There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.
It’s a complete blitz. | The West Australian
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The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost all the members.
The Labor leader, Mark McGowan, is no Rhodes scholar or Cary Grant. There are no stirring speeches, but he’s wildly popular, by mostly just for standing up for the state. The Labor Party WA is an old fashioned centrist type player. So un-progressively neutrally-woke that when the (ahem, right wing) Liberals recklessly talked about removing all coal power in… f.o.u.r… (4!) years, McGowan said it was too fast, renewables were too unreliable and electricity bills would rise. Did I say centrist?
Firstly, secondly and thirdly, it was about borders
Make no mistake, there was only one issue in this election which was a 90 percenter, and that was the two week mandatory quarantine — the hard borders. They worked brilliantly (at least for people on the inside of them). To be fair, Western Australia has a land border which is 1,800 kilometers long — but with a million square kilometers of desert, there are only two bitumen roads across the entire length. If WA couldn’t close the border, who could?
So Western Australians have lived the last year like Covid didn’t exist and loved it. (Wishing our friends could too). Closing the borders was hugely successful, wildly popular, and the Liberal (conservative) party opposed it all the way, and they lost the election months ago, and everyone knew it.
For months on end, the voters universally sent the message, that they didn’t want Covid, or lockdowns, or any of that. McGowan reached stratospheric popularity — in the order of 90% approval. At one point in polls — as many as 95% of WA voters approved of the border closure. When, in any democracy, on any question do we get such a unanimous decision? Even Apple Pie would struggle.
It’s worth noting that this was popular among young voters: despite not being at much risk from the virus, the young wanted the borders closed even more than older voters in WA did — probably because their jobs in the service industries of restaurants and pubs were so at risk from lockdowns. And thus with no virus and no lockdowns, the open economy boomed, the stadiums had crowds of thousands, the nightclubs danced, and the weddings rolled on. We could visit our older folk in aged care homes without a second thought. The only exceptions to the happy list were some tourism operators and the poor sods caught outside the state trying to get back in. A problem that is still a blight. What does it mean to be a citizen if you can’t come home?
Not a bad river to play on. Matilda Bay, WA.
But even many of the hapless tourism operators ended up happy. Western Australians were prolific long distance travellers before Covid, but after Covid, many of them finally toured the distant corners of their own state for the first time, and the roads were packed with caravans. Local flights were busier than before.
The Liberal state opposition in WA, and the federal government Liberals in WA too, consistently took the side of other states, including backing Clive Palmer and his High Court case against WA. Go figure. It was like they wanted to lose. And it will hurt them federally too. Which WA Liberal Senator or member spoke for WA? As far as I can tell, they all represented the Liberal Party, not the people. They got what they deserved.
… the single biggest factor in the history-making victory was McGowan’s steadfast defence of WA’s right to close its border to keep coronavirus out of the State. He resisted pressure from Prime Minister Scott Morrison, defeated Clive Palmer in the Federal and High courts, waged a war of words with his NSW counterpart and watched the WA Liberals implode spectacularly when they misread public sentiment. — Peter Law, The West Australian
Once upon a time, conservative parties were the ones which spoke of sovereign borders, but when it came to the cheapest and most obvious way to stop a potential Sino bioweapon, to prevent debilitating lockdowns and loss of individual liberties, mortality, hospital surges, long term unknowable health problems — most conservative parties missed best chance they’ve ever had to argue for strong borders. And they are still missing it.
Western Australia is an extreme example, but this was an extreme result. Border control is a tougher pill when the economy is built on tourism instead of iron ore sales to China (which need to diversify). It’s awful when families are split. It’s tough when there are border towns — but there must be a better way to manage them than a state wall through the middle — why not draft a federal agreement that the twin towns are automatically temporarily moved to the care of the state without an outbreak?). But the next virus is coming. Giving up the trips to Bali was a small price to pay to avoid doing lockdowns and to avoid potential long debilitation.
Speaking of which: What’s a lockdown with no border control? At best, inefficient. At worst, sabotage.
