Category Archives: Politics – Australian

The app to automate contact tracing

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Better than Malcolm is about the best I can say about him. From here.

Scott Morrison has said new guidelines are coming on a range of restrictions in place, and Australians can expect the COVID-19 contact tracing app soon.

Mr Morrison said the app to automate contact tracing was now in the final stages of development, and that rapid response measures were being bolstered to handle outbreaks.

The Australian Government’s controversial app will store users’ personal information in a central database hosted by US tech giant Amazon, it was confirmed today.

But Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the database would be hosted on servers within Australia and it would be “illegal” for the multibillion-dollar company to use the information for any other purpose than for what it was originally intended.

It’s not that words fail, but I am not quite yet ready to say them.

Who is the Prime Minister to order the banks to do anything?

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PM roasts banks over Covid fail.

Australia’s biggest banks have been stymieing business attempts to gain bridging finance for wages before the $130bn JobKeeper payments begin next month, prompting Scott Morrison to order them to be read the riot act.

What does “stymieing” mean? Shall we go to the dictionary.

Stymie. The verb stymie means to obstruct or hinder.

Is this what has been happening?

Australia’s biggest banks have been obstructing business attempts to gain bridging finance for wages.

Seriously? Why would they do that? This sounds more like what has been happening.

NAB chief executive Ross McEwan on Thursday night acknowledged the government’s frustrations and said his bank was “working overtime” to provide assistance. “We’ll (today) launch a dedicated hotline for customers needing support with JobKeeper bridging finance and we’ll also expedite any requests we’ve already received from customers so far,” Mr McEwan said.

“We recognise this funding is critical to keeping businesses afloat, people in jobs, and food on the table for the many people who are doing it tough right now.

“We’re working as quickly as we can, with more than 350 people retrained to support customer facing roles so far, so we can support as many customers as we can over this hurdle.”…

The ABA conceded that while the banks had worked “tirelessly to process applications as quickly as possible”, more needed to be done to keep businesses afloat until they could access the $1500 JobKeeper payments.

I find this unbelievable.

A furious Prime Minister vented his anger about the big four during a phone hook-up with tax commissioner Chris Jordan and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg early on Thursday….

Mr Jordan is believed to have delivered Mr Morrison’s blunt message to the chief executives of ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and NAB in a later phone conference that included Mr Frydenberg and Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar….

One chief executive is believed to have tried to make excuses for the delays on getting cash through to businesses, earning a rebuke from Mr Jordan, who said the banks would have a hard time convincing the Prime Minister of that.

Let me see. Out of nowhere the banks have been landed with a massive increase in responsibility that has come from out of the blue and are struggling to fulfil the obligations that have been placed on them. And I will just add this from the end of the story.

Restaurant and Catering Australia chief executive Wes Lambert said many of the association’s members had been asked to prove their acceptance under the JobKeeper program before receiving their bridging finance. That had not been possible because formal applications for JobKeeper only opened this week.

The one thing I could not find out is how much the government is paying the banks to undertake all of this additional effort.

Frauds and conmen

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We are dealing with totalitarian mentalities which must always lurk behind everyone who runs for political office. They want not just to manage our affairs, but to run our lives. There is no longer anything to worry about, and the data are even more stark by the day. But was in an argument this afternoon – online of course – over the data. In the end, I went looking for the numbers, and this is what I found.

This was published by the ABC in Feb 2020 so “last year” in the story refers to 2019. Flu season which struck down 310,000 Australians ‘worst on record’ due to early outbreaks. The final lines:

“While 2019 saw the highest number of influenza cases across the country, 2017 still holds the record for the highest number of flu-related deaths, with over 1,100 cases.”

Last year there were over 900 influenza linked deaths in Australia.“

And then there was this from the ABS, not the ABC this time.

Australia’s leading causes of death, 2018

Influenza and pneumonia (J09-J18)

Number: 3102
Median age: 89.3

The number of deaths from the Corona Virus will possibly never reach 100 and will certainly never reach 1000.

