a litany of failures with intent to do more damage...

At some stage many of us reach the point when we conclude that our leaders are not just useless and meddling, but downright dangerous. The Coalition’s monumental bungling of the quarantining of infected Covid-19 arrivals is a continuation of their previous years of ineptness. They have endangered our lives, our economy, our health and well-being and – astonishingly – our country’s federation.

Is it time to put our PM and his Treasurer into quarantine?

By ROBIN BOYLE | On 24 December 2020

The seven years of Coalition leadership is a litany of failures, incompetence, cronyism, hypocrisy, indecision and paralysis. Their handling of the pandemic, by Australian standards, has been their biggest ever disaster – blameable on a lack of pandemic planning and shirking their responsibilities for quarantining.And in quarantine the Commonwealth has primary responsibility.

At year’s end we might think Australia is in good covid shape. Compared to the USA and Europe we are. Compared to NZ we aren’t: at year’s end we are going through yet another stage of closed borders and fractured lives.

Six of our jurisdictions – SA, WA, TAS, NT, ACT and QLD – have performed better than or equal to NZ or almost any country in the world, with zero-case community transmissions for months. However, major quarantine outbreaks in Victoria and NSW have had massive countrywide implications.

All eight state and territory leaders have been out outstanding. The failure is at the federal level.

Scott Morrison is our country’s leader. Josh Frydenberg is his chosen Treasurer. Through shameless bravado and more concerned about business interests than lives they have shirked, squirmed and bullied their way out of any responsibility or accountability for Australia’s Covid-19 mess.

For ScoMo maybe we should read SquirMo.

The baying Murdoch media said about Daniel Andrews “the buck stops at the top”.

Well sorry guys, Scott Morrison is the one at the top.

Seven years of unproductive Coalition leadership point to Covid-19 chaos

Rudd, Swann and Gillard introduced substantial and long lasting legislation. Most importantly was their decisive economic action which saved Australia from the GFC.

In contrast, Coalition government has meant years of holding ness and nothingness. The PM and Treasurer have been major players.

Notable areas of policy failure include climate change, energy, drought and water and bushfire prevention.

Many millions of Australians hoped that in response to Covid we would seize the opportunity to address serious climate change and growing inequality.Instead we are to return to the way we were, a gas led recovery with funds directed to busineses,a prospective tax cut for high income earners and no increase in Jobseeker.And we have an infantile approach to our relations with China.

After a decade of accusing the ALP of squandering taxpayers’ money on things like Pink Batts and creating a mountain of debt with their GFC stimulus packages it has been an amazing about-face to become Keynesian converts and where a mountain of debt to be “repaid by our children and their children” is no longer of consequence. We have the most spendathon government in Australia’s history.

We should not have been surprised about their derelict handling of the pandemic.

Covid-19 reveals a PM with no leadership skills and a Treasurer with no economic nous

The federal government is in charge of all aspects of our international borders, including quarantining of international arrivals. And it is in charge of the national economy.

There are some notable examples of covid stuff-ups.

Failure to shut down flights from the USA in March: Despite anecdotal and hard evidence, did our PM choose not to make this decision in order not to upset its prickly president in a selfish trade-off for duty of care for the Australian people? No wonder Donald Trump awarded him a Legion of Merit!

The Ruby Princess fiasco: Despite the federal government’s clear responsibility for border control, NSW was lumbered with the blame, and NW Tasmania with three weeks of lockdown.

Follow another leader – New Zealand’s: It seemed our PM was paralysed in his decision making, with a pattern whereby what NZ’s PM did, we would do soon after.

Our state and territory leaders were in charge, despite Canberra: As the pandemic progressed, Scott Morrison’s disconnect with his responsibilities showed and overall control was quickly usurped by state and territory leaders who increasingly defied and ignored him.

Shirking of aged care responsibilities: The federal government is the primary funder and regulator of the system. An aged care facility should be the safest possible place in a pandemic for elderly Australians, yet under the PM’s watch hundreds have died.

The bubble that burst: If anything displays our PM’s incompetence it was the so-called “trans-Tasman bubble with NZ” whereby arrivals in NSW and the NT were turning up in other states, much to the shock of some premiers.

Hysterical targeting of Daniel Andrews and Victorians: In October as Victoria struggled to reach zero-community cases, our nation’s PM, Treasurer and Health Minister (the latter being the two most senior Victorian federal members) rained down the most poisonous and unwarranted invective I can recall in Australian politics.

