Court order to expose @PRguy17 threatens the right to be anonymous online

The problem is not anonymity. It is defamation. A more robust and accessible system to punish misleading and derogatory tweets is what is needed

A Federal Court order forcing Twitter to hand over identifying details of a prominent anonymous account has far-reaching consequences for all internet users.

For those who engage in heated online debates under a pseudonym, the decision means they may be at risk of having their identity exposed.

But even if you’re not a chronic online poster, this court decision has important implications for our online rights. It is part of a growing debate about the merit of online anonymity, which stands to affect the way we can participate in cyberspace.

The court order is a result of defamation proceedings launched by far-right social media personality Avi Yemini against anonymous Twitter account @PRGuy17, which was set up in March 2020 and has since attracted more than 80,000 users.

The account is known for posting content in support of the Labor Party, with particular emphasis on praising Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. PRGuy has been critical of the anti-lockdown “Freedom Movement”, of which Yemini has been a figurehead. Sky News has accused the account of pumping out “pro-Labor propaganda” and some have claimed it may be connected to the premier’s office.

However, the precedent created by this case – where a social media platform has been ordered to hand over identifying information so a party to a court case can legally pursue the person behind the account – is chilling for many who use anonymity to participate in online debate. Defamation has a notorious history in Australia, and certain plaintiffs have used it to strategically silence criticism.

Those who benefit from the use of pseudonyms online are not a small minority. People who have jobs that limit their ability to engage in public debates, such as those in the public service or in frontline client-facing roles, often rely on anonymity to call out bad behaviour (or to simply have an opinion) without fear of repercussions in the physical world.

Human rights defenders, political organisers, lawyers and whistleblowers often rely on the shield offered by anonymity to do their vital work while also engaging in regular online life. Even if you aren’t one of these people, we all benefit from their ability to hold power to account.

We cannot glorify the Arab Spring protests and the might that social media has given to other social movements since then, then seek to remove the key ingredient which made those movements possible.

All this must be balanced against the proliferation of online trolling, in which people can be subjected to hundreds, even thousands, of abusive messages, often for posting something innocuous.

Defamation policy won’t tackle online trolls, lawyers tell PM

In criticising trolls in October 2021, then prime minister Scott Morrison labelled social media a “cowards’ palace” and called for a crackdown on anonymous accounts. In March that year, a federal parliamentary committee had recommended people be required to provide 100 points of ID to create a social media account. Morrison’s government then unveiled draft legislation purported to tackle online trolls with a requirement that social media companies collect unspecified additional identifying information. This has a huge impact on those who need online anonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence.

Regardless of whether you personally feel you have “nothing to hide”, in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to protect our data from breaches and misuse, the proposal to hand over additional information to big tech giants – despite the privacy and security risks – is troubling.

There is little evidence that reducing anonymity online would prevent trolling. Research has found that prohibiting anonymity online does not necessarily reduce bullying or the spread of misinformation. And when it was attempted in South Korea, 35 million people had their national identification numbers stolen by hackers. We need to improve the quality of online debate, but policies should be based on evidence, not instinct.

These are not easy challenges to tackle. Anyone who has ever been attacked by an anonymous online troll would tell you the abuse has real-world consequences. But if we give up the ability to be anonymous we pave the way for the complete erosion of privacy online, to the detriment of public debate, safety, expression and democratic participation.

Regardless of your opinion on Yemini or PRGuy, we shouldn’t let a public beef between two of Australia’s most divisive people on the internet obscure why online anonymity is vital for our democracy. The consequences of this court decision may very well impact all internet users, not just the people who say things we don’t like.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/court-order-to-expose-anonymous-tweeter-threatens-all-our-democratic-freedoms-and-safety-20220608-p5as3g.html

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Australian universities have held their position in world rankings through the pandemic with seven institutions in the latest global top 100 list released by higher ­education analyst firm QS

At 30th, the Australian Nat­ional University retains its position as the best ranked local institution in the 2023 QS World University Rankings, down three places from 27th last year.

Second is the University of Melbourne at 33rd, followed by the University of Sydney at 41st.

Also in the top 100 are UNSW (45th), the ­University of Queensland (50th), Monash University (57th) and the University of Western Australia (90th).

Among other Australian universities, La Trobe stood out, rising 46 places to 316th in the latest ranking list. QS said the improvement was mainly due to a rise in the number of citations per ­research paper published by La Trobe academics.

La Trobe has also increased its output of research papers, up by 37 per cent since 2016, nearly three times higher than the 13 per cent average growth in research output over that period.

QS senior vice-president Ben Sowter said although Australian universities had suffered from international isolation during the pandemic, their rankings had stagnated rather than declined.

“There are as many universities rising as falling,” he said. “Australia continues to shine for research excellence, but its recognition among the global academic community and employers has taken a hit, connected with the reduced international engagement during the pandemic.”

Mr Sowter said if the number of international students in Australia took a long time to recover, it would “jeopardise the intellectual diversity and exchange that are causing Australia’s institutions to thrive”.

Because of two years of closed borders during the pandemic, Australian universities also went backwards in the reputation surveys that account for half of the QS ranking. Of the 38 ranked Australian universities, 37 declined in the academic reputation survey of more than 150,000 ­academics globally, which makes up 40 per cent of the QS ranking.

And all 38 ranked universities declined in the employer reputation survey (which samples nearly 100,000 employers ­globally), which makes up 10 per cent of the ranking.

However, Australian universities did well on the research measure, which counts the number of research citations per academic, and makes up 20 per cent of the ranking score. Thirteen Australian universities are in the world’s top 100 on the research measure.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/seven-australian-universities-are-in-qs-world-rankings-top-100/news-story/5e36dd99035a6dcc74ce701026c2b277

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Why men kill themselves

Bettina Arndt

Over twenty years ago, federal member of parliament Greg Wilton took his own life. The tragedy was the culmination of a series of events which highlight how poorly we deal with vulnerable men. Three weeks earlier, Wilton had been found “in a distressed state” with his children in a car in the national park, apparently rigging a hose to the exhaust. It was widely reported as an attempted murder-suicide.

He spent time in psychiatric care, but with his Labor colleagues maneuvering to force him out of parliament and relentless hounding from the press, it wasn’t long before he tried again. This time he succeeded. On June 14, 2000, the 44-year was found dead in his car, with the exhaust hose attached.

A few years earlier Wilton had given a speech to parliament pointing out that group most likely to commit suicide in this country were men like him – adult males struggling with marital separation. He mentioned extensive research that had emerged over previous years showing “men kill themselves due to an inability to cope with life events such as relationship breakups of the kind I myself have suffered.”

In the two decades since then, that research has piled up. The case is now overwhelming that men facing relationship breakdown should be a key target of Australia’s suicide prevention policies.

There’s no way our health bureaucrats are going to let that happen. The March 2022 budget allocated $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to “improve long term health outcomes” for men and boys. Isn’t that extraordinary? Somehow females are seen as deserving of 2000 times more investment in their health than men, despite their more robust health resulting in four extra years of life expectancy.

What a tribute to the mighty efforts of our feminist health bureaucracy which for decades has strenuously ignored the enormous elephant sitting in their room - namely, the ever-increasing male suicide rate wiping out so many younger adult males.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 25-44. Male vulnerability is at the heart of the problem. Look at these statistics:

· Men account for 3 in 4 of the lives lost to suicide.

· 7 of the 9 people who kill themselves every day are male.

· There have always been more male than female suicides.

· Over the past ten years males have become even more at risk.

· The male suicide rate is twice the annual road toll.

Men wiping themselves out is a hugely important health issue – yet there’s a very good reason why our politicians and feminist bureaucrats don’t want to go there. As Greg Wilton pointed out, the evidence is piling up that a key reason many of these young men are at risk is they are casualties of family breakup.

The consequent minefield that hits these men, who are frequently fathers, often proves unbearable. Most face some combination of stressful legal battles, false accusations, crippling child support payments; financial ruin and most importantly, the loss of their children.

Marty Grant could have been one such casualty. He had it all planned. The tough young farmer from the West Australian wheat belt had the wire around his neck.

The other end was tied to a tree and the car ready to surge into motion. But he stopped himself. “I realized I couldn’t do it to my family and friends.” Marty pulled back, drove himself home, packed a bag and set off to seek help from the local nurse.

I wrote about Marty many years ago in an article on bush suicide for the Australian Women’s Weekly, covering all the stresses these farmers were going through, including crippling drought, dropping commodity prices, succession problems. But it took some doing to persuade the magazine editors to let me tackle the major suicide research issue emerging at that time – family breakdown. It was the loss of his loved ones which pushed Marty over the edge. His partner took off because she didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife, and then the son from a previous relationship – a child Marty had cared for a decade as a single parent - went off to live with his mum. Marty’s family disappeared.

This was the type of story highlighted in research published around that time by the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University which found relationship breakdown to be the main trigger for suicide, with male risk four times that of females.

According to the researchers Drs Chris Cantor and Pierre Baume, men are most vulnerable in the period immediately after separation – with separation from children a major source of their despair.

That’s a red flag, crying out for suicide prevention intervention. Just think what usually happens when we discover one of these trigger points. Like mothers at risk of suicide due to post-partum depression. When that first made the news, support groups got to work, government funding started pouring in, and now prevention programs are everywhere.

Currently the federal government is targeting anorexic girls. Wham, the latest suicide funding promised $20 million for eating disorder treatment services. Then there’s indigenous suicide. Righty-o. They’ve come up with $79 million in the budget for that one.

