Australian Politics

COVID left us poorer, sicker and with a big financial headache, inquiry told

COVID-19 has left Australians with poorer physical and mental health, helped fuel inflation because of too many government handouts and encouraged people into the black economy, the first wide-ranging inquiry into the pandemic has heard.

Businesses, unions, health experts and the education sector have told the inquiry, due to report in weeks, that Australia needs to prepare for future pandemics to avoid repeating mistakes made across all levels of government that are still being felt in some parts of the nation.

The inquiry, promised by Anthony Albanese ahead of the 2022 federal election, is being headed by former senior public servant Robyn Kruk plus economist Angela Jackson and infectious diseases expert Professor Catherine Bennett.

Established last year, the 12-month inquiry is due to report by September. It has been given a wide remit to look at joint Commonwealth-state actions, although its terms of reference preclude examining unilateral actions taken by states and territories or international programs.

Across a series of roundtables, the inquiry has been told of major shortcomings with elements of the federal and state governments’ responses to COVID-19 and the long-term problems these have caused.

Health experts said border closures had a “significant” impact on healthcare provision, particularly in rural, remote and border communities, arguing health workers should be exempt from such restrictions.

Australia’s average age fell last year while the country experienced a record number of deaths in 2022.

Chronic disease monitoring and cancer screening were disrupted, the sector said, noting a nationally co-ordinated effort was now required to clear the backlog of tests.

“People are currently waiting longer for care than before the pandemic, are often sicker and [are] finding it less affordable,” the sector said.

Experts said the mental health system was in crisis before the pandemic, and COVID-19 had exacerbated problems that had only worsened since.

Anthony Albanese announces inquiry into COVID-19 pandemic

An inquiry into how Australia dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic has been announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“Australian communities are experiencing a process of rolling recoveries from one emergency to the next (extreme weather events and the pandemic), with resulting cumulative trauma,” they told the inquiry.

“More emphasis is needed on community resilience and on strengthening the system ahead of the next emergency.”

Economists from academia and the private sector said original government spending was important in supporting households and businesses, but the speed at which it was rolled out meant “compromises” in policy design that should be avoided in future pandemics.

However, the ongoing financial support proved too much for the economy, they said.

“The scale of the initial fiscal and monetary support was likely warranted during a period of uncertainty. However, the winding back of these measures as the pandemic progressed was too slow,” they said.

The small business sector said differences in public health orders between the states and territories caused significant problems for many companies.

This, coupled with confusion over the definition of essential services and essential workers, encouraged some businesses to participate in the black economy.

“The lack of clarity and consistency around important definitions and public health orders resulted in an increase in the number of sole traders operating in the cash economy in some sectors, such as hairdressing,” it told the inquiry.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/covid-left-us-poorer-sicker-and-with-a-big-financial-headache-inquiry-told-20240725-p5jwer.html

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Facts at a premium in blustery climate debate

We think we are so clever. The conceit of contemporary humankind is often unbearable.

Yet this modern self-regard has generated a collective idiocy, an inane confusion between feelings and facts, and an inability to distinguish between noble aims and hard reality.

This preference for virtue signalling over practical action can be explained only by intellectual vanity, a smugness that over-estimates humankind’s ability to shape the world it inhabits.

Moonshot? Old news. Supersonic global travel? Been there, done that. Contraceptive pill, heart medication, painkillers, Viagra and antidepressants? Pharmacies are goldmines. Computers, video cameras, internet access to all knowledge of all history, audiovisual communication and electronic transactions? All in the palm of our hands.

Hot water when we want it, cool rooms when we need them, frozen meals, out-of-season fruits, self-driving cars, smart fridges and Uber deliveries. It is a wonder we bother getting out of bed.

As a result we have a tendency to believe we are masters of the universe, that we can control the climate and regulate natural disasters. Too lazy or spoiled to weigh facts and think things through, we are more susceptible than ever to mass delusion.

