Senate votes against vaccine-injured Australians

I am a vaccine-injured Australian, writing under a false name to protect my identity. The reason I do this is because I don’t want my claim to be affected. No one in power wants to believe me, they just want me to curl up and disappear. I am an inconvenience that threatens the narrative. But there are tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Australians like me, and we are not going to go gently into the night.

Today, I watched as Gerard Rennick, an LNP Senator for Queensland, moved for an inquiry into the federal COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Claims Scheme. Senator Rennick is one of the only voices that stands up for us. He stands up for us loudly. But his calls for an inquiry were shot down by his colleagues.

According to the parliamentary Hansard, Senator Rennick specifically wanted an inquiry into the scheme’s eligibility criteria, the time in processing claimants’ applications, the differences between the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s assessments and specialists’ assessments reported in vaccine injury claims, the adequacy of the scheme’s compensation of claimant’s injuries, mental health and lost earnings, the risks that inadequate support and compensation for vaccine-related injuries might exacerbate vaccine hesitancy, and other related matters.

In speaking to his motion, Senator Rennick told his colleagues how, in Australia, the government has done a woeful job of acknowledging and compensating those people who it has injured through drugs that it has prescribed. He talked about the victims of thalidomide, and how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s apology came 60 years too late. He talked about how Australians had suffered in the 1980s when the Red Cross and CSL Limited allegedly infected tens of thousands with AIDS and Hepatitis C. He talked about mesh injuries, and how his uncle had been left blind after taking a sulfa drug. He talked about how the pharmaceutical industry has a history of putting their wallets in front of people’s health. He said that Australians ‘were told the vaccine was safe and effective.’ He asked, ‘If we [politicians] aren’t here to protect the people, what exactly are we here for?’ He said that Australians ‘should not be made to suffer for following the advice of the government that said they would be protected’.

Later in the debate, another senator said that no one else had spent more time talking to vaccine-injured Australians than Senator Rennick. ‘He speaks with a good heart and from a place of deep conviction.’ And that’s right. Senator Rennick does. He talked about and said all the right things. He gave me and all those other vaccine-injured Australians a voice. He was fighting for us, and he was winning.

Then the Albanese government’s chief spokesperson in the chamber, Katy Gallagher, stood up.

Senator Gallagher used her speaking time to gaslight Senator Rennick, describing his views as ‘irresponsible’. She said that the government would consider the recommendations made to the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, which advocates for a national no-fault vaccine injury compensation scheme. ‘There is no need for another inquiry,’ she finished.

Except that’s exactly what the recommendations made to the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee demand: a review of the COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Claims Scheme. How can you conduct a review if you can’t have another inquiry? How, Senator Gallagher, how? She said that the government had only received the report earlier this week, and implied that decisions were being rushed. No, Senator Rennick was just getting on with the job, fighting the good fight. Fighting for us.

When Rennick’s motion went to a vote, a division was required. The bells were rung. Coalition senators rocked up to support their colleague, as did Malcolm Roberts from One Nation, but it wasn’t enough. The Labor government, the Greens, Jacquie Lambie’s mob, and Lidia Thorpe all voted against the motion. It was defeated 24 votes to 31.

This is what the government thinks of us. We are the problem that, in their collective mind, deserves no solution. Australians are dying because they were forced to take an experimental drug and were told that if they didn’t, they would lose their jobs, their livelihood. They were ridiculed and shamed into submission. At least the Coalition seems to have the courage to admit it got it wrong, and under Senator Rennick wants to try and repair the damage as best it can. Why, now, is the Labor Government so frightened of uncovering the truth?

And I cannot believe that Senator Rennick won’t be on the LNP’s ticket at the next federal election. One of the last blokes with any real guts in Canberra, prepared to stand up to the powerful, has been, like we have, shoved aside.