Clearly the West needs a better Pandemic Plan
It’s a personality thing as well as a medical thing. Right wing entrepreneurs might be happy taking risks, but the democratic masses are clearly not, no matter how hard the risk takers try to convince them. And until widespread anti-viral cocktails make this treatable (which means getting past the gatekeepers), or SARS-2 evolves into something more like the flu, the cheapest easiest way to make both the risk takers and the masses happy (ie. democracy) is to keep unknown epidemics in their country of origin. i.e. All Chinese bioweapons should stay in China.
Though, of course, no matter which lab or cave generates the next one, the problem code could pop up anywhere, not necessarily just at a wet market next to a lab. The best time to close borders was January last year when the WHO was telling us to keep them open.
Second political black hole — the Green-left climate trap
Facing disaster, the WA State Liberals installed a new inexperienced leader in the last few months. He promptly announced a far left climate anti-coal policy and thus drove off any support from the base that still remained. His energy policies were so bad, they didn’t just make it hard for Liberal supporters to vote Liberal, they made it imperative to vote against them. In a complete flip of normal politics — the Liberals sounded like the Greens, and the Labor Party were speaking like climate skeptics.
The stupid Green Left Climate election trap is so obvious, it’s amazing any Western politicians still fall for it. The trap is when any centre right politician thinks they can appeal to young lefties in the hope of picking up Green votes. The climate religion has nothing to do with science or reason, or the centre of politics. It’s only a fashion quest for status — so young woke voters cheer the craven centre right for two microseconds (if that), but they don’t change their votes.
Appealing to the group that say they care about carbon dioxide emissions is doomed from the get-go. Reducing actual emissions is worthless to them — as has been shown again and again. In every choice between cutting CO2 and advertising their own virtue, they choose the advertising every time. They don’t support nuclear power, they don’t say “no” to flights for frivolous holidays, or advocate online conferences instead of carbon hungry global symposiums, and they keep supporting wind and solar power even though neither of those is a cost effective way to reduce CO2.
The Liberals in WA didn’t do their research, didn’t understand the science of virology or climate, nor did they understand the voters they represent.
The future
Perhaps it won’t be as awful as it could be. Given that some states are run by The disguised Uniparty anyhow, being run by The Labor Party is at least a known risk, and there is the hope that the Opposition will rise like a phoenix reborn, without so much baggage. There’s also the possibility that with so much power, the Labor Union powerbrokers will lose their control. Maybe no faction will rule the roost, and a bunch of Labor members sitting on seats that are really not Labor seats, will respond to pressure from electorates that could flip back any minute. (To those West Australians, start writing letters now).
And maybe a few political leaders will notice that simple policies are winners. Listen to the voters, aim for the centre, toss out all the climate vanity, and control your own borders.
UPDATE: For a case study in “Complacency” read how the Libs thought it could not get worse than 2017.
Former Liberal leader Mike Nahan agrees, it was the border call:
Asked where it all went wrong, he had a simple answer: the borders.
When McGowan closed WA to the “eastern states” at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the then-WA Liberal leader Liza Harvey made a catastrophic tactical error by opposing it.
One Liberal said this was “the starting point of decay” of the party’s brand, which would see Ms Harvey lose her seat and her party effectively wiped out within a year.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison not only opposed McGowan’s hard border but doubled down by siding with controversial Queensland businessman Clive Palmer — who is toxic in WA — to challenge its constitutionality in the High Court. They lost.
For a man who ran Operation Sovereign Borders, it’s ironic that Morrison so profoundly misread the mood on this one.
As one source put it, “[The federal government] doesn’t look like it’s barracking for WA,” — a perception made even worse by the fact that Morrison didn’t once visit the state during the campaign.
Federally, the Liberals have been dominant in WA, their brand bolstered by Morrison’s “miracle” win in 2019 which saw the party take 11 of the 16 seats in the west.
But after Saturday’s devastating defeat, the party lost the state-based infrastructure and resourcing that’s vital to fight elections and run costly campaigns.
The next New South Wales state election will be interesting, Premier Gladys is on top of the COVID-19 situation and as a manager doing very well, but she has lead in her saddle bags, Cabinet Members who present as Liberal In Name Only (LINO) and lean left into greenism territory, example Environment Minister the woke bloke Matt Keen.