We have seen this tendency play out in deeply worrying ways, such as the irrational belief in the communal benefits of Covid vaccination despite the distinct lack of scientific evidence. Too many people just wanted to believe the vaccine had this thing beaten.

For that matter, we accepted draconian restrictions such as curfews and outdoor mask mandates when there was no medical evidence presented to support them. With most media operating hand-in-glove to generate fear and trepidation, our political and bureaucratic masters imposed frightening constraints on our freedom of expression, but most people seemed compliant because they wanted to believe we could control the virus and not vice versa.

Still, there is no area of public debate where rational thought is more readily cast aside than in the climate and energy debate. This is where alarmists demand that people “follow the science” while they deploy rhetoric, scare campaigns and policies that turn reality and science on their heads.

This nonsense is so widespread and amplified by so many authoritative figures that we have become inured to it. Teachers and children break from school to draw attention to what the UN calls a “climate emergency” as the world lives through its most populous and prosperous period in history, when people are shielded from the ill-effects of weather events better than they ever have been previously.

Politicians tell us in the same breath that producing clean energy is the most urgent and important task for the planet and reject nuclear energy, the only reliable form of emissions-free energy. The activists argue that reducing emissions is so imperative it is worth lowering living standards, alienating farmland, scarring forests and destroying industries, but it is not worth the challenge of boiling water to create energy-generating steam by using the tried and tested technology of nuclear fission.

Our acceptance of idiocy, unchecked and unchallenged, struck me in one interview this week given by teal MP Zali Steggall. In many ways it was an unexceptional interview; there are politicians and activists saying this sort of thing every day somewhere, usually unchallenged.

Steggall was preoccupied with Australia’s emissions reduction targets.

“If we are going to be aligned to a science-based target and keep temperatures as close to 1.5 degrees as we can, we must have a minimum reduction of 75 per cent by 2035 as an interim target,” she said.

Steggall then patronised her audience by comparing meeting emissions targets to paying down a mortgage. The claim about controlling global temperatures is hard to take seriously, but to be fair it is merely aping the lines of the UN, which argues the increase in global average temperatures can be held to 1.5 degrees with emissions reductions of that size – globally.

We could talk all day about the imprecise nature of these calculations, the contested scientific debate about the role of other natural variabilities in climate, and the presumption that humankind, through policy imposed by a supranational authority, can control global climate as if with a thermostat. The simplistic relaying of this agenda as central to Australian policy decisions was not the worst aspect of Steggall’s presentation.

“The Coalition has no policy, so let’s be really clear, they are taking Australia out of the Paris Agreement if they fail to nominate an improvement with a 2035 target,” Steggall lectured, disingenuously.

“The Labor government, they need to do better, we are currently not on track to keeping temperatures within sound boundaries from a climate risk point of view.”

This was Steggall promulgating the central lie of the national climate debate – that Australia’s emissions reduction policies can alter the climate. It is a fallacy embraced and advocated by Labor, the Greens and the teals, and which the Coalition is loath to challenge for fear of being tagged into a “climate denialism” argument.

It is arrant nonsense to suggest our policies can have any discernible effect on the climate or “climate risk”. Any politician suggesting so, directly or by implication, is part of a contemporary, fake-news-driven dumbing down of the public square, and injecting an urgency into our policy considerations that is hurting citizens already with high electricity prices, diminished reliability and a damaged economy.

Steggall went on to claim we were feeling the consequences of global warming already. “And for people wondering ‘How does that affect me?’, just look at your insurance premiums, our insurance premiums around Australia are going through the roof,” she extrapolated, claiming insurance costs were keeping people out of home ownership. “This is not a problem for the future,” Steggall stressed, “it is problem for now.”

It is a problem all right – it is unmitigated garbage masquerading as a policy debate. Taking it to its logical conclusion, Steggall claims if Australia reduced its emissions further we would lower the risk of natural disasters, leading to lower insurance premiums and improved housing affordability – it is surprising that world peace did not get a mention.

