniel ­Andrews to free Victorians from “devastating’’ coronavirus restrictions, warning that businesses are losing hope and the state now has 40 per cent of the nation’s effective unemployed.

The Treasurer sparked a bitter political row with the Victorian Premier on Monday when he ­accused Mr Andrews of “callous indifference” towards economic hardship in the state after restrictions on many businesses were ­extended for two weeks.

A dismissive Mr Andrews hit back, accusing Mr Frydenberg of playing politics when Victorians wanted their families kept safe so the state could reopen safely.

More psychology here, this time a bit of projection when he accuses The Treasurer of “playing politics”.

Face it, he’s a political moron and even worse economic manager. But he has had some psychological wire tripped and he is now going to show us how it is done properly.

He was elected because he promised to get rid of rail crossings and even he found it too expensive and hasn’t done it. Now he is in charge of dealing with the Covid where we once again discover how massively out of his depth he is.

And there is this which has just cropped up. I wonder who Mr Stupid will blame: Hotel quarantine guests at risk of HIV and other viruses after testing blunder.More than 200 people who were in Victoria’s hotel quarantine program are being urged to get tested for HIV and other viruses after a testing mix-up.`State health authorities have announced that 243 people are being advised to undergo testing for Hepatitis B and C and HIV after it was revealed that single-use blood glucose testing kits were used multiple times.

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Dan really has to go. Worst Premier in Australian history.

There has never been a government with such a high approval-to-incompetence ratio

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Guess who that is? And guess what it’s about. The first two minutes should make you sick. Do not watch too much more since it will be bad for your health. Much more dangerous than CV-1984.

So this is where we are with Mr Stupid: Andrews threatens border closures over Kiwi arrivals. There has never been a government with such a high approval-to-incompetence ratio. Bumbling fools comes nowhere near covering it. Twenty-one years of almost continuous Labor Party management have brought community expectations for their governments to the lowest level in history.

Mr Andrews said he had previously told the federal government Victoria was not part of the travel bubble and blamed federal authorities for the arrivals, saying he did not know they were coming and they should have been stopped before they boarded flights to Melbourne. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian made it clear her government would not prevent passengers travelling to Victoria, with a spokeswoman saying the issue was a matter for the southern state. Victoria’s borders are not closed to NSW…. Victorian authorities spent much of yesterday trying to track down the travellers, with Mr Andrews conceding the state’s health department had no power to stop passengers, detain them or force them into quarantine if they had arrived from interstate, rather than overseas.

They arrive from places where there are no cases of the Corona Virus, so what’s the problem? And if you want more evidence just how incompetent these people are, try this although there is much much more:

A spokeswoman for the federal Department of Health confirmed Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton was present at a meeting on October 12 when the matter of onwards travel of New Zealanders from Sydney to Melbourne was discussed. Mr Tudge also tweeted that Professor Sutton “did not raise any concerns” in the discussions. It also emerged Mr Andrews’ own department had given one of the arrivals from NZ the green light two weeks ago to travel onward to Victoria although the advice, from the Department of Premier and Cabinet, was issued before Mr Andrews had officially declared his state was not joining the travel bubble. The Age has also seen an email from the Premier’s Department, sent on October 12 in response to a query about travel from NZ via Sydney, that clearly advised that Victoria’s borders were open and that the traveller was free to arrive in the southern state.

I can only think Dan is still there because the rest of his cabinet has joined Michael O’Brien (the unknown leader of the Liberal Party) in not wanting to become Premier until the present Victorian mess is limited to the level of “Ongoing Catastrophe” from its present level of “Major Calamity”.

A $30m contract for three months’ work

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This is what Daniel Andrews was dealing with. From Peta Credlin: Too much we’re not being told about Victoria’s hotel quarantine fiasco. And while who made the decision is important (here’s the answer, it was Dan), more important to me is why he chose some local mates over the ADF.

The Premier’s chief of staff was the first person Eccles briefed on the national cabinet decision to introduce hotel quarantine. Jobs Department head Simon Phemister then put the process in train that led to the engagement of Unified Security, a company not on the list of preferred tenderers, but that somehow won the lion’s share of the work — a $30m contract for three months’ work…. How could Phemister have set up the private security contracts without knowing how this had come to be authorised? What public servants would spend $30m without being clear about the authority for it?

So many questions, so few answers.

Australians watching American politics according to The Oz

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This really is one of the creepiest stories I have come across in the papers in quite a while: Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars. It’s by Katrina Grace Kelly and it’s in The Australian.

Confession: it is easy to laugh when on the other side of the world, I suppose, but Donald Trump has been a source of great amusement for many years. However, as the mind-boggling events unfolded this week, the smile was wiped from my dial.

Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted — although when and where remains a secret — the President checked out of hospital and returned to the White House.

A day or so later, as the US death toll reached 211,532, reports on television claimed Trump was symptom free and had declared his infection a “blessing in disguise”.

This is her central point:

If the leader of any country has only one job, it is to keep their citizens out of harm’s way. Despite any other previous policy triumphs, if a leader doesn’t do everything to keep their people alive in the face of avoidable death, they won’t be appreciated.

I don’t want to get into just how inane I think this is. If you don’t see it yourself, I can do nothing to help you. But it was the sentence that followed that makes it clear just how much, in Jane Fonda’s words, “Covid is God’s gift to the Left”. Here we have, in The Oz:

Polls often are wrong but they have Trump on track to lose the election. If he does, it will be because of his COVID-19 response.

And it will be just because of this safety-first inanity from people of the left such as herself. Save me, she begs, save me. No one is any longer dying, there are other issues that also matter, and many that are much more important. But so far as she is concerned, that is the first priority with everything else a long way distant behind. Here are the first five comments under “Best Liked” and then a few others after that.

“Voters expect politicians to do everything to keep them safe”. No, we expect them to provide information so we can decide for ourselves how “safe” we want to be. It’s time we recaptured the notion of individual responsibility. The thought of big government nursing me from cradle to grave has me more worried than the virus.

Used to like reading your columns Katrina now they are better suited to the Guardian.

Keeping the population safe includes the responsibility of not destroying the economy.

KGK over the last couple of her articles, has shown herself to be a Dan lover and Trump/right hater/disliker. It’s always good to know the perspective from which the authors come. One thing though for KGK, as a person who will relentlessly defend Dan Andrews and his draconian lockdowns, can she please explain how my child in France was in the very same class with another child who was confirmed to have Covid. The Covid positive child stayed away from school for a few weeks and the rest of the class went on as normal with no one else (nor the teacher) getting Covid (and their classrooms is really, really small and packed with students). Compare this with Victoria where there are very very few diagnosed cases (certainly in comparison to France) but no kids going to school for 6 entire months. KGK, can you see why some people may see that there has been a bit of an over reaction by your man Dan? I think KGK ought to check her bias.

A very simple response Katrina. You’re so very, very wrong in your thinking.

“Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted.” Am I the only person in the world who understood his words to be along the lines of not letting yourself become too afraid to live and to still find joy in the world despite the times we are living in; but to take care and be responsible. The man has his faults but for just once could anyone report on his utterances with just a small degree of objectivity?

It is the perpetually terrified who have urged politicians to bring us to our knees. Governments cannot keep us safe. In the ultimate scenario it is they that send troops to die to achieve economic and moral objectives. Safety is am illusion. Live under the doona for as long as you like Katrina but the rest of us want to live life.

This is what gets my back up. People who are so quick to blame Trump for the deaths from corona but yet give a free pass to Dan Andrews. Seriously?? The same bloke who let 10000 BLM protesters run amuck thru Melbourne because apparently they couldn’t be policed but yet dragged a pregnant mother out of her home for supporting a Fb post about a protest. What a joke.

Sorry, but most of this is a string of nonsense cliches.

We can’t hide under the bed forever. I think it is eminently sensible advice to say ‘don’t let this virus rule our lives, we must learn to live with it’.

I swear people still peddling this fear campaign must live under a rock.

“Stark staring mad”

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“Australians not living in Victoria cannot possibly fathom how ‘barking mad this place is’ or how mad its government has become …”

And so what if it is, what then? It’s not as if we are locked up with a psychopathic moonbat moronic low-IQ fool in command. And if 61% are happy with the Premier whose policies have directly led to the deaths of over 700 people, be grateful, you are living in the essence of a democratic society. Majority rule, right? At least he is making the trains run on time even if no one has anywhere to go more than 5km from their homes.

The Melbourne Syndrome in pictures

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It would be much funnier if it weren’t actually true.

AND THIS FROM TODAY’S FINANCIAL REVIEW: Mask crackdown mad, health experts warn. Their headline, with this text:

Asked why he would require Victorians to wear masks when there is no health purpose, Mr Andrews dismissed the question. “That’s an esoteric debate, isn’t it? Maybe there will be a time when we have the luxury of having those sorts of debates.”

Maybe there will be a time! “Mad” is just the word.

And indeed, Andrew Bolt now specifically asks

Has Daniel Andrews gone mad?

I cannot tell if this is just hyperbolic exaggeration or is meant literally. To me, it could be either, but what if it’s literally true? I keep coming back to The Caine Mutiny and Captain Queeg. The Caine is a US battleship during the war in the Pacific. Captain Queeg is its captain who has gone insane. The leader of the mutiny is Maryk.