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Dennis, You are spot on Matt Keen is definitely due for a move OUT notice. His comments and philosophies are treasonous for a Liberal! DJT would be urging us to Drain The Swamp.
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Thanks for mentioning Matt Kean. His plans for electricity are dangerous and frightening – price and reliability. No country or region on the planet has been successful at replacing base-load power with wind, solar and storage as Kean wants to believe. Complete lunacy, he belongs in the Greens not a centre right political party. Matt Kean is Gladys Berejiklian’s kryptonite.
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Well then everything seems to be going according to the Federal Government’s plans for Australia.
The liberal party room, national, is firm in it’s belief of & adherence to the Paris Accord, implementation of policies whereby Energy Australia will be shutting down the Yallourn Power Station & building. Battery in it’s place, AGL is shutting Liddel P/S . Soon there’ll be no generators left.
This is all condoned by the Federal Government. Shut our energy down step by step whilst preaching platitudes about their energy plans for our future??
Another 3/4 years and we’ll reach a tipping point where reversal of the glorious Paris Accord will be impossible, too late for new generators to be built because they take years to build never mind the environmental mob blocking all attempts to even talk about it.
We’ll be left with useless expensive windmill & solar panels , the subsidies will disappear & prices will probably quadruple, reliability will go down the toilet & Hey Presto we’re a 3rd world shihole!
Have you not noticed that we’re being led down this dangerous path. The Federal Government a
Ways stands by saying nothing, doing nothing to reverse the trend. Banks will not finance energy projects! Government muttered a few platitudes.? Corporations are planning for Zero Emmissions knowing full well it’s impossible to achieve without ruination of the whole country the Federal Government does nothing!! It’s not the Labor Party we need to be afraid of!! It’s the Coalition Government we must be afraid of. At least Labor tell the truth about their intentions not like this current devious mob!
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I agree GR,
I thought Scomo would be good and I had high hopes he had a backbone, he showed some at the start but it has slowly melted to lard! He should have stood up and backed Trump when he dumped the Paris Con they might have got Boris to follow also before his girlfriend tied his netheries in the tripple knot.
Too late now, Scomo and party needed to get up and challenge the Climate Con, demand the ABC have open fair UNBIAS science debates, take the argument up to the late greenies – stop being so frightened of them, challenge the Con Science, force the CSIRO to admitt the truth. If the Libs and Nats really pushed back against the CO2 BS with real science, with real guts & conviction, if they actually led the debate and actively persued it we would be in a much better place now. Australians want a leader = someone who ACTUALLY leads we are loosing this battle and Sconmo will not loose the ELECTION WAR because he is not leading, he lost his ticker somewhere and if he doesn’t find it soon it will be years of greeny Albo largess form which this country will take 100 years or more to recover.
God help us all!!! 🙁 🙁 🙁
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SLOMO, a man without principle and cojones. I’m sure his favourite song is Blowing in the Wind.
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Totally agree
Green Kean has to go
We need to keep NSW coal fired power stations running
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Especially as SA wants an interconnector to draw electricity from them. All those windmills and solar panels need reliable backup.
From The Australian yesterday.
“Wholesale electricity prices in South Australia surged more than 300-fold on Friday night after a fire knocked out AGL Energy’s Barker Inlet gas-fired power plant and the Victorian interconnector was down for repairs.
Wholesale power prices jumped to the maximum $15,000 a megawatt hour cap as a series of events briefly threatened the stability of the grid, strengthening calls for a planned interconnector to be built between South Australia and NSW”.
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The era of logic has died as we now have the Great Endarkenment. “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” ~ Jonathan Swift
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That and to have a battle of wits, people need some to start with…..
I was musing over the landslide in WA and consider it a State version of Stockholm syndrome.
Harsh? Maybe. Is what it is. That goes for any state that re-elects the incumbents after the “horrifying” ( /sarc ) experience of covid.
Trauma Based Mind control is the process whereby the mid is subjected to a significant trauma, once the brain is “plasticised” the suggestion is inserted and once the trauma subsides, the suggestion is retained.