This is a dark day for Australia, but it’s just another day in the last four years for me, for all those Australians injured by the Covid vaccines.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/senate-votes-against-vaccine-injured-australians/

********************************************

Woke mathematics teaching: Rather sickening

Cresta Richardson, the head of the Queensland Teachers’ Union, declared that the 1.3 million children in Australia preparing to sit this year’s Naplan test should be spared the ordeal because it is too stressful for them. It is not surprising Richardson is calling for a boycott of testing, because Naplan testing exposes the complete failure of our education sector to teach people how to read, write and add up.

To his credit, federal Education Minister Jason Clare disagrees, stating he believes Naplan should stay. Since being sworn in as minister in June 2022, Clare has often repeated the mantra that we need to get ‘back to basics’. This is an admirable sentiment, but as long as this country’s education sector is controlled by a cohort of progressives who believe education is a vehicle for politicisation, it will remain nothing more than wishful thinking.

The progressive view of education is of course completely at odds with the expectations of most mainstream parents who still cling to the antiquated notion that, at the very minimum, schooling should be about acquiring basic skills such as numeracy and literacy. Nowhere is this difference more vividly illustrated than in the mathematics learning area of Australia’s national curriculum.

Deeply embedded in the K-10 mathematics syllabus is the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures’ cross curriculum priority, which ensures ‘students can engage with and value the histories and cultures of Australian First Nations Peoples in relation to mathematics’. The consensus seems to be that children should be taught things like statistics and algebra, not because these will furnish them with necessary life skills such as planning budgets or finding the best prices for products bought and sold, but because it will give them a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal dance, corroborees and dreamtime. Not so long ago, this was called anthropology.

Indeed, Aboriginal dance features heavily in the primary syllabus, especially when it comes to addition and subtraction. In Year 1, teachers attempt to explain to the kiddies why 2 + 2 = 4 through First Nations Australians’ dances. In Year 2, the point is hammered home again, using ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances to understand the balance and connection between addition and subtraction’.

For those students who still have not caught on, their teachers will explain through ‘First Nations Australians’ cultural stories and dances about how they care for Country/Place such as turtle-egg gathering using number sentences’. In Year 4, teachers explore ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances that show the connection between addition and subtraction, representing this as a number sentence and discussing how this conveys important information about balance in processes on Country/Place’. Just in case you thought this might be the last time children are subjected to the silent snake or cassowary dance, think again. The Year 5s are investigating ‘how mathematical models involving combinations of operations can be used to represent songs, stories and/or dances of First Nations Australians’.

As it turns out, these all-singing, all-dancing classes are a bit of a distraction. Not from learning the times tables or how to do a long division, but from something much more pressing, which is Reconciliation. This highly charged political concept is introduced in a Year 3 ‘Number’ class by ‘comparing, reading and writing numbers involved in the more than 60,000 years of First Peoples of Australia’s presence on the Australian continent through time scales relating to pre-colonisation and post-colonisation’. Two years later, they are busy ‘investigating data relating to Australia’s reconciliation process with First Nations Australians, posing questions, discussing and reporting on findings’.

It is in secondary school, however, that the architects of the mathematics syllabus really get down to business. From Year 7 onwards, students studying statistics are introduced to the notion of reconciliation between ‘First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians’. They are told to look at ‘secondary data from the Reconciliation Barometer to conduct and report on statistical investigations relating to First Nations Australians’. The Reconciliation Barometer was invented back in 2008 by Reconciliation Australia to measure, every two years, just how racist non-Aboriginal Australians really are. This racism is confirmed for students in Year 9 as they go about ‘exploring potential cultural bias relating to First Nations Australians by critically analysing sampling techniques in statistical reports’ as well as observing ‘comparative data presented in reports by National Indigenous Australians Agency in regard to Closing the Gap’.

Every Australian parent should know that their children are being subjected to overt politicisation in maths classes courtesy of the national curriculum. They should also know that the technique being used was developed by Brazilian Marxist, Paolo Freire, who proposed that the only true education is political education and that all teaching is a political act. When Freire talked about literacy, he meant political literacy, rather than actually being able to read and write.