Morrison promoted the ‘gold standard’ approach of NSW: Yet a reluctant petulant premier would not make the hard decisions about mask-wearing and strong and fast lockdowns.

Double standards: With the others praised, Victoria, WA and Queensland with their Labor Governments were under relentless attack from federal ministers and their favoured media cronies.

The states rightly took it upon themselves to fully manage the areas for which they had responsibility and did it well. Stuff that Canberra was pushing them into! All eight leaders, even Gladys, displayed amazing leadership, with no shirking, no squirming, no pomposity and little unwarranted invective, relying on scientific and health advice.

The one area they have struggled with, and the cause of all our Covid-19 woes, is the quarantining of international arrivals: a job they should not have to do.

Quarantining arrivals: no care and no responsibility from the PM

The federal government has full responsibilities for international borders, yet our wily PM somehow off-loaded quarantining to the eight states and territories.

The National Cabinet is one of the few positives from the pandemic. We can only speculate that on March 27 the PM had yet another disconnect with his duties as national leader and arrived with no plan on how to deal with mounting imported infections. It seems the eight leaders – with less than two days to prepare – had no option but to accept hotel quarantining, with them wearing the cost, full responsibility and the consequences.

Hotel quarantine was certain to have breakouts and Victoria copped it. The Murdoch press would be after blame, blood and resignations, trying to pin the Premier to the rather irrelevant question as to who made the decision to use security guards. The haranguing of the Victorian premier would become merciless, uncalled for and un-Australian.

Other jurisdictions also used security guards. The important question was why and how did the Victorian system fail?

During the Coate inquiry the rest of the country learnt about the numerous ways in which infection could escape into the community.

The final report (released 21 Dec) points to the lack of planning for a pandemic like Covid-19, despite awareness of the possibility of such a pandemic. Existing Commonwealth and State plans did not include the scenario of mandatory, mass quarantine. In fact Coate says: “… it would be unfair to judge Victoria’s lack of planning for a mandatory quarantining program given the Commonwealth, itself, had neither recommended nor developed such a plan.”

The report includes:

“The lack of a plan for mandatory mass quarantine meant that Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Program was conceived and implemented ‘from scratch’, to be operational within 36 hours, from concept to operation. This placed extraordinary strain on the resources of the State, and, more specifically, on those departments and people required to give effect to the decision made in the National Cabinet and agreed to by the Premier on behalf of Victoria. This lack of planning was a most unsatisfactory situation from which to develop such a complex and high-risk program.”

On this website we have explained how hotel quarantining is like a rusty bucket – a leakage certain to happen, with devastating consequences.

Flight arrival data show that within two weeks from the 28 March there would be over 17,000 in hotel quarantine around the country. Decent national leadership would have had plans in place for quarantining away from Australian population centres, in remote or more secure locations.

We are currently averaging around 10 new infections a day from overseas arrivals going into mandatory city based hotel quarantine.

From the recent NSW breakout, to the nation’s surprise, we hear that certain arrivals have bypass privileges. The AFR has posed that “Politicians, past and present, diplomats, movie stars, billionaires with private jets, sports stars, international airline crews, have all somehow made the list of exemptions.”

The recent NSW breakout and the ruined Christmas for many, and the cancelled Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race and possibly the Sydney cricket test might have derived from one of these privileged sources.

The PM fails the leadership test

The primary role of any government is to protect the population from threats, danger and infection.

The PM is meant to be in charge of our country and thus has ultimate responsibility for all coronavirus issues in Australia, including the Victorian disaster, the Ruby Princess fiasco, the Tasmanian cluster, the South Australian outbreak and the NSW Christmas cluster, and over 900 deaths nationwide.

It is with our PM where the buck stops. If Andrews was meant to check in on how his hotel quarantine system was going, then why was the PM exempted from having to check in on each state and how they were faring? Australia is the victim of his failure to have a national approach and to oversight the premiers.

The quarantining system needs to be fixed immediately. There is no guarantee Covid-19 vaccines will work in the long term or without side effects and against mutating forms of the virus. At the beginning of the pandemic the PM should have initiated measures for remote quarantining. However, like the fires, he has detached himself from the catastrophe in front of him as if in another world – unable or unwilling to help or make a decision.