Yet for the last two decades there has been absolutely no government funding to follow up Cantor and Baume’s work on vulnerable divorcing men, even though recent Griffith University research still shows relationship difficulties to be the major triggering life event, accounting for 42.5 % of suicides. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data lists relationship disruptions/problems as the key suicide psychological risk factors after self-harm, which is more a symptom of distress than a trigger.

But this key issue never features in the public narrative. Instead, we are presented with carefully constructed red herrings. Remember the lavish 2016 ABC television program, Man Up, which spent three episodes claiming we need to teach suicidal men to show their feelings. Hours of television about men having to learn to cry, but not a word about what they were crying about.

Then they announced a mental health expert, Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, and followed up with $5.6 million from mental health funding to encourage men to seek help. Don’t they love this new diversion, focussing on encouraging men to rid themselves of their toxic masculinity and show their softer side?

But the fact is that even though many suicidal men have mental health problems, our authorities are strenuously ignoring the key event which might push them over the edge. Data from the Queensland Suicide register shows that 42% of men who die by suicide have a mental health diagnosis but 98% have experienced a recent life event, such as relationship breakdown.

Given the ongoing male suicide crisis, it is an absolute scandal that our suicide policies are still proudly “gender neutral” with up to 4 of 5 beneficiaries female, according to analysis by the Australian Men’s Health Forum. Read the case AMHF makes for a male suicide prevention strategy here.

Yet finally there are tiny green shoots appearing midst the ongoing gloom. In January this year Suicide Prevention Australia, the peak body for suicide prevention organisations, announced that “it’s time to talk about male suicide prevention.”

“Of the 3,000 lives tragically lost to suicide each year, over 75% are men. They are our husbands and fathers, our brothers and uncles, our colleagues and friends”, wrote CEO Nieves Murray, announcing they were pushing for an “ambitious male suicide prevention strategy,” guided by “the evidence” and “addressing underlying issues that might lead men to the point of crisis,” and actually mentioning support for men in family courts.

The Morrison government announced last November that some suicide prevention funding would be targeted at risk groups including men but didn’t manage to get this up before the election. No doubt the health bureaucrats have no interest in rushing this one through and it’s hard to imagine this happening if a Labor/Green government gets into power.

Look what happened after Pauline Hanson had the guts to speak out about false allegations and bias against men when appointed Deputy Chair of the recent parliamentary inquiry into family law. She was ripped apart in the media and her Labor/Green committee members stymied any hope of addressing these issues, despite hundreds of submissions documenting how men are being done over.

Tackling male suicide means highlighting the way the family law system is now weaponised against men. This will attract huge resistance from the feminist mob controlling our media, so adept at cowering politicians into inaction. But too many people now know and care about what’s driving so many men to take their lives.

The time is right for a mighty campaign to galvanise public opinion and demand real change

https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/jMua25/post/bettina-arndt/why-men-kill-themselves/bvZtjy

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The power struggle: inconvenient truth proves renewables can’t cut it

Australia’s low-emissions energy journey is locked in a struggle ­between engineering and hope.

The nation has lost its way on energy because it has failed to think long term, excluded emerging technologies from the discussion, and refused to learn the lessons of failure from elsewhere.

Debate this week about how a capacity market should work to keep the lights on and industry in business underscores the point.

Too many people with too little understanding have turned a problem of physics and engineering into one of politics and economics. The breakdown in electricity supply is as serious as it has been predictable. Engineers know that grinding the coal sector into the ground won’t make renewables produce electricity when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Leaving gas in the ground, as NSW and Victoria have done, won’t power a back-up supply. Stealing back supplies of gas from companies that have contracted to sell it elsewhere will compound the problems.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has fired back at the Coalition over their push for Labor to…
Governments generally don’t last long enough to reap the product of the chaos they sow. But new governments should learn the mistakes of others.

Contrary to popular opinion, Germany’s transition away from nuclear power has not been fuelled by wind and solar. It has been powered by greater use of brown coal and a dependence on Russian Gas. Power shortages in South Australia, California, Texas, UK and Europe all share a common feature, a naive hope that renewable energy will do the job it is not equipped to do.

Politicians have been cowered into supporting solutions they don’t understand. No serious thinker believes it’s economically sensible to firm up a national grid with batteries but a whole industry is willing to take government money to give it a try.

It might well be an expensive fix for individual households, but not industry. Spending billions to extend the national grid is based on the premise that the wind will always be blowing somewhere. The reality is this is not necessarily the case.

Hydrogen is a promising technology but experts who have worked in the field maintain it is a dangerous substance, difficult to contain and invisible when it burns. From an environmental perspective, the vast amount of materials and area of land needed to attempt what is being proposed using wind, solar, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen and transmission lines does not meet the cost/benefit test. A bigger concern is electricity is only a small part of the challenge ahead. Bigger and more important for industry is process heat, something that wind and solar can never deliver.

Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery belled the cat this week that the energy crisis was caused by chaotic market planning that had swamped the country with renewables that in turn made coal uncompetitive.

“We’re committing economic suicide if we rush and try to do it too quickly when we haven’t got the alternative supplies in place,” he told a Melbourne conference.

To illustrate the point, he said renewable energy plants in South Australia last Wednesday at 6.15pm were producing one megawatt of electricity, a tiny fraction of capacity. There was no wind in Victoria either.

“So it wouldn’t have mattered if you doubled the capacity of the transmission, and it wouldn’t have mattered if you quadrupled the capacity of intermittent generation. Without coal and gas, the lights would have gone out in South Australia, that is a fact,” he said.

Watching on, as the nation’s energy thinkers look for Band-Aid solutions to potentially fatal conditions in the energy market is the former head of Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Adi Paterson, who has also commercialised pioneering research on lithium ion batteries and participated hydrogen policy work in South Africa.

Paterson says the nation is locked in a false struggle. “This ­debate has become about economics and the universal law of economics is that it does not trump physics,” he says.

“We have the burden of ­explaining more clearly to people what the real energy choices look like. Carbon-free process heat is a much bigger problem than electricity. And the fundamental problem is, if we are going to electrify everything, we are going to need reliable, predictable, ‘always-on’ electricity for a rational society to function.

“With the energy cost issues, people are starting to see that when you take the baseload out the costs go up.”

He said it was important to have an intergenerational view of the problem: “We do not have to do it all in 10 years. In the next century, I believe, if we just take off the false time problem, we will be looking for the highest density of energy we can get, and at the top of that pile is nuclear fusion.”

There are critics who can point to decades of promises but the world is looking to new-generation nuclear reactors and fusion to solve the problem of low-emissions electrification to run a developed industrial economy.

In the domain of nuclear fission, the first small-scale modular nuclear reactor by a US firm NuScale is under construction and will be completed this decade.

The US National Academies road map has set a time line to build nuclear fusion reactors from 2035. Australian company HB11 Energy, of which Paterson is a ­director, is leading the world in ­exploring nuclear fusion using a new generation of high-energy ­lasers. The technology won a Nobel prize for the inventors and can bring decades of theory into reality.

HB11 Energy is looking at the 2040s to have a plant operating based on the principles of inertial fusion using lasers.

Despite this, nuclear fission and fusion technology are not part of Australia’s official energy discussion. Jim Chalmers, says he has ruled out nuclear energy because “the economics don’t stack up”.

The Treasurer said he had never been a supporter of nuclear power and would maintain his opposition to it, which was “economic not ideological”.

Paterson says this view misunderstands the problem.

“There is a tendency to oversimplify,” he says. “I think the fundamental problem of wind and solar is it is highly accessible to the domestic consumer but most of what is useful in our society we don’t really understand. You can win an argument by saying solar, wind and batteries because people understand it.

“I think we need to have this discussion about fission and fusion as a low-cost source of electrons because it gives us predictability and optionality.

“It will give us a stab at solving the energy problem not just the electricity problem. The question for wind, solar and batteries is ‘Where is the process heat?’

“If we solve the issue of nuclear fusion plants – because they will also provide process heat for ­industry – they will be the anchor tenant of most modern economies from about 2060.”

This line might not suit the catastrophisation narrative of a climate emergency. But at least it might just work.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/in-the-dark-on-the-power-struggle-inconvenient-truth-proves-renewables-cant-cut-it/news-story/c27c87f70c854bc5cf5a7e867c3b01f6

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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‘I rent because I choose to have my money working harder in other places’

Wow! How poorly advised can you get? See below. The only way of making enough money to have an independent income is usually via real estate. I too come from a humble background but real estate allowed me to retire at age 39

When personal trainer Brando Hasick catches up with friends, he is often the one who brings up the subject of money.

“I can’t help it. I like surrounding myself with people who are doing interesting things with their money,” he says.

“When we’re out for dinner, I find it fascinating to hear their approach to making it work for them. It’s how I learn,” he says.

The 29-year-old Sydneysider’s ultimate dream is to establish a passive income stream – maybe shares that pay good dividends – that will set him up financially for life. He hopes it would enable him to retire early. “It would be nice to think that working is a choice,” he says.

Brando has a savings account, a transaction account and another as a means for stashing some cash away to pay any additional tax requirements. He admits to being a diligent saver.

He rents an apartment that he shares with partner Aisha and their baby Rupert. It provides him with greater liquidity to make a move – if he sees a good investment opportunity.

‘We always had what we needed, but there wasn’t much left over.’

“I rent because I choose to have my money working harder in other places”, he says

Brando has always been determined to be financially independent, even paying mentors to teach him the tricks of business. One charged $6000 to impart their knowledge, but he didn’t flinch. “I saw it as an investment in my future,” he says.

However, learning financial lessons has come at a cost: He lost more than $75,000 in a failed business attempt. “That experience definitely made me systemise things better, which has probably been a silver lining for me,” he says.

