This gutless government of ours

A bit late to the keyboard but have just been blessed with another granddaughter. I have seen her on Facetime and have the photos but am not allowed to see her, nor would I at such a time. That said, I will also begin by reminding everyone not to miss Andrew Bolt’s interview with Cardinal Pell tonight at 7:00 pm.

Bolt today was an absolute torrent of anger, all directed towards our gutless government. There were two issues in his brief that he discussed – one the pathetic response by our government to the overwhelmingly obvious absence of any need to keep our country in lock-up because of the coronavirus. And then he went after the hopeless Liberal government for providing no serious response to the irresponsible actions of the ABC in persecuting Cardinal Pell, which continues almost without let up. I also no longer think they are being politically careful. I now think they are an identikit with Labor. There may be some way to distinguish one from the other, but I could no longer tell you what that difference is.

First watching Greg [rhyming slang] Hunt refusing to even hint at a timetable short of the six months our craven Prime Minister absurdly indicated at the start of this disgraceful episode. As near as I could tell, there is a medical team being set up to decide when to lift the restraints. Let me be very clear about this: doctors do not know anything at all about epidemics other than perhaps how to treat individual patient if they happen to catch the disease. Dcotors can provide no advice whatsoever that is worth ten cents on when and whether to end the lockdown. Here’s why, other than that the expert advice up until now has been wrong at every turn, so why would you listen to them now? There is also second reason:

THIS IS A POLITICAL DECISION!

No one can tell you anything about the future. No one knows what will happen next. Every single forecast has been wrong, both here and oversees. But what we can tell you about the so-called experts whose advice you have been listening to up till now is this. They do not know anything at all about the potential for this virus to kill any of us. THEY WERE CONSISTENTLY WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE! You should ignore them. Meanwhile the economy is rotting, incomes are being lost, businesses are folding, jobs are disappearing, and your deficit is climbing. Is there absolutely nothing at all you intend to do about any of it?

It is you, the Government, that must make the decision. What are you waiting for? Hunt was brave to go onto Bolt, but if you think Andrew was angry, you wait another month and we’ll see just how angry everyone else will by then be. This government is such a pathetic bunch of cowards, which we knew from the start when not a single public servant lost a single dollar of income while large slabs of the private sector were put out on the grass. Gutless and worse. Pathetic losers. All to keep their Commonwealth cars. What do they represent? What values matter to them. Careerist clowns, every one of them.

Sure Labor will blame you for every death. But have you not worked out that no one is dying? Are you such a bunch of incompetents that you are unprepared to do anything, either to protect our prosperity or our freedoms? Are you really willing to be led around by that even greater incompetent Daniel Andrews and follow his lead?

And then there’s the ABC. Are you that weak that even after the High Court has emphatically stated in a 7-0 decision that every thing argued and implied by the ABC was untrue. Will you still do nothing about an organisation that hates you, hates your constituency and has no respect for truth?

You are a repulsive lot.

Hey SloMo, what’s the plan from here?

Received this quite astute comment about where we are to go from here.

I think the ‘endgame’ will become an interesting political maelstrom. I can’t see how there is any choice but for governments to finally concede to take the calculated (cost vs lives) approach to open back up.

Try to eradicate? No way

Wait for a Vaccine? long way away and may not work

Wait for Herd immunity? long way off (think need 80%+) and who knows if that will work

Keep flattening forever? doesn’t make sense

Open up and then find the same exponential curve? can we take such a crazy risk (and how is it different to the risk we haven’t allowed ourselves to take to now)

Eventually I think it will just have to get back to normal and people will accept the risk that there’s a new strand of flu and just get on with it. Now how do the politicians enable that from the position we are in now?

Yes, indeed. How does the government begin to ease the restrictions and under what circumstances? Are they even giving us the rudiments of an exit strategy? Nothing so far, so why don’t they get on with it and let us know what’s in their minds and what the end game will look like?

Rudd returns to defend his economics because no one else will

There was a letter to the editor in The Oz yesterday which they have not even preserved on their editorial page so I have had to re-type it so that you can see it in full. The heading is “Conservative no radical”.