Experts warn of more pandemics with increasing frequency. Controlling outbreaks is much harder in the bigger cities. Remote facilities with multiple uses could be used or built – Hamilton Island has a large airport and rooms for 5,000 guests!

Failure to have proper pandemic and quarantine planning has had consequences that are immeasurable in terms of extra cost to the governments, failed businesses, wrecked livelihoods, higher unemployment, unnecessary deaths, delays in restarting education, and the rest. Hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy and a trillion dollars of debt.

If the Victorian situation warranted a formal enquiry, the Coalition’s response warrants a Royal Commission.

We need better leadership than that provided by Morrison and Frydenberg during the pandemic.

For our country’s sake it is time they were put into permanent quarantine, after all that’s what we do with others who are a danger to the community.

https://johnmenadue.com/is-it-time-to-put-our-pm-and-his-treasurer-into-quarantine-permanently/

The federal government has the intent to do more damage with coal and gas developments, as well...

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Dec 2020 - 5:55am
Gus Leonisky's blog
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the folly of governments stupidity...

NSW is smoothing the path for a prominent piece of the federal government's gas-led recovery by granting critical infrastructure status to plans for a Commonwealth-funded gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley.

Planning Minister Rob Stokes declared the federal government's gas plant proposal as Critical State Significant Infrastructure on Wednesday to standardise and streamline the project assessment process.

"Gas-fired power stations will have a critical role to play in ensuring our energy security as we transition to a low-carbon emissions economy with renewable energy projects such as wind and solar," Mr Stokes said.

"As well, this project could create jobs for up to 600 construction workers and generate around $800 million worth of investment for the local economy."

...

Lock the Gate co-ordinator Georgina Woods said approval of the Maxwell mine "further entrenches an industry with a highly uncertain future" and Hunter Valley communities would "bear the brunt of this government stupidity".

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nsw-backs-scott-morrison-s-gas-plant-as-critical-for-state-s-renewable-ambitions-20201223-p56ptn.html

the rorts of team australia...

Team Australia. It’s such a simple, seemingly inoffensive little slogan from the marketing guys that we hardly noticed it was a theme for the year.

Scott Morrison, fresh from his disastrous “Shake Every Hand” tour of bushfire hell holes, launched it without much fanfare as he struggled to get a toehold on the ladder to his hoped-for comeback “The Pandemic, A Global Event”.

Mr Morrison, with an eye for that exquisite nexus between business jargon and political propaganda catchphrases, let it roll down the centre aisle of the nation like a well-aimed jaffa during the matinee session.

You could see the much younger Mr Morrison taking notes as Australia II designer Ben Lexcen laid out his team-building-for-success playbook, the distillation of which is “whatever you do has to make the boat go faster”.

Mr Morrison loves these little business/politics stories, realising the power of simple seduction in a few well-chosen words.

Team Australia had everything this challenging year demanded for a politician just out of the recovery ward from a near-fatal summer. It aimed to rally the country as one, gave enormous power to its current progenitor and allowed a protective shield from criticism and dissent.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic was unnervingly pervasive, Mr Morrison had stamped the situation and his response as a Team Australia moment.

You were either on the team or not, the unity of the team gathered its direction and mission from the top, and to buck team membership was that most dishonourable of behaviours, un-Australian.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/12/26/dennis-atkins-slogan-pm-from-harm/

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By Gus Leonisky at 26 Dec 2020 - 6:47am
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scomo's class warfare...

Australians like to think of themselves as living in a classless society where anyone can succeed, unimpeded by socio-economic barriers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's mantra has been “if you have a go, you get a go”.

The reality is the Coalition Government has engaged in blatant class warfare that has punished and disenfranchised workers and the most vulnerable, whilst protecting corporate interests and its political donors.

Let’s take a tour of the most recent policy misadventures.

obodebt was an initiative by the Federal Government in 2016 to recover alleged overpayments to recipients dating back to 2010.

The automated compliance system sent out discrepancy notices to welfare recipients, placing onus of proof upon individuals instead of the previous practice of collecting and verifying information through investigations. As such, debt notices increased dramatically with over one million sent out since the scheme began, including to over 3,000 who had already died.

The shameless demonising of vulnerable welfare recipients is where the Government reached a new low.

Even after Tudge was informed on 76 separate occasions by a tribunal that robodebt was not legally enforceable, the process continued unabated.