We are in the midst of a gigantic fraud and a burst of the most disgusting hysteria. We are not led by leaders but by hysterics and conmen who love power and love to tell everyone else what to do. They have no business being leaders in a free society. First they do everything they can to scare as many people as possible and then invent a near-on-totalitarian system to protect virtually all of us from virtually nothing at all.

Illustrating the political divide

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My post from The Age on Malcolm Turnbull’s dealings with Donald Trump underscores the sort of far left low life Malcolm was and is. But it’s worth bearing in mind that even at the end, when the Libs finally got rid of him, he commanded almost half the party room.

To understand a bit better the mentality of the kind of people who see merit in Malcolm, it is worth having a look at the comments section on the article at The Age I had quoted from. This is the comment which was overwhelmingly selected by those who went through the comments section as “most respected”. This is the comment that, it seems, most accurately reflected the views of the people who had read through all of the comments.

It’s all part of the job, as MT would have known this before he took it on. The American people did elect a lunatic and our far right wing politicians see Trump’s behaviour as pretty good, that is, anything you can get away while still holding the treasury benches is okay. Democracy is such a lottery, anyone can nominate and when they get elected their true traits come out. In Canberra Malcolm was from a different universe, well educated and successful while so many of the career MPs have done little else since they landed a ministerial adviser job at age 25 or so. These people no nothing [sic] about dealing with ‘normal’ human beings – they see everything from the prism of the Canberra bubble. My hope is the Libs and Nats implode – what a nice thought!

What overlap is there for those of us who are supporters of the American president with people who see things this way? Unbelievably ignorant, with not an ounce of common sense or understanding of anything. But they’re there, and in large numbers too. Useful idiots to the party leaders of the left though they may be, these “no nothings” will yet doom us to perdition.

Why didn’t Malcolm see his removal as a CIA coup?

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From The Age: ‘Trump kept talking over the top of me’: Turnbull recounts tense call. Turnbull has to be the absolute high water mark of political stupidity. Is there anyone more completely dense who has ever been a political leader anywhere. Read this and wonder.

A furious Donald Trump berated then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull over a deal to resettle hundreds of refugees, only to joke about the agreement months later by claiming 2000 “terrorists” would come to America.

The US President swung wildly in the negotiations to resettle asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru, in a pattern repeated in volatile talks to give Australia valuable exemptions in Mr Trump’s trade war with China.

Recounting the clashes and compromises in a new memoir, Mr Turnbull tells of a colleague going “white with horror” at Mr Trump’s ferocity about the refugee deal in a notorious phone conversation in January 2017….

“As his anger rose, Trump kept talking over the top of me, with more intensity,” Mr Turnbull writes of the phone call.

“It was as though at times he was talking to himself or perhaps to the people in the room, which of course included [then presidential adviser] Steve Bannon, one of the deal’s fiercest opponents.

“At one point, I looked up from the phone across my desk to [senior adviser] David Bold – his face was white with horror – so I turned to look out the window instead.”…

When Mr Trump asked his wife, Melania, to join the talks, he joked with Mr Turnbull about the refugee deal he had been so angry about months earlier.

“Melania, do you know, Malcolm has 2000 of the worst terrorists in the world locked up on a desert island and that fool Obama agreed to take them?” Mr Trump said, according to the new memoir.

“And now Malcolm has talked me into taking them, too.”

Mr Turnbull notes that while the conversation was “surreal”, the deal meant refugees would soon begin leaving the islands to resettle in the US….

“So, you’ve been having a little fun at my expense, Malcolm?” he said, according to Mr Turnbull’s account. “It’s not bad. Lots of people think you are better than Alec Baldwin.”

As French President Emmanuel Macron listened, Mr Turnbull told Mr Trump – “wearily” – that the refugees were not terrorists.

“Oh, yes, they are,” Mr Trump replied, in Mr Turnbull’s account. “They are the worst, and that fool Obama – the worst president EVER – agreed to take them to America. Can you believe that? Would you take them, Emmanuel?”

Mr Turnbull says the French President opened his mouth but did not say anything.