Janet Albrechtsen accuses me of executing a “canny con job” by campaigning as an economic conservative.

As Peter Costello has said, John Howard had become a serious big spender by 2007. Our election commitments tallied about 75 per cent of the Liberals’; hence my statement I would not match his reckless spending promises. Indeed, in May 2008, we budgeted for a surplus of 1.8 percent of GDP. Then came the global recession in September. We took the mainstream conservative approach, learning from the Great Depression by reaching for the proven lever of fiscal stimulus and leaving a legacy of productive infrastructure.

The economic radicals of the Liberal Party voted against the stimulus. If they had succeeded, there would have been a 15-month recession with 210,000 more unemployed according to Treasury and the OECD. Instead, we were the only advanced economy to avoid a recession. Conservative does not mean reactionary.
Kevin Rudd, Sunshine Coast, Qld

The point of a “stimulus” is to reduce unemployment, which other than trivially never occurred. And if he thinks there was no recession in Australia following the GFC, he ought to take a look at the rise in the unemployment rate which has remained more or less at the same elevated rate it reached at the height of the GFC. Meanwhile productivity growth has been dismal, and real wages have continued to stagnate.

So to remind us of just how conservative K. Rudd was, I attach for your interest two articles I published in Quadrant. First, Reflections of a Neo-Liberal, which discusses an article by Rudd published at the time giving his economic philosophy. In my response to Rudd, there was this.

To capture as least some of the rhetorical overdrive, I reproduce the two insert quotes displayed in large print across the page. The first:

The great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed … the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy.[ellipses in the original]

And then there’s this:

The stakes are high: there are the social costs of long-term unemployment; poverty once again expanding its grim reach across the developing world; and the impact on long-term power structures within the existing international political and strategic order. Success is not optional. Too much now rides on our ability to prevail.

We are here not discussing whether some policy or another might make the economic system work more effectively. This is not about whether there ought to be a stimulus package and if so, how it ought to be structured. This is beyond the technical side of economics and into the realm of good and evil. It is a psycho-drama in which Frodo and his mates take on Gollum in a bid to save the world.

That was in April, 2009. In July I wrote another, also in Quadrant, The Neo-Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. Here are the final two paras:

We in the West once understood how to develop strong economies. Kevin Rudd’s article reminded me that such knowledge is not possessed by all. The coin of the political realm is now the creation of jobs irrespective of what those jobs actually do. The Soviet Union had no unemployment for almost all of its seventy-odd-year history, but those who had “jobs” produced next to nothing because they did not have the market to guide them, either in what to produce or over which inputs to use.

Why these questions are important was one of the major ideas developed by Friedrich Hayek, the arch “market fundamentalist” [Rudd’s phrase] to whose good advice and sound counsel our Prime Minister has closed his mind. On the surface Rudd appears to be guided by some defunct academic scribbler, but in reality looks to be making it up as he goes along.

And let me just refer to this comment by Rudd in his letter, that in trying to roll back the Great Recession, they were “reaching for the proven lever of fiscal stimulus and leaving a legacy of productive infrastructure”.

Since all that has been proven by the stimulus spending across the world following the GFC was that public spending never brings an economy out of recession, it is astonishing that no one ever seems to learn from experience. Neither here, nor in Obama’s America, nor anywhere else did public spending lead to a recovery. If anything has been proven it is that Keynesian economics is economic nonsense. This was the great Keynesian experiment, adopted across the world, and it was an absolute failure whose dismal legacy remains with us to this day.

And then to have suggested that left behind from the stimulus was “a legacy of productive infrastructure” you really do have to wonder what kind of fantasyland Rudd is living in. The Pink Batts and School Halls programs left nothing productive behind. Only left behind were the debts and deficits which remain with us still, more than a decade later.

SHUT DOWN THE ABC “NEWS” AND CURRENT AFFAIRS DIVISION

This is our ABC, scum, traitors and liars. Hardly an honest word to be found anywhere in this story. And where true, not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who might be affected. Not just propaganda, but Chinese propaganda. Watching the ABC for news is a form of self-administered ignorance. This is despicable. And what is worst of all, not only is everything below modern media misdirection, along with CNN and the rest, but it is also what the journalists, reporters, management and administration at the ABC appear to want and hope to be true. They appear to want people to die, and the more that die the better since these deaths might move the political centre to the left.

