Friday 29th of March 2024

team aussieland half packages...

pilotpilot

Senior ministers are defending the federal government’s $1.2 billion airline bailout plan amid a barrage of criticism from all corners.

Tourism Minister Dan Tehan said a “team Australia” approach to the package, which offers half-price flights between a host of destinations, would help boost the ailing domestic travel industry.

“If we had … really, a team Australia approach, everyone being positive, I can tell you people will be going across Australia like we have never seen before – and that is wonderful for our tourism sector,” he said on the Gold Coast on Friday.

The $1.2 billion tourism and aviation rescue package will provide an estimated 800,000 subsidised airfares on government-nominated routes. But the subsidised airfares are available on only about 15 select routes, leaving many hard-hit regions reeling.

Ben Shields, the mayor of Dubbo in western NSW, said it was unfair that four Queensland destinations had made the list while Victoria and NSW had just one each.

“There is still time to go back to the drawing board, get your crayons out and work out a better plan for tourism and the aviation industry for Australia,” he said.

Cr Shields said tourists who might have come to Dubbo would head to Victoria or Queensland instead.

“[Queensland] is the very state that pretty much behaved appallingly during the pandemic, same with Victoria – they just locked their whole states down when there was a small outbreak,” he said.

“We did it right and now NSW is effectively being punished for how we handled the coronavirus, which was the best way all along.”

Victoria’s Tourism Minister Martin Pakula said Victoria and NSW were being short-changed, while the scheme encouraged people from those states to travel elsewhere for their holidays.

“This is about the Commonwealth really treating Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide as nothing but cash cows for other parts of the country and that’s just not reasonable,” he said.

Tweet from @MartinPakulaMP

But Prime Minister Scott Morrison pushed back at the criticism, saying there had been a 75 per cent jump in searches for Australian holidays since the scheme was announced on Thursday.

“Tourism is a very significant part of the local economy, but international tourism is a very significant part of their tourism economy, and that is how we have selected the places,” he said on Friday.

“It is not selected on the basis of which premiers and states have been naughty and nice, that is not what this is about. This is about trying to get targeted support to those Australians on the ground.”

Mr Morrison said the greatest benefit from the scheme would come if state borders remained open.

Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack echoed the comments. Asked at a media briefing if Melbourne if Victoria deserved more from the handout, he said the state had locked its borders “at the drop of a hat” when there were “a couple of community outbreaks”.

“It has come at a big cost – come at a big cost to business, come at a big cost to livelihoods,” he said.

Mr MrCormack said the hardline approach to the pandemic by states such as Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia – all with Labor governments – had been hard on local tourism operators.

“The federal government’s coming to their assistance. Once again we are the white knight on the shining white horse and we are coming to the support and the help of those tourist operators on behalf of those
cafes and hotels and accommodation places and, of course, the airlines and, of course, the airports.”

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton took aim at local mayors and others “playing politics” with the program.

“The fact is mums and dads love this policy because they want a cheap airfare and they want to go for a holiday, they want to be able to spend money in regional areas,” he told the Nine Network.

scomo isn't worried... you should be...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he is not worried by news that some European countries have temporarily suspended the use of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine after reports of blood clots in a handful of people who received doses from the same batch of the vaccine.

Asked if Australia should pause its AstraZeneca rollout in line with Denmark, Norway and Iceland, Mr Morrison said “No, that is not the view of our medical advisors”.

Austria had earlier stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca shots while investigating a death from coagulation disorders and an illness from a pulmonary embolism.

Danish health authorities decided to suspend the vaccine for two weeks after a 60-year-old woman in Denmark, who was given an AstraZeneca shot from the same batch that was used in Austria, formed a blood clot and died.

But the European medicine regulator EMA said the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks and could continue to be administered and there was no evidence so far linking AstraZeneca to the cases.

EMA said the number of thromboembolic events – marked by the formation of blood clots – in people who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine is no higher than that seen in the general population, with 22 cases of such events being reported among the 3 million people who have received it as of March 9.

Mr Morrison, when asked on Friday morning if he was personally concerned about the reports, said “no I’m not, no”.

