Australian Politics
Thursday, December 09, 2021
The Northern Territory is giving Australia a bad name
Articles such as the one below have appeared on many sites in America. It is never mentioned that the NT is not typical of Australia as a whole. It is also not mentioned that the harsh measures were designed to deal with the Territory's large and unco-operative Aboriginal population
UPDATE of 10 Dec: The Northern Territory will scrap its border restrictions on December 20, its government has announced.
Since the first cases of COVID were discovered in every country, the ruling class of each has tried to orchestrate different levels of control.
The worst global pandemic in a century is bad enough. However, corrupt leaders have used it as an exercise in power. Lockdowns have destroyed economies, including the personal lives of people everywhere. Indirect consequences caused by lockdowns have been devastating.
Mask mandates have done nothing to help curb surges, but stolen personal freedoms. Vaccine mandates are now an increasingly used way of trying to force people to conform. However, possibly one of the most startling acts of authoritarian control is happening in Australia.
In one of the freest democracies outside the United States of America, Australians are being punished for opposing any COVID order leveled by the government. Despite a higher percentage of vaccinated people getting sick again, the unvaccinated are being punished.
In America, Joe Biden continues to falsely insist that any new surge in COVID cases is the fault of anyone who is unvaccinated. This completely ignores a wealth of data suggesting natural immunity after recovering from COVID may reduce second infection chances to virtually zero.
These authoritarian government mandates and tyrannical orders are not about the pandemic. Each and every order is about power and control. Governments are using the misfortune caused by a deadly virus to force people into conformity.
In Australia, the unvaccinated are being shipped off to internment camps. Not since the horrific acts of the Nazis have we witnessed such an abuse of humanity. Video footage from one of these internment camps has been leaked.
The video shows boundary lines that these imprisoned Australians must stay within. They are restricted to when and where they can even do laundry. The audio portion of the video mentions explicitly that if an imprisoned person crosses a particular line, they will be fined $5,000.
The woman questioning a creepy medical-gowned Gestapo-like guard was informed the reason “doesn’t have to make sense.” As with the underlying principle behind mandates, such as those imposed by Joe Biden and liberal-run U.S. states, people should shut up and do as they’re instructed.
Do not ask questions. We must follow orders and just conform. Increasingly, videos are leaking out of these Australian detention camps through social media. Images clearly resemble wartime prisons used to hold people against their will.
One Australian woman broke silence over her ordeal. Hayley Hodgson moved away from Melbourne to get away from the continuous lockdowns there. Living in Darwin, she thought she was free to make her own choices. She was not.
The spiral of circumstances that led to Hodgson being imprisoned against her will started when a friend tested positive for COVID. Authorities showed up at her front door. Investigators had run the license plate number of Hodgson’s scooter.
They informed her she had been recorded as having had “close contact” with her now COVID infected friend. She was asked if she had recently taken a COVID case. Believing this private information was none of their business, she lied.
That exercise in personal medical freedom eventually landed Hodgson in a COVID internment camp. As she was hauled away, all she was told is that the orders came from “higher ups”. Hodgson was tossed in a rented fan and hauled away to Howard Springs.
There she remained for the full 14-days, regardless that she tested negative multiple times. Obviously, her time detained was not about being a health threat, but about resisting government authority. Remember, this happened in Australia, not Russia.
These were healthcare professionals and law enforcement personnel in a democratic republic. The liberals in America will use the same tactics if they are not stopped. Joe Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine mandates will fling open a door to government intrusiveness that we will never get closed.
The videos of what is going on in Australia are startling. They prove to what lengths the ruling class elite will go to exercise power. Americans must not rest on their laurels. This could bleed into our country in an instant. It already has. The left wants to seize permanent control of power.
They want control of educating our children. The left wants full federal control over elections. They’re pushing for a socialist welfare state in America. Now they want control over our medical decisions.
These leaked videos clearly show internment camps in an otherwise free nation. This is not a joke. Americans must take these assaults on personal freedom seriously. If not, we will soon find ourselves living in a country that looks nothing like the free republic we all cherish.
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Victorian Big Battery switched on
The biggest battery in the southern hemisphere is operating in Victoria.
Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio on Wednesday officially launched the $84 million Big Battery, located at Moorabool near Geelong.
Owned and operated by French renewable energy giant Neoen, the battery has the capacity of 300 megawatts and 450 megawatt-hours - making it more than double the size of billionaire Elon Musk's Tesla big battery built in South Australia in 2017.
Labor touts business support for emissions target
The Victorian battery also uses the Telsa technology and made global headlines when it caught fire during testing in July.
An investigation found the blaze, which went for four days, was most likely sparked by a coolant leak causing short-circuits. It prompted Tesla to upgrade its global fleet of Megapack batteries.
Ms D'Ambrosio said the battery would safeguard the state's energy supply in the summer, reduce energy prices and support the government's emissions reduction plan.
"The Victorian Big Battery will deliver cleaner, cheaper and more reliable power and help us reach our ambitious target of halving emissions by 2030," she said.
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A pessimistic view of omicron
A top medical expert has issued a dire warning about the newest Covid variant on The Project – leaving host Waleed Aly “petrified.”
A top US epidemiologist has issued a dire warning to those unconcerned about the new Omicron Covid variant rapidly spreading across the globe, describing the notion that it’s a milder version of the disease as a “sweet little lie”.