Coronavirus is hurting America’s place as a world leader while China appears to rise

Updated 

Yesterday in America, 1,940 people died from coronavirus. In a single day, 31,935 new infections were recorded.

I personally know five people who have been told they have COVID-19.

Only one of them was able to get a test and it came back inconclusive.

The rest were told by their doctors “don’t bother” because there weren’t enough test kits to go around.

On the testing front, things have improved greatly in recent weeks, but not everywhere.

An empty street in New York

And yet, since the start of the crisis, the President has boasted about America’s testing capacity.

“Anyone who needs a test gets a test … and they’re beautiful,” Donald Trump said during a tour of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

That was five weeks ago.

America is now the world’s ‘worst-case scenario’

In New York, things are looking so dire that prison inmates are being asked to don protective gear as they dig mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx.

The island has been used for decades to bury New Yorkers with no next of kin or no money to afford a proper funeral.

As COVID-19-related deaths surge, new trenches have been dug to cope with an expected influx of coffins.

Furthermore, the official death toll in New York hasn’t been counting those who died outside of hospital.

On Monday, that was 280 people.

So, it’s very likely the real number of infections and deaths is much higher than the already-staggering published numbers.

The world is no longer measuring the “worst-case scenario” against Wuhan, Italy or Spain.

For now, America is the benchmark.

A nation accustomed to being a world-beater in business, innovation, sport and on the battlefield, has been reduced to its knees.

Revenue agents stop religious service

Now this is civil disobedience! Ros Spence, Multicultural Affairs Minister in Victoria, encouraged Victorians “to find new ways to express faith”. Are there words to describe her and her anti-religious non-beliefs. I guess the police need to build up the revenue losses from their Red Light Cameras. The perfect way to build up respect for the law. From The Herald Sun today.

MAN FINED OVER SYNAGOGUE GATHERING

Police shut down a religious gathering after a prayer meeting failed to heed social distance warnings in Ripponlea today.

Officers slapped the male organiser with a $1652 fine after he was caught disobeying a warning given to him yesterday.

Sources said at least 10 people were found at the gathering and as many as thirty may have attended.

Photos taken by the Herald Sun show police officers in protective masks entering the property on Glen Eira Rd about 11am and speaking to men in ultra-Orthodox attire.

The crackdown comes as Melbourne’s Jewish community celebrated Passover this week.

Police indicated the gathering was not at a formal Synagogue but still flouted the COVID-19 rules which ban religious gatherings.

Police found several people gathered at a Jewish Synagogue despite strict stay at home rules. Picture: Tony Gough
Police found several people gathered at a Jewish Synagogue despite strict stay at home rules. Picture: Tony Gough
At least 10 people were believed to be at the synagogue when police arrived. Picture: Tony Gough
At least 10 people were believed to be at the synagogue when police arrived. Picture: Tony Gough

Witness Julie Cherry said police were at the synagogue all morning.

“There were heaps of them (police), out the front and also the back, maybe to stop anyone getting away,” she said.

Ms Cherry saw a Jewish man and about a dozen police on Glen Eira Rd.

“I could hear him saying something about a service.”

Officers took some time to take people out from the synagogue, but she was unable to say how many.

“They looked a bit sheepish but were calm,” she said.

A local business owner said the property had been busy throughout the lockdown period.

He said the police activity couldn’t be missed as they had all entry and exit points to the property which is above an IGA, blocked.

Multicultural Affairs Minister Ros Spence encouraged Victorians to be innovative and find new ways to express faith.

“I know that for many faith communities, this time of year is about coming together,” Ms Spence said.

“Unfortunately, this year must be different. We each need to stay home. And for the good of our community, we must.”