‘Being careful with money was drilled into me’

Brando grew up in a working-class family in Sydney’s western suburbs, which spurred him on to work hard and seek out financial independence. “We always had what we needed, but there wasn’t much left over,” he says.

By his teens, he was working in a fast-food restaurant and managed to save up to 50 per cent of his pay while trying to figure out what to do with it long term. This meant that when he was offered the chance to live in the UK for six months as part of his tertiary education, he was able to jump at the opportunity, using $30,000 in savings to cover living expenses.

When he returned to Australia, he moved into an apartment with a friend. He worked as a personal trainer, launching a side hustle in his backyard a year later.

Brando has been an investor in cryptocurrency for a few years, and also bought shares. Ultimately, he would like to help his parents financially. “They’ve always been there for me, and I’d like to be able to be there for them,” he says.

https://www.smh.com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/i-rent-because-i-choose-to-have-my-money-working-harder-in-other-places-20220607-p5arn5.html

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Submarine realism at last

Defence was working on a plan before the election to purchase two Virginia-class nuclear-­powered submarines from the US by 2030 – at least a decade before their scheduled arrival if they were built in Australia.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who was defence minister three weeks ago, says he came to the view that the American submarine was the best option for Australia, and believes the US government would sell Australia the boats off its Connecticut production line.

The disclosure is the first ­concrete insight into the work of Defence’s high-level nuclear submarine taskforce, led by navy Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead.

It’s understood preliminary discussions on the option were held with the US government, which would also have to supply submariners to serve on the vessels to train Australian personnel.

The plan would, if successful, eliminate a feared capability gap following the retirement of the Collins-class submarines from 2038. Writing in the The Australian, Mr Dutton says the option is “laid out” for new Defence Minister Richard Marles, and makes an interim “Son of Collins” submarine “unfeasible”.

If it went ahead with the option, the Coalition would have pledged to build a further eight boats in Adelaide, as originally envisaged, lifting the planned acquisition to a total of 10 nuclear-powered submarines.

Mr Dutton, who hinted before the election of a plan to fast-track the nuclear-powered submarine program, says it “became obvious” to him that Australia should opt for the US Virginia-class boats under the trilateral AUKUS partnership with the US and UK.

The prospect of securing two Virginias within the next eight years was key to Mr Dutton’s preference for the US design.

“I believed it possible to negotiate with the Americans to ­acquire, say, the first two submarines off the production line out of Connecticut,” he writes.

“This wouldn’t mean waiting until 2038 for the first submarine to be built here in Australia. We would have our first two subs this decade. I had formed a judgment the Americans would have facilitated exactly that.”

Mr Dutton says the Albanese government should “continue to encourage the Americans to base some of their Virginia class subs here in our waters”.

“Again, I believe this is achievable and should be pursued vigorously,” he says.

Unlike Britain’s Astute-class submarine, the Virginia has vertical missile-launch tubes, and is a “mature design”, with 22 completed and another 44 on order.

As production of the Astute is due to end in the UK after seven submarines, Mr Dutton says ­selecting a British boat would mean signing on to a “first-in-class design”, with inevitable time and cost blowouts.

Mr Dutton says Australia could purchase more Hunter-class frigates or other British made hardware to “honour and respect” the UK’s role in the AUKUS partnership.

Mr Marles told The Australian this week that plugging the anticipated submarine capability gap was his most urgent priority. He said he was “completely open-minded” about the potential options, declaring it was too early to be drawn on whether an interim “Son of Collins” or some other capability could plug the gap.

Mr Dutton says more Collins boats would be “easily detectable and inoperable” by the time they get in the water, and “Australia doesn’t have the construction workforce, let alone the crew capability to run three classes of submarines”.

“I am speaking out on this topic because Labor is on the cusp of making a very dangerous decision which would clearly be against our national security interests,” Mr Dutton writes.

Vice-Admiral Mead’s taskforce is midway through its 18-month study to determine how Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

The process, due for completion in about March next year, will identify a preferred design, develop plans for building and crewing the submarines, and examine the regulatory and infrastructure requirements for basing nuclear submarines in Australia.

Mr Dutton told the ABC’s Insiders program in March that the anticipated 2040 timeline for the arrival of the first nuclear submarine could be brought forward, with details on design and construction to be announced “within a couple of months”. He later told Sky News he believed the first subs could be acquired “much sooner” than expected, avoiding the need for an interim conventionally powered boat.

Mr Marles told Nine Newspapers this week that the projected submarine delivery schedule under the Coalition was “more likely to be in the mid-2040s”.

Mr Dutton says Australia needs nuclear-powered because “diesel-electric submarines would not be able to compete against the Chinese in the South China Sea beyond 2035”. His successor said the Albanese government was “completely committed to doing what is required” to deliver eight nuclear submarines, including providing the necessary funding.

“We have got to make this work,” Mr Marles told The Australian.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute says building eight nuclear boats in Australia could cost $117bn to $171bn, with extra regulatory and infrastructure costs potentially adding tens of billions of dollars to the bill.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/defence/peter-duttons-secret-planto-fast-track-nuclear-submarines/news-story/1c5dde51594d2fb6210128c97c7ee02e

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The dismal history of bushfire prevention

We once knew how

Three consecutive extreme summers accompanied the Settlement Drought of 1790-93. Masses of flying foxes and lorikeets dropped dead in Parramatta during three days of blistering northwesterly gales with temperatures above 43 degrees Celsius. Aboriginal fires were burning 24/7 but there were no fire disasters.

Our first megafire, around 1820, established the Great Scrub of South Gippsland after Aboriginal burning was disrupted by a 1789 smallpox epidemic. Following European occupation, five million hectares of Victoria exploded in the Black Thursday disaster of 1851. The Strzelecki Ranges were incinerated again on Red Tuesday 1898.

When the Highlands were set alight in extreme weather on Black Friday 1939. Fourteen large fires in East Gippsland did little damage because the land was managed by grazing and burning. In 1961, four towns in Western Australia were destroyed by the Dwellingup fires. Foresters woke up, reintroduced broad area burning, and developed aerial ignition techniques. Bega was saved from disaster in the horrendous 1968 fires by prior aerial burning in what is now wilderness to the northwest.

In the 1970s, ecologists had a dream that species that thrived through about 40,000 years of Aboriginal burning would be wiped out by mild fires. Prescribed burning was reduced and the Hume-Snowy Bushfire Prevention Scheme was disbanded.

In 2003, lightning strikes started many fires in and around Kosciuszko National Park. Fires in managed areas outside the park were all rounded up within three days. Fires in the park went on to destroy nearly 500 homes in Canberra and claim four human lives.

The parliamentary inquiry into A Nation Charred took evidence from land managers and:

‘Heard a consistent message right around Australia:- there has been grossly inadequate hazard reduction burning on public lands for far too long; local knowledge and experience is being ignored by an increasingly top heavy bureaucracy.’

A dissenting report relied heavily on information from Professor Robert Whelan of Wollongong University who claimed that ‘broad scale hazard reduction is threatening biodiversity conservation and must therefore be avoided by land managers and resisted at a political level’.

South-eastern bureaucracies boycotted the Nairn Inquiry and set up a Council of Australian Governments Inquiry under an emergency manager, Professor Whelan, and another professor. They gave us ‘learning to live with bushfires’ – education, emergency response, and evacuation instead of sustainable fire management.

Since COAG 2004, more than 200 people have been killed in bushfires.

Whelan set up a bushfire ‘research’ industry at Wollongong University which eventually became the core of NSW Bushfire Research Hub. The academics made models supposedly showing that prescribed burning doesn’t work in the southeast because it’s biogeographically different from the southwest, where 60 years of real data have proved its effectiveness. They said that, in any case, prior burning has no effect under extreme conditions.

The long-term operational data from Western Australia show that burning is ineffective unless a minimum of around 9 per cent of the landscape is treated each year. The effects last up to six years. So prescribed burning is effective when at least half the landscape is being maintained. In the southeast, the figure has been around 1 per cent per annum. The real data also show that the positive effects of maintenance apply particularly in severe seasons, by preventing the development of unstoppable firestorms.

Authorities in the southeast use models to target the miniscule amount of prescribed burning around the edges of suburbia. They are, in effect, creating supposed firebreaks. The scientific and historical evidence is crystal clear that firebreaks, fire engines, and waterbombers can’t stop firestorms coming from unmanaged land. The world record Gospers Mountain fire of half a million hectares started from one lightning strike in the Wollemi Wilderness.

After Black Summer, NSW’s Bushfire Inquiry took advice from the Bushfire Research Hub. I will not attend the International Fire & Climate Conference set to be held on 7-9th June 2022, but I think one of the highlights must surely be this presentation by Professor Ross Bradstock, the Founder and, until recently, Director of the Research Hub: The role of science in the bushfire-inquiry cycle: a case study from the 2019/20 fire season.

It will be impossible for attendees to miss the Keynote Address by Mr. Greg Mullins, Climate Councillor and Founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action: Climate and fire – learnings from the political interface.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/the-incredible-international-fire-climate-conference

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Lockdown disasters: We told you so

Not for the first time – and certainly not for the last, we can assure you – The Spectator Australia has been shown to have been prescient and astute in its analysis when all around us were heading in the opposite direction. That the knowledge that we belled the cat early on and against the orthodoxy comes with a degree of satisfaction is self-evident, but it also comes tinged with genuine unease. Why on earth does what appears to be common sense to so many of our writers and readers fly in the face of the accepted media and political dogma of the day?