His view was that the teacher’s role is not to educate in the traditional liberal education sense of the word, but to bring about what he termed the ‘conscientisation of the student’ by awakening their consciousness to the real political condition of their lives. Freire claimed that conscientisation could be achieved in the classroom by ensuring children are taught to see structural oppression in all aspects of life.

Thus, a potentially dull statistics lesson on standard deviations, random variation and central tendency is transformed into an entirely different, and much more exciting class in which children develop a critical consciousness of Australian society.

They might discuss the devastating consequences of the invasion of this land and colonisation, past and current systemic racism in Australia, the need for truth-telling, the reconciliation processes, or the need for reconciliation action plans. By the end of the session on statistics, all they will see is structural oppression. And by the end of twelve years of schooling, they will be ready and willing to overthrow the oppressive capitalist power structures and replace them with a utopian socialist society of diversity, equity and inclusion.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/dreamtime-maths/

********************************************

The grim cost of firming up solar and wind

Alan Moran

The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.

These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law, where computer chip performance doubles every two years. The application of this to electricity supply, it was argued, just needed a short-term leg-up.

Time has demonstrated this to have been spurious. The need wind and solar facilities have for subsidies, far from withering away, have escalated.

The initial measure provided a subsidy to renewables (and cost to consumers) growing to about $380 million per year. To his credit, John Howard resisted pressures to increase this but the Rudd/Gillard governments and state governments vastly expanded the support with new schemes for rooftop facilities and budgetary expenditures. The Turnbull and Morrison governments further expanded the subsidies, which at the outset of the present government’s tenure amounted to $9 billion per annum.

The Albanese government has introduced a number of additional measures. These include the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires the major carbon-emitting firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 or buy the equivalents in carbon credits. The cost is conservatively estimated at $906 million per annum.

The government is also set to introduce the Capacity Investment Scheme involving power purchasing agreements designed to attract $68 billion of spending on additional wind, solar, and batteries. The best estimate of the cost to the taxpayer is $5,775 million per annum. In addition, the government is expediting the transmission roll-out.

Present subsidy levels are estimated at $15.6 billion per annum. The effects of subsidies have come in three phases.

The first was in the decade after 2003 when renewables progressively increased their market share as required by regulations. By 2014/15, wind and solar had grown to about 7 per cent of the electricity market. The subsidised supplies placed downward pressure on the market price as well as taking market share from coal. That outcome was intensified by new Queensland gas supplies coming on stream. Without access to export ports, that gas was redirected to domestic electricity generation and the share of gas supplies in the National Electricity Market increased from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. Gas now has more lucrative markets overseas and governments are exerting pressure on the producers to allocate more than is commercially sensible to the domestic market.

This first phase came to an abrupt end when low prices and higher supplies forced major coal generators, Northern Power in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria, out of the market.

Those market exits led to a second phase, whereby reduced coal capacity brought a trebling of wholesale market prices from their 2015 level of $40 per megawatt hour (MWh). Covid caused a temporary downward blip but the wholesale price is averaging $119 per megawatt hour in the March quarter, 2024.

These higher prices reflect the higher cost of wind and solar and will continue to prevail and, in fact, increase. Price increases may be concealed by governments entering into power purchasing agreements but this means subsidies financed by taxpayers rather than electricity users.

The subsidies to wind and solar have now resulted in their market share growing from zero 20 years ago to over 30 per cent. This is ushering in the third phase of the ‘transition’, which involves desperately seeking ways to firm up the intermittent and largely unpredictable electricity supply from wind and solar.

Gas, coal, and nuclear can operate pretty much continuously and without special storage facilities, but weather and nightfall limit solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

With wind and solar at their current market share, coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply, albeit unprofitably. But the policy in all Australian government jurisdictions is to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover, coal (and, for that matter, nuclear) is technically ill-suited and costly to be used as a back-stop to variable wind and solar supplies. ‘Social licences’ aside, new coal or nuclear plants could not be commercially built except as near continuous baseload.

Other means of ‘firming’ wind and solar supplies are therefore increasingly required. One such is the conversion of Snowy Hydro into a pumped storage facility. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.