“The TGA obviously looks at these reports when they come through, but they do their own batch testing … on the batches going out across Australia,” Mr Morrison said.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.smh.com.au/national/astrazeneca-is-safe-australia-not-concerned-by-reports-of-blood-clots-in-europe-20210312-p57a74.html

 

you're scomo's mugs...

Scott Morrison’s modus operandi mimics John Howard’s. It is essentially to run government on a day-to-day basis, with little or no longer-term strategic thinking or planning on major policy issues – it is almost solely driven by political and marketing strategising, headline announcements/events/stunts.

The end game is simply winning the next election, and the daily focus is to minimize the risks in doing so. As challenges emerge, the initial response is reactive not pro-active, to let them run for a while to see how they unfold, “nothing to be seen here” – maybe they’ll even solve themselves. But, if finally there is a need to act, the response is to do as little as they can get away with.

However, once a position is taken, it’s non-negotiable. This led to Howard’s defining intransigence on issues such a ratifying Kyoto and saying ‘sorry’ to the Stolen Generation. Morrison’s position on refusing an independent inquiry on Christian Porter may prove to be just as electorally defining.

Given the significance of the Porter issue, coming on the heels of the Higgins revelations, with very important wider ramifications, Morrison’s modus operandi prevented the obvious and logical response.

As soon as Morrison was informed, and raised the accusations with Porter, he could have done a joint press conference with Porter, emphasized the importance of the issue, and then announced a full independent inquiry, which he could have claimed would get to the heart of the issue, while giving Porter his chance to clear his name, having declared his innocence. This would have minimized the scope for trial by media.

When you hear that neither Morrison nor Porter had read the “dossier” provided to the police, you can begin to understand how they were simply hoping to “tough it out” after Porter’s most disturbing press conference, hoping it would all go away.

This completely misjudged the significance and urgency of the issue, and was not helped by Morrison announcing four other inquiries rather than sticking with the main game, nor by his increasingly shrill opposition to “extrajudicial inquiries”.


He should reflect on the fact that Howard ultimately lost both his seat and government by sticking with hardline positions on Kyoto and the Sorry Statement, which gave Rudd a basis for an election-winning strategy.

 

Beyond the politics, Morrison’s political-type strategies can have very serious longer-term policy consequences as a result of policy drift – the issues don’t go away, but grow in intensity and urgency, making the ultimate responses more difficult, disruptive, and “expensive” than they would otherwise have been.

The best current example is the aged-care scandal, where the consequences of “neglect” over at least the last couple of decades, identified by the royal Ccommission in 148 recommendations, will probably cost tens of billions of dollars and require effective bi-partisan reform to be implemented consistently over at least five years.

Similarly, the government’s economic policy response to COVID, with its already very significant deficit and debt consequences, is yet to move on to an effective recovery strategy. It is easy to get lost in the spin and hubris – Josh Frydenberg’s claim that this is “the first time in recorded history that Australia has seen two consecutive quarters of economic growth of more than 3 per cent”.

He would have us overlook the historically more significant collapse in the first two quarters of last year, totaling more than the two quarters of growth, not yet recovering the pre-COVID size economy, and leaving an economy that is over 10 per cent smaller than was predicted pre-COVID.


It is easy to make growth numbers look ‘good’ when you are pumping some 17 per cent of GDP into the economy, with the cheapest ever credit.

 

However, it is much more challenging to reduce that budgetary stimulus while having to increase tax to fund the repair of other structural weaknesses, address the significant increase in inequality, the mounting debt overhang, and meet multi-decade imperatives such as climate.

Climate stands as a classic example of the Morrison’s government’s strategy of doing as little as possible to get by, despite overwhelming momentum developing across households, business, institutions, civil society, and internationally for an urgent and decisive government–led response, to transition to a low carbon Australia by mid-century.

Morrison is now going to quite ridiculous lengths to make it look like he is being dragged screaming to a formal target of net zero by 2050, but such a target is a myth if he remains committed to 26-28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. The 2030 target would need to be 50-60 per cent to meet the net zero objective – otherwise he would be locking future governments into annual reductions that would be multiples of those achieved before 2030.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2021/03/14/john-hewson-scott-morrison-politics/

 

 

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