"Yes" voters still cannot see that their country voted for equality

Janet Albrechtsen

“The story of the referendum matters and history matters.” So said Indigenous professor of law Megan Davis. It’s a terrible shame, then, that Davis and others interviewed by this newspaper last week have, a year on, still ignored why Australians voted against the voice.

History matters when it is accurately told. That is what John Roskam has done in his report Why Australians Voted to Be Equal, to be published on Friday.

The report sets out the results of the most comprehensive polls of Australians after last year’s constitutional ballot.

The Australians Speak survey, commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, the two groups that spearheaded the No side, asked 3526 Australians a week after the referendum why they voted against the proposal to alter the federal Constitution to create a permanent Indigenous-only body.

The real story of the 2023 referendum is brimming not with emotion but data.

When asked to nominate any of eight reasons that best explained their decision to vote No, 70 per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would divide Australia. Sixty-six per cent said there was not enough detail. Sixty per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would make Australians unequal.

Last October’s referendum was a defining moment for the country. The vote against the voice was a rejection by a large swath of the country of identity politics, and an embrace of that fundamental civic value of equality over separatism.

Roskam notes that while there were more than 50 published polls before the referendum asking Australians how they might vote, only three comprehensive polls since the vote have asked Australians why they voted the way they did.

Analysis deliberately bereft of data is just waft. That’s what most Yes campaigners have offered since the referendum. Evidence would get in the way of them blaming the result on racism and ignorance, or on other equally spurious grounds – for example, claiming that Labor MPs and unions didn’t do enough to help, that infighting killed the voice and, even less credulously, that the voice failed because of insufficient money and time.

Are they serious? More than $50m was spent by the Yes campaign – a lot of it swiped from shareholders – to try to convince Australians. Hard data wouldn’t allow them to blame the loss on Peter Dutton either.

The publication of Roskam’s report and the Australians Speak survey by polling company Insightfully lays bare the real reason the voice failed.

While the poll shows that 60 per cent of Australians still support Indigenous recognition in the Constitution, entrenching inequality in the Constitution was a bridge too far.

Roskam is correct to conclude “the outcome of the voice referendum was the most decisive result of any significant political contest in Australian history”.

His analysis reveals that the thumping defeat of the 2023 referendum proposal surpassed defeats of earlier important referendum proposals – from conscription in 1916 (52 per cent against) to banning the Communist Party in 1951 (51 per cent against) to the republic referendum in 1999 (55 per cent against). Nor has any federal election contest since Federation attracted a 60 per cent voting bloc of Australians akin to the No vote last year.

While some previous referendum proposals attracted a higher No vote, as Roskam details, none of them had to counter a tidal wave of support from high-profile political, media, business, religious, education and arts elites as the Yes case did for the voice.

That made the No vote in favour of equality even more telling – even if it wasn’t surprising to Roskam. “The ‘seductive idea’ – that everyone is equal – is the foundation of the modern world and of liberal democracy,” he writes. “It is also an idea at the heart of Christianity. In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul writes, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ ”

Under Roskam’s leadership, the IPA prosecuted the case for equality when the voice concept was first raised in 2015. The IPA’s message in its Race Has No Place research program was clear: “Changing the Constitution by dividing Australians according to race or ethnic background makes us all unequal.”

As Roskam writes in his soon-to-be-published report, “Nearly 10 years later (equality) was the reason a majority of Australians voted No.”

Those foolish enough to quip that “Roskam would say that, wouldn’t he” must deal with overwhelming evidence. As Roskam says, the Australians Speak data is confirmed in two other surveys done in the weeks after the October 14 referendum last year.

In a poll of 4200 people by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods immediately after the referendum vote, 66.1 per cent of respondents said dividing the country was a “very important” factor in deciding how they voted. ANU’s Australian Constitutional Referendum Study concluded: “The data suggests that Australians voted no because they didn’t want division and remain sceptical of rights for some Australians that are not held by others.”

The poll commissioned by The Australian Population Research Institute in December last year of 3001 respondents found 53 per cent of people who voted No chose this reason: “We are one country, and no legal or political body should be defined on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Roskam is right that before the October 14 ballot, “supporters of the voice never came to terms with the key argument against the voice which was its creation would overturn the principle of equality of citizenship and so would divide Australians”.

The senior fellow at the IPA told me this week that voice advocates refused to engage with real constitutional conservatives like him because they had no satisfactory response to concerns that “the voice created ‘separate Aboriginal rights’ and so divided Australians and overturned equality of citizenship”.

Some simply ignored it. Roskam points to law professors Davis and George Williams, who made no mention of equality in their 200-page book Everything You Need to Know About The Uluru Statement From the Heart.

Others advanced woefully unconvincing arguments. The constitutional expert group – chaired by Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and comprising six professors of law, a former High Court judge and Noel Pearson – claimed “the voice does not confer ‘rights’ much less ‘special rights’ on Indigenous people”.

You didn’t need a law degree to understand that a proposal to cement into the Constitution a body for Indigenous people only was a fundamental breach of the civic value that everyone have equal rights.

To their credit, says Roskam, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson and Father Frank Brennan had a serious crack at answering the voice’s fundamental flaw of infringing equality.

Turnbull said he would vote Yes despite his misgivings that the voice was inconsistent with his “republican and egalitarian principles” that all offices in a constitutional democracy should be open to every Australian.

Brennan was the most intellectually honest. Roskam says the Jesuit priest and law professor acknowledged the “concept of the voice does positively discriminate in favour of Indigenous Australians, that it does provide Indigenous Australians with special rights, and it does provide those special rights to Indigenous Australians by virtue of their group identity. For Brennan the voice is a measure necessary to address the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians.”

Still, the resounding belief among grassroots Australians in unity and equality was a wake-up call to the vast number of religious leaders who supported the Yes side. With the Australians Speak poll revealing that 74 per cent of religious voters rejected the voice, “it’s clear,” writes Roskam, “that those religious organisations did not speak for their members”.

The Australians Speak data also buries the fallacy that bipartisan support would have ensured the voice won.

More than one-third of Labor voters – 37 per cent – rejected the voice. Eighty-two per cent of all respondents said Coalition opposition to the voice “made no difference” to how they voted on October 14. Similarly, 70 per cent said Labor’s support for the voice “made no difference”. As Roskam points out, some referendums (in 1937, 1967 and 1977) have failed with bipartisan support and one passed (in 1946) without bipartisanship. In any case, plenty of premiers openly supported the voice, along with other state and federal Liberal MPs.

As Roskam writes: “Yes advocates should not have been ‘shell-shocked’ by the power of words such as ‘equal’ and ‘equality’.”

Many of them, after all, had worked on the same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017 where the theme of “marriage equality” convinced 62 per cent of Australians to vote Yes. A similar number of Australians voted in favour of equal rights under the Constitution for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

“To some it might have appeared that those who argued for ‘equality’ in 2017 were arguing against ‘equality’ in 2023.”

The Australians Speak poll contains other nuggets about the nation. Go read it.

The final word goes to Roskam: “At a time when social cohesion is under unprecedented strain and our way of life under assault, we chose unity over division. The referendum result should give Australians the confidence to speak freely about issues that for too long have been deemed off-limits.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/yes-voters-still-cannot-see-that-their-country-voted-for-equality/news-story/348cf474b61119dcb2c50b401a9de26e

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‘Must do better’: ABC boss David Anderson apologises to staff over racial slurs

One wonders whether slurs against whites -- as in critical race theory -- will be penalized

An independent review has found journalists at the public broadcaster were told their voices and appearances were “too Western Sydney” for broadcast, and that they would avoid redundancies because they were “diversity hires.”

Managing director David Anderson issued an apology to employees – both past and present – who experienced racism after the taxpayer-funded broadcaster released its independent racism review on Tuesday, 17 months after it was first announced.

He said anti-racism training will be rolled out at the ABC.

“On behalf of everyone at the ABC, I am sorry for any and all racist behaviour and past harms experienced by our Indigenous and CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) employees, either currently or formerly employed,” Mr Anderson said on Tuesday.

“We all need to do better for our colleagues on our commitment to zero tolerance for racism in our workplace.”

The ABC has accepted in principle 15 recommendations including that all staff read the report, the ABC commit to being proactively anti-racist, improve diverse representation at management level and better understand lived experiences by staff to help with storytelling and create culturally-safe support systems.

Another recommendation is to improve the ABC’s response to public attacks including on social media and that a staff member immediately reports an attack to a centralised and independent team.