In this instance, and it is by no means a solitary example, we now learn from a variety of respected and reputable sources that the draconian lockdowns we repeatedly railed against in these pages may have done more harm than good – quelle surprise! – including untold medical damage out of all proportion to their claimed successes. Worse, lockdowns may even have led to the deaths of thousands of young people who were never at risk from the virus in the first place. Indeed, one US study reports 170,000 surplus deaths amongst people in the prime of their lives (18-44) who were of low risk from Covid.

This disgraceful news was conveyed to an astonished world via the Australian newspaper this week along with numerous other sources.

Yet twelve months ago Dr David Adler, in his column in these pages entitled ‘Lockdown needs a slapdown’, was predicting this very outcome.

For the first time I deeply fear for the future of my country. This fear arises not from existential threats and challenges but because Australia is being trashed by incompetent control freak leadership which has also succeeded in severely scaring much of our citizenship. Panic rules the day.

Melbourne with over six months cumulative lockdown already holds the world record for the most locked down city and we’ve seen other cities locked down for a handful of community cases. Our state premiers are the world’s most reactionary in imposing panic lockdowns. The PM has signalled this is to continue.

There has been a complete loss of proportionality with Australian lockdowns doing much more harm than good and based on international data and experience, we now have impossible policy settings to sustain if we want life to return to normality. Our situation could now be described in the Eagles classic hit ‘Hotel California’, ‘you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave’.

The damage being done by lockdowns in smashing small businesses, disruption of education for kids, mental health problems including rise in self-harm and suicides, deferred routine health services resulting in delayed diagnoses of cancer and other illnesses – far exceed the harm caused by the virus. Australia may experience a wave of additional morbidity and mortality in the next few years due to cancers not being detected in 2020 and 2021 at Stage 1, but once they have spread to Stage 3 or 4. This could well affect thousands of patients.

Pursuing the lockdown and zero-case policy will do untold economic, health and lifestyle damage to Australians.

That is just part of Dr Adler’s article from a year ago. Several other Speccie writers, but most notably Rebecca Weisser and Ramesh Thakur, have throughout the two years of the pandemic, often on a weekly basis, provided insights, analysis, facts and warnings regarded as heresy by the left wokerati. Indeed, both have must-read articles in this week’s magazine, including a terrific – and terrifying – piece on excess mortality and the vaccines by Ms Weisser.

As the editor of The Spectator Australia, my commitment to you is that we will never flinch in providing you with well-researched and informed opinion that quite often upsets those in positions of power and flies in the face of the politically correct dictates of the day. And yes, there is a word for that, too. It’s called journalism.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/das-spectatorfuhlung

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Poor to suffer as the climate wars bite

As Woke South Australian politicians last week declared a ‘climate emergency’, the reality of Australia’s ill-thought-out climate policy is biting families and businesses.

Regulators are warning of a shortage of gas and the possibility of electricity blackouts for no other reason than bad politics.

The Australian reports:

‘Regulators have warned Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania face potential gas shortages while power supplies in NSW and Queensland will be stretched over the next 24 hours, as (Treasurer) Jim Chalmers declared the economy confronted a “perfect storm’’ of energy price spikes.’

Our nation is blessed with some of the world’s most abundant reserves of energy, yet some people may not be able to heat their homes this winter and all of us are paying through the nose.

How did it come to this?

The answer lies in the shutting down of discussion on climate policy. This censorship has been as ruthless and premature as the shutting of coal-fired power stations which have not been replaced with a suitable or stable generating capacity.

Regardless of where one sits in the debate about the impact of small quantities of human-generated CO2 joining the vast array of naturally occurring CO2 in the atmosphere, it is an incontrovertible fact that our energy policies are driving prices through the roof and reliability through the floor.

Meanwhile, China keeps opening new coal-fired power stations, emitting more CO2 every 16 days than Australia’s entire annual contribution.

This will not stop any time soon.

Even our chief scientist said Australia’s contribution could not influence the temperature of the planet, yet politicians are happy for some pensioners to freeze this winter because they can’t afford their rising utility bills.

For sure, the war in Ukraine is having an impact on global prices, but that is driving the United Kingdom and Europe back to cheaper and more reliable fossil fuels while Australia jettisons reliable energy sources without a viable replacement plan.

The LNP’s Matt Canavan was not wrong to observe that Net Zero, as a policy aim in Europe, is dead.

Reality bites.

The UK is re-thinking plans to close coal mines because windmills and solar panels can’t do the job.

At this crucial moment for energy security, Australians from rich suburbs (who are largely insulated from rising electricity and gas prices) have populated our Parliament with un-costed demands to close fossil fuel generating capacity.

There is no consideration of, or debate about, the consequences.

What happens if there’s not enough power after the premature closures? They don’t know. Mumbling something about ‘battery storage’ isn’t going to cut it when the lights go out.

Even the new Nationals leader, David Littleproud, is turning Teal as out-going leader Barnaby Joyce now admits that Net Zero is not a realistic objective.

He wrote on Facebook this week:

‘Climate policy affects how much is in your wallet and this is becoming more and more evident each day. The question is, are you willing to pay the price for the policy?

When you pay for your power, you are paying for a 2050 target, when you pay for your petrol, you are paying for a 2050 target, when you buy groceries, you are paying for a 2050 target. Some people cannot afford the extra cost of a 2050 target and a 2030 target will massively exacerbate this. These people must be heard.

The nation cannot shut down its major exports, such as coal, gas, live cattle and sheep, losing hundreds of billions of export dollars and associated taxes, but still expect to have the same money for health, education, the NDIS, roads, communication, the arts and defence.’

It’s a shame he wasn’t writing this on Facebook when he was cajoling the Nationals Party room to get on board with Net Zero before then Prime Minister jetted off to the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow last year.

Discussions of ‘green’ policy consequences have not formed part of the election discourse. Politicians sadly kowtow to politically correct and Woke orthodoxy rather than telling us the truth – afraid it would lose them the votes of young apocalyptic ideologues.

But these energy shortages and price hikes are our moment of truth in what was a completely avoidable crisis.

We all want to help the environment, but we need a truthful debate about the costs versus the benefits.

To get that, we must put principled and courageous people in our parliaments.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/poor-to-suffer-as-the-climate-wars-bite/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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The sentimental narrative of Aboriginality

Usually far divorced from reality

In last Saturday’s Weekend Australian, Professor Peter Sutton, an internationally recognised anthropologist and linguist, wrote ‘Indigenous identity has become such an attractive option that false claims to it now abound’. If you are not familiar with the considerable body of his work, look him up and then ask yourself why Bruce Pascoe needs no introduction while you weren’t aware of the achievements of Peter Sutton.

Also in the Australian that weekend was an article by Jacinta Price in which she claimed, ‘…the genuine voices of indigenous suffering are being drowned out by the virtue-signalling calls for a “voice” and “recognition”’. What characterises the comments of both Sutton and Price is the impeccable credentials they bring to a debate which is going to dominate the political arena for the life of the new parliament.

Unfortunately their arguments are probably going to be lost in the torrent of comments from the wokerati and their fellow travellers which are going to inundate us in the months ahead. Take this bit of grovelling Greenspeak which is from the Greens’ policy statement which says we must ‘recognise,learn from and seek consent for first nations peoples spiritual, cultural and physical relationship …environment, and their rights and obligations’. I suppose it means something to the Greens.

On a more practical level is Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, the aim of which is to establish ‘parity with and for Indigenous Australians within one generation’. Given that the considerable efforts from both the private and public sectors over the past half-century have not had much success, we wish the Minderoo project well. The CEO of the team charged with achieving this goal is Ms Shelley Cable, a young woman who describes herself as ‘a Wilman-Nyoongar woman from Perth’ and therein lies a problem. The numerous photographs of Ms Cable on the Minderoo Foundation website show her to be a well-groomed, attractive person, of what appears to be Caucasian heritage.



I do not, for one moment, wish to imply that Ms Cable does not have a strong connection to ‘Wilman-Noongar’ culture. Nor do I wish to argue that her belief in that connection is not genuine. What I find troublesome is the fact that she is content to describe herself in a way which, to someone who knows nothing about her, would seem to ignore a major part of her genetic inheritance. She is of course not alone in making such a claim. The vast majority of the people of indigenous background who rise to positions of prominence, and are of mixed race descent, never acknowledge the complexity of their ethnic origins. The females, in particular, are always ‘proud Yolngu’ or ‘proud Wiradjuri’ women when clearly, a substantial part of their ancestry must have been the terrible racist white people who stole the land and then went on to steal the children.

It is worth considering why so many ‘indigenous’ public figures choose to avoid an honest discussion of their genetic heritage. In this they stand in contrast to politicians who are keen to spruik the complexities of their heritage. Your average pollie will be proud to emphasise that he or she has a multicultural background but will always identify as an Australian first and foremost. The indigenous community leaders and especially those who frequent the corridors of self-delusion in the ABC Ultimo Centre, almost never identify as Australian. Instead they identify as part of the oppressed minority who are the descendants of people who suffered dispossession and two centuries of discrimination.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores the complexity of the history black white relations in this country. Of course over the past two centuries there was considerable cruelty and injustice. But there were also examples of genuine attempts to work together to develop outback Australia and there were and are hundreds of thousands of children being born from interracial relationships.

Yes, we must recognise that not all the relationships were based on equality of the partners and, in the past, white men frequently used their economic power to obtain sexual favours from Aboriginal women. But the days when, as Stanner so bluntly put it, ‘any woman could be bought for a fingernail of (tobacco) or a spoonful of (tea)’ are long gone. Also gone is the shame of being the product of such relationships. But every day we see intelligent articulate mixed race women appearing on television telling us how proud they are of their indigenous heritage while glossing over the unmistakeable fact that a substantial part of their genetic and cultural heritage is European.