Between 2016 and 2018, more than 2,030 recipients died after receiving debt notices — an unusually large number. The Government’s secretary of the Department of Human Services disputed any correlation, but two mothers in separate cases have written letters detailing how robodebt notices were a contributing factor in their sons’ suicides.

When robodebt was introduced in the 2015-2016 Budget, a savings of $1.7 billion was announced. Instead last month the coalition government agreed to a $1.2 billion settlement in a class action with Gordon Legal on behalf of robodebt victims.

Ultimately, the robodebt scheme came at a significant human cost without any foreseeable financial benefit.

When we examine JobSeeker, the Federal Government – after concerted lobbying from the union movement and bipartisan parliamentary support – introduced a substantial increase to unemployed Australians with a $550 fortnightly supplement during the height of the pandemic in Australia.

However, since then the supplement has been cut to $250 and cut again to $150 until March 2021 when it is completely removed.

As early as June, Morrison laid the groundwork to justify the cuts by characterising the jobless as people who are turning down jobs “because they’re on these higher levels of payment”.

Such statements were baseless when data from Australian Unemployed Workers Union found that during that same time period 1,640,773 jobseekers were in market for only 79,281 jobs available (a ratio of one job for 20.69 jobseekers), while by August, the numbers improved only slightly to just over fifteen people to one job occupancy.

As Greg Jericho has noted, our economy, especially in relation to jobs, is in a state of acute weakness. Jericho has rightly pointed out that for the economic situation is actually grim for "prime-aged workers" and that in September over 600,000 more people were either unemployed or wanting to work more, compared to February of this year.

Independent Australia’s Alan Austin has already pointed out Australia’s growth in the September quarter ranked 47th out of 55 and the jobless rate of 7.03% ranked 41st out 91 — Australia’s worst ranking to date.

Further, university-based modelling by Simone Casey and Liss Ralston has found that the cutting of JobSeeker will cause:

‘... crippling rental stress for unemployed and underemployed private renters.’

The research further found that low-income households and in particular young people and women to be the hardest hit by these cuts.

Meanwhile, corporate welfare has been rampant and shamelessly handed out by the Morrison Government.

The $70 billion in JobKeeper wage subsidy has potentially been rorted by thousands of businesses. The Government has not dealt out any fines in relation to over 8,000 tip-offs to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and employers placing 2,200 employees on multiple applications for payments.

Companies have also used their JobKeeper payments to subsidise dividends to shareholders, including Adairs providing $11.3 million to shareholders and Nick Scali giving $2.5 million of $3.9 million in dividends to the Scali family.

Liberal party donors, in particular, have profited nicely with the Coalition Government in power.

The Government’s bushfire recovery fund has been difficult to access for some of the most vulnerable bushfire victims and community groups. At the same time, Visy, owned by one of the Liberal Party’s largest political donors, Anthony Pratt, has received $10 million from the fund to upgrade technology and improve productivity at its Tumut mill.

The superannuation reform package "Your Money, Your Super" is a policy designed to undermine not-for-profit – mostly union-run – industry superannuation funds whilst protecting for-profit retail superannuation funds, dominated by the big banks (Westpac and NAB are some of the leading donors to the Liberal Party).

The proposed legislation would potentially restrict industry super advertising critical of the Government and "compare the pair" marketing.

Super funds consistently outperform their retail counterparts and have been proven to be more financially beneficial to their members. Meanwhile, retail super funds have been exposed in the Hayne-led Royal Commission into Financial Services Report as using unethical profit-extraction practices.

Industry Super Australia CEO, Bernie Dean, has lodged a submission detailing that the new laws will exempt retail super funds from justifying their profit-making, whilst scrutinising industry super funds’ every decision in an effort to hamstring their business model.

The legislated super guarantee was meant to increase to 12% by July 2025 but successive Coalition governments have stalled on such changes. Former prime minister and chief architect of superannuation in Australia, Paul Keating, has accused the Morrison Government of using the cover of COVID-19 to destroy super through early withdrawals and stopping the 2.5% increase.

Meanwhile, the super of parliamentarians is set at the far more generous 15.4%.

In the last six years, wage growth in Australia has stagnated while super has been frozen at 9.5%.

Insecure work has become increasingly more pervasive with a 2019 OECD report finding one in four Australian workers identified as casual.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government has patently ignored such economic conditions for workers to introduce new anti-worker laws by Attorney-General, Christian Porter.