Snowy 2 is planned to provide 376 megawatt hours of storage. The Capacity Investment Scheme is an attempt to augment this, though, notwithstanding its name, it earmarks 70 per cent of its intended power purchasing agreements simply for more wind and solar. These add nothing to replacing the dispatchable (controllable) power being lost from the forced retirement of coal plants. The Capacity Investment Scheme will add just 36 gigawatt hours of storage from the 9 GW of facilities planned to be contracted.

The Australian Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated Systems Plan for 2050 envisages a total storage capacity of 642 gigawatt hours for a system double the size of the present one and overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar. This is utterly inadequate for backing up intermittent power.

Francis Menton has assembled a wealth of evidence of how much storage a renewables system would require. He authored a major report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation as well as many other papers like this. Basically, his work shows that a wind and solar system, if it is to provide a secure and reliable electricity supply, requires some 26 days of storage. For Australia, this means 13,000 gigawatt hours of storage, which is 25 times what the AEMO Integrated Systems Plan envisages.

The highly regarded GlobalRoam consultancy estimated that the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia), with perfect planning and no losses in storage or transmission, would require at least 9,000 gigawatt hours of storage. The costs of this, at $US 350 per kWh, would be three times Australia’s GDP for batteries that would need to be replaced every 12 years.

It might be argued that Germany, with little storage back-up, already has wind and solar providing 45 per cent of its electricity and, although it has some of the world’s highest prices, its supply is reliable. But Germany also has access to supplies from Polish coal and French nuclear power to firm up its wind and solar. Australia has a stand-alone system.

Our politicians are plunging us into a perilous future. Policies have already given us an electricity supply system with costs that cannot support energy-intensive industries. Those policies are now poised to bring about lower reliability than is compatible with a first-world economy.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comm

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-grim-cost-of-firming-up-solar-and-wind/

********************************************

Gasp! The Christians are voting in Tasmania

Dave Pellowe

It’s election week in Tasmania, and former leader of the Australian Greens, Christine Milne, appears to be clutching her pearls at the prospect of authentic Christians having a vote and a democratic voice in her home state of Tasmania.

When I tweeted last week that the Church And State conference is coming to both Hobart and Launceston in early April with teachings from God’s Word about the important public issues being debated in Tasmania, she was triggered.

‘This is where Tas Liberals want to drive Tasmania: extreme right wing religious views embedded in politics. Eric Abetz keynote speaker. By then he’ll be in Parlt (sic). Expect prayer breakfasts, push for conversion therapy, oppose women’s reproductive rights.’

Teaching from God’s Word is ‘extreme right wing’? Well, that says a lot about the Greens, doesn’t it?!

Yes, Christians have religious views [gasp], and do you know who else’s worldviews are embedded in their politics where they seek democratic representation?

Everyone’s. It’s what we call civilisation in the pluralistic, inclusive, liberal democracies of the Christian West.

A long time ago in England, it was mandated by the government that people couldn’t choose their religion. They were fined, arrested, tortured, or even executed if they refused to go to the government-run church on Sunday.

This led to the Pilgrims fleeing to the New World to create freedom of conscience. It is a story celebrated each year on Thanksgiving in America and enshrined in their First Amendment.

It was that history and Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson called ‘a wall of separation between Church and State’, that was used as a reference to the principle that never again should people have the free exercise of their conscience in private or public curtailed by an overreaching government (the kind extreme left wing demagogues fantasise about).

Along with a free press, free speech, rights to petition, and peaceable assembly, religious freedom is a check and balance on craven politicians who seek to bring the power of the State to bear against common people who dissent with their vision of society.

So yes, I am coming to preach the Gospel in Tasmania to those who are humble enough to listen to what Jesus says about debated issues. As it is said, ‘Captives will be released, the blind will see, the oppressed will be set free, and the time of the Lord’s favour has come.’

Not once was Jesus tolerant or inclusive of proud and unrepentant moral lawbreakers, because ‘Woke Jesus’ is only a false god of self-righteous hypocrites, an idol made of human imagination and ignorance.