Daniel Andrews is right: social isolation must be maintained

I saw this letter to the editor the other day and have now come to agree with Daniel Andrews totally. Social isolation must be absolute, no exceptions, and must last until the Corona Virus is completely eradicated, not just here but across the world. Here was the letter which I found completely compelling.

My partner and I are around 70 but due to recent health issues and underlying conditions we are in a very high risk category, to the extent that I am not prepared to risk experimenting with life as usual. Can I say that neither of us is a vegetable in a nursing home. We have lives and plans, are active with our friends, we travel and have children and grandchildren. We have many years to enjoy.

A look around the world highlights that Australia is better off than some mainly because of the tough measures we have taken, not in spite of them. To suggest the extent of the battle is to isolate the vulnerable while the rest of you go about your business is short-sighted. As a member of the vulnerable let me say I’m not prepared to take one for the team.

He described my own situation perfectly and what else is there to say? We vulnerable members of the community are not prepared to accept such selfishness from the rest of you, from all of those younger people who wish to get on with their lives, earn an income, save for the future, pay off their mortgages and continue meeting up with their friends and relations. Do they not understand that this will put people such as myself at much greater risk? Already something like fifty Australians have died from the Corona Virus. If present trends continue, this number might well rise to over 500.

With GDP around $1.5 trillion, the loss of 10 percent of our economic growth for the coming year is a mere $150 billion, although the actual number may, of course, be even higher. But sticking with the $150 billion figure, the cost of preserving those additional 500 from an early death, will come at a cost of only $300 million dollars for each life saved. Of course, even to think of money saved at a time like this is an ethical abomination.

The country has made a moral commitment to preserve lives at all cost. With my own life in such danger, along with the lives of all of our friends who are in that same boat, it would be an eternal disgrace for the country to choose to abandon us to the possibility of an early demise, or if not exactly early, to a demise sooner than might otherwise have occurred.

Good for Daniel Andrews who has shown such leadership in ensuring that every life is seen as precious.

So how will things now change?

Obviously not guilty from the start. And as sinister as the entire episode has been, possibly the most sinister part is that one’s political beliefs are an almost perfect dye marker for how one receives the decision. For the left, it is symbolism alone that matters. On the right, it is that justice has finally been done. The left will attack you for your class membership in whatever way they wish to define you. There are no individual rights nor individual responsibility. This is the way of the left who are totalitarian through and through.

The left are a gang of ideological thugs who roam in packs. To the left, paedophilia is wrong, George Pell was accused of paedophilia, George Pell is a Catholic archbishop, therefore George Pell was guilty, irrespective of the virtual impossibility of his being actually guilty of the crime. It is the justice of the accusation, the Lubyanka, the show trial and bullet to the head. Not quite there yet, but they have effectively ruined Pell’s career, and have provided an exemplary lesson for anyone who falls outside the permitted norms as laid down by the left.

If this has been a learning experience, it is a learning experience for us. This is the Press Release from Daniel Andrews. Try finding an ounce of remorse in this meaningless statement:

I make no comment about today’s High Court decision. But I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you.

And this is the only comment I can find from the Prime Minister, and there was no press release I could turn up.

The decision of the ‘highest court in the land must be respected’.

This was a handy dandy comment that could have been written a week ago. Works whichever way the decsion might have gone. As vacuous a form of words as could possibly have been constructed.

What should change? The ABC should have its charter revised so that it can only present cultural forms of entertainment. It should be forbidden to present news and political commentary.

And what will be changed? Nothing.

Morrison seems to take his lead in almost everything from Daniel Andrews, whether this decision in the High Court or in how to deal with the Corona Virus. What Morrison personally believes about anything political I really could not say.

WORSE THAN WHITLAM

If I hadn’t just listened to Steve Conroy present the Labor side of things on Andrew Bolt, I would not have known that they are even more absurd than you and your national cabinet. But I don’t really blame you since you are an economic simpleton. I blame those buffoons in Treasury who are giving you and your Treasurer this advice. They are your enemies. They are incompetent. Don’t you know that?

The important part of what first needed to happen was to ensure that no one runs out of purchasing power, which means that no one runs out of MONEY. This was not supposed to be an endless supply of cash unbacked by any productive activities. It was only supposed to be a stop-gap of a week or two and only for those who have been caught short of cash to spend.