Mr Anderson announced a racism review on May 21 last year following the fallout involving former Indigenous ABC host Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri, Dharawal and Gurrawin man, who said he had been subject to “sickening behaviour” over his coverage prior to King Charles III’s coronation.

Grant said at the time he felt unsupported by his employer.

“No one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support.

“Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me.”

Mr Anderson apologised to Grant over the matter.

The 171-page report titled Listen Loudly, Act Strongly, led by Indigenous lawyer Terri Janke, a Wuthathi, Yadhaighana and Meriam woman, included 120 participants – both past and present ABC staff including Indigenous and CALD employees – and revealed a “lack of shared understanding of racism among ABC Leadership”.

The report also found: “People who are First Nations and CALD expressed not feeling valued in the workplace, and tokenised.

“There is a cultural issue throughout the organisation that allows racism to exist and persist at the ABC, which has caused widespread distrust in these systems among First Nations and CALD staff.”

One participant told the review that they were told: “how much of you is Aboriginal? Don’t worry. You don’t look it’.”

The ABC will launch an internal campaign to help boost awareness of racism and create a new position, First Nations Strategy director, to join the ABC’s leadership team who will report to Mr Anderson and help implement the 15 recommendations in the report.

The ABC’s head of Indigenous, diversity and inclusion Kelly Williams will do this role until a new managing director replaces outgoing boss Mr Anderson.

A recruitment process will then begin.

Mr Anderson also said: “For anyone who thinks it is OK to display or practise racist behaviour, or who thinks they can make people feel belittled based on their identity, we will call you out and remove you from this organisation.

“You are not welcome here.

“We are a workplace that values respect, and we expect it.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/must-do-better-abc-boss-david-anderson-apologises-to-staff-over-racial-slurs/news-story/59a83d6ef56b427835cc1d50d5cabad9

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The chattering climate class and their war on coal

Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it.

We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.

There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.

Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.

Mr Bowen claims wind and solar are clean, green, and cheap.

An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy. The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.

Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.

In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…

‘When it is needed.’

Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.

Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy.

I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.

Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.

Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.

Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.

We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.

The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz 22 cents/MW, and Barakah 23 cents/MW.

Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.

This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan. Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300. On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.

We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.

If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-chattering-climate-class-and-their-war-on-coal/

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Lying far-Left union

Queensland’s largest union has launched a “Mediscare” style campaign claiming - with no evidence - the LNP are attempting to privatise health services.

The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union in an election eve ad blitz has called for voters to “put the LNP last” as the party was planning to “privatise health services” – despite having no evidence.

The union bases its claim on comments made by opposition health spokeswoman Ros Bates, where she voiced support for an existing $100m government scheme to use private hospitals to treat public patients in a bid to treat Queenslanders closer to where they live.

The union ad is reminiscent of the 2016 Federal Labor scare campaign claiming a Coalition government would privatise Medicare.

The launch of the campaign has rocked the first official day of the Queensland election and has generated a significant reaction from our readers.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/what-you-said-about-mediscare-campaign-that-rocked-first-day-of-qld-election-battle/news-story/b6861edb540fc762f2bbe6a06d5ec148

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Negative gearing? We are working on the wrong side of the decimal point

Judith Sloan points out that the wooden heads of the Left want to INCREASE rents -- for what?

Here we go again: changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are being floated even though Anthony Albanese rejects any proposals to do so.

Mind you, the Prime Minister had ruled out any changes to the stage three tax cuts, declaring that his word was his bond.

In the event, the Coalition’s stage three legislated cuts were junked in favour of what was seen as a politically more palatable version of income tax cuts.

Does it make any sense even to be talking about negative gearing and capital gains tax at this point? Is it a case of working on the wrong side of the decimal point? Are there much bigger issues affecting the way the economy is operating and the impact on the public?

Let’s run quickly through the facts related to negative gearing. They have been discussed at great length for far too long.

There is absolutely nothing controversial about having a tax code that provides for the deduction of expenses associated with investment. Indeed, it is essential that this provision exists lest investment and the associated capital accumulation are discouraged.

That some investors, and not just in property, lose money and are able to deduct the losses from other taxable income is also uncontentious.

On the latest figures, there were about 1.1 million negatively geared property investors claiming a total of $7.89bn in deductions, yielding a tax benefit for them of $2.7bn. (There are about the same number of positively geared investors.)

In the context of the federal budget (total receipts now close to $700bn), we are talking small beer.

Moreover, any change to the rules would almost inevitably involve grandfathering of existing investors, so any gain in revenue would be insignificant, at least for several years.

Let’s be clear on another point: negative gearing subsidises renters. If investors were unable to use the losses to offset taxable income, they would have no choice but to put up the rent.

Sure, some might sell up, but many renters are not able to buy properties.

When it comes to the capital gains tax discount, again there is nothing controversial about imposing tax on only the real (adjusted for inflation) component of the gain. When the tax was first introduced by the Hawke-Keating government, there was a complicated formula to estimate the real gains that was then replaced by the Howard-Costello government to simplify the arrangement. The discount of 50 per cent for assets held for longer than 12 months became the rule.

Now one may quibble whether 50 per cent should apply for assets held for two years compared with assets held for 20 years, but the simplicity of the arrangement is the real value.

Bear in mind that any realised capital gains must be brought to book in the year of the transaction, meaning that even investors on relatively modest incomes are often pushed into the top marginal income tax rate of 45 per cent plus 2 per cent Medicare levy.

Any change to the capital gains tax discount would have to be grandfathered, which would mean any gain in government receipts would be relatively small. It also would create a lock-in incentive as people hold on to assets subject to the old, lower capital gains tax. This itself would cause economic harm.

In fact, the biggest capital gains tax concession, if you want to call it that, applies to the exemption of the family home. Treasury estimates that the revenue forgone of this exemption plus the discount on the tax is close to $50bn a year.

This figure has been growing rapidly in recent years along with house prices.

Let’s face it, it would be a brave government that proposes a capital gains tax on the family home. Should it do so, consistency would require the deduction of expenses associated with buying and running these homes. In other words, that’s not going to happen. The only conclusion is that sweating the small stuff such as tinkering with negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount has little economic upside, if any, but potentially large negative political consequences. While it’s easy to express outrage at the small number of negatively geared, multiple-property owners, the reality is that most investors hold only one property and many of them are middle-income earners.

The often intense disapproval of negative gearing is really derived from the objections that some people, including Greens supporters, hold to the accumulation of wealth. That some people are rich and use their money to purchase properties (and other assets as well) is somehow regarded as unjust, which is then conflated with the negative gearing provisions.

What, then, are the big issues that this government should be addressing? There are two and they are related. The first is the woeful performance of productivity and the second is the rapid burgeoning in the size of the public sector.

Taking the first: according to the recent national accounts, productivity is now where it was in 2016. Labour productivity fell by 0.8 per cent in the June quarter alone. Even the downward revisions that the Treasury made in relation to productivity growth – in the Intergenerational Report, for instance – now look wildly optimis­tic.

Just in case you think all advanced economies are being hit with productivity slumps, take the case of the US. Between 2014 and now, labour productivity in the US has increased by close to 15 per cent. Here, the growth has been 1.5 per cent.

Given that productivity growth is the engine for higher living standards, our performance on this score is worrying. It also is why the Reserve Bank will need to delay cutting the cash rate because of the lack of supply responsiveness to demand pressures.

Public sector demand essentially has exploded since Covid. From a figure of 22.5 per cent of GDP before the pandemic, public sector demand will reach 27.3 per cent this year because of actions of the federal and state governments.

This reallocation of resources within such a short period is essentially unprecedented, although it does mimic the temporary mining boom that occurred in the middle of the first decade of this century. At least with that boom the results were more production and more privately funded infrastructure.

In today’s case, the ramp-up in public spending is replete with higher recurrent payments and higher public sector wages. In political terms, this sort of spending is difficult to reverse. It is directing resources into low-productivity activities – the Treasurer likes to call it the care economy – and crowding out private sector initiatives that otherwise might be implemented.

Forget the distraction of negative gearing and capital gains tax – the issues have probably been raised only because the government has achieved absolutely nothing in terms of economic reform. There are some significant perverse developments noted above that the government is ignoring or making worse.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/negative-gearing-we-are-working-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-decimal-point/news-story/6bf4cc48ea7b21c09d54a46c38a83a48

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Concerns over Gender Queer book dismissed by Australian classifications board as anti-LGBTQ+, court hears

OK to promote deviant sexuality to kids (?)