The current emphasis on a ‘truth telling’ emerged from the ‘statement from the heart’ produced five years ago to provide “a Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution providing a practical path forward to…address the issues that governments alone have been unable to solve”. An essential component of this will be “a truth telling about our history” but many of the Yorta Yorta, Djabwurrung, Gunnai Gunditjamara et al., women are simply not telling the truth about their own ancestors. The much-vaunted ‘truth telling’ focuses on a selective view of the past. It isn’t so concerned with truth telling about the present or about the vast discrepancy between the lives of the ABC/Canberra ‘first nations’ mob and the people they claim to represent who live in remote outback settlements. Furthermore, with the full backing of the Labor Party, our new Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Linda Burney, will ensure that, very shortly, we shall be inundated with the sort of feel good statements designed to bring forward a referendum on constitutional amendment. There is going to be a torrent of ‘truth telling’ from privileged middle-class indigenous women who will tell us all about the hardships they faced at school and how difficult it was to get access to free university education.

My own guess is that the majority of Australians have little sympathy with the ideas contained in the Voice Treaty Truth rhetoric. Warren Mundine has said ‘The Uluru Statement made two proposals. One is a “top-down” lawyers’ approach that will certainly fail. The other is a grass roots proposal with overwhelming indigenous support that could be implemented without the need for any referendum. I’m calling time on ten years of discussion on constitutional recognition. We don’t need it’. Unfortunately Mr Mundine’s position of honest pragmatism is probably going to be crushed by the woke steamroller.

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False promises of cost-of-living relief from renewable energy

How’s your first polar blast of winter going? So much for global warming. It’s enough to freeze the testicles off a brass monkey.

Even in Queensland, where winter is usually like a Pommy summer, the heaters and air conditioners are in overdrive as people seek refuge inside from the icy weather. And to make matters worse, we’re in the grip of a massive surge in power and gas prices. Some businesses have seen their gas costs quadruple in the past few months.

Experts blame the big rises on a global shortage of coal and gas. The Australian Energy Market Operator says wholesale prices are up 141 per cent in the past 12 months.

So much for promises of cost-of-living relief by our political leaders.

The fact is – when it comes to renewable energy driving down the cost of electricity – we’re being sold a pup.

For 15 years, we’ve heard mostly Labor and Greens MPs talking up the transition to renewables and how it will drive down power prices. I call bulldust. Power prices have escalated while we’re chasing renewable pipedreams.

Any politician who bobs up with an argument that our transition to net zero by 2050 will reduce electricity prices is talking rubbish.

Remember Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talking about helping with cost-of-living pressures during the election campaign? The politicians, frankly, are full of excrement on cost-of-living relief. There’s more chance of me playing five-eighth for the Blues on Wednesday than pollies driving down cost-of-living pressures.

The Milky Bar Kid, former PM Kevin Rudd, is the zero renewables muppet-in-chief.

When his predecessor, Liberal PM John Howard, brought in a renewable energy target in 2001, it was set at a tokenistic 2 per cent. When Rudd took office in December 2007, things changed.

By 2010, the Labor-Green Alliance had enshrined a 45,000GWh renewable target set for 2020 – 41,000 of which sat under the Large-Scale RET, and the balance under the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES). Had the 41,000 GWh LRET remained in place, it would have amounted to around 30 per cent of Australia’s electricity market in 2020.

“The message for coal, long-term globally, is down and out,” Rudd told Sky News in 2017. We need “a heavy mix of renewables”, which was why he was proud the government had introduced the renewable energy target.

Rudd upped the target by more than 450 per cent in an uncosted promise before the 2007 election. It was crazy, as the Productivity Commission politely tried to tell him in a 2008 submission. The target would not increase abatement but would impose extra costs and lead to higher prices.

It would favour wind and solar while holding back new ideas. Rudd, of course, knew better. Not for the last time, he ignored the Productivity Commission and pushed ahead with his renewable target of 45,000GWh by 2020, of which 41,000GWh would come from wind and solar.

If the policy was designed to punish Australian consumers, it was a roaring success. Household electricity bills increased by 92 per cent under the Rudd-Gillard governments, six times the level of inflation. Rudd went further, and further. He is close to Albanese.

The winter chills around power prices have only just begun.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/peter-gleeson/opinion-so-much-for-promises-of-costofliving-relief/news-story/6e66c215a091a0bea8de6f8d7dc3f2ff

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Corrupt Victoria hurting the innocent

Where I live, in Kooyong, many voters have sent a message that they care deeply about issues of integrity. Rightly or wrongly, this was perceived to be a weak point for the Morrison government.

With upcoming state elections, we’ll soon be able to test if the Teals were genuine in their concerns, or whether they were simply a plausible excuse to give high-profile Liberal men a metaphorical kicking.

The Teals did particularly well in Victoria, knocking off both the Treasurer in Kooyong and Tim Wilson in Goldstein. Good luck to them. I, for one, hope integrity features just as strongly at the Victorian state election this November as it did at the federal election.

When the Victorian state Liberals were last in power, we established the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, which has done outstanding work ever since.

It has shone a light on the appalling behaviour that has clearly become normalised within the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. The Premier himself has been hauled before IBAC at least twice.

In all, six Labor Cabinet Ministers have lost their jobs in this term of Parliament alone, most notably, Adem Somyurek. Somyurek says Labor ‘stole’ the 2014 election after misappropriating public funds through the Red Shirts scheme.

Sometimes, issues of corruption generate significant interest inside the beltway, yet fail to cut through with voters. But Victorian Labor’s malfeasance, unlike that of the Federal Coalition, is so bad that it might make it into the election discussion.

We should all care that our leaders act with integrity because when they don’t, fundamental services suffer; people suffer.

Let’s take child protection. I need to admit that when it comes to child protection I’m deeply biased. You see, I was born into the care of the State in Victoria.

After some months in foster care as a baby, I was put into a permanent placement with a wonderful family. After the mandated period (then 12 months) this generous family adopted me.

This isn’t a sob story or a hard luck story. I’m incredibly lucky to have been born in Victoria at a time when the child protection system functioned really well under an outstanding Minister – Labor’s Pauline Toner – our state’s first female cabinet Minister.

Back then, being born into the care of the state could act as a springboard to a life of real opportunity. Not any more.

Last week at the Victorian Parliament’s Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, we learned that over 2,500 young people with confirmed cases of abuse or neglect have not even been provided with a case worker. That’s over 16 per cent of all kids in the system.

We are also aware that, in this term of government, a record number of Victorian children known to child protection have died. More than half had not been allocated a worker. So, it matters.

The Child Protection Minister, Anthony Carbines, took to ABC radio to play down the significance of this metric. Nothing to see here…

His spin didn’t wash.

Carbines’ bizarre, train-wreck interview precipitated a huge response from listeners, all with their own stories of the failures of child protection under Labor. The ABC’s Virginia Trioli has now described the interview as ‘notorious’.

It was particularly odd for Carbines to assert that a huge number of unallocated cases is not a problem as the previous Minister – Luke Donnellan – had bragged about reducing the unallocated rate to 4 per cent just a year earlier.

I’m not a great fan of Luke. He resigned after coming to the notice of IBAC and admitted to breaking Labor Party rules. But to his credit, he worked to drive down the number of unallocated child protection cases. Then had had to quit. The vital Child Protection portfolio was shifted on a temporary basis to Richard Wynne, the Minister for Planning. Go figure. Finally, it was given to Anthony Carbines, who – in a long Parliamentary career – had never previously held a front bench position.

Carbines has also been implicated in the corruption probes that are dogging the government. Last December it was reported that he ‘gave a taxpayer-funded job to one of sacked powerbroker Adem Sumyurek’s chief branch stackers’.

In the midst of all this, the Andrews Labor government dropped the ball, and vulnerable children are suffering as a result.

Being born into the system, I know far better than most that the Child Protection portfolio matters. That’s why it deserves a senior Minister who is committed for the long term; like Labor’s Pauline Toner in the 80s or the Liberal’s Mary Wooldridge from 2010-14.

State Labor’s corruption scandals have robbed us of that. So, for the sake of our most vulnerable kids, let’s hope integrity matters just as much to Victorian voters in November as it did in May.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/does-integrity-matter-to-the-teals-lets-see/

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Safetyism

Is safety the best course of action? Our grandparents were willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve freedom for future generations. Our generation is sacrificing children’s futures to protect our lives… There is something terribly wrong in this equation and to me, it feels cowardly.

Our societies appear to be labouring under the belief that safety is the most important value to possess.

In public spaces, there are imprecations that ‘your safety is our top priority’ and entrances to all buildings are besmirched with myriad posters with details about viruses and hand hygiene. Who actually reads these is anyone’s guess, but there they remain a symbol of public health and government outreach. Indeed, one of the more common greetings we encounter is ‘stay safe’.

I don’t want to stay safe – I want an appropriately risky day for the activities I have chosen to undertake. Although I admit, that sounds less pithy.

Ultimately, Safetyism is an example of what Thomas Sowell might call ‘stage-one thinking’. Namely, a theoretical solution to a theoretical problem is implemented without anticipating the consequences.

Sadly, so-called ‘stage-one thinking’ appeals to politicians as the messaging is simple. ‘Risk is bad’ and our party’s intervention will reduce this risk. Invariably we do not know if 1) said intervention does reduce said risk 2) there are adverse effects of said intervention or if 3) the costs outweigh the benefit.

I submit that having safety as the priority is a poor mantra.

On one level, there will always be a trade-off between safety and convenience, thus in most domains we accept a certain level of danger to have convenience in our lives. Though none of us want to disregard safety as a principle, for many of us it is the danger of certain activities which makes them fun and exciting.