It would be intersting to do a count of news articles during the last WA seige and work out what percentage of new articles touts the vaccine as the “saviour”. My guess is its a lot, and this would have been played over and over ( a la 9 / 11 methodology ). You also saw it in the Lindt Cafe seige – same thing, same siege footage shown over and over, hysteria, emotion, hype….a lot of nonsense, but endlessly recycled.
The globalists have had a century to hone thier propaganda. The aim appeears to scare as many people into taking the “vaccine”, to do this requires a complaint and scared-witless “Im just over it, just jab me” population.
Question – if as it appears, the globalists are eugenicists ( is that a word? ) , why do you think they target the old and vulnerable first?
Think T4 program.
People dont realise they are being manipulated into entering a dead-end street, by globalist wolves…..
Been studying the globalists for 20+ years. We havent got to the nasty bit yet…. but ask Chairman Dan what its like to deal with them…
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Remember the Queensland State Election when “Can Do” Campbell Newman became Queensland Premier leading a Liberal National Party Government?
The Labor side was left with almost enough members elected to fill the seats in a Toyota Tarago people mover.
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WA must have used the same advisers as QLD did last election.
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The ALP returned to government at the following election, running no policy other than personal vilification of Campbell Newman.
Running the same policy program, they twice got rid of Tony Abbott.
If the coalition do not lift their game dramatically they will be out altogether at the earliest opportunity.
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Good synopsis of the whole catastrophe Jo. Many fine members of The WA State parliament gone! McGowan will now be empowered to do so many things that Labor have previously been thwarted from doing. Electoral Reform will be on top of his agenda, imho. At best 4 Nationals, maybe 5 will not provide a good springboard for a a return of the Conservative side of politics in WA.
Nic Goaran and Peter Collier were the main instigators of the move to bypass Dean Nalder and install the young fellow. The WA Liberal Party need to get rid of these two ASAP. Both are very clearly determined to Right Wing Christianise the party and become power blockers in their own right. Worked a treat didn’t if?
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Being a Brit I have no knowledge at all of the politics in this state
You say
“McGowan will now be empowered to do so many things that Labor have previously been thwarted from doing.”
What sort of things, other than electoral reform and if that is enacted what is it expected to achieve?
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When Labor control both houses of government the wasteful spending starts and no one spends money better than the Labor party.
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Tony,
When you have such an advantage of numbers it makes it easy for him to place “his” people in the right place.
Labor hacks will be placed in such QUANGOS – semi government agencies and advisory boards. Places like Board Members for Harbour Boards, Port Authorities, Racing and Gaming, Lotteries West there are hundreds of them. While many have been appointed in the last 4 years this trend will continue.
There will be an increase in women in these posts as well as Union hacks and the plethora f leftwards.
It is about saturating the levels of government wit influence.
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The last two lib leaders seemed to be hopeless, making McGowans job so much easier, what’s the shadow treasurer like.
Labor seem keen to decimate Collie and Muja power stations and the coal industry.
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Matthew says:
Why would they steal the idiot child’s thunder and do that?
That was a Liberal Party policy. You know: Zac what’shisname and his bible-bothering string-pullers.
The unions will keep the power stations going for as long as their members need the jobs. Coal and unionism go hand-in-hand. It’s only when the green-dolts get their lever into Labor that idiotic things happen.
McGowan Labor doesn’t need the greens to govern. He has a massive majority in his own right. So, it’ll all be good for coal.
Go long coal, is my tip.
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I agree Sceptical,
Also…
Coal is one of the key irreplaceable inputs for the production of steel.
WA has trillions and trillions of tonnes of Iron ore…
That red rock is just a useless rock, without coking coal.
Yet many groups advocate closure of coal mines.
They do not know that there is nothing that can replace coking coal, at this time.
No coking coal, means no steel.
Go long coal.
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But no coking coal in WA
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I has only heard of the Zakster in this blog and was amazed at his apparent naivety. I have since seen a few snippets of him in action and he seemed a far from impressive choice for a Liberal leader. More like a slightly limp Adam Bandt that might appeal to Greens in whatever the soy latte belt is in Perth.