The Australian classifications board made a “broadbrush dismissal” of over 500 submissions calling for a ban of the book Gender Queer by labelling those submissions as anti-LGBTQ+, a court has heard.

In July last year, the Classification Board rejected calls to restrict access to a memoir about gender identity that was the target of conservative campaigns to have it banned in the US, and found the content was appropriate for its intended audience.

Activist Bernard Gaynor had applied to the board in early 2023 to review the classification of the graphic novel-style memoir about gender identity by writer Maia Kobabe.

Complaints about the book – which details Kobabe’s experience coming out as non-binary – are focused on the cartoon images of sex scenes, one of which has been described by critics seeking a ban as “pornographic” and “paedophilic”.

When the Australian Classification Board upheld its original decision to classify the book as unrestricted with the consumer advice of “M – not recommended for readers under 15 years”, Gaynor appealed against the ruling to the federal court.

In a hearing on Monday, Bret Walker SC, acting for Gaynor, said the overwhelming majority of submissions to the board on the review of the decision had called for the publication to be restricted or refused classification. He argued the classification board had erred by not taking these submissions into account, by broadly labelling them as “anti-LGBTQIA+”.

Walker said there was a “deliberately broadbrush dismissal” of those submissions, many of which he said objected to what they saw as depicting a man having sex with a minor – referring to an image portraying Plato’s Symposium. Walker said many of those objections did not refer to the gender of the image’s subjects, just that it appeared to depict paedophilia.

Justice Ian Jackman said that while by his count, about 600 submissions from among 9,000 people had been considered to be anti-LGBTQ+ by the board, on closer examination Jackman said just 52 of these expressed anti-LGBTQ+ views – less than 1% of submissions received.

Walker said the board gave little weight to the submissions, and had failed to engage with them in its review decision.

In response, the barrister for the minister for communications and the classification board, Houda Younan SC, said the law did not require the board to accept submissions as part of the review of its classification decision and that the invitation of submissions did not require the decision-maker to then consider them.

However, Younan said the board did consider the public submissions and did not dismiss them on the basis of being anti-LGBTQ+ but because they did not assist the board in its statutory task of a classifications decision.

“We say that in this case, every submission was received and considered,” Younan said.

Submissions in the decision were labelled to give their tenor, she said. Submissions were given weight based on whether they contained evidence the writer had read Gender Queer and understood its content within the context of the publication.

Those that did not demonstrate an engagement with the publication were given little weight, she said.

Younan indicated the board had considered whether a submission noted the context of the image being of Plato’s Symposium, or was a criticism of the image on its own, removed of context.

She later identified 14 additional examples of explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ submissions beyond those initially identified by Jackman.

Among the orders sought, Gaynor is seeking to have the decision remitted back to the classifications board.

Jackman reserved his decision.

In the US, Gender Queer is one of the most challenged books in libraries. Kobabe told the ABC in May that the US push to ban the book had been frustrating and that the depiction of Plato’s Symposium had been included as it was one of the few gay-themed texts Kobabe had encountered in college.

“It stuck in my mind, because it was the only one.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/30/bernard-gaynor-classification-appeal-gender-queer-graphic-novel-ntwnfb

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Penny Wong’s UN speech shows Labor has abandoned Israel

Foreign Minister Penny Wong gave surely the worst speech of her life at the United Nations. It was so monumentally divorced from reality, so morally obnoxious in its treatment of Israel, so undergraduate in its pretensions of clear certainties in an issue of immense complexities, so selective in its politically convenient moral posturings, as to be utterly unworthy of her. And unworthy of Australia.

The Albanese government has revealed itself to be hostile to Israel. It’s also a government that, despite a few welcome gestures, seems to have relatively little concern for the welfare or sensitivities of the Australian Jewish community.

All this has to be set against a global crisis of anti-Semitism, of which the Albanese government has no grasp. This is the most ancient and terrible hatred of all. It’s so powerful today partly because it’s fuelled by diverse but converging streams. There’s the hangover of traditional Christian anti-Semitism, though all mainstream Christian groups have now repudiated that. There’s the anti-Semitism of white race nationalists. Both these forces are fairly minor compared with the two big engines of anti-Semitism today.

These are the irrational and wild hatred of Israel on the left in Western societies, which applies completely different standards in its judgments of Israel compared with any other nation, and which sees Zionism and the existence of an Israeli state as inherently racist and an outcrop of Western colonialism. This hatred of Israel is so intense and irrational that it frequently and easily becomes a hatred of Jews.

And there is the long established Islamic and Arab tradition of anti-Semitism. This is much at work in the contemporary Middle East. The Houthi movement of Yemen, which, like Hamas and Hezbollah is a proxy force of Iran, has a slogan it displays at many gatherings. It reads: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!”

The original Hamas charter was full of almost caricatured and obscene anti-Semitism. Hezbollah, entirely a creation of Iran, is similarly full of such hatred of Jews. Iran’s government frequently repeats its determination to “wipe Israel off the map”.

All these four distinct sources of anti-Semitism co-mingle in grotesque fashion and weirdly reinforce each other. In that environment, you might think a government claiming its foreign policy is driven by the highest morality would make countering anti-Semitism a major plank of its rhetoric.

At the very least, you’d expect any adult Australian government to be acutely conscious of this environment. While our government is certainly not in any way anti-Semitic itself, it fails dismally in confronting one of the greatest moral evils of our time.

In her speech, Wong did repudiate both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations. However, she directed the bulk of her criticism at Israel. Yet nowhere was there a recognition that Israel is taking the action it’s tragically forced to take in Lebanon because Hezbollah has fired something like 9000 rockets, drones and other projectiles at Israel since the Hamas atrocities on October 7 last year. Wong says Israel has the right to defend itself but opposes any action it could possibly take in self-defence.

Wong also called for the UN Security Council to determine an independent Palestinian state should be declared very soon. And no one should be allowed to prevent this.

She declared, with sublime and fatuous undergraduate certainty, this would lead to “peace and security” for Israelis and Palestinians. At best, that’s an absurd attempt to ignore history.

Much of the Arab movement using Palestinian nationalism is motivated by religious and ideological anti-Semitism. The Palestinian leadership has non-negotiable demands that make a Palestinian state inconceivable in present circumstances. One is that every descendant and relative of any Arab who ever lived in the territory that is now Israel should be allowed to return and live in Israel itself. Not in the new Palestinian state, but in Israel.

This is millions of people and is obviously completely unrealistic. This so-called “right of return” is really an excuse never to negotiate compromise seriously. Wong understands that Australia has no influence at all on these matters but, bizarrely, decided to make it the centrepiece of her contribution at the UN. So now as an expert on the Middle East, and a foreign policy leader impelled by principle to speak out, could Wong show us the speeches she’s made urging the Palestinian leadership to abandon the right of return and other completely unrealistic positions?

For that matter, every analyst of the Middle East has been pointing out for months that Hezbollah’s increased tempo of rocket attacks on Israel would likely eventually trigger an Israeli response. Could Wong point us to the line of speeches she’s made denouncing Hezbollah for this and demanding it desist?

Similarly, any realistic analyst of the Middle East knows, as the Gulf Arabs certainly know, that the chief source of instability and conflict in the Middle East is Iran. Iran supplies weapons to Russia to attack Ukraine. It also bankrolls and directs all the region’s main terrorist groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and numerous others. So, as a Foreign Minister urgently concerned with peace in the Middle East, and impelled by the highest moral principles, can Wong direct us to her many speeches denouncing Iran for this behaviour and mobilising maximum diplomatic pressure on Tehran?

Quite the reverse. The Iranian ambassador to Australia posted on social media his hope that “the Zionist plague” will be “wiped out” by 2027 and was subject to the mildest imaginable rebuke by a mid-level DFAT official. The ambassador himself later claimed this was no rebuke at all. When taxed over this shameful cowardice, the Albanese government leaked the explanation that the Americans valued Canberra having an embassy in Tehran and if we did anything remotely sensible like expelling the ambassador our diplomats would be expelled from Tehran and we’d lose this priceless dialogue.

What an apathetically unconvincing rationale for cowardice that is. We should happily sacrifice this entirely worthless dialogue if keeping it means we sacrifice our basic principles.

The Albanese government is much more hostile to Israel than our friends and allies. Unlike the US, UK and even politically correct Canada, we didn’t criticise the absurd International Criminal Court prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders. No Australian cabinet minister has visited the site of the Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians. And so on and so on.