The element of individual assessment is key to this. Imprecations of safety for someone in their eighties are going to be very different to a healthy eighteen-year-old. The priorities and the risks will be very different. By having a blanket policy of safety for all of society we do not admit this difference and we risk harming our young and healthy people through Safetyism.

It is especially relevant as, over the last decades, we have seen the results caused by over-protecting children from risk as they develop.

In order to grow as humans on a social, psychological, and immune-physiological level, we need to expose ourselves to reasonable risk. The consequence of this has been a generation of young adults who are ill-equipped to defend themselves by means other than censorship (see Jonathan Haidt).

It is damaging on so many levels to protect someone who does not need protecting. The same principle allows us to improve at our jobs; especially in medicine, it is only by being out of our comfort zone that we learn new skills and improve as clinicians.

Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

We each have our own takes on this, but there is something cowardly in society about having too much of a focus on safety. Without saying we should court danger, to live life in perpetual fear of an existential threat is no way to live.

It is ignoble and dehumanising to have safety as the pure priority, for safety is not what gives life meaning. It is interactions with fellow humans, sports, activities, social groups and religions, jobs, and voluntary exchange which gives our lives meaning, and these involve risk. Safety is incidental and can either facilitate or curtail these activities. To have such a disproportionate focus on safety is to sacrifice our humanity and the meaning in our lives for an indefinite end.

Increasingly, in medicine we have been shifting towards a holistic model of care, where we are not just asking how to most extend a life or cure a disease, but rather, how can we provide an individual’s life with the most meaning. It asks how we can care for a patient by considering their concerns and wishes.

We accept some people for joint replacements despite the risk of surgery because the improvement in quality of life for them may outweigh any risk of surgery. We also do not always treat illnesses towards the end of life because the treatment will cause more suffering than the disease running its course. Indeed, a lot of the time we chose not to investigate low-risk conditions is because the investigations themselves may cause harm and are unlikely to show anything.

With every decision there is always risk, what matters is if this is justifiable.

Why the emphasis now? Perhaps the exigencies of a pandemic warrant this. Perhaps the damage to healthy populations by safety measures is justified by the benefit to at-risk populations. On the other hand, perhaps Safetyism is the easiest way for a government to avoid addressing complex and difficult questions – the easiest way to appear proactive whilst avoiding the issue. At what expense does this come?

Just as an individual needs risk exposure to develop themselves, our societies do as well. We can purchase temporary safety from disease, from industrial accidents, from corruption by a burden of regulations and rules. This comes at the expense of our future; as our society starts to stultify, we stop taking risks, we stop investing, and we stop providing for the future. Instead, we develop a high time preference, thinking of the present and thinking of ourselves.

Our ancestors sacrificed themselves to protect future liberty; we are sacrificing liberty to protect ourselves, perhaps we are cowards after all.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/we-all-need-a-little-risk-to-survive/

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The full costs of the pandemic response are yet to come

There is a cost of lockdown crisis coming. It will be economic and political. Take the latter first. This political lockdown crisis, in my view, will really only hit right-of-centre parties. Left-wing parties (I’m about to generalise) tend to be peopled by voters who trust big government and for whom equality concerns easily trump freedom concerns. On the left, to continue to generalise you understand, are the parties of the public servants, the human rights barrister caste, the well-off, the university, public broadcaster and corporate HR classes, the virtue-signallers (but I repeat myself) and those on welfare.

Almost none of those groups did badly out of the pandemic and the brutal, despotic, heavy-handed governmental responses we saw pretty much everywhere outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, a few other US States, and a few islands like Iceland and Taiwan. In fact, most did very well. The super-rich did super well. To be blunt, these castes had no skin in the game when it came to the costs of these liberty and small-business-crushing ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’. (And my Lord I hate these Orwellian acronyms.)

On the other hand, all right-of-centre parties have a segment of their voting base that really cares about freedom-related issues. Now certainly the big tent, broad coalition that makes up right-of-centre parties includes your low-tax types, some of whom aren’t too fussed either way once you leave the economic sphere. And there are social conservatives, some (not all, but some) of whom aren’t overly concerned about freedom issues at all.

But there is no denying that a noticeable chunk of all right-leaning political parties is comprised of voters who care deeply about freedom issues, a fair chunk of whom did very badly indeed out of the pandemic. And let me be clear, I mean they did badly due to governments opting half-heartedly to emulate the ‘let’s copy China and weld them into their homes’ strategy. You know. There we are in November 2019 with a World Health Organisation pandemic plan that is based on a century of data and that says ‘never lockdown, never shut schools, give people the information’. Yet other than in Sweden really (whose wonderful chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said ‘I just copied the existing British and WHO plans’ which the data now shows was the correct approach) this gets tossed out the window after China welds a few cities’ people in their homes and journalists go down the fear-porn route in reporting from Italy.

Well, as I said the costs have overwhelmingly hit a segment of the political base of right-of-centre parties. Many a person’s life has been unalterably ruined. And many are not in the forgive-and-forget mode, however much these same right-leaning parties now do not want to talk about their despotic pandemic approaches. At this point I usually get all sorts of unsolicited (and not infrequently hostile) emails telling me how wonderfully Australia did in its pandemic response. Heck, half the Sky After Dark hosts and three-quarters of the op-ed writers in the Australian continue to say this. In my view, it’s palpably untrue.

UNSW academic Gigi Foster has spent the last year getting the data together and she says it is nothing like 40,000 lives that the Morrison government’s ‘let’s not say a bad word about any despotic lockdown anywhere in the country’ approach saved. At most it was not even 10,000. In quality-adjusted life-years it was a far less impressive figure again. But that’s just one item in the cost-benefit ledger, deaths ‘with and because of’ Covid.

On the other side there are going to be all sorts of deaths because of lockdowns themselves. This data is starting to pour in. In the US more people died of alcoholism than Covid in 2021. Wonder why? There are missed health checks. Two years of schooling that poor kids will never make up, never, and that will have big health effects. And get this. A huge pandemic literature review and meta-analysis out of Johns Hopkins by Professors Hanke et al. now calculates the ‘how many Covid deaths did lockdowns save compared to Sweden pre vaccines’ at barely over two per cent…. [so] ‘had little to no effect on Covid mortality rates’.

Remember, that’s the sum total of the benefits side of the ledger. Meanwhile the costs will be, heck are, immense. And these authors have a small section that is relevant to Australia. When you look at island countries – Australia, NZ, Iceland, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan – there is almost no statistical difference in Covid deaths per million despite some countries (think Oz, think NZ) being despotic and others (think Iceland, think Taiwan) being much, much closer to the Swedish approach. All island nations did extremely well. I wonder what the lockdownistas have to say about that? Well, nothing of course.

But here’s the thing. Some of us on the right of the political spectrum are not going to forget what our side of politics did to us. It’s one of the reasons the Morrison government lost I think (and why I’m glad it lost). It is why in the province of Alberta the conservative premier was a fortnight ago removed by his side of politics; he had caved in too much to the despots. It’s why Boris is in big trouble in Britain and people are obsessing over a few 30-minute parties – because if you are going to impose insanely irrational rules on all and sundry and make the police enforce them then if you’re caught cheating it’s not going to help you to plead ‘we need a bit of perspective here’.

And let’s be clear that Boris showed infinitely more resolve in standing up to the fearmongers than ScoMo ever did – just remember the 1,200 supposed UK public health experts who wrote the open letter in mid-2021 saying the sky would fall if Boris opened up. Boris did anyway and it didn’t. But we on the right are still angry and want ‘politicians on our side’ to be taught a big lesson.

Compare that to Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida who locked down for not much more than a fortnight and then realised this was wrong and moved straight over to the Swedish approach. He was literally called a ‘granny killer’ by the media. Last election DeSantis barely pipped the Democrat; today he is over ten points ahead – the rewards of political bravery!

So that’s the political side. The economics is easy. All but the uber-Keynesian economists believe that inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. Print money like a Zimbabwean and borrow and spend like a drunken sailor and (Modern Monetary Theory notwithstanding) there will come a day of reckoning. It may well bring stagflation and worse in its wake. In part this will be another effect of the pandemic response, though actually it was happening before Covid.

This time, though, the politics will hit both sides because the left-leaning parties are in even more thrall to uber-Keynesianism than the right (and Treasury and the Reserve Bank). And the Left barracked even more for this big spending, big Keynesianism.

Want to know what it’s going to be like for indebted governments and house-owners when interest rates rocket up? Just wait and see.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/the-coming-cost-of-lockdown-crisis/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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A damaging obsession?

Since ancient times, women have long sought to improve their appearance by colouring their faces and hair in various ways -- and that is a major industry to this day. Modern times differ in the availability of surgery -- with face-lifts and boob-jobs being well-known.

The article below is aimed at curbing the surgical adventures. But it is not clear why that should be so. Where the procedures do harm, one can be critical with some justification but otherwise if it gives satisfaction, why not?

The small point in the critique below is that people sometimes feel pressured into undergoing the procdures and are not really happy with it. But that is a personality matter. Susceptibility to social pressure is real but so can the the ability to withstand it be. And if that resistance is lacking, who else is able and entitled to supply it?.

I personally inherited a "Roman" or "aquiline" nose, which is both unusual and sometimes regarded as ugly. I have never felt the slightest urge to alter it but I understand that affected women sometimes do

Australians' body image problems are getting worse. Amidst an 'epidemic of body image anxiety', could one simple act change everything?

The term 'body modification' covers everything from hair-dye and braces, to lip fillers, nose jobs and butt augmentation.