Mind you, these activists do like to talk about global warming as a security issue. They will say anything that heightens fears, escalates the problem and supports their push for more radical deindustrialisation.

Our national contribution to global emissions is now just over 1 per cent and shrinking. Australia’s annual emissions total less than 400 megatonnes while China’s are rising by more than that total each year and are now at 10,700Mt or about 30 times Australia’s. While our emissions reduce, global emissions are increasing. We could shut down our country, eliminating our emissions completely, and China’s increase would replace ours in less than a year.

So, whatever we are doing, it is not changing and cannot change the global climate. Our national chief scientist, Alan Finkel, clearly admitted this point in 2018, even though he was embarrassed by its implications in the political debate. Yet the pretence continues.

And before critics suggest I am arguing for inaction, I am not. But clearly, the logical and sensible baseline for our policy consideration should be a recognition that our national actions cannot change the weather. Therefore we should carefully consider adaptation to measured and verified climate change, while we involve ourselves as a responsible nation in global negotiations and action.

Obviously, we should not be leading that action but acting cautiously to protect our own interests and prosperity.

It is madness for us to undermine our cheap energy advantage to embark on a renewables-plus-storage experiment that no other country has dared to even try, when we know it cannot shift the global climate one iota. It is all pain for no gain.

Yet that is what this nation has done. So my question today is what has happened to our media, academia, political class and wider population so that it allows this debate and policy response to occur in a manner that is so divorced from reality?

Are we so complacent and overindulged that we accept post-rational debate to address our post-material concerns? Even when it is delivering material hardship to so many Australians and jeopardising our long-term economic security?

Should public debate accept absurd baseline propositions such as the idea that our energy transition sacrifice will improve the weather and reduce natural disasters, simply because they are being argued by major political groupings or the UN? Or should we not try to impose a dose of reality and stick to the facts?

This feebleness of our public debate has telling ramifications – there is no way this country could have embarked on the risky, expensive and doomed renewables-plus-storage experiment if policies and prognostications had been subject to proper scrutiny and debate.

Our media is now so polarised that the climate activists of Labor, the Greens and the teals are able to ensure their nonsensical advocacy is never challenged, and the green-left media, led by the publicly funded ABC, leads the charge in spreading misinformation.

Clearly, we are not as clever as we think. Our children need us to wise up.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/facts-at-a-premium-in-blustery-climate-debate/news-story/cc9e6f52afd7f611e431ab98b3b4a19b

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Who cares about the sisterhood when you look cute in a keffiyeh!

Gemma Tognini

A lot can happen in nine months. In some countries (definitely not Australia) you could build a small house. A baby can go from crawling and curious to teetering around on two small feet, suddenly and terrifyingly mobile. A gangly teenage boy can become, seemingly before his parents’ eyes, a young man.

And, the most obvious of all, a woman can become pregnant and give birth.

There are five young Israeli women in their late teens who have been hostage for this length of time.

I want to remind you that in a highly disturbing video released a few months ago, their captors were filmed saying these chilling words: “These are the women who can get pregnant. These are the Zionists.” And then: “You are very beautiful.”

We don’t know if these young women are pregnant but people fear that is what has happened.

Don’t like to think about it? Neither do their parents. Neither do their siblings and friends. Neither do I. But I’m going to insist we do because somehow it feels like much of Australia and the world has become shamefully comfortable with the fact these young women are still being held hostage.

We’ve been comfortable with the obfuscation and the whataboutism that says look the other way. Well, I’m not comfortable with it. And I want to make you as uncomfortable as I can.

We know if any of these young women were an Australian citizen they’d be collateral damage. That much is clear. If Australian women were being kept hostage in Gaza, being sexually abused and paraded around for the world to see like bargaining chips, Hamas would be in receipt of a very stern word salad.

Australia’s current government wouldn’t have the international clout or the ticker to rescue our own. It’s easy indeed to call for calm and suggest a two-state solution (that is, a reward for effort to the terrorists) when you’re safe and uninvested on the other side of the planet.