But He shows patience, mercy, and grace to those who are poor in spirit and grieving their terminal unrighteousness and those who humble themselves willingly before Almighty God.

The Greens can expect a debate on debatable issues. Expect Christian behaviours like praying [gasp]. And expect more Bible-believing Christians to take an active interest in the injustice, oppression, and the chains which extreme left wing worldviews are imposing upon the vulnerable.

Because as much as it might trigger the Greens, we still have democracy in Australia.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/gasp-the-christians-are-voting-in-tasmania/

************************************

4 Billion Reasons Why Building Homes in Aboriginal Regions Will Achieve Little

The Australian prime minister has promised that $4 billion (US$2.6 billion) of taxpayer’s money will be a “historic investment” in housing in remote communities across the Northern Territory. Investment implies a return. I doubt there will be a return.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared, “The Northern Territory has the highest level of overcrowding in the country, which we are working to halve by building 270 houses each year.”

There was no guide as to which of the scores of discrete Aboriginal communities would be the lucky recipient. At the rate houses deteriorate in the north, and in these communities, the “investment” will be lucky to keep up. But is it even an investment?

Aboriginal Housing NT CEO Skye Thompson said it was. “This investment will help ensure Aboriginal Australians across the Northern Territory are able to live with dignity and pride, where their kids can grow safe, healthy and strong and truly look to their futures with real hope and optimism,” she said.
Ken McNamara of Wollongong had a different view.

In a recent Letter to the Editor of The Australian newspaper, he wrote, “These communities are economically unsustainable. After all, that’s why those areas were left alone for so long. Supporting people to stay ‘on country,’ irrespective of economics, just maintains the gap.”

I’m Indigenous and my family was subject to a natural experiment about whether it was better to stay “on country” or not.

My grandmother was sent off mission as an orphan to be a servant. Her immediate relatives were “allowed” to stay. Two generations later, not only are there a couple of doctors in our family but economically, healthwise, and spiritually, we’re doing just fine.

Those who stayed back on the mission—not so great. Unemployment, shorter average lifespans, and all the concomitant ills.

It’s clear that giving young people in remote communities every chance to get an education and career, is the only way to close the gap. Yearning for the old ways (usually selectively) and a past that will never return won’t close any gap.

The Commonwealth and the Northern Territory have done this before, paying for people to live in houses they do not know how to care for.

People’s capacity to maintain their houses is probably declining. Many evidently cannot and probably do not want to maintain them.

This investment is meant to help close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It cannot. These places do not have an economy capable of generating capital. They are capital sinks, and they will remain so.

The prime minister announced the housing giveaway while visiting the Binjari community near Katherine in the Northern Territory. By coincidence, I received correspondence from a colleague at Katherine the day after the announcement:

“We have around 30 funded NGOs and agencies here in Katherine, accessing millions of dollars annually, and for a small town like Katherine, that’s a bit of overkill in the number of agencies, especially when we aren’t seeing much in the way of returns for the money being spent.”

“It’s interesting to note that, when the business community was so fed up with the constant level of ram raids, smashing of windows and doors, theft of goods, threatening of staff, and trashing of premises that they had a meeting to put together a petition to Parliament about what was going on, the NGOs wouldn’t sign the petition, even though their premises were similarly affected.”

There is the golden insight.

NGOs rely on Aboriginal funding for their jobs, such as the newly announced Justice Reinvestment, which is $70 million; Safer Futures for Central Australia, which is $200 million; and Jobs for Northern Australia, which is $700 million.

As my correspondent wrote, “Aboriginal money is largely what makes the world go round here, so trying to get anything done is difficult because there are those who don’t want anything to change.”

The “historic” investment would best be made in out-migration and supporting services.

Building houses in the middle of nowhere to replace those ruined by bad behaviour is a fool’s errand.

Keep throwing our good money away, prime minister, but do not expect a better outcome until people’s capacity, place, and culture—not their leaders’ job prospects—are at the centre of policy.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/4-billion-reasons-why-building-homes-in-aboriginal-regions-will-achieve-little-5610114

**********************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

***************************************