What's considered normal or extreme comes down to who you hang around with: depending on your social circle, you might consider make-up unusual, or regular botox injections the norm.

But across the spectrum of procedures, there are two powerful common points. More of us are opting for body modification than ever. And more of us are judging the choices others are making. UK philosopher Heather Widdows says we are increasingly comparing ourselves to others online, with a "moral judgement that goes both ways".

It's directed towards those who do and those who don't modify their bodies, she says. And it's becoming a destructive force. "We have an epidemic of body image anxiety," Professor Widdows says. "We have to move away from that."

In Australia, more than 43 per cent of people are highly concerned about their body image, according to Monash University's Body Image Research Group.

In a study of over 3,000 mostly female Australians, aged 18 and over, the Butterfly Foundation found that over 70 per cent said appearance was "very important" and wished they could change the way they look.

Roughly one-fifth of the respondents had attempted to change themselves to look like images they saw on social media. Nearly half felt pressure to look a certain way.

Behind statistics like these is the influence of beauty ideals on body image "” and it's time to talk about that, Professor Widdows says. "We need to start taking it seriously."

Joseph Taylor, 36, says he grew up hating his "stereotypical [ethnic] big nose". He's since had three nose jobs, the first when he was 17.

Schoolyard teasing played a part in his decision. "Kids can be horrible," he says. "Someone probably said something like, 'Oh, you big nose'. "It must have, at some point, really got to me."

"When we're young, we're constantly trying to be the best that we can be on the exterior because we feel that's all that matters "¦ and we're so impressionable," Mr Taylor says.

But it's not only in our youth that we are susceptible to this influence. For young people and adults alike, beauty has become "our primary obsession", Professor Widdows argues.

She's not out to criticise beauty rituals. After all, as she notes, "we are embodied beings; we live in our bodies. It's how we see other people, how we relate to them".

The cosmetic enhancement industry in Australia is booming. We meet the people chasing their aesthetic ideal and those jumping off the cosmetic enhancement conveyor belt.

And plenty of beauty practices are enjoyable. Mr Taylor, for example, says today he is happy and confident with his appearance, and he feels in control of the influence of beauty in his life. "I've definitely grown to like the way I am," he says.

It's when beauty ideals tip into an obsession that problems can arise. For example, when not weighing what you'd like ruins your day. When getting one selfie right takes hours of preparation and editing before posting. Or when not being happy with the way you look might even stop you leaving the house.

These, Professor Widdows says, are things she's observed in researching her latest book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. She believes they signal a "very profound shift" in values.

"We've gone from beauty being one thing we care about to it being almost defining of who we are," she says. "How we present success used to be the car or the house. Now it's how we look."

Professor Widdows suggests several reasons for this shift.

* We live in a more "visual culture" today, where "the image always speaks louder than words", she says.

* Courtesy of social media, we are able to constantly examine our appearance in relation to that of others.

* Also, where once beauty treatments were "very topical and superficial", now "we literally can change the shape of our bodies", she says. "You go from the cut of the dress to the cut of the breast."

Philosopher and physician Yves Saint James Aquino argues that with an increase in accessibility, there's now a "normalisation" of body modification, which has also fuelled its rise. "Now because it's so common, it's part of people's lives, they feel less stigmatised "¦ and therefore they feel freer to do it," he says.

Dr Aquino says another factor has led to the rise of body modification: prolonged exposure to our own faces on video calls throughout the pandemic.

Yves Saint James Aquino says body modification has become normalised and destigmatised. ABC RN: Siobhan Marin
"People are encountering their faces more than ever," he says. "That's when they start noticing things that they haven't really noticed before."

This, Dr Aquino says, has led to an uptick in cosmetic surgery around the world.

In the last five years or so, there's been a sharp increase in the use of injectables (such as in wrinkle-reducing or lip-filling procedures) in Australia. And the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) operation is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world today.

At 2018, Australians were spending more per capita on cosmetic surgery than people in the US, with anti-wrinkle (Botox) injections the most popular operation at the time. And while it is mostly women choosing cosmetic surgery, the number of male clients is growing.

Former Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Kirstie Clements had the majority of her cosmetic procedures in her 40s, including lip fillers, Botox and collagen injections.

A decade later, she'd had enough. "I didn't like that sort of overworked look that it gives you, the kind of chubby cheeks and squinty eyes," she says. "When I got to my 50s, I thought, 'Oh, who are you kidding now?' "So I gave it up."

Ms Clements, now 60, believes ageism is a driving force in the increase of cosmetic enhancement. "The pressure is for us to try and keep up and to stay young and to be fresh," she says.

And cosmetic procedures are even more readily available today. "There are now literally lunchtime procedures where you can go back to work and nobody cares that there's a few marks in your face," Ms Clements says.

"They're not taboo. It's as fashionable as getting a piece of clothing, which is quite sobering. It's your skin that's being punctured."

Ms Clements calls out the "constant hammering" of edited or altered images that prompt us to question if we should benchmark ourselves against them. "It's the brave woman who says, 'No, I don't care what any of you do. I'm happy in my own skin'," she says.

But resisting pressure isn't just about bravery or defiance; it's about deflecting messages that arrive with increasing frequency. Where once we might have encountered beauty images 12 times a year in a monthly magazine, today "you're seeing things 12 times in 10 minutes" on social media, Ms Clements says. "It's getting more and more pervasive ". So it's the strong person who can stand back and say 'no'."

Professor Widdows is concerned about a future in which we might "begin to see exceptionally modified bodies as normal".

To downgrade the status of beauty in our lives, she is calling for a culture shift.

What do people of colour, who've often been racially vilified for their appearance, have to say about others cherry-picking their features?

She wants us to ditch the negative comments about other people's bodies and appearance. "Often, cosmetic surgery recipients report that their insecurity began with a nasty comment," she says.

Professor Widdows believes more of us need to understand the harm that negative comments and body shaming can cause, arguing that it should be considered as seriously as any other form of discrimination.

"I say, if you don't do [body modifying], don't feel smug because you don't feel the pressure," she says. Similarly, if you do engage in body modification, don't question those who don't.

"Rather let's think about, culturally, do we want to live in a society where people feel pressured to engage more and more? That's the bit I want to push back against, the social pressure," she says.

Professor Widdows' plea? Stop talking about other people's bodies "” full stop. "Let's not look at what people do or don't do. Let's not say, 'this practice is okay, that perhaps is not'," she says. "Let's just take the pressure completely off."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-03/body-image-beauty-face-value-heather-widdows-kirstie-clements/101109500

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Greens fury as Labor won’t rule out more coal to deal with energy crisis

THE energy and gas crisis has put the days-old Albanese Government under pressure after it did not rule out increasing coal-fired power output to deal with shortages, sparking a fiery response from the Greens fresh off record-breaking election wins.

There was large swing to the Greens in Brisbane which saw the party pick up three seats, with climate change a big issue in the areas.

New Energy Minister Chris Bowen said he was not ruling any options “in or out” as the government seeks to deal with a “very serious” gas shortfall driving up wholesale power prices.

A “perfect storm” of coal-fired power outages, flooded coal mines and the war in Ukraine impacting gas supply has caused prices to soar, leaving the east coast states at risk of a supply shortage in the coming days.

Last month more than 30 per cent of the coal power capacity in the National Electricity Market was estimated to be offline.

Origin Energy boss Frank Calabria has called for government and industry to work together to increase coal power in the short term.

Asked about the comments, Mr Bowen said the Federal Government’s ability to up output might be “limited” compared to the private sector or states. “If there is advice to me about sensible and measure actions that can be taken, I will take them,” he said.

Mr Bowen confirmed he had spoken with Mr Calabria, and would convene an emergency meeting with all state and territory energy ministers early next week to discuss the crisis. He is also in talks with heavy industry and regulators to work on options to ease the extreme pressure on the Australian market.

Incoming Greens Griffith MP Max Chandler-Mather said Labor should not be considering ramping up coal or opening up more gas to deal with the issues.

“Fire chiefs and climate scientists are begging Labor to take urgent climate action – but instead, they’re doing the complete opposite by backing massive new gas projects,” Mr Chandler-Mather said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/greens-fury-as-labor-wont-rule-out-more-coal-to-deal-with-energy-crisis/news-story/7fc671419057b5da1aef333c3f191fd3

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Pandering to women won’t save the Libs

Bettina Arndt

‘Women were the forgotten people in this election’, pronounced Katherine Deves on Sky News Australia, following the election. The Liberal candidate for Warringah claimed, ‘Women want to be listened to and they need to have a voice,’ suggesting the Morrison government’s failure to pay attention to women contributed to the 6 per cent swing against her in Tony Abbott’s former seat.

Deves took a brave stance arguing for females not only in women’s sports, but supporting the notion that the Coalition government didn’t do enough for women – which is absurd.

For decades our conservative governments have bent over backwards to pander to feminist demands in an extravagant display that failed to win them votes but repelled their true base – namely, the majority of men and women keen that both genders in this egalitarian country should receive fair and equal treatment.

Yet Deves is joined by a mighty chorus of Coalition figures indulging in the same delusion. The newly appointed Deputy Opposition Leader, Sussan Ley, told Australian women that her party ‘hears them’ and is determined to ‘win back women’s trust’.

Give me a break. Won’t these people ever learn that the folk who created this notion of the Coalition’s ‘women problem’ would never think of voting for a conservative party? This is the same mob who ignored the fact that Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech was a desperate attempt to detract attention from her political reliance on Speaker Peter Slipper, who was then in trouble over a text comparing female genitalia to ‘a mussel removed from its shell… salty c***s in brine’.

