That Victoria has been in a financial sinkhole has been obvious to me for quite a long time. Andrews even tried to sign up to the Chinese Road and Belt program to stave off the ruin that was certain to follow his profligate ways. But now all this has come to the attention of others: Andrews govt accused of blurring budget figures found in a late night release on a Saturday night in the Herald Sun [update: now the front page story in the Sunday paper]. Perhaps the news will last until the beginning of next week. It is certainly a dismal story.

The state government has been accused of hiding the state’ true financial plight from Victorians.

In a bombshell report, parliament’s independent budget watchdog says the Andrews government has missed and blurred key figures as the state races towards record debt levels.

The report by the Parliamentary Budget Office has accused the government of:

SCRAPPING or modifying most of its own fiscal targets;

BURYING key details to make it harder for Victorians to properly monitor its financial performance;

FAILING to be transparent about the government’s debt position;

DEFINING fewer targets, and less clearly, than before than pandemic; and

IGNORING recommendations made by the parliament’s budget watchdog.

“Blurred figures” is trying to put it nicely. It is a catastrophe that will even outdistance the horrors of Cain-Kirner years which was the previous occasion when Labor was left alone to run the Victorian economy for a succession of years.

State government ‘hides truth from voters’

Massive Protest Today in Melbourne Australia Against Proposed COVID Laws and Opposition to Mandates.

Sky News has more details HERE.

The State of Victoria, Melbourne area, led by Premier Daniel Andrews has been the epicenter of some of the most brutal police action against protestors.  However, due to the scale of the crowds, it appears the police are no longer going to attempt to beat them into submission again or use rubber bullets.

It appears the international spotlight, provided by alternative media breaking through the control of the government media, has led to shame upon the political establishment.  The police no longer seem willing to participate in the government efforts to stop voices of opposition.

This is taken from Nick Cater’s article in today’s Oz: Victoria: From a state of emergency to a state of tyranny. Daniel Andrew’s level of incompetence is astonishing, but the high regard so many still have for this utterly stupid buffoon is more astonishing still. Here is the story as told by Nick.

The Andrews government serves as a living example of why governments that rule by fiat are more prone to failure than those forced to run the gauntlet of parliament. Decision-making is restricted to a handful of individuals who lack perfect knowledge and are vulnerable to groupthink. Contrary facts, discordant data and alternative strategies are suppressed. Since all power emanates from the emperor, no one in his inner circle is game to tell him he has no clothes. Increased power leads to an excess of hubris. Any reserves of humility the leader might have had are depleted as the god complex begins to set in.

From the start of the outbreak, there were many who tried to argue for a different strategy, one a lot less like that employed in China and more in keeping with the principles of individual liberty and personal responsibility that have served us well. The alternative approach advocated focusing protection on the elderly and vulnerable instead of pretending the risks were equally shared. There was strong evidence in March 2020 that the World Health Organisation’s estimate of a 3 per cent fatality rate was wildly overstated. It was also known the risk of death for the elderly was substantial, but the risk for the young was statistically insignificant.

Yet instead of putting all available resources into protecting the few, most governments were fixated with the false indicator of the incidence of Covid-19 in the general population. Kids with almost no risk of becoming seriously ill were kept home from school and barred from playgrounds to stop infection spreading to the elderly.

The strategy failed. The notorious hotel quarantine bungle that led to Melbourne’s outbreak in the winter of 2020 was a minor hiccup compared with what happened afterwards in Victorian nursing homes. The government followed flawed advice that Covid-positive residents should be treated in their nursing homes, supposedly to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed.

By early July, it was apparent that scores of residents were dying in nursing homes who might have survived if they had been treated in hospital. Since nursing homes lacked the experience and equipment to abide by the highest protocols of quarantine, the virus rapidly spread to other residents.

Nursing homes were screaming for ambulances, but Andrews’ bureaucracy was slow to react. In mid-July, chief health officer Brett Sutton said the official strategy was to keep the virus out of aged-care homes by screening healthcare workers who entered, rather than removing sick residents: “I don’t think moving residents out who are infected is always the control measure that is required.”

Belatedly, the policy was changed, but by then the coronavirus wave was passing and the damage was done. In 2020, 678 nursing home residents died, all but 19 in Victoria. In 2020, three out of four Covid deaths were nursing home residents. So far this year, with the new policy in place, the figure is one in 50.

The core to understanding Victorian policy is to understand that it is entirely the will of Andrews who is a particularly stupid man. I would also add that he seems to have taken all of his policies from Andrew Cuomo, who was at the time the Governor of New York. Putting elderly covid patients back into nursing homes was a particularly deadly killer. But for those who have not died, they are grateful to be alive and think it is in some way because of Andrews they have been spared.