The Albanese government is completely out of its depth in this Middle East crisis, its words and actions only decipherable through the most tawdry of domestic politics. It’s unworthy of Australia.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/penny-wongs-un-speech-shows-labor-has-abandoned-israel/news-story/b688ffe41df54344532ad93845fd01e9

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The growth of Queensland’s public sector under Labor must be reversed

Queensland’s October 26 election bears some resemblances to that of 2015. True to the maxim that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them, the gormless Steven Miles’s regime is on track to lose after a single term, as the abrasive but effective LNP former premier Campbell Newman did in 2015.

At that election the little-known Annastacia Palaszczuk, who began her term as opposition leader with a caucus of seven, became premier, leading a government in which many ministers had no political experience even as MPs. She won because she wasn’t Mr Newman, because voters rejected his policy of asset leases to reduce debt and public service cuts. In office, Labor struggled to formulate a plan, ordering a new review or inquiry every three business days for 2½ years – 213 reviews by August 2017. In Ms Palaszczuk’s first two terms, Queenslanders warmed to her homely, approachable style. But it speaks volumes about Labor’s lack of a substantial legacy that Mr Miles is not running on his party’s record. Its record of service delivery has been ordinary. In nine years, Labor has achieved little apart from almost completing Brisbane’s Cross River Rail project, first mooted in 2010. It secured the 2032 Olympics, which desperately need leadership and should be an election issue.

Queensland Premier Steven Miles says he is “excited” about the state election campaign because it is “unlike anything else”.
LNP leader David Crisafulli and some of his colleagues were ministers in the Newman government. They have more experience than the first Palaszczuk team and are slightly better known. Their strong suit, which has lifted their profile, is their commitment to tackling the state’s youth crime crisis with tougher, more effective penalties for offenders. But many of their other important policies remain a mystery.

Chief among these is debt reduction, the elephant in the room for both major parties. In his budget in June, Cameron Dick abandoned plans to pay off the state’s mounting debt, preferring to increase borrowings to fund billions of dollars in cost-of-living relief measures such as $1000 energy rebates and 50c public transport fares. “The focus of what we have to do is to support Queenslanders in a time of need,” the state Treasurer said. In Mr Dick’s haste to spend, the government opted to borrow, increasing the general government sector net debt to $27.4bn in 2024-25, rising to $59.8bn in 2027-28.

Mr Crisafulli says taxes and debt will be lower under an LNP government but the Opposition Leader has yet to release his plan. It will be one of the most important points of the campaign. Both he and Mr Miles have promised to keep the cheap public transport fares. While fuelling inflation, soaring state borrowings, an EY analysis showed last week, are a threat to living standards. The analysis showed state governments would exceed federal borrowing this year, collectively needing to issue more than $100bn in new debt in the 2024-25 financial year. Almost 60 per cent of that new debt will be issued by Victoria and Queensland, disproportionate to the size of their economies which amount to just over 40 per cent of the nation’s GDP.

If Mr Crisafulli is to lay the foundations for effective government with a mandate for change, which Queensland needs, he must use the campaign to show how the LNP would improve on the efforts of Labor, which has disillusioned voters badly. Before Labor’s state budget he recklessly promised to adopt it holus-bolus for four years – before he read it. If he honours that silly commitment he will saddle 5.6 million Queenslanders with a blueprint for ongoing big government dependency starkly at odds with encouraging self-reliance and enterprise. Because Labor’s ruinous coal royalty scheme, with the highest taxing rates in the world, funds spending across the forward estimates, Mr Crisafulli has ruled out overhauling it until 2027, leaving coal companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Should it win, the LNP must curb the influence of public sector trade unions. Their power has expanded exponentially under the Palaszczuk and Miles governments to the point that United Workers Union boss Gary Bullock levered Ms Palaszczuk out of office, replacing her with Mr Miles, his ally from Labor’s Left. Public sector nurses, teachers and police unions have signalled their intentions to squeeze the government elected on October 26 for nation-leading pay rises, piling pressure on the budget bottom line. In promising not to emulate Mr Newman’s public service sackings, a Crisafulli government could and should deflate the overblown public sector through natural attrition.

In one vital area the major parties need to be on a unity ticket. Preferential voting is compulsory and the LNP has said it has no intention of preferencing the economy-wrecking Greens. For the sake of Queenslanders, Labor should do the same.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/wanted-plan-to-fix-failing-state/news-story/1701b82e01a98fce13b43ed3a3c71294

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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If the supply of goods and services remains largely static, putting more money into people's pockets MUST fuel inflation

Cooking the books via electricity bills will not alter that

The most surprising thing about last week’s Australian Bureau of Statistics inflation figures was not that annual CPI had fallen back under 3 per cent – a huge drop from our horror December 2022 number of 8.4 per cent.

And it was not that the Reserve Bank of Australia looks no closer to cutting interest rates despite the US, Europe, Britain, Canada and many other places pushing out rate cuts.

For me, the most surprising factor of the monthly Consumer Price Index Indicator data was the huge impact government handouts have had on official inflation. State based electricity rebates combined with the federal government’s $75 quarterly electricity bill discounts – for everybody – to push electricity prices down 17.9 per cent in the year to August 2024.

When Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced the $300 annual electricity credits in his budget earlier this year, he seemed pleased with himself that the policy would push down official inflation.

And it has. A 17.9 per cent fall in one CPI component will always bring down the overall annual inflation figure.

The big problem is that the Reserve Bank of Australia and economists see right through this government-engineered inflation game.

For starters, RBA governor Michele Bullock and her board don’t focus on the headline inflation figure when deciding to raise or cut interest rates. They use the “trimmed mean” measure of inflation, which ignores volatile items such as energy and is still 3.4 per cent, well above the RBA’s 2-3 per cent target range.

Ms Bullock reiterated last week that the cash rate is the only tool the RBA has to impact inflation. It raises the cash rate to lower CPI by reducing consumer spending and overall demand in the economy, as it has done with 13 rate rises since May 2022.

Conversely, cutting interest rates – which many countries are already doing – aim to support spending and inflation.

And it’s clear that governments cannot try to trick the RBA by lowering inflation artificially. Unless the federal government continues spending billions of bucks annually on recurring electricity bill credits, their removal will eventually send electricity prices higher.

It’s silly to hear the government complaining that it is working to lower inflation pressures when it is clearly pumping extra money into the economy, which fuels demand and inevitably higher inflation.

It’s even sillier to hear the Greens holding the Albanese government to ransom by refusing to support other legislation unless the government forces the independent RBA the cut rates. To quote a former Labor Prime Minister, fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate!

All this government and RBA argy bargy is a sideshow to the real problems facing households: mortgage repayments that have jumped 60-plus per cent in Two-and-a-half years, surging rents and other living costs, and expensive loans and other bills that have smashed business owners.

The good news for borrowers is that rate cuts are coming, albeit not as fast as in the US and elsewhere, where inflation is much lower than it is in Australia.

Most economists believe RBA rate cuts should start in the first few months of 2025, with several pencilled in for next year. Just like we imported higher inflation amid global supply squeezes following the pandemic, we should import lower global inflation too.

Our relatively high interest rates keep the Aussie dollar strong, which also puts downward pressure on inflation and interest rates.

Borrowers – both business and households – just need to get through the next few months before long-awaited relief arrives.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wealth/inflation-down-interest-rates-still-up-why-were-not-yet-moving/news-story/675d1671f97fdac8963e7a00c3c95980

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Lawyer Lana Collaris faces heavy backlash after refusing to take part in Acknowledgement to Country

It's fundamentally racist

A top lawyer has hit back after being accused of racism for refusing to participate in an Acknowledgement to Country procedure at the Victorian Bar Council.

At meetings of the Victorian Bar Council, the president Georgina Schoff precedes matters with an acknowledgement of the Aboriginal group associated with the land on which it is held.

At a recent such meeting, barrister Lana Collaris instead acknowledged all Australians and then posted the minutes of the meeting on social media.

She was quickly met with a barrage of criticism, including being called a 'racist', a 'visitor' and an 'introduced species'.

Ms Collaris was also attacked by two Bar Council colleagues and was told by the Indigenous Justice Committee that she had brought the Victorian Bar into disrepute.

The under fire lawyer stood by her actions and told Sky News she could not tolerate the ubiquity of the Welcome to Country ceremonies.