Maryk keeps a secret log of Queeg’s eccentric behavior…. Soon afterward, the Caine is caught in a typhoon, an ordeal that sinks three destroyers. At the height of the storm, Queeg’s paralysis of action convinces Maryk that he must relieve the captain of command to prevent the loss of the ship. Willie, as Officer of the Deck, supports the decision. Maryk turns Caine into the wind and rides out the storm.

Fundamentally incorrect government statements

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This seems very direct.

Lying is native to politics. If you did not realise it before watching the inquiry into Victorian Labor’s disastrous COVID-19 quarantine scheme, you will now. The Victorian government led by Daniel Andrews is so mired in lies that truth is a distant memory….

We heard the lie by omission, the half-truth, blame-shifting, obfuscation, red herrings, selective memory and collective amnesia. The Premier claims not to know who made the decision to hire private security staff to guard people in hotel quarantine. Labor ministers have followed suit, though most peppered their feigned ignorance with a generous serving of selective amnesia….

On August 8, the Premier told a parliamentary committee: “I think it is fundamentally incorrect to assert that there was (sic) hundreds of ADF staff on offer and somehow someone said no. That’s not, in my judgment, accurate.” However, Sky News and others reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison personally wrote letters to the Victorian Premier urging him to accept the help of Australian Defence Force personnel in July as the number of COVID cases surged in Victoria. It was reported that the PM sent letters to Andrews on July 4, 6 and 11. In the final correspondence, the PM offered about 1000 defence personnel to work alongside Victoria Police to ensure the virus was contained, affected suburbs were locked down and contact tracing was undertaken….

When Defence Minister Linda Reynolds noted the Victorian government had rejected commonwealth offers of ADF help with hotel quarantine, the Premier framed it as playing politics. He supported the alternative version of events authored by Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp, who said he neither sought nor was offered ADF assistance with hotel quarantine in meetings on March 27-28. However, Defence records showed that from late March the offer stood. The Victorian government authorities rejected at least half a dozen offers of assistance.

And then there is this from Maurice Neuman: Nostalgia won’t protect Snowy white elephant.

Paul Broad, the chief executive officer of Snowy Hydro, has provided a solid rebuttal (The Snowy 2.0 project will pay its way) to an open letter (On every count, Snowy 2.0 is a disaster in the making), published on this page on September 18. The letter’s 37 authors cannot be easily dismissed. All have relevant expertise in energy markets, engineering and the environment.

That said, Broad is adamant that Snowy 2.0 is “underpinned by a strong business case”. He alleges that “critics have run with every falsehood under the sun” and that most arguments are “flimsy” and not warranting a response….

The project’s announcement bears many of the hallmarks of the National Broadband Network, which was a dream brought to life on the back of a drinks coaster. As predicted, it is a technological and commercial white elephant.

While there were no drinks coasters, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 announcement in 2017 was widely viewed as a cynically timed thought bubble. Like the NBN, it had no business case but was still acclaimed as an “electricity game-changer”. Turnbull boasted, “it will increase the generation of the Snowy Hydro scheme by 50 per cent, adding 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the national electricity market”. He made no reference to cost. However, Broad later told a Senate estimates hearing that a “very rough, top-level estimate”, was $2bn.

Rough it was. Two years later, a construction contract was let for $5.1bn….

All in all, and without allowing for cost overruns, the final investment for the entire project could well sit at about $14bn or, seven times the original indicative figure….

Whatever the reality, Australians are getting the impression that Snowy Hydro 2.0 is yet another “trust me” project where the business case has been written to reflect the announcement. It will take time for the truth to be known but, sadly, history is not on the government’s side.

The sad part is that we still live in a kind of fantasy theoretical economic environment in which government waste is believed to be good for the economy. It may well be good for those on the receiving end of all this money, but for the rest of us, it is a straightforward loss that keeps us much poorer than we would otherwise have been.

The question was not who was responsible but why did anyone think it was the right way to go?

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I watched the examination of Daniel Andrews the other day until I could bear it no longer. The major issue seemed to be who had decided to employ these private contractors rather than bring in the ADF. But that was not the right issue. The right issue is why was that decision made? And let us not kid ourselves. The decision was made by Daniel Andrews irrespective of who is being asked to take the rap. As if he didn’t know what was going on. Is everyone an absolute idiot?

But that aside, the question of who is irrelevant. What demands explanation is why it was decided almost immediately to enforce the quarantine within Victoria using unqualified personnel who had to be trained from scratch.

It cannot be because they were a cheaper source of labour, since they cost an additional $18m whereas the ADF were being sponsored and funded by the Commonwealth.