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“The Labor leader, Mark McGowan, is no Rhodes scholar or Cary Grant. There are no stirring speeches, but he’s wildly popular, by mostly just for standing up for the state. The Labor Party WA is an old fashioned centrist type player. So un-progressively neutrally-woke that when the (ahem, right wing) Liberals recklessly talked about removing all coal power in… f.o.u.r… (4!) years, McGowan said it was too fast, renewables were too unreliable and electricity bills would rise. Did I say centrist?”
As far back as the early 1980s, Hawke Labor were voted into Federal Government in 1983, Labor started to realise that to beat the then much more Menzies’ Liberals and Country Party (now National Party) they needed to move right and present as centre of the political spectrum and push the Coalition further to right of centre. They were centre to centre-right, a “broad church” Prime Minister Howard later described them. And then the Turnbull Party dragged them to centre-left and further to the left until in 2021 the Coalition presents like Union Labor & Greens associates.
POTUS Trump understood the mood of most people, in the US as in Australia most voters are centre of the political spectrum, somewhat conservative.
In my opinion Australian politicians have embraced globalism socialism and have permitted organisations like the United Nations to interfere in our national affairs, sovereignty. POTUS Trump warned the UN Officials to back off and stop interfering in member nations business. He did that twice during addresses to the UN in New York.
Climate hoax, renewables debacle and much more, Agenda 21 now Agenda 30 and other UN based objectives are no longer being accepted by the majority of voters.
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It is interesting that the most “isolationist” state in Australia has re-elected the leader that took them there with such resounding support.
By contrast, it is not considered good form to put country ahead of globalism in Europe and parts of the US and some inner city locations in Australia.
Victoria was the last to close borders but after the hard won effort to be Covid free, the State soon realised the value of closing borders.
In Mark McGowan’s defence, not that he needs it, he is possibly the best Liberal leader in the country, growing up in the family business in NSW and attending UofQ although an Arts/Law degree rather than a real education. His only failing as far as I can see is that he happens to be in the Labor party. But that shows my prejudice – I believe I would find it hard to vote for a Liberal party that was demonising carbon.
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In my view Rick, that just shows the utter incomptence of our Health Authorities.
They have had more than 12 months to formulate Covid responses:
After all that time we still do not have a quarantine station in Victoria.
HOTEL QUARANTINE IS PROVEN TO BE HOPELESS.
Closing Borders should be a last resort. The proper response is to isolate cases.
Then we need to sequester known cases and treat them with the best available treatmennts.
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When all facilities are empty, why not put virus carriers in a big hotel in the middle of a city of 5 million people. That just go to be safe. Surely that was the idea of the Chief Medical Officer?
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🙂 🙂
You forgot to mention the obligatory closed system recycling air conditioning.
Eventually they are all equal.
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Exactly.
The measure of future success in reducing the effect of CV19 is how fast infected people are properly quarantined away from society.
Total lockdowns have only negative consequences; with lives torn apart due to failed businesses, unresolved separation and a huge national debt from the unnecessary support measures implemented by government to support crashed businesses and industry.
But, perhaps the worst thing about lockdowns has been the separation of family members at the time of death.
This is a moment that can be precious, but now lost forever because of the inability or unwillingness of our managers to introduce a sense of proportion to things.
Life has been ruined for so many because politicians look after themselves first.
The concept of quarantine has been around for at least two thousand years , but hey, history is so old fashioned.
I still remember the first half dozen CV19 deaths in Australia. Ages ranged from 71 to 86.
And now we have the scandal of Cuomo’s performance in New York to mull over.
KK
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“In Mark McGowan’s defence, not that he needs it, he is possibly the best Liberal leader in the country, growing up in the family business in NSW and attending UofQ although an Arts/Law degree rather than a real education.
A very important quote RickWill, and I wish there was an easy and straightforward way to overcome the problem that our Universities in the USA are plagued by the same problem. Students are steeped in Socialist/Communist propaganda at all levels of education. The higher the level of education (Elementary, Jr. High, High School, Undergraduate university, and graduate school), the farther left towards the curriculum is.
To overcome this huge (and fatal for a democratic form of government) problem we need to re-engineer our education system.
Of course education begins in the home and this is where we need to start. But how do we do this in a non-totalitarian society?