'The reason why I decided to acknowledge all Australians that day is because I'd had enough of this implicit ceding of sovereignty before every meeting, before every Zoom meeting, before every time we land on a Qantas flight,' Ms Collaris said.

'I'd had enough and just wanted to take a stand against it.'

She said the implication of the welcome messages was that non-Aboriginal people are of a lesser status, and to say so was at odds with the law she had sworn to uphold.

'It's the constant repetition of this message that's being given to us, that sovereignty does not exist within the Crown in some way, and that's what I've got an issue with.

'It's wrong in law and it's wrong in fact as well and that's why I decided to make a stand.'

Ms Collaris said the response she got online was no surprise.

'I got fairly predictable personal attacks levelled towards me.

'And that's what made me think "I'm going to sit down and I'm going to express my views clearly in writing", and that's what I did.'

In that article, published by The Australian, she wrote that 'acknowledgments of country are not about respect but were part of a political agenda.

'We show respect to Indigenous Australians by celebrating their culture and language, by valuing their historical knowledge, and by holding them to the same standards as all other Australians, not by making ubiquitous acknowledgments of country.'

The barrister said Welcome to Country ceremonies go against 'the fundamental guiding principle of our constitution today (which) is the quality of citizenship.

'If you're going to take a stand that's different to that by making these repeated acknowledgements of country, which repeatedly chip away at that sovereignty, then I think Australians have an instinct and they know that something is not quite right and they understand that there is a political push behind this.

'For as long as people continue to make political statements by way of acknowledgments of country, I will continue to acknowledge all Australians, signalling my support for an Australia where we are all equal and subject to the same laws regardless of our race.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13905187/lawyer-hits-accused-racist-refusing-Welcome-Country.html?ico=related-replace

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A radical proposal: bring back coal

Up to the year 2000, coal was responsible for over 80 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation. Its share today for the country as a whole is under 50 per cent.

In 2000, we had among the lowest electricity prices in the world. We now have among the highest.

In 2000, Australia had a smoothly-functioning electricity system. The system is now tottering, with supply interruptions and regular threats of blackouts.

Fixing our electricity system requires a completely different way of thinking about it.

Electricity demand over the next 15 years – between now and 2040 – is likely to increase by 20-25 per cent. To meet this additional demand, we need new generating capacity.

This means new coal-fired plants. There are no other options for reliable, low-cost electricity.

Natural gas is in short supply in the eastern states and, in any case, is roughly twice the cost of coal for electricity generation.

Nuclear power, if accepted in Australia, will not be in place before the mid-2030s and will play no major role before the 2040s.

Wind and solar farms are not suitable as they cannot generate reliable electricity, given that cloud cover and wind are variable.

In addition, they are inherently expensive. This is because of high transmission costs (which form roughly 40 per cent of total electricity costs) and because the development of wind and solar farms to meet the needs of the grid requires serious overbuilding.

To illustrate the point on overbuilding, to match the electricity produced by one coal-fired plant of (say) 500 megawatts requires wind and solar farms and rooftop solar panels with total capacity of at least 1,500 megawatts.

The reason? Coal-fired plants can operate 85-90 per cent of the time, about three times the average for wind and solar farms.

Such overbuilding is enormously wasteful.

Conventional thinking requires that there should be a transition in Australia from coal to renewables.

The transition should be the other way around, from renewables to coal.

The critical first step in making this transition is mounting the case for new coal-fired plants.

And a way of starting this process would be the preparation of a concept studies of new plants, one (say) in the Latrobe Valley and one (say) in the Hunter Valley. The studies would almost certainly show that coal was the most cost-effective way of meeting Australia’s immediate electricity needs.

Widespread dissemination of such studies would stimulate public discussion on the way forward for our electricity system and put pressure on Labor and Liberals to say why the coal route should not be pursued.

Who will provide the financial and organisational support for such studies and their dissemination?

To date, there has been no clear answer to this question, given that opponents of our current approach to electricity have been scattered and lacking organisation.

However, the launch in August of a new organisation, Coal Australia, raises the possibility that support is at hand.

Mobilising coal companies and others to join Coal Australia, an effort led by Nick Jorss, Executive Chairman of Bowen Coking Coal, has been an impressive achievement.

The organisation aims to promote the industry in Australia, focusing on both thermal coal (used for electricity generation) and metallurgical coal (used for steel production).

It recognises that ‘without our coal industry, Australia would not have reliable and affordable baseload electricity’.

But is it willing to take the next step and support new coal-fired plants?

A serious problem in this context is Coal Australia’s apparent support for the goal of reaching Net Zero emissions.

For example, it says on its website that it ‘strongly supports the work of Australia’s mining industry associations, such as the Minerals Council of Australia, Queensland Resources Council and NSW Minerals Council’.

But the Minerals Council says that it ‘and its members have a strong commitment to climate action, supporting the Paris Agreement and an industry ambition of Net Zero by 2050’.

This is nowhere challenged by Coal Australia.

Coal Australia also says on its website that ‘by investing in low emissions technologies, together with carbon capture and storage, the industry can contribute to meeting both our energy needs and emissions goals’.

It wants to be seen as contributing to ‘emissions goals’, whose end game is Net Zero emissions.

The Net Zero goal entails the death of the coal industry in Australia – and the death of Coal Australia itself.

In supporting Net Zero, Coal Australia is attempting to walk both sides of the street, supporting coal and supporting those trying to destroy coal.

It should change course and oppose the target of Net Zero emissions If this is a bridge too far, it should at least not take any position on emissions.

Coal Australia may consider the conclusion here to be wrong – that it can walk both sides of the street.

If so, would it consider supporting the preparation of concept studies for new plants, in the Latrobe Valley and the Hunter Valley respectively?

And would it consider moving quickly on this work, completing and starting to disseminate the concept studies by February next year?

This would allow it to play a significant role in stimulating discussion of coal in the lead-up to the next Federal election (due by May 2025), with the chance that such discussion would force political decision makers to stop pretending that coal can be ignored for electricity generation.

It would be wonderful way of supporting coal.

Finally, a little post script on the topic of Net Zero. Not only does the Net Zero goal entail the death of the coal industry, it is also a fundamentally-flawed concept.

It risks the destruction of our economy as we know it, requiring impossible levels of expenditure to achieve ($7,000-9,000 billion according to a comprehensive study released last year, chaired by Professor Robin Batterham, former Chief Scientist of Australia).

And it is a disastrous concept when applied to countries poorer than ours.

For example, electricity consumption per capita in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka is less than 15 per cent of that in Australia.

‘In Africa, electricity is so scarce that the total electricity available per person is much less than what a single refrigerator in the rich world uses.’ (Bjorn Lomborg)

Addressing these problems overwhelmingly requires fossil fuels, notably coal and natural gas, not renewables.

‘Fossil fuels are the most important factor in explaining the advance of modern civilisation.’ (Vaclav Smil, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, Canada)

In addition to being economically threatening, the Net Zero concept is contentious on scientific grounds.

While scientists agree that emissions contribute to global warming, there is no agreement that they are the main driver of warming.

Other drivers are at work, something that is clear from warming periods in the past, most recently in the Medieval period (around 950 to 1,200 AD) and the Roman period (around 300 BC to 300 AD).

These warming periods, referred to as ‘natural cycles’, had nothing to do with emissions, which did not start increasing until about 1850.

Natural cycles are probably solar related; they (not emissions) may be the main driver of the current warming period, which started around 1800.

Michael Asten, a retired professor of geophysics at Monash university who has done considerable work in this area as part of an international team, says that ‘until mainstream climate-science opinion can be reconciled with observations of natural cycles, climate science can be considered a work-in-progress’.

Or in the words of Judith Curry, a prominent US atmospheric scientist, ‘The climate system is way more complex than just something that you can tune with a carbon-dioxide control knob’.

On political and economic grounds, the goal of Net Zero emissions should be strongly opposed.

On scientific grounds, it should also be opposed, unless future climate science reaches the firm conclusion that emissions are the main driver, not just one driver, of global warming.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/a-radical-proposal-bring-back-coal/

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Pandemic confusion in NSW

NSW’s COVID-19 public health orders were a one-size-fits-all approach forced upon the police, who struggled to decipher the ever-changing rules they did not request nor want, the state’s former top officer has told a panel of business and community leaders.

The former NSW Police commissioner Mick Fuller, who led the force throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, said updates to the health orders – which dictated what people could and could not do as NSW Health tried to stem the spread of the virus – often made little sense and were not always enforceable.