It cannot be because these people had an expertise that would allow them to undertake these tasks with greater focus and with less potential for mistakes. We know that cannot be the case since we have heard from many of them about their lack of relevant skills and qualifications and their absence of training.

We also know it cannot be the case that they had a superior skill set since the virus – uniquely in Victoria – escaped from confinement and went onto to kill hundreds more while being contained everywhere else.

It cannot be because Daniel Andrews wanted to provide more money to his union colleagues by providing them with sinecures that would earn them a tonne of money for providing an essentially simple service, because the task wasn’t all that simple as it turned out. But the money they most surely did receive, lucky them, for taking on a job that was well beyond their capabilities.

So why were these completely unskilled union colleagues of the premier chosen to receive the millions for undertaking these tasks even though they were not even a favoured tenderer for the state and had no requisite skills?

It is obviously a very difficult question because not a single person seems to be able to come up with a plausible answer.

Columnists who try men’s souls

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I get all the papers now since there is so little to do that the extra crossword puzzles and sudokus help fill in the day. But these are columns that try men’s souls, I can tell you, and from The Oz as well. And once again, Daniel Andrews is the cause. Let me take you first to Angela Shanahan and her pathetic Let’s give these poor pollies a break. There we find:

The Victorian Premier is held up as an incompetent fool, a crazed ideological warrior with no sense of “reality”, careless of the econo­mic devastation cutting a swath through his state, and adopting totalitarian methods of control.

And so he is and all of that. Angela, however, thinks we are being too hard on this poor, misbegotten sod:

These two premiers [Dan and the premier of Queensland] have become symbols of ideological warfare that preceded the pandemic. Many attacks directed at them have nothing to do with how well, or badly, they are managing to control the spread of the virus in their states. It is a type of proxy warfare. The border closures and even the economic versus fatality arguments are an extension of the ideological warfare that apparently cannot be halted even in times of national emergency.

She then added this, gratuitously to my mind, towards the end, so that I will now feel free to never read another word she writes:

Generally our politicians are men and women of quite high calibre and good character. (If you don’t believe me, look at the two contenders for the American presidency.)

Unbelievable. You can tell almost everything about someone’s politics by their attitude to Donald Trump.

Then we come to Katrina Grace Kelly who writes in her column today, We are managing the pandemic quite well, so stop the wild shrieking. Someone I had long ago stopped reading. The heading did get me in today, but the contents will keep me away for even longer after this. She is discussing the poll results that show Daniel Andrews has 61% approval for his handling of the Corona V:

This data rises above the chorus of remarks by federal coalition politicians, and hyperbolic and often inaccurate criticism from the angry tub-thumpers on SAD (Sky after Dark). On SAD, our Premier is called “Chairman Dan” or “Dictator Dan” and Victoria is referred to as a “socialist republic” and a “failed state”. These insults demean every Victorian, regardless of how they vote.

What about the extra 750 deaths in Victoria, you absurdist goose? The Sky After Dark crowd are trying to tell you something, but you are obviously too thick with sentimental eyewash to take in what they are saying. Any thoughts on the Chinese Road and Brick business? These are the first four comments under “Best”, that is, the comments most in keeping with the views of others.

Fact number one: the Victorian government’s massive incompetence in handling hotel quarantine has led to awful human and economic loss. It’s the biggest failure of public policy and administration in modern Australian history. This, really, is all that needs to be known. Nothing to do with the political opposition or politics more generally. Just sheer, industrial scale incompetence by the Victorian government.

Walking though the Geelong CBD is hard not to notice around 20% of the shop fronts are empty. The economic pain Andrews has caused with the bungled hotel quarantine program is yet to be felt and will linger for years to come. Andrews economic record is headed south at a rapid rate. He wasted $1.3 billion on not building a road and now the road he’s building to replace has a cost overrun of $3 billion and it not even half build. It pretty clear Andrews government is following the trajectory of the Cain Government and like Cain I expect Andrews to jump ship just as the economic pain starts to wash across the deck.

In this country your state of Victoria has failed to control this virus. 700+ deaths , billions lost, thousands of jobs lost, denial of civil liberties resulting in the hardest lock down in the world. People are shrieking because the ALP have lowered the standard of accountability of Government to the point that your Premier sets up an inquiry to investigate a failed hotel quarantine management policy that HE introduced and after months he finally shows up unprepared and doesn’t know who introduced private security guards. And you still “stand with Dan”. And the worst performing state govt in this country probably ever.

Nobody does diversions better than Labor or the sycophantic media cheer squad.

It’s lucky I now subscribe to The Age so I can get some balance in what I read in the press.