Mr Turnbull concludes that Trump is a “radical” and “populist” leader whose deliberate unpredictability generates fear and anxiety in other nations rather than respect for American strength.

The only reason we can rule out a CIA coup is that everything Malcolm stood for is part of the American Deep State agenda.

ILLUSTRATING THE POLITICAL DIVIDE: It is worth having a look at the comments section on this post at The Age. This is the comment which was selected by the others as “most respected”.

It’s all part of the job, as MT would have known this before he took it on. The American people did elect a lunatic and our far right wing politicians see Trump’s behaviour as pretty good, that is, anything you can get away while still holding the treasury benches is okay. Democracy is such a lottery, anyone can nominate and when they get elected their true traits come out. In Canberra Malcolm was from a different universe, well educated and successful while so many of the career MPs have done little else since they landed a ministerial adviser job at age 25 or so. These people no nothing about dealing with ‘normal’ human beings – they see everything from the prism of the Canberra bubble. My hope is the Libs and Nats implode – what a nice thought!

What overlap is there with people who see things this way? Unbelievably ignorant, with not an ounce of common sense or understanding of anything. But they’re there, and in large numbers too. Useful idiots though they may be, they will yet doom us to perdition.

Good for you Scott

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As he goes from blunder to blunder, his sure-footed errors have reinforced in my mind that our Scott Morrison has been following an internationally-determined road map that has nothing to do with our circumstances here in Australia.

So to thank the Prime Minister for his work I have set up up the #GoodForYouScott twitter account, which may be better recognised by its short-form version, GFYS.

Who will guard us from the guardians?

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Not Malcolm Turnbull, that’s for sure.

I posted what you see below in February 27, 2015 just as Malcolm was about to overturn Tony Abbott as Prime Minister: I would never vote for a Coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull. It turned out that I would vote for Malcolm Turnbull when he led the Coalition, but everything else below remains unchanged. And to all this we can add this new revelation discussed by Andrew Bolt in the video above which is a revelation from Malcom’s new book: it was he who encouraged The Guardian to open an Australian edition. Why would he even say it if he wanted to have an ounce of influence on the side he once led. Only because he is an even bigger fool than most of us had already believed he is.

Going even further, more evidence that the Libs have a rotten core of funders and MPs is also highlighted in the video if one listens to Fiona Scott, a Coalition MP from New South Wales. She is barely capable of saying anything negative about Malcolm, even now, even with everything we know.

Below, however, goes back to my post from 2015 in which the only change I can think of is that my views have hardened a great deal further since then.

Andrew Bolt says that Malcolm Turnbull is about to have his final go at taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party by Tuesday, so that it is now or never to make our views known (see here, here and here).

When I used to work in Canberra, our offices backed onto the Liberal Party headquarters, and I was asked one time, even before Malcolm entered Parliament, what I thought about him. My answer was that if I was in the constituency that would decide the fate of the next election, and my vote was the one that would put him in or out, that I would hesitate about which way to go. That was then. Today I would have no doubt. The reasons.

Peter Wright For me, national security is the ultimate issue in any election. There are always international issues that matter, and they weigh heavy with me. All but forgotten today, The Spycatcher Trial was one of those moments I do not forget. Wright was an MI5 agent who set out to write a tell-all/reveal-all of the English intelligence service. Margaret Thatcher sought to prevent the publication of his book, and the final determination was in a court in Tasmania, in which Malcolm Turnbull sought to defend Wright and ultimately was successful in allowing the book to be published worldwide because it could be published in Australia. I was told then that everyone deserves the best defence and etc etc, but if Malcolm has ever said that he defended Wright even though he was treasonous scum, I haven’t heard it. I would never trust Turnbull on any national security issue, and there is nothing more important at the present time.

He’s a Warmist Anyone soft-headed enough to take in the Global Warming scam without at least some doubts is not a possessor of the shrewd, sensible, incisive mind I am looking for in a leader. He lost the leadership on this one issue at the time because there are people like me who would never line up behind anyone who believes this stuff needs trillion dollar government solutions to what is looking every day less of a problem.