The orders made under the Public Health Act covered a range of restrictions at different stages of the pandemic, from how many guests could attend a wedding or funeral, to patron numbers in cafes and restaurants, trading rules and social distancing. Even who could take to a dance floor was at one stage determined by a health order.

A panel of six experts – which included Fuller – convened by The Sydney Morning Herald to interrogate NSW’s approach to lockdowns and policing agreed that the health orders lacked clarity, should have been more localised and continued for too long once COVID-19 vaccines were available. The health orders also risked creating serious social division.

Fuller said the health orders were fast-moving and did not pass the usual parliamentary scrutiny of any other legislation. For the first three months of the 2020 lockdown, NSW Police did not have a legal representative at the table as the orders were drafted.

“There was a light-level approval process. Brad Hazzard, minister of health at the time, would sign off and ultimately that would empower those orders. Then police had to operationalise those as best as possible,” Fuller said.

Fuller said he did not know how many health orders were enacted – “I would hate to think” – but he only ever requested one. That was a $5000 on-the-spot fine for “people who cough or spit on health workers, police, pharmacists, paramedics or other public officials”.

It’s been more than four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised.

The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we asked tough questions about the pandemic’s impact on education, health and lockdowns and policing.

This is the last in our three-part series with six expert panellists looking at the impacts of border closures, lockdowns and policing during this period.

In November 2022, 33,121 of the 62,138 fines handed out since the start of the pandemic were withdrawn after Revenue NSW conceded in court that they were not valid.

Fuller said police did the best they could, bar one incident on March 31, 2020, when a convoy of five patrol cars drove through Rushcutters Bay Park, in Sydney’s east, directing people to comply with the latest social distancing orders. At the time, the eastern suburbs had been identified as a COVID hotspot.

Fuller conceded it was a “terrible” look for police. “The cops should have been out of the cars and talking to people and just explaining it,” he said. However, beyond that incident, Fuller said the police were just carrying out their job, albeit one they did not relish.

“It was a challenging time. I don’t feel as though we over-policed, but I totally understand the community disliked the health orders, and police didn’t like them either, to be honest,” Fuller said.

“One of the toughest things about the orders were the exemptions that would follow the next day.”

A city divided

While the image of police officers descending on Rushcutters Bay played on Fuller’s mind for months after, Adam Leto, the chief executive of think-tank Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, has an equally powerful recollection.

Two months into what would become the 107-day Delta lockdown in 2021, south-western and western Sydney – home to the most ethnically diverse communities in the city – had far tighter restrictions imposed on them than the rest of NSW. Twelve council areas were declared “areas of concern” as virus case numbers climbed.

By late August, those 12 hotspots were slapped with a 9pm to 5am curfew and outdoor exercise was limited to one hour a day. The rationale was that too many people were moving around western Sydney, taking the virus with them. The result was that Sydney became a city divided.

“I think there was a failure to really understand that that movement wasn’t residents spiting the government or spiting the system, it was born out of necessity,” Leto said.

“People couldn’t work at home. Some didn’t have digital connectivity. Their work required them to move. Their life required them to move. They had care responsibilities. They had extended families. So there was a lot of movement.”

Former president of Local Government NSW and City of Sydney councillor Linda Scott said she vividly recalls driving to south-western Sydney when the announcement was made, passing military personnel on the way. It was a stark difference to much of the city.

Scott said the risk of serious social unrest in western Sydney was very real. On August 20, 2021 – the day 12 areas of concern were declared – she held a press conference in her capacity as Local Government NSW president with then mayor of Canterbury-Bankstown Khal Asfour, whose council was one of the dozen affected.

There was a dangerous vacuum of information, Scott said.

“Nobody, none of the mayors, none of the local leaders, could tell their community what it meant for them. We couldn’t tell them why. We couldn’t tell them what it meant. None of us were clear on what people were allowed to do or not,” Scott said.

“It was a very dangerous point for social cohesion, where communities did not understand and did not accept why they had been chosen.”

Leto said western Sydney residents were watching vision of people picnicking at Bondi Beach while they were only allowed out for an hour a day for exercise. The panel agreed that far better communication was needed, involving community members and religious leaders, before the poorest areas of the city were plunged into a stricter lockdown.

The panel concurred that stay-at-home orders and restrictions needed to be “place-based”.

“Not all western Sydney is the same so your methods and your approach to Penrith are going to be different to what your message is and how you communicate that to Fairfield,” Leto said.

“It needed to be nuanced. It needed to be considered, and it needed to be consulted with local councils, with [community] leaders.”

Leto said the south-western Sydney lockdowns took him back to the Cronulla race riots of 2005.

“It had a mood and a tone to it that I could see that if it wasn’t handled appropriately, that there were enough ingredients to spark something. East versus west was real, and tensions were high. It didn’t get to that point, thankfully, and that’s a credit to the government and Mick [Fuller].”

Whiplash responses

Nationals MP and former deputy premier Paul Toole was a member of the Coalition government’s crisis cabinet, which met daily for much of the pandemic.

He said the priority “from day one” was the health of all NSW residents. That was the right approach, he said. However, that attitude continued for too long and, ultimately, at the expense of the economy.

The panel – which also included Professor Patrick McGorry, a leading adolescent psychiatrist and 2010 Australian of the Year – agreed with Toole’s assessment.

“If you went by the advice of Health, we would probably be in lockdown still today,” Toole, a former police minister, said.

Toole said the early days of the pandemic brought whiplash responses, as a little-known virus from Wuhan, China made its way into Australia. Suddenly, NSW was grappling with the same deadly disease that was killing people on the other side of the world.

Toole said the then-customer service minister Victor Dominello was the first to provide briefings to the cabinet and then-premier Gladys Berejiklian. Every decision, Toole said, was based on NSW Health advice. But eventually, as the pandemic dragged into its second year, the public stopped paying attention.

“There were public health orders that just kept changing. Even when the premier stood up and did an 11 o’clock presser every day, people were starting to get fatigued by the end of it,” Toole said. “There’s another public health order. There’s another change. So people then stopped listening.”

Toole said the public health orders were often too city-centric, especially when it came to restrictions around how far people could move. “Travel in the city is very different to travel in the regions and sometimes it was, hang on, this is not going to work. This might work here in the city, but this is just ridiculous having a public health order for the regions,” Toole said.

A previous panel of health experts convened by the Herald to probe pandemic decision-making warned that while the public largely complied with health orders, the population’s willingness to forgo freedoms would not likely be repeated.

NSW Police would also be less willing to enforce the orders.

While police were responsible for enforcing the health orders, Fuller said there were some requests that could not be delivered, such as a Melbourne-style ring of steel around south-western Sydney. Hundreds of police staffed Victoria’s “ring of steel” for about four months in 2020 when Melbourne was under tighter restrictions than the rest of the state.

Fuller was asked to do the same. He refused. “There were 330 roads they wanted me to lock down. It was logistically impossible, but it was morally wrong as well,” Fuller said. There was also another flaw to that plan: local governments owned many of those roads and they had not been consulted.

Scott said it was another example of poor communication. “There was this instruction to close roads that we owned, that we didn’t know about, that we couldn’t enforce,” she said. “Everyone was trying to act in the public interest, of course, but there was a complete failure of communication about what needed to be implemented and what could be implemented.”

Ultimately, a more effective response to a ring of steel was found, Fuller said.

“It was, in fact, the local police relationships, with the imams and the other community leaders and local government, that really saved the day there, to be honest,” he said.

Keep it simple

The panel also took issue with the complex nature of the restrictions and their multitude of exemptions, saying in a future emergency they should be kept as simple as possible. Margy Osmond, head of lobby group the Tourism and Transport Forum said: “If you’re a business that has multiple outlets in different parts of the city … keeping up with all the difference was just diabolical.”

Leto said the ambiguity around the restrictions caused “tension and frustration” in western Sydney. “I think a lot of people in western Sydney thought that there was one set of rules for some and one set of rules for them,” he said.

Scott agreed. “We had great trouble interpreting the health orders and then managing the infrastructure. The curfews were very difficult in particular.”

“We had some councils interpreting the health orders as ‘we should rope off playgrounds’, which at the time may have seemed sensible, but in retrospect probably meant that less people were using outdoor spaces and congregating indoors,” she said.

“Any decision has consequences but communication about how to interpret those things – giving a clear reason why they were put in place … would have really helped. They revealed the inequities in green space across Sydney in a very stark way.”