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Ruled by Presidential edict, leaders in hiding, capitol behind barbed wire and populated by troops, silencing dissent, millions clamouring for the next handout of ever more worthless fiat currency. If you think that is non totalitarian what will it take to get it over the line?
My guess is that its too far gone now. Secession of a cluster of States to re-establish a viable normal might work, other than that its just a tsunami of Idiocracy
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yarpos. Thank you.
Yes, I know how bad and totalitarian the Democrats are and what they did in the 2020 election.
My question was unclear. I meant how we on the right could restore our educational systems so that we could win elections without also becoming totalitarian?
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At some stage you gave you play like them, at least for a while.
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I wish that the Federal government did something about Victoria instead of going after WA. Good grief.
As for the Federal government, they knowingly did the wrong thing here and there, but they’re arguably the best thing we have for now. Not that this is saying much.
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Going after WA ? really? what, they made a comment?
What is the something that you would do about VIC now? bit late I would have thought
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It will. With their ballooning popularity we have already seen untrammeled arrogance from the premiers of WA, Vic and Qld. They all believe their press and genuinely seem believe they can do no wrong. This will inevitably lead to them making more and more outlandish decisions, firmly believing they know better than those advising them.
The electorate will ultimately turn on them and they will be turfed unceremoniously from office. It’s a cycle we’ve see repeated far too often. The scary thing is that there is a greater level of support than previously that can only inflate their egos more than has been the case in the past.
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The Libs don’t even have the numbers to form the opposition.
In question time it’s going to be like, “What, you again! Didn’t you just ask the last question?”
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There are so many labor govt ministers, they have to sit on the opposition benches, their side is full
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You’re leaving out that industrial metals are trading at or near record highs. The mines must be booming & the WA government flush with cash.
Hard for an opposition to beat that.
The fact that neo-Liberal Party are spineless cowards just meant they were stomped into the gutter.
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How long before the minerals market comes off the boil, and how far will it come? How many more Mr Guptas. are there?
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Depends on how fast Brazil gets its Iron Ore production up. WA is the largest iron ore producer in the world with 800mt. Brazil is second with about half as much. China buys about 80% of our ore, and if they could have cut Australian iron ore off this year, as they did with barley, wine, beef and coal to play hard against Australia, presumably they would have. But Brazil let covid run, and had some bad dam failures, and quite a lot of iron ore mines were out of production.
The price of iron ore has risen $100/t in two years up to $170. But Brazil will recover.
After Iron Ore, WA exports 75% of Australia’s gold, then there is bauxite, natural gas, rare minerals. Plus wheat etc.
The state is hugely exposed to China. When the GFC hit it missed WA. We had a boom all the way through, due to China ramping up demand.
But if inflation takes off (everyone’s printing money), then gold may become the largest most valuable export.
When the short lockdown occurred last April, McGowan cut the state into nine regions and kept them isolated. He was rightly scared of the virus getting into remote regions where there are no ICU beds, many indigenous (presumably high risk) people, plus all those mines worth billions of dollars, and our gas supply which we depend on for electricity too.
I suspect a lot of the success of McGowan and the state is just that our Swamp is not as mature. Call us backwards, old fashioned, and behind the times. (But who wants to be progressive?) The guys in charge of the hospital beds here, I suspect, had a more direct line to the Premier and explained what needed to be done. Elsewhere in the world, the middle-men desk-jockey academics probably had more sway and helped bureaucratize and stuff everything right up.
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The WA Liberals have totally lost the plot. What were they thinking? Probably not a lot. They offer NOTHING to the average conservative voter, and frankly I think we the Right thinking voters should now start a new Party that truly represents our hopes and wishes.
My main fear of Labour is that it will (in a fit of hubris) be swayed by the real Left in their midst. That will lead to really silly, egregious policies (a al Biden) and they too will squander their political capital. This would till the ground for seeding a meaningful Opposition.
We shall see…….
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Shooters! At least they are good with guns.
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jmd the shooters and fishers party gave their preferences to Clive Palmer and Clive is anti gun so I wouldn’t trust them at all with firearms policy .
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Shooters have to get enough votes to be elected, otherwise they have to give preferences to someone.
Who do you suggest, the party of John ‘gun grabber’ Howard?