Such reforms include removing the "better-off overall test" in enterprise bargaining agreements (EBA) if a business can prove that it is in economic hardship. The test is a necessary precondition to guarantee that the EBA is better for workers than the standard award.

Its removal could allow business to impose unfair wages and conditions upon workers.

Other reforms include part-time workers being offered more hours without being paid overtime wages, removing backpay claims for misclassified casuals and the locking-in of workers into long-term contracts without opportunities to improve pay and conditions.

Research by Professor David Peetz has shown that the new reforms of casual labour would empower employers to hire and fire workers at will, whilst subjecting employees to perpetual insecure work.

Porter has offered an olive branch to unions with increased penalties for wage theft, but overall, the reforms are simply creating new legal pathways for employers to maximise profits and disempower workers.

Scott Morrison markets himself as an everyday, suburban, daggy dad. The reality is with each new policy the Morrison Government is damaging the economic health of working Australians whilst serving the interests of corporate Australia.

There is some hope though. Remember John Howard’s WorkChoices was roundly rejected by a nation-wide union movement. Support for bushfire-ravaged communities came about through large-scale public scrutiny and criticism of the Government’s mismanagement.

With a mainstream media that appears incapable of holding this Government to account and an Opposition following a consistent policy of keeping quiet until the next election, such class warfare will continue unless working Australians realise their collective power to challenge this status quo.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-morrison-governments-program-of-class-warfare,14644

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Dec 2020 - 7:51am
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covid-santa in belgium...

Almost 160 people linked to a care home in Belgium may have been infected with Covid-19, with 18 succumbing to the disease, after a “stupid” visit by a volunteer dressed as Santa Claus, who turned out to be a carrier.

The tragedy struck Hemelrijck, a large assisted-living facility in the Mol municipality, which serves as a home to 169 elderly residents. The virus spread through it like wildfire, affecting 121 residents and 36 staff and claiming 18 lives in three weeks. A lot of anger has been directed at the management of the care home, who were accused of misleading the public in an effort to contain the scandal.

https://www.rt.com/news/510832-santa-outbreak-belgium-care-home/

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By Gus Leonisky at 28 Dec 2020 - 5:19am
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aged care, quarantine, passing the buck...

Aged care, quarantine: open and shut cases of federal responsibility but Morrison won’t step up to the plate

By SARAH RUSSELL | On 5 February 2021

Experts have spent years warning the federal government that pandemics would increase in frequency and severity. Yet the government was asleep at the wheel when Covid hit. Older people paid a heavy price, with Australia having one of the highest rates in the world of deaths in residential aged care as a proportion of total Covid-19 deaths.

There have been two areas of major failures during the Covid-19 pandemic – aged care and hotel quarantine. Both are ‘open and shut’ cases of Commonwealth responsibility. Yet federal government ministers, with the cooperation of parts of the mainstream media, have indulged in semantics to try to shift the blame on to states and territories.

In a delightful word salad designed to confuse, Scott Morrison said: “Well public health, we regulate aged care, but when there is a public health pandemic, then public health, which, whether it gets into aged care, shopping centres, schools or anywhere else, then they are things that are matters for Victoria. So I don’t think that it is as binary as you [the journalist] suggest.”

Let’s be clear: the federal government had no pandemic plan for aged care or quarantine. Scott Morrison not only failed to coordinate a national approach to quarantine and aged care but he and his colleagues sat on the sidelines providing unhelpful commentary. Rather than show leadership, the federal government chose to politicise the pandemic.

When the first outbreak of Covid hit BaptistCare’s Dorothy Henderson Lodge in March, it was clear that federal Health Minister Hunt and Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck had no national plan for aged care. Instead, government guidelines outsourced responsibility to each individual aged care home, claiming providers were responsible for their own pandemic plan.

Similarly, when National Cabinet met on 27 March, the state premiers were shocked when Scott Morrison arrived at the meeting with no quarantine plan. State and territory leaders were forced to devise their own plan. It was the premiers of NSW and Victoria, not Scott Morrison, who proposed that all arrivals should undertake 14 days quarantine in a hotel. Given the federal government’s obvious lack of planning, it was decided that the states and territories would run the hotel quarantine system.

https://johnmenadue.com/aged-care-quarantine-open-and-shut-cases-of-federal-responsibility-but-morrison-wont-step-up-to-the-plate/

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By Gus Leonisky at 5 Feb 2021 - 5:36am
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