Fuller said some of the rules NSW eventually implemented during the Delta wave, such as the five- to 10-kilometre travel radius, were more about “trying to get the community to come on board” and understand the importance of social distancing or staying home, rather than because they had a specific purpose in stopping the spread.

“Some of them I think were more hopeful than [really thinking] they were ever going to be enforced. And I think that’s OK,” Fuller said. “We were never going to police it properly.”

Chris Minns took over as Labor opposition leader in June 2021, just before the Delta wave hit NSW, and generally offered bipartisan support for restrictions and health measures introduced by the then Coalition government.

Now as premier, Minns said it was important to reflect critically on the COVID-19 response, but would not buy into specific conclusions drawn by the Herald’s expert panel.

“At the end of the day leaders across the world were asked to make critical decisions that would impact millions of people in a very uncertain environment, based on the information they had available,” he said.

“Not every call was right, not every call was wrong. There are always things we can do better to ensure we are prepared for emergencies like another pandemic.”

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/the-morally-wrong-restriction-the-police-refused-to-follow-20240923-p5kcw3.html

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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David Crisafulli's big chance

The 45-year-old Liberal National Party leader enters the campaign proper next week as white-hot favourite to become Queensland’s 41st premier. News­poll shows it is his fight to lose against Steven Miles, who succeeded three-time election winner Annastacia Palaszczuk barely 10 months ago and has struggled to get his arms around the poisoned chalice he inherited.

Crisafulli’s watchwords are work, discipline, caution and more work. He presents as a man willing to take nothing for granted, to leave as little to chance as possible in the frenetic sprint to polling day.

Had the voters had their say last week, he would have been the comfortable winner: The Weekend Australian’s Newspoll puts the LNP 10 points clear of Labor after preferences and there is daylight between the leaders’ personal numbers. Crisafulli leads 46-39 per cent on the key measure of preferred premier that traditionally favours the incumbent, reinforcing perceptions a change of government is imminent.

Fellow Queenslander Peter Dutton will certainly hope so. While it is unwise to extrapolate a state outcome to the national level, victory for the LNP would be a fillip for the blue team in the countdown to the federal election Anthony Albanese will call by next May. Atmospherics are always important in politics, and the Country Liberal Party’s triumph in the Northern Territory last month breached the red wall of mainland Labor governments.

A result for the LNP on Dutton’s home turf would boost Coalition morale and fundraising prospects coast to coast. If Miles contrived, however, to pull off the Houdini-like act of delivering Labor a fourth consecutive state term, the Liberal-Nationals merger would come under renewed if not irresistible pressure.

The LNP is cumbersome to operate in Canberra. It was created to govern in Queensland, and if it can’t knock over Miles’s tired and unpopular outfit, what’s the point of it?

No pressure then, DC, to borrow the nickname Crisafulli’s advisers use. No pressure at all.

When we sit down to a working lunch at one of Crisafulli’s favourite haunts, Paradise Point Bowls Club, on the northern lip of his Gold Coast seat of Broadwater, he expresses the hope we’re hungry because he certainly is.

As usual, he has been up before the sun to hit the gym. He has done a media doorstop where he banged on about the LNP’s “adult crime, adult time” antidote to youth offending – a problem that has galvanised the electorate, especially in north Queensland where he grew up on a sugarcane farm outside smalltown Ingham. Crisafulli likes to say his values come from there.

He orders a steak – rare, please – with mashed potato and greens, washed down by mineral water for the table. The eatery staff know him, all right. His plate arrives piled high and he goes at it with gusto. Chomp, chomp.

We’re talking about the man he was and who he became after that chastening election defeat in 2015. Until then, Crisafulli’s future looked assured. Following high school, he had studied journalism at Townsville’s James Cook University and landed a job as a cadet reporter on his local paper, the Herbert River Express. He wound up on regional TV.

But his dad, Tony, let the cat out of the bag recently by recalling that young DC always had his sights set on politics. “That’s his way of saying he didn’t think I was a good farmer,” Crisafulli quipped, unconvincingly, during their awkward exchange for a profile segment on Nine News.

Tony: “No, no … he just wanted his thing for politics … it’s in your genes if you want to do something.”

Soon enough, 23-year-old DC was working as a staff member for Townsville-based Liberal senator Ian Macdonald in 2003. Within a year he ran for an elected spot on Townsville City Council, considered at the time to be a closed shop for Labor. He wore out three pairs of shoes doorknocking and won; he stood for the deputy mayor’s job in 2008 and got that to boot. By then he had married his teenage sweetheart, Tegan, the mother of their two daughters.

Anna Bligh’s state Labor government was on its last legs when Crisafulli was preselected by the LNP to contest the local seat of Mundingburra at the 2012 election. Newman, parachuted into the leadership from outside parliament, chalked up a win for the ages, capturing 78 of the 89 seats in state parliament then on offer. He went straight into cabinet as minister for local government, characteristically impatient to make his mark.

Unfortunately for him, what should have been a two or three-term government turned out to be a lone-term disaster for the LNP. The headstrong Newman brawled with all comers – public servants on job cuts, the judges over a crackdown on outlaw motorcycle gangs – and further alienated a sceptical electorate when he tried to rebrand as 99-year leases the state asset sales on which he had savaged Bligh to pay down surging public debt.

The tide went out as swiftly as it had come in, leaving Crisafulli high and dry, out of parliament, out of a job, and Palaszczuk unexpectedly premier in a minority Labor government. (Newman also lost his suburban Brisbane seat.)

Father-of-two Crisafulli moved the family to the Gold Coast and went into business as sole director of a training company, SET Solutions, that failed in 2016 owing creditors more than $3m. Following allegations that the firm might have traded insolvent, Crisafulli paid $200,000 to settle claims from liquidators; he denies any wrongdoing.

In 2017 he seized his opportunity to return to state parliament via blue-ribbon Broadwater, ousting incumbent Verity Barton, one of the LNP’s under-represented female MPs, in a bruising preselection challenge. It’s hard to see how he would get away with that today. Labor accused him of “destroying the career of the youngest woman in parliament”, while Barton’s supporters claimed the branch had been stacked, an accusation Crisafulli rejected.

Speaking publicly of those events for the first time from Britain, where she has built a career as a corporate consultant, Barton is magnanimous. “David is a determined man with a clear sense of the Queensland he wants to create,” she says.

Even now, the memory of those fraught times still animates the LNP leader. Crisafulli stabs at his beef. He admits that he pushed too hard and being belted by the voters in 2015 was the life lesson he needed. “You can make reform, but you can do it with compassion,” he says, recounting what he took out of that “humbling” experience.

“You can make the decisions that are needed, but you can still treat people with respect and decency. I genuinely believe I have always been a good listener and … the longer I’m in public life, the more I see the value of compassion and empathy and … I think that’s one of the really important things that I’d like to see if we were to win the election.”

Sounds reassuring, and those who know the man attest that he absorbed the mistakes of the Newman government and is the better for it, both as a person and politician.

“Part of the reason why the Labor Party has governed almost exclusively in Queensland for the last three decades is because we, as a political movement, haven’t been focused on service delivery,” he says.

Was his side too fixated on the value issues driven by its powerful Christian right wing? Distracted by Newmanesque symbolism such as making convicted outlaw bikies wear pink prison garb or some other outbreak of culture warfare?

Crisafulli responds cautiously. “That would be wrong to say that … but let me give you an example. When I became leader some people said to me: ‘Focusing on the health system is not something that is an equity of the LNP.’

“I disagree. I’ve seen the complete and utter disintegration of health services in this state – everything from escalation of ambulance ramping, to waiting lists and the closure of services in regional areas. Now, in the past, we haven’t had a laser-like focus on fixing the health system. And the fact that Queenslanders are looking at us as a solution to the health crisis, I think, shows the results of four years of discipline, not just for me … that’s been a combined effort.”

Certainly, his me-tooism in backing Labor policy has dismayed conservative purists.

Crisafulli in June made an unprecedented commitment to adopt Miles’s big-spending budget, vowing to honour all infrastructure projects and social services funded across the forward estimates. He voted his conscience against Palaszczuk’s abortion and voluntary euthanasia law reforms but insists the questions are settled and won’t be revisited by an LNP government.

There will be no rerun of the proposed 14,000-strong public service cull that arguably doomed Newman’s government at the outset, even though the LNP is critical of the extra 57,000 hirings made under Labor, excluding police, doctors, nurses and emergency personnel. (Crisafulli is on another unity ticket with Miles in saying he wants more of these “frontline” workers.)