He’s a Keynesian I once had a conversation with Malcolm over economic issues and mentioned something that I think of instinctively as an issue, the kind of thing Peter Costello put at the centre of his own management of the economy. His response was to walk off. Having watched and listened to him over the years, he has no sense of how an economy works. Given that when he led the Libs he was all set to follow Labor’s lead on the stimulus, and declared that the Coalition would have done much the same, in many ways he owns the problems we have right now.

Useless as a Minister He may be popular with the ABC and others like it, but this is only because he has never done anything of any use that would upset them. If he doesn’t upset the ABC, what could he possibly stand for? What issue has he carried forward as part of the government that has done an ounce of good? If the NBN is his crowning achievement, he has done nothing other than implement Kevin Rudd’s back-of-the-envelope idiocy that will cost us billions and return millions.

He Cannot be Trusted To draw a distinction between himself and the Prime Minister over the Human Rights Commission Report on children in detention not only shows the worst imaginable political judgement, but has him line up with the Government’s enemies. I am a million miles from Canberra right now, but since all and sundry report Turnbull’s treachery, who am I to doubt it. This is a government that needs to survive and win that next election. Abbott is learning how to be a PM on the job, and is actually getting the hang of it. Shame about the wasted first year, but that is now the past.

There is clearly a succession plan in place at the top of the Liberal Party. What may have begun as the second eleven is now starting to function as a very good government. And the PM does not like to lose, and I don’t think he will.

Actually, there is one other matter I should have included but will include now.

Led the Republican Movement He has no idea how we are governed nor the crucial role of the Governor-General in a Parliamentary Democracy. He prefers a system in which a single person makes the rules and everyone else follows the rules this single person has made. Utterly ignorant of the necessary constitutional restraints on a government of the day. Even though a shift to a republic was utterly rejected across the country he remains bitter about the loss. Too shallow to understand any of the deeper issues involved.

Time to open our economies and restore our freedoms

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The difference between Trump and every other world leader that I can see is that he recognises there is a balancing act involved between protection from the harm the virus might do and the immense costs of shutting the economy down. Unlike most others, he is seeking to bring these shutdowns to an end as quickly as possible, unlike say Slo Mo. The Oz front page is Coronavirus Australia live updates: Downturn will hit us like a truck: Morrison. What he intends to do about it is an unknown but it sounds bad. Personally I think it is the decisions he has made that is hitting us like a truck, but perhaps that’s just me.

In the US we now have this: Trump unveils ‘Opening Up America’ plan, aims for May 1. Unlike the pleasures of enjoying the power trips they are on that so many political leaders are in the midst of, Donald Trump seems anxious to get not just the economy back on the road, but to return our lives to the previous normal, or as close as we can.

President Trump on Thursday announced new guidelines for reopening states as soon as May 1 now that the coronavirus appears to be peaking in the US, but he left the decision up to each state’s governor while recommending criteria that would have to be met for each to gradually reopen.

“America wants to be open, and Americans want to be open,” Trump said at the White House during the daily Coronavirus Task Force press briefing.

“Based on the latest data, our team of experts agree we can start the next front in our war, which we are calling Opening Up America Again, and that is what we are doing, opening up our country, and we have to do that.”

You can see the details of his plan at the link. You can also see where we are at the moment in relation to this virus.

This graph shows new cases of COVID-19 in Australia by date of notification. See the Description field on the publication page for a full description.

The above is the Australian experience. Here is a description of the international experience which is identical, which was an article Currency Lad linked to yesterday.

“Is the coronavirus expansion exponential? The answer by the numbers is simple: no. Expansion begins exponentially but fades quickly after about eight weeks.” …

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week….

The data from the past 50 days indicates that the closure policies of the quarantine countries can be replaced by more moderate social distancing policies. The numbers simply do not support quarantine or economic closure.

Madness on steroids. I can see we will need a staged recovery for our political leaders from the delusions they have been indulging in over how significant their decisions have been, when all they have done is copied from everyone else in how much of a police state they could erect. Time they started thinking about bringing all this to an end.