Few here outside the Jewish community speak of these young women and the other hostages any more. In the context of the ongoing dialogue about women’s safety and broader gendered violence, the most complicit in their silence are Australia’s feminists.

They’ve lost their tongue when it comes to these young women. When it comes to the sexual violence of October 7 last year, the weaponisation of sex during this conflict, they’ve had nothing to say except attempting to legitimise the regime that perpetrated this evil.

Is modern feminism dead? And if not yet, why not? Surely it’s time to end the charade that is third-wave feminism. It is nothing but a frenemy at best to women.

Modern feminists in Australia and elsewhere are, by their silence and invisibility, OK with young female hostages in Gaza. They are, for the most part, invisible on Iran.

They shout “From the river to the sea” without so much of a word about what life is like for women under Hamas’s strict sharia law.

I wrote about those inconvenient truths back in December. Under sharia, and in Gaza under Hamas, a woman’s testimony is legally worth half a man’s. If she can get a divorce, she has to pay her ex-husband for it. Intra-family sexual violence is legal and justified.

As I said back then: feminists, when you’re throwing your fist in the air and yelling “From the river to the sea”, you’re championing a regime that says it’s OK for a father to rape or beat his daughter. A son is legally permitted to abuse his mother.

But none of this matters if you look cute in a keffiyeh.

Third-wave feminists have had nothing to say on the butchering of Christian women in the Plateau region of Nigeria. And, closer to home, where have they all gone since the voice to parliament was rejected by most Australians?

The plague of family and domestic violence. Terrible, systemic disadvantage that disproportionately affects Indigenous women hasn’t gone anywhere. It has not magically disappeared because the government threw its hands up after the failed referendum. The problems are still there. The lack of virtue to signal seems directly proportional to the silence of modern feminists when it comes to all of these issues.

They pick and choose their causes and their champions. The right kind of woman versus the wrong kind.

Melania Trump, for example, is fair game. Her choice in husband is none of my concern but the feminist, leftist narrative around her and her marriage is laughable. Compare this with how Hillary Clinton is feted and adored as some kind of icon for empowered women. As if her husband weren’t caught bonking the intern in the Oval Office behind his wife’s back, then lying about it to America and the world.

One of the worst things about that whole grubby situation was that Monica Lewinsky’s life suffered the most. Where were the feminists then? Talk about a power imbalance. Bill Clinton should never have been able to show his face again. Hillary was never judged for staying in that marriage.

Gosh, it must be exhausting being consistently caught in your own hypocrisy. I could write reams about this subject. Truly, I could.

I’ve shared before that the world I grew up in was gender blind. As a child, my Nonna worked full time. My Zia too. My mum went back to work when my brother and I were closer to high school, but that wasn’t a choice made out of victimhood, it was about purpose over preference. Nobody needed to tell me women could do anything. I saw it every day. Nobody needed to tell me that choosing to be a mum for a while, then go back to work (if the circumstances of life allowed it) was a beautiful and worthy sacrifice. I saw that in my mother.

That being said, I was well aware of the huge gender and opportunity pay disparity because we spoke about it at home and as a family more broadly.

I’ve experienced that too in my previous career and have shared openly about that. I say all of that by way of context and to say gently that, to me, modern feminism has lost sight of the sacrifices women in previous generations made. It has conveniently forgotten that we ladies today, of all ages, are standing on the shoulder pads of giants. Women who went before us and fought for things of substance.

That’s not to say, well gals, this is as good as it gets. What I am definitely saying is that we must not lose sight of the fact feminism was never about picking and choosing which women were supported, heard and fought for. It was always about women being empowered to live the lives of their choosing. About saying no woman should be taken and held hostage. Not being judged for the men they marry or divorce or choose not to marry. And I will say this until I’m blue in the face. Men are not the enemy. We are better together, always.