We’ve seen successive Coalition governments cowering to the feminist lobby, throwing endless money trying to appease their insatiable appetite for an obscenely large slice of the cake. Malcolm Turnbull’s first act as Prime Minister was his plea for ‘respect for women’ as he announced the first $100 million of the never-ending bucket-loads of funding poured into the domestic violence industry. Last year, Scott Morrison topped up these rivers of gold with a 150 per cent increase in funding, from $100 to $250 million per year, as a result of the feminist’s Covid scare campaign about women being locked up with dangerous men – money paid out even as official statistics showed decreased violence during lockdowns.

Just last week, Tom Burton in the Australian Financial Review named the ‘shameful failure to end family violence’ as the greatest social policy issue which he claims led women to vote for ‘real change’. Do these journalists really have no idea that domestic violence rates are being artificially inflated by the current epidemic of false accusations related to family law battles?

The former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson has published a conversation with me covering, in detail, the evidence of how feminist ideology has risen to dominate public policy. It reveals how the movement has set about advantaging women at the expense of men through the distortion of the Australian media, tilting law, promoting anti-male ideology in schools and workplaces, and consistently manipulating government statistics to demonise men. This is the alternate reality that is usually kept well hidden from the world of powerful men.

It wasn’t that the Morrison government didn’t listen to women. This whipped crew sniveled and groveled, like a cuckolded man clutching desperately at the ankles of his departing wife. Remember the awkward apology to Brittany Higgins? Or Morrison’s forced smile when Grace Tame gave him the side-eye? Or the cowardly act of allowing Christian Porter and Alan Tudge to be pushed out of their ministerial roles over unproven sexual assault allegations? Or the cringing over the parliamentary harassment report, denying the very low incidence of actual harassment and high rates of female bullying…?

Recent Coalition governments have gone in for the shameless promotion of women into every conceivable public role. We had Susan Kiefel appointed Chief Justice of the High Court. Ita Buttrose as Chair of the ABC. Lorraine Finlay for Human Rights Commissioner. Cathy Foley as Chief Scientist. Women, women, women. A constant stream of beaming female faces endlessly gracing our news.

Consider the extraordinary appointment of Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, at a time when six of the eight people killing themselves each day were men and 4 of every 5 beneficiaries of their ‘gender neutral’ prevention programs were women.

The results of the Coalition government’s relentless push to get more women into higher levels of the public service are all too apparent in grossly biased policy outcomes, like the March 2022 budget allocation of $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to ‘improve long term health outcomes’ for men and boys.

For the last few weeks we’ve been treated to unabashed celebration from our biased media about the ousting of the Coalition and wild assertions that this was all due to angry women turning on Morrison. No mention, of course, of the fact that conservative parties everywhere are now struggling to attract women.

Irrespective of how desperately the Coalition tried to win them over, women are turning left. Five years ago, I wrote about the growing power of left-wing women, making the point that women are becoming more left-wing in their policy preferences – not only in Australia, but across much of the Western world. Analysis by the Australian Election Study (AES) of 2019 election results confirmed an ever-widening gender gap, starting back in the 1990s marked by dropping female support for the Liberal Party.

By 2019, 45 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women voted Liberal, while the split for the Greens was 15 per cent to 9 per cent.

The AES asked voters to rate themselves on a scale from left to right, where 0 is left and 10 is right. In 2019 the average position for men was 5.2 whereas for women it was 4.8, a significant shift from the 1990s when there were minimum gender differences.

One of the key factors I identified back in 2017 for why the shift was occurring was leftist university education.

‘The hearts and minds being captured in our universities belong mainly to young women’, I wrote, pointing to fascinating research from the AES showing women emerge from university education notably more left-leaning than women without degrees, whereas male graduates aren’t very different from less educated men in their political views.

Women’s increasingly left-wing policy preferences have been showing up in AES data on issue after issue: asylum-seekers; government spending on indigenous affairs; stiffer criminal penalties; positive discrimination for women and same-sex marriage. The 2017 postal survey on same-sex marriage showed that more women voted yes in every age group from 18 through to 75.

Over 60 per cent of graduates are now female, so women are disproportionately affected by the ideological indoctrination taking place in our universities, particularly as they are mainly the ones studying humanities subjects steeped in identity politics and neo-Marxist propaganda.

Unlike many men who become more conservative as they age, the work/life patterns in most women’s lives simply reinforce these beliefs. Women predominantly work in education, health care, and welfare services or as public service professionals. They make up 58 per cent of public service positions and are more likely than men to work in unionised jobs. All this means their working environment provides a culture that supports rather than challenges their political beliefs.

Then there’s the motherhood issue, with mothers particularly receptive to the Left’s big spending promises – and scare campaigns – on health and education. The growing number of single mothers significantly dependent on government benefits is another key issue, with the left-wing parties playing up their support for such disadvantaged families.

So, it goes on. Hardly surprising then that polling suggests the indoctrinated mob of professional women flocked to the Teal faux Independents with their trendy list of leftist policy proposals. No doubt when proper analysis of the gender gap in this election is available, we will discover even more women across the board may be turning their backs on traditional conservative beliefs.

But the biggest risk for the conservative parties currently licking their wounds is to believe the mad left media claim that they were ousted by the wrath of angry women. Somehow, we need to convince Coalition politicians that they have long been bleeding votes from ordinary folk who have had a gutful of seeing women endlessly privileged whilst the men they love, their fathers, sons, brothers, and friends, are pushed to the back of the bus and at every point denied fair treatment.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/pandering-to-women-wont-save-the-libs

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Has Albanese government’s support for a 5.1pc pay rise lit the fuse to its demise?

TERRY MCCRANN compares the Albanian to Whitlam

Will the Albanese government’s support for a 5.1 per cent minimum wage rise come to be the signature policy exercise that combines with and unleashes forces which end up destroying it?

Like has happened with every other Labor government in the 77 years since the Second World War?

In the 1970s, it was the Whitlam Government’s shock – dashing and daring – 25 per cent across the board tariff cut.

This was aimed at fighting surging inflation, by slashing the prices of almost the entire array of consumer durables – fridges, TVs, washing machines, stoves and the rest – in a way not possible in today’s tariff-free all-imported reality.

It was bold. It was innovative. As a young commentator, I supported it.

But it turned into both an economic and political disaster – especially when joined with, so ominously, portentously, resonant of today’s 5.1 per cent – another Whitlam agenda.

This was the deliberate policy of having big public sector wage rises, literally to “set the pace” for wage rises across the economy, precisely like with the 5.1 per cent, to keep pace with inflation.

The tariff cut did zero in taming inflation – which through the mid-1970s was running at 14-16 per cent a year.

Joined with the big pay rises, businesses and jobs in manufacturing and across the economy were destroyed.

This joined with a whole range of other forces, which were so destabilising to both the economy and the government.

Back then the world was smack in the middle of the first oil shock. Back then, the Coalition had far, far more powerful supporters in business.

Then in the 1980s came the 18 per cent Reserve Bank interest rate which sent home loans rates to 17 per cent. Try putting that in your loan repayments calculator.

The savage rate increases weren’t only supported by then treasurer Paul Keating; he actually urged the RBA on – and sent the economy plunging into a real recession, which dwarfed anything we’ve seen over the past two years.

The by-then Keating-led Labor government should have lost the 1993 election. It was saved by a totally inept opposition leader named John Hewson and his infamous GST cake.

But as the consequences of those high rates ground on, the reckoning was only postponed, until 1996 and someone named John Howard.

In the Rudd-Gillard years, the signature policy move was – well, there were probably two: the boats and the carbon tax, along with the budget deficits after Peter Costello’s unending surpluses and even more potently, his yearly tax cuts.

Tony Abbott promised to axe the tax and stop the boats. He won the election and did both. Missing him, yet?

You can argue over the appropriateness of the policy decisions, whether they got ambushed by circumstances outside their control, or just the reality of ‘unintended consequences’.

But all that is subsumed by the ‘only poll that matters’ – as so many prime ministers in trouble have intoned over the years. The one on election day.

So why am I suggesting that the support for the 5.1 per cent might be this government’s ultimate Achilles Heel?

Surely it’s a classic, even obligatory Labor policy? Having the lowest-paid at least keeping up with inflation?

Won’t it actually be helpful for the economy? Can’t it be limited, as the government wants?

Ah, that’s the problem. It can’t be and it won’t be. The government is directly replaying the Whitlam pace-setting reality. In the 1970s it was public servants; today it’s the low-paid. I have to add, it’s pretty obvious which were/are more deserving.

It is also doing so, precisely into a world – that I suggest you can pretty obviously see – that is ‘right on the edge’ in so many ways and across so many fronts.

Energy prices – all of them: gas, petrol and electricity – are rocketing, and are not going back to 2018 levels anytime soon if indeed ever. Indeed, price is bad enough, we may actually be heading into rationing.

We’re still grappling with the Covid legacy.

What it’s done directly to our economy and our lives; plus all the supply-chain issues; a China which is not the benign China pumping cheap product into the world of the pre-Covid years.

The war against Ukraine has already unleashed a global food crisis; and again it’s only going to get worse. The high prices our farmers will get will be only a small offset.

Then there’s the way that we have built the entire world economy on this great bubble of zero interest rates and multi-trillion dollar money printing.

We are going to see the RBA raise its rate – it has to raise by at least 0.4 per cent – on Tuesday, with more to come.

The support for the 5.1 per cent could turn out to be the tiny spark that lights the fuse to the great explosion.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/has-albanese-governments-support-for-a-51pc-pay-rise-lit-the-fuse-to-its-demise/news-story/2c564838f2bcf2590207e7dc1533f00b

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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