If you think this kind of funding of unproductive activity can go on for even a couple of months, never mind six, you will go down in history as WORSE THAN WHITLAM.

I understand that such considerations have gone out of fashion, and are never mentioned in an economics text, but have you ever heard of this thing called the private sector? Do you understand the conception surrounding the notion of value added? If you do not do as much as possible to ensure that incomes are related to productivity, you are guaranteed to run the Australian economy off the rails. You will make the Liberal Party poison for a generation if not longer.

I am perfectly aware that governments skim billions that have been earned through actual value-adding work through taxation and other forms of revenue acquisition. I am just as aware that these tens of billions you gather in are spent on producing assets that never have a positive return on funds invested. The NBN, the train lines in Melbourne or the streetcars in Sydney are a sinkhole of loss that must be covered by actual value-adding projects in the private sector. The ratio of wages paid to value produced in the public sector is a massive negative. You guys have never managed a payroll in your lives which shows in almost every economic decision you make.

But to take these stupidities and extend them even farther is gross negligence. To fund the economy’s wages bill while you have shut down productive activity all across the continent is nuts.

We have eighteen dead from the Corona Virus. People are getting sick, and anyone of us, particularly our older citizens, might end up with this disease and some may die. But to crash and burn an economy because there might eventually be a few thousand of us caught up in this medical firestorm is so bizarrely disproportionate as to defy belief. Have you no sense?

Say you are doing everything you can to overcome this virus, and then do everything you can. There are cures coming, vaccines being developed to prevent its spread, forms of isolation and treatment on the way that will limit how much further the disease continues. Common sense ought to be the prime prerequisite for a Prime Minister. That is why we elected you, to make difficult decisions. People will die from the Corona Virus, that is a certainty. They will also die from incompetent economic decisions.

You must open the economy up as much as possible and do it as soon as possible. Everyone now knows they need to be careful of what they do. Everyone is aware of what they must keep an eye out for. But if you do not let us get back to work, you may ultimately be held responsible for the greatest economic disaster in Australian history.

Attention Greg Hunt, you should listen to this

Because we are all self-isolating we have been discussing things online, and then suddenly there was this in relation to a post on the Corona Virus by Phil Ruthven. A quite sensible post I might add, but that is, in this case, neither here nor there. In the midst of our online conversation among others was this.

Sue: I told Greg Hunt not to put Covid clinics at hospitals and guess what? Our first two deaths in Victoria were at the Alfred Hospital where they have a Covid-19 unit and they were cancer patients. Three staff so far have tested positive to the virus and 60 are now in self isolation………How can we function with 60 staff away from a hospital???

Always knew staying at home, ringing the Hotline and not going to either the hospital or to a GP was the solution …… We would come to you.

Me: That is an incredible story. I’m afraid I may not understand why you were in a position to tell Greg Hunt anything. How sensible you were. But why were you advising him?

Sue: Sadly I do not advise Greg Hunt but I just email and ring and generally annoy him and his staff constantly. It started nearly 5 weeks ago and it continues.

He is going to get another call on Monday to close down the Covid Clinics (which I also told him to do) because he cannot guarantee the safety of all other patients or the Alfred as I explained previously.

None of this is rocket science just common sense. I know of one girl who went to the Alfred suspecting she had Covid-19 and went through 5 people before she had a swab taken. That is way too much exposure to the staff. So I will be suggesting if you think you have Covid-19 you ring the Hotline, you do not go to your GP or to the hospital (unless you are very very unwell). We will come to you or set up a drive by and you can go there. We need to be smart because with increased exposure the staff can get into serious trouble themselves. (This is well documented internationally)

We also know of a RN from the Alfred who is not at work because she has had too much exposure – she is not happy. We also have a vested interest as we have a daughter who is a Doctor who because she does General Medicine is on the Front Line and we are very mindful of this. Same goes for all the Front Line nurses and anyone who cares for these patients.

All this sounds ultra-sensible. Why is this not being done in exactly the way Sue suggests?