THIS NOW IN: From Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit:

AND YES, I KNOW, A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE VIEWING TRUMP’S DECLARATION AS A HOPEFUL SIGN. I SEE IT AS HIS CONTINUING TO ALLOW US TO BE GOVERNED BY SCIENTISTS WITH PRETTY CHARTS. BECAUSE THAT WORKED SO WELL FOR THE USSR:  Trump bows to bureaucrats, unveils a never-ending 3-phase program to end shutdowns.

They didn’t close us gradually. They can reopen like they closed.

Also, am I the only one who still remembers this was ALL about “bending the curve” which apparently auto-bent (because three weeks of isolation would be when it started to bend, but instead it never spiked. Even with all the dubious diagnostics and highly exaggerated “deaths.”)

SERIOUSLY people go outside. Being locked indoors with the MSM leads to strange amnesia and hysteria.

I still assume that Trump has been in part guided by a series of screaming meemies* among his own side of the political divide.

* Knew the phrase since I was a lad, but looked it up to see how it was spelled. Turned out “origin, originally used of German shells in World War I”. I find that both fascinating and charming.

Boring beyond inanity

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Since no one seems to have mentioned it anywhere else, I can see just how uninterested anyone is in Malcolm Turnbull’s memoire which is discussed in The Oz today, exclusively: Inside Malcolm’s big-picture world of gossip and axe-grinding. This lack of interest is a clear sign of how lack-lustre he himself was, how incompetently he dealt with the events he oversaw and how dull his reflections on his time in office are. This is beyond tedious, and I only raise it here so that we are aware that the book will be available Monday. It’s the only reason I can think of to be pleased that many bookshops are now shut.

Malcolm Turnbull has sensationally claimed that Scott Morrison and the Coalition he once led didn’t deserve to win the 2019 election and delivered highly personal accounts of his relationship with the current Prime Minister and scathing assessments of his former cabinet colleagues.

In his highly anticipated memoir, due to be released on Monday, Mr Turnbull recounts his own version of events that led to his dismissal as prime minister in August 2018, while revealing the darkest days of a political career that was marked by a bout of severe ­depression.

In claims that will be hotly disputed by those he attacks, Mr Turnbull says that colleagues of Mr Morrison, including the Prime Minister’s now closest confidants Mathias Cormann and Peter Dutton, had once described Mr Morrison as a “Machiavellian plotter” who could not be trusted.

According to those who have read the manuscripts, Mr Turnbull describes Mr Dutton as a “narcissist” and “self-delusional” in his belief that he could become prime minister while revealing his personal anguish at what he believes was the ultimate betrayal at the hands of his finance minister, Senator Cormann.

If these are the highlights, cannot picture anyone actually making it through the book.

When will this lockupdown end?

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The same question is being asked in the United States except there it is the states who hold the spigot. It is freedom, and it is prosperity and it is human rights at risk. Our lives, hardly at all.

___________Below the line is where this post originally began
From The Australian but with the first and last words in the original headline reversed: Virus cabinet to outlive crisis. It begins:

Scott Morrison has signalled his preference for the national cabinet to become a permanent decision-making body to manage the federation, with West Australian Labor Premier Mark McGowan arguing the COVID-19 leaders’ model should replace the Council of Australian Governments.

The Prime Minister said that through the national cabinet — formed in response to the coronavirus pandemic — the “federation had been more responsive and more co-ordinated than we’ve seen in many years”.

Sure thing, and you know why that is? Because the effective Prime Minister has been Daniel Andrews. Watching Greg [rs] Hunt on Bolt the other day trying to explain why this lockupdown must continue even though the number of deaths is effectively negligible and the incidence of new cases is falling rapidly was itself sickening. What do these people stand for? Who do they represent?

So let us ask what Andrew Bolt asked: What are the actual signs that will signal that you should once again begin opening the economy up?

You may think people are thanking you now, and maybe some are, but in a month the entire country will hate you with such venom you will be astonished at their lack of gratitude, which no one will in the slightest owe you.