Australian Politics
Some refreshing realism from Jim Chalmers
He has in fact inherited a poison chalice. Unwinding inflation is always painful. Unless he is very lucky he will fail so badly that it will detonate the already shaky support (32.8 per cent of the primary vote) for the ALP government and return the conservatives to power after just one term
Australia’s next Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he felt a sense of responsibility with the nation facing “dire economic challenges”.
“This will be the trickiest conditions an incoming treasury has inherited since World War II,” Mr Chalmers said from his Logan home.
“Inflation is skyrocketing, real wages are falling and there’s substantial pressure on the budget with $1 trillion in debt.
“We intend to implement our commitments, we intend to start with these challenges straight away, but we’re realistic about how long it will take to turn these challenges around.”
Mr Chalmers, Labor’s most senior federal MP in Queensland, said he would bring a perspective to the Cabinet table and Treasury from outside the Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra triangle.
“I’m a Queenslander born and bred, but I want to be a Treasurer for the whole country,” he said.
“Being from the suburbs in general and being from Logan particularly means that I have an understanding of the realities of life in communities like ours.
“For me personally, there’s a real sense of responsibility for the hard task ahead.”
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Labor can't ignore low primary vote: Shorten
Incoming NDIS Minister Bill Shorten says while the Morrison government had “run out of puff, Labor can’t “walk away” from their historically low primary vote.
After losing the “unloseable” 2019 federal election, Mr Shorten said the qualitative difference between the two polls was that Scott Morrison’s promise to “just be a daggy dad who wouldn’t cause much harm” had proven to be a lie.
“But more importantly, it feels like a national sigh of relief. The Morison government had run out of puff arguably like this to happen three years ago,” he told Sky News on Monday.
With less than one in three Australians voting for Labor as their first preference, Mr Shorten said he wasn’t going to “walk away” from the challenge of improving Labor’s primary vote, but rejected the narrative Labor's low primary meant the party had not “won the election”.
“When you look at where people put their second preferences, more Australians wanted Labor to be in charge than Liberal. But I don't walk away from the challenge of wanting to improve Labor’s primary vote,” he said.
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Coal, gas sticking point in Senate: Bandt
Bandt is a nasty old Trotskyite but seems to have conned the Greens into thinking he is one of them
Greens leader Adam Bandt says Labor’s support for new coal and gas mines will be a sticking point between the parties in the Senate, saying it will be a “very critical question” in the next parliament.
Riding high behind the Greens' shock victories in the Brisbane seats of the Labor-held Griffith and Liberal-held Ryan, Mr Bandt asserted the party could end up with six seats in the lower house if voting in Macnamara and Richmond broke their way.
But with Labor likely to gain a majority in the lower house, attention has turned to the Senate, where Anthony Albanese will need to negotiate with the crossbench to ensure his legislative agenda can be passed.
“But on the question of climate, the big issue is coal and gas. And we were clear about that during the course of the election and we said to tackle the climate crisis, we can't open up more coal and gas mines now,” Mr Bandt told Radio National on Monday morning.
“And Labor went to the election saying they back the Liberals in opening more coal and gas mines. That is going to be something we were going to need to talk about in this Parliament. We can't put the fire out while we're pouring petrol on it.”
The Greens' demands for their support could put a raft of energy projects in jeopardy, including the Northern Territory's Beetaloo gas basin and mega-mines mooted for Queensland's Galilee Basin.
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Australia set to sign Geneva’s Global Pandemic Treaty
The ‘New Normal’ of medical fascism is coming regardless of how Australians vote at the federal election.
Having acquired a taste for globalised control during the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organisation has teamed up with vaccine manufacturers, philanthropic billionaires, and power-crazed world leaders to create a ‘Global Pandemic Treaty’ in Geneva.
It is set to form part of the ‘one health’ approach proposed by the WHO and has been pitched by its creators as a way to overcome the inconvenient battle between – as they put it – globalism and statism.
According to International Affairs who were reviewing the treaty, the globalist approach ‘shares many overlapping values with that of a transnational cosmopolitan, medical humanitarianism or moral egalitarian world-view, rooted in the Kantian logic of universal community’ while the statist approach is a nationalist one that might ‘undermine’ global efforts.
In June of 2021, Scott Morrison commented on the proposed treaty, saying:
‘It’s essential that we strengthen global (disease) surveillance and provide the World Health Organisation with the authority and the capacity to do this important job for all the peoples of the world. If we are to deliver on this ambitious reform agenda, then we must work together and put other issues aside.’
Yes, the same Prime Minister who attempted to escape criticism by saying ‘there’s no such thing as vaccine mandates’ is champing at the bit to grant the WHO absolute control over the health choices of Australian citizens. It amounts to extending similar emergency powers to the WHO that Daniel Andrews gifted himself in Victoria – except Australians can’t vote the WHO out of power. As for Labor, they have laid down at the feet of the WHO, tummies up and paws in the air like dogs waiting for a rub.