He insists that state debt, projected to hit an eye-watering $172bn by 2028, will be lower, but doesn’t say by how much, and there’s a commensurate absence of detail around his pledge to ease the state tax burden.

Voters must wait for the campaign to be told of the LNP’s target to reduce ambulance ramping outside choked hospital emergency departments.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/poised-to-make-amends-and-possibly-some-history-the-man-who-would-be-premier-is-doggedly-determined/news-story/e062d8930da5ef5dffd9b255b07336dc

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Sexist judge quashes Mona Ladies Lounge tribunal decision that saw it shut down

Strange reasoning

In March, New South Wales' man Jason Lau brought an anti-discrimination case against Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) after being denied entry to the lounge last year, and initially won in Tasmania's appeals tribunal.

But that decision has been quashed by Acting Justice Shane Marshall, and sent back to the tribunal for reconsideration.

He found the lounge was designed to promote equal opportunity for women generally, and so it could lawfully exclude men.

Acting Justice Marshall found the discrimination experienced by women was not just confined to the past, but occurs today as well, and so women should be able to create an "exclusive space" to create a "flipped universe".

"The correct approach … is to ask first whether the arrangement's purpose was to promote equal opportunity," he wrote.

"On the evidence, the unequivocal answer is 'yes' because the Ladies' Lounge was designed to provide women with an exclusive space where they receive positive advantage as distinct from the general societal disadvantage they experience."

'Celebration certainly due', curator says
Artist and Ladies' Lounge creator Kirsha Kaechele described it as a win for women.

"I'm very inspired by the occurrences in the courtroom today. In 30 seconds the patriarchy was smashed," she said.

"The verdict demonstrates a simple truth: Women are better than men."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-27/mona-ladies-lounge-decision-tascat-supreme-court-decision/104403720

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Aussie state sparks outrage for major treaty move: 'Stop wasting money'

NSW premier Chris Minns has been slammed for forging ahead with treaty consultations with Indigenous Australians despite the defeat of the Voice last year.

Warren Mundine, an Indigenous leader who opposed the referendum, urged Mr Minns to 'stop wasting money', saying a treaty would not solve problems within the Aboriginal community.

'It's not going to … help anyone, it's just a total waste of time,' he said. 'Stop with these stupid, stupid conversations.'

Mr Mundine, who started out as a Labor political operative before later running for a seat as a Liberal, said NSW should instead 'start looking at the crime rate'.

'Let's start getting education, let's start getting jobs and dealing with those government issues that need to be done,' he told Sky News.

On Friday, the state government appointed three commissioners to conduct a one-year 'listening tour' across the state.

This tour will look at whether the state's Indigenous communities want a treaty and how that should work if they did.

But Mr Mundine dismissed the plan as a waste of money and time.

'If we take their track record so far it shows like in the Voice campaign they went out on a "listening" tour, and they didn't listen because they got flogged in that vote,' he said.

'My advice to Chris (Minns) is, come on mate, stop wasting money. We know what the issues are within Aboriginal communities.

'We know how to fix things and get things better. Setting out these talkfests (is) just a waste of time, and even if you go ahead with it, it has to be a vote for the people of NSW.'

Victoria was the first to introduce legal frameworks for an Indigenous treaty in 2018, with Queensland, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory also looking at establishing their own treaties.

South Australia legislated for a state-based Voice in March 2023.

But Mr Mundine said state treaties would not help solve the problems experienced by Indigenous communities.

'None of them (states pursuing treaties) are going to fix anything, I can tell you that now,' he said.

'All it is… going to do is fix the hip pocket of the people who are sitting on those communities.'

He pointed out that in Australia's First Nations Voice to Parliament election in South Australia in March, more than 90 per cent of eligible Indigenous voters did not vote.

'We saw in South Australia only… 10 per cent of Aboriginals actually voted in that election, 90 per cent didn't. That's a big... "no we don’t want this,"' he said.

In Victoria, the First Peoples' Assembly held elections in 2019 and 2023.

But the Assembly, which is supposed to negotiate a treaty with the state government, has had very low voter turnouts, with just 7 per cent of eligible voters doing so in 2019 and 10 per cent in 2023.

Mr Mundine told Sky News host Danica di Giorgio that it's pointless to try to find other ways of getting a treaty after the referendum was so comprehensively defeated, with 60.06 per cent of people voting no.

'It divides the community. They community has already voted. They voted on the Voice and it was quite clear, treaty was in that Voice,' he said.

'They made it quite clear, "No, we want to come together as a nation, we don't want to be divided."'

The three people appointed to work on the NSW treaty process are former senator Aden Ridgeway, academic Dr Todd Fernando and Naomi Moran, editor of the Koori Mail newspaper.

The NSW Aboriginal Affairs and Treaty Minister David Harris said 'The NSW Government is delivering on its election commitment to consult with Aboriginal people about whether they want to embark on any future treaty process.

'This is the first step in work that could eventually drive improved outcomes for Aboriginal people, and all NSW taxpayers,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13902971/Aussie-state-treaty-Aboriginal.html

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Coalition to say ‘no’ to Labor’s misinformation bill

The Coalition has committed to formally opposing Labor’s misinformation bill in parliament, after months of concerns over the risk it may pose to free speech.

Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman said the bill, which was withdrawn by Labor in November and redrafted following harsh criticism of its overreach, had “no place in Australia”.

“The Bill gives digital platforms an enormous financial incentive to censor statements made by everyday Australians. If the government decides that they have not censored enough ‘misinformation’, they can face large fines,” Mr Coleman said.

“Digital platforms don’t care about the free speech of Australians – but they do care about their profits. So they will censor large amounts of material in order to avoid the risk of fines. Digital platforms cannot be fined for censoring too much material – but they can be fined if they do not censor enough material.”

Mr Coleman added that the Bill, which Labor hopes to pass before the end of the year, was “extremely broad” and would capture many things said by Australians every day.

“The process of identifying … ‘misinformation’ is highly subjective and will lead to the suppression of the free speech of Australians,” he said.

“Everyday Australians are captured by the bill, but some groups are excluded from its operation. For instance, any ‘reasonable dissemination’ of material for an academic, scientific, or artistic purpose is excluded from the bill, but if an everyday Australian disagrees with an academic, that can be ‘misinformation’.

Mr Coleman warned such provisions in the “created two classes of speech in Australia – one for favoured groups, and one for everybody else”.

“This is outrageous,” he said.

The Coalition also holds concerns about the communications minister being given power to personally order “misinformation investigations and misinformation hearings”.

This could include investigations and hearings into digital platforms which the Minister believes contain too much ‘misinformation’.

“This is wide open to abuse and an extraordinary power for a Minister to hold in a democracy,” Mr Coleman said.

“On the other side of the coin, the Minister can choose to exclude a favoured digital platform from the operation of the misinformation laws entirely.”

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has maintained the rejigged bill got the balance right between protecting Australians against harmful misinformation and not undermining free speech.

“The Albanese Government has consulted extensively on the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, including with the release of an exposure draft for public comment, the publication of submissions and further targeted consultation with experts,” she said.

“Misinformation and disinformation threatens the safety and wellbeing of Australians, and undermines our society and democracy. Doing nothing is not an option – and 80 per cent of Australians agree on the need to act.”

But Queensland Council for Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said he still held concerns about any government body being the judge of truth and the impact this could have on freedom of speech.

Mr Cope, who stressed he was still considering the changes in the updated bill as he worked towards the “ridiculous” deadline of September 30 to complete his submission, said he was not so far convinced his concerns about the bill had been addressed.

“A government body is creating these codes, and these codes require the social media entities to remove misinformation and disinformation, that is information which is not true, and if they don’t, they’re subject to civil penalties.

“So the government – through the ACMA – is deciding what’s true and false and politics is full of all sorts of claims which are just value judgments.

Mr Cope said he was still considering if changes to the latest version of the bill to specify that misinformation was content which caused “serious harm” were sufficient to address his concerns, though his “gut reaction is probably not”.

“There’s a difference between a regulation in relation to say, what the doctors says to their patients, most of the time that is the subject of that can be demonstrated scientifically,” he said.

“But you know, if some politician stands up and says, ‘the RBA’s inflation target is a load of rubbish’. That’s a contested political judgement. Somebody could say, ‘that’s undermining the Australian economy’, because that’s a contested political statement.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/coalition-to-say-no-to-labors-misinformation-bill/news-story/1b9b2d18ddba39a989b63c52819d7be0

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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