Appearing on Monday’s episode of The Project, epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding’s worrying predictions clearly rattled host Waleed Aly
Feigl-Ding told The Project hosts that, with a new variant circulating, Australians should be vaccinating children “as soon as possible”.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation last year that kids can’t be infected, kids are immune – that’s not true. If anything, the Delta variant is much more severe in children, hospitalisation rates are much higher, and that’s before Omicron,” he said.
“Kids do get sick, kids do get hospitalised and they do die. Please protect them against Omicron – vaccinating them is of the highest urgency.”
Feigl-Ding described early evidence out of South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first reported, as “very alarming”.
Over the weekend, government adviser Waasila Jassat told reporters in the Johannesburg area, where the virus is spreading widely, there has been “quite a sharp increase” in hospital admissions “across all age groups but particularly in the under-fives”.
“Hospitalisations are absolutely soaring,” said Feigl-Ding.
“Hospitalisations in children are about sixfold higher than previous waves. Omicron is not mild in any way … It’s already outpacing the previous waves, even despite higher vaccination rates. The data is very bad, and we have to not try to want to believe in the sweet little lies that we hear that it’s mild – it’s not.”
Project panellist Peter Helliar asked where we might be in the life of this pandemic, prompting a dispiriting answer from Feigl-Ding, who says the pandemic is “far from over,” pointing to what he called a “vaccine apartheid” in regions like southern Africa, where new variants are able to emerge in populations with low vaccination rates.
“We’re eventually going to shoot ourselves in the foot, because another variant like omicron – or worse – will arise, and it will restart the whole pandemic system,” he said.
Feigl-Ding noted that World Health Organisation had already announced they may switch to using stars and constellations if they run out of Greek letters to name Covid variants
Not all medical experts share Feigl-Ding’s views on Omicron – one leading voice even believes Omicron could, counterintuitively, spell “the end of Covid”.
“I actually think there is a silver lining here, and this may signal the end of Covid-19, with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it is highly contagious but does not cause severe disease. That’s what happened with Spanish flu,” said Dr Richard Friedland, CEO of the Netcare Group, which operates more than 50 hospitals in South Afric
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COVID to have ‘life-long impact on population’ as fertility crashes to record low
Uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to Australia’s fertility rate falling to its lowest level on record with warnings it may never recover, leaving the nation with a recession-sized hole in its population make-up.
Through 2020, 294,369 births were registered across the country, a 3.7 per cent or 11,500 fall on 2019. The fertility rate dropped almost 5 per cent to an all-time low of 1.58 births per woman, a fall larger than Australia experienced during the darkest years of the Great Depression.
It was the lowest number of births registered in the country since 2007 and down by 6.6 per cent on the peak number of births recorded in 2018.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that the biggest falls were in Victoria, where there were 3846 fewer births, a 4.9 per cent drop, and in South Australia where births also fell by 4.9 per cent or 952.
Across NSW, there was 3.4 per cent fall, or 3330 babies. Tasmania defied the trend, up by 1 per cent or 54 births.
Demographer Liz Allen from the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods said the nation’s fertility rate had been falling for the past 50 years, but a range of factors were now making it even more difficult for prospective parents to start a family.
She said the financial insecurity caused by the COVID recession now overlaid ongoing issues including the high cost of housing, which required both parents to work to raise enough money to buy a home, anxiety over climate change and growing gender equality.
COVID would weigh on the nation’s population profile forever.
“Potential parents are being hammered on all sides, and struggling to survive in a climate that directly translates into missing children,” she said.
“Potential parents’ active choices to start a family or the size of that family is slipping away from them and that will have long-term repercussions for them and for the country.
“People have postponed having children and we could see a lift next year, but I suspect that what we have seen is a life-long impact on our population.”
The lowest fertility rate in NSW is across Sydney’s CBD and inner south. It has fallen by 24 per cent to less than one over the past decade. While the number of people living in the area has climbed by more than 92,500 since 2010, the number of babies born to local residents has fallen by 328.
It’s a similar story in the city’s west. While Parramatta’s population has swelled by 100,569 over the past 10 years, the number of babies born has fallen by 134.
The largest fall in fertility nationally has occurred in Melbourne’s inner city, down almost 28 per cent since 2010. The fertility rate is a national-low of 0.91. Across Melbourne’s inner suburbs there have been falls in fertility of more than 20 per cent over the past decade.
All these areas, however, have recorded large population increases over the period, driven by internal and overseas migration.
Not one part of Melbourne now has a fertility rate above 2, with falls in growing areas such as the south-east and western suburbs.
Across Australia only one region – the north-west of Western Australia, which has a large Indigenous population – has recorded an increase in fertility rates since 2010.
Debt, deficit and grey haired: COVID-19 upends economic future
The bureau’s demography director, Beidar Cho, said the fall in fertility could be attributed to COVID-19 disruptions.
She said not only had the fertility rate fallen, but the median age of mothers had lifted to a high of 31.6 years. The highest median age is 32.4 years in the ACT while the youngest mothers are in the Northern Territory at 30.3 years.
“The long-term decline in fertility of younger mums as well as the continued increase in fertility of older mums reflects a shift towards later childbearing,” she said.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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