The advertised pretext for a global health treaty is that countries were wrongly allowed to take bespoke approaches to Covid – in particular, their vaccine roll-outs. According to the WHO, this endangered the health of the whole planet.
A more accurate reading of the situation comes from discussions had at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and a consortium of nations that include Australia. The Liberal government pledged a further $100 million to CEPI in March, 2022 to add to the $1.5 billion it has raised from other governments.
As explained in a previous Spectator Australia article, CEPI’s mission is to create ‘equitable access to vaccines’ because they do not like the volatility (and competition) of the free market. This is the same organisation that poured a fortune into RNA and mRNA vaccines for the WHO’s DiseaseX scenario which – less than a year later – was put into emergency production to combat Covid as a ‘proof of concept’ exercise. Their stated objective from the beginning, long before Covid, has been to find a way to force Western governments to purchase vaccines in bulk for the Third World under the banner of ‘equity’.
The handling of the Covid pandemic is being used as an excuse to justify what was already designed and publicised. In this light, the proposed Global Pandemic Treaty is – first and foremost – a trillion-dollar business deal.
Being discussed is a $10 billion per year ‘preparedness fund’ along with an additional $100 billion emergency fund – that you pay for. Who knows what else is coming…
The World Health Organisation often complains about free will when it comes to national pandemic responses. We now know that nations like Sweden were able to provide real-world data that contradicted much of the ‘approved’ health advice issued by the WHO. We also know that the WHO ‘leaned on’ European nations that tried to go their own way with health directives.
If anything, one of the great weaknesses of the Covid pandemic response was the uniform approach enacted by world leaders that copied Communist China in their locking down of nations, unethical medical coercion of citizens, and widespread police brutality. How much worse would the behaviour of state premiers, prime ministers, and presidents have been if their actions were ‘legalised’ by an international treaty with no possible recourse for citizens? There is certainly no confirmation that the WHO took the correct approach, considering some of the countries who deviated from the norm did better than the average of obedient nations.
Worse, the nation that caused the pandemic – China – is one of the notable absences from the treaty. What is the point of enacting the treaty if Patient Zero refuses to come to the table? It’s a bit like the United Nations’ Climate Change promises that don’t include the world’s largest polluter.
Further difficulty is being created by the reputation of the WHO. Historically, the WHO has hardly been a reliable or independent body worthy of wielding absolute power over the global health decisions. Its leader, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was controversially backed by Xi Jinping’s government in a nasty election process. Tedros, in turn, was criticised for shielding China from investigation over the outbreak of Covid that (almost certainly) escaped from a Level 4 Viral Lab in Wuhan. On repeated occasions, advice issued by the WHO was found to be inconsistent or simply wrong, while they issued eye-brow raising changes to long-held dictionary definitions of fundamental concepts like ‘herd immunity’ and ‘vaccines’, let alone the near comical back-flipping on mask advice.
It is not the sort of behaviour that instils confidence. This is before addressing the recorded failures and subsequent investigations into WHO practices in the Third World. If anything, what the world desperately needs is independent thought in pandemic responses – a free market of ideas where merit, not compliance, is given the opportunity to advance health.
If Anthony Albanese signs this treaty, it represents a seismic shift in everything we thought we knew about democracy.
It is likely the treaty will make it possible for a foreign bureaucracy with unacceptably close ties to China to call the shots – literally – on global public health. Universal healthcare was meant to be a voluntary safety net – not a stepping stone to international socialism or the dissolution of body autonomy. That said, the wheels are already falling off, with questions being raised about whether it will be a ‘treaty’ in the legal sense after parts of the WHO Constitution were re-worded.
The vote for this dangerous Pandemic Treaty will be held in Geneva on May 22-28. The Prime Minister of Australia will be there will bells on, ready to sign and absolve himself of the ‘bother’ of responsibility. It is a dream come true for weak leaders who would love nothing better than to let the blame for the next pandemic and the accompanying citizen outrage rest safely offshore.
Among the horrors facing Australia if the treaty were to proceed are the advertised promises of global tracking (most likely through the World Economic Forum’s Digital Identity policy linked to health passes), mandatory vaccination of all citizens, and the ability for the WHO to declare and sustain a pandemic along with its emergency powers.
Lately, international treaties have been used to undemocratically circumnavigate the sovereign will of nations. A treaty is a powerful legal document that leaders use to defy public opinion. While the United Nations cannot force a country to honour its ink-mark (as we saw with China’s shredding of the Sino-British Joint Declaration), Western leaders frequently brandish these treaties as security blankets to justify unpopular policy.
‘The ongoing chaos of this pandemic only underlines why the world needs an ironclad global agreement to set the rule of the game for pandemic preparedness and response,’ said WHO Director General, Dr Tedros.
Or – stay with me on this one – the WHO could do its actual job and properly investigate China and its medical partners for dangerous and experimental gain of function research in dodgy labs.
Will Australia vote for freedom?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-set-to-sign-genevas-global-pandemic-treaty/
************************************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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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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