Those young women chained up in Gaza, suffering god knows what. They are being kept prisoner. They have been held for close to a year and modern feminists at the UN, in Australia and elsewhere have shamefully turned the other way. Have become OK with it. They can protest all they like but their silence betrays them.

Modern feminism is a cheap imitation of the real thing. It’s not about equality, it’s about revenge. It’s not about women for women. It’s what infatuation is to love, what a one-night stand is to a healthy marriage. If it’s not dead yet, the sooner and the significantly better off we’ll be.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/who-cares-about-the-sisterhood-when-you-look-cute-in-a-keffiyeh/news-story/8a2cc58f3347cc8f5e79b4383c276606

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Green feels chop over Labor deals: For New South Wales Labor, green morality trumps forestry

Last month, 15 timber harvesting operations were suspended by the NSW timber industry controller Forestry Corporation. The Environment Protection Authority changed the habitat protection rules for the endangered greater gliders, making timber harvesting illegal.

Environmental activists have deployed a Victorian-style lawfare in an effort to shut down native timber production. But no amount of marsupial propaganda masks the human toll inflicted by the government’s betrayal.

Despite the NSW timber industry having more teeth than its Victorian counterparts and some sharp operators like ex-Labor Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, there is limited political interest in the arguments for sustainable management, homes, and sovereign capacity.

Activist environmentalists are cunning; having crippled the Victorian timber industry, they have worked out a successful model and are now replicating it in NSW. They take legal action against government bodies that trigger ‘stop work’ orders. This forces businesses to suffer death by attrition – court actions take years to resolve, and even if they are successful, few businesses are left, and fewer financial institutions are willing to back them.

Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty barely rated a whimper when responding to the crisis, stating that her government was ‘committed to delivering the right balance between protecting the environment and sustaining our state forests’. As to what that means, who knows?!

The Australian Forestry Products Association CEO James Jooste called for an intervention into dispute resolution three months ago, likely knowing full well the impact of the strategy.

‘We need a better resolution-dispute mechanism so we’re not spending six months out of our forests where we have no environmental outcomes and no productive outcomes,’ he said.

This fell on deaf ears, with neither the Minister for Agriculture, Tara Moriarty, nor the Minister for Natural Resources, Courtney Houssos, offering a solution. A surprising betrayal considering Minister Houssos’ commitment prior to the NSW election, where she promised:

‘No net job losses and an independent skills audit to guide investment and incentives and encourage new economic opportunities in the forestry industry.’

The truth is Labor cannot be trusted on forestry. The party has been overrun by inner-city greens, while the political hard-heads of old Labor are too weak to stand up for their traditional base.

This should not be the story for native forestry. The government should ensure that environmental activists cannot abuse the court process. If regulations need to change, then do so in a consultative manner over a period of time. Anything less is a calculated betrayal.

If Labor wants to close the book on native forestry, they should do so with an industry transition over decades, not weeks. Chile and Uruguay fought deforestation by investing in hardwood plantations; today, they have a thriving industry exporting Australian timber species, Eucalyptus Grandis, to the world. The question NSW Labor should be asking is, why can’t we?

Political parties on the centre-left have become unreliable for industry, because the unions which founded them are no longer run by workers. And as a result Green morality has defined many industries as immoral and destructive.

Blaming environmental activists for the final nail in the industry’s coffin is easy, but frankly, the timber industry helped build the box. Over the past decade, industry groups and unions ignored the signposts. Emotive and targeted messaging changed public opinion against the forestry industry, such that ultimately, dead koalas became more powerful than thousands of jobs and millions of homes.

If the industry wants to survive in Queensland, South Australia, and Tasmania, it must make an ongoing effort to change its reputation. This requires sharp and consistent communication to make the case for the importance of timber products to our economy, a demonstration of genuine outcome-driven conservation, and a long-term plan for industry transition.

Several industry organisations are already seeing the light on this, but without the long-term bipartisan backing of government, it may all be too little too late.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/green-feels-chop-over-labor-deals/