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jmd you force me to do something unpleasant, defend John Howard .
As ridiculous your notion is in giving preferences to John Howard at least he never took them all , Clive Palmer wants no privately owned firearms in oz .
How on earth the shooters and fishers would prefer an anti gun Palmer left a lot of people scratching their heads .
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Robert…
I’ve just checked the HTV cards for every seat contested by SFFP outside the metro area.
First preferences go to a mix of Nationals, WA Labor and the Liberals. Not one of them goes to the PUP.
I’ve seen a lost of propaganda by other minor parties trying to attract votes from the same demographic, and I’ve learned that it cannot be trusted…. which is why I went to the source.
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Wasn’t aware PUP was contesting this election, I’m referring to when he was elected to parliament years back but if they were stupid enough to pull a stunt like that then they don’t support our interests and obviously are clueless .
I’ve had dealings with them here in Victoriastan at an inquiry into invasive animals of which Deer was the number one foe of every farmer but according to Shooters Farmers Fishers deer had to keep their protected status .
So not for the farmer and not for the gun owner I guess they are like any political party that when they say they’re here to help, – run .
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In the seat count, “Green 0” is a source of comfort.
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Finally Jo I find myself reading something you’ve written that I completely agree with.
Maybe the conservatives in Liberal parties in other states with understand the lesson that in this WA election as well.
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One of the lessons for the libs is don’t pander to the left, they won’t vote for you no matter what you say or do, look after your base.
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Yes Matthew. I agree.
Part of the Liberals’ problem is that they’ve been infiltrated by green-left thinking. That is slowly undermining the philosophy of the Liberal Party and its appeal to the centre-right voters and the centre.
In the case of Western Australia, McGowan saw this. He now owns the centre in this state and many centre-right voters as well.
I take heart from the fact that the WA voters demonstrated their preparedness to select the best set of policies available to them. That augurs well for the future of this state.
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Absolutely 100% agree. Much of the modern Libs are appeasers and have no spine. They deserve to loose all elections until they learn their lesson and move away from the left back to centre-right. Otherwise, we need a new party to represent better policies, such as supporting coal and nuclear power stations to help us avoid the real economic catastrophe to come, not the fake one promoted by both major parties.
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‘For a second time in a century, West Australians have overwhelmingly endorsed the idea of breaking away from the federation, re-electing a wildly popular Premier, whose crowning achievement during the pandemic has been shutting the border and closing WA to the “eastern states”. ABC
Our quarry wants to break away and become a republic.
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Sandgropers define themselves by hostility to “the Eastern states.” McGowan tapped into that rich lode in a totally cynical way and won the prize.
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Yes they do, so when I visited the company’s WA branches I often reminded our employees that the wise men come from the east.
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That’ll generate some Myrrhth over here.
But it makes no franken sense, we’ve got all the Gold. (And the camels).
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I’ve just started researching the trip to Broome this winter and the ins and outs of the various state Covid policies of the states I have to travel through , WA is going to be the headache with their draconian permit system and GTG .
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Don’t forget to obtain a list of prohibited food items, even sealed honey jars, before reaching border check points.
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This will be our fourth trip into WA Dennis and no you don’t want to get caught with uncooked fruit and veg or honey , no roadblock on the Tanamai or Great central we’ve noticed but there is now .
10
Jo
There is a clear lesson here for Scomo and the Federal Liberal party, if they choose to listen. That is that Liberal leaders who espouse climate change rubbish will have complete desertion on their hands. Yes, I know all about McGowan and borders but look at QLD with a similar election. Bad but absolutely in a different universe to the idiots in the West.
Scomo needs to cease his “net zero” prattlings and immediately cease any moral support to the climate change crazies. He will rue the day he started on this unless he reverses course.
My view is that the Conservatives were an election too early. People had to vote Scomo due to the Labour loonies on climate change so gave Cory a wide berth. Now though I believe that Cory would get far more solid support from LNP and Liberals dismayed at the anti science stupidity which they are hearing. An opening for somebody here…
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Too Late unfortunately. The Australian Conservatives are dead and gone. Winning a senate seat in each State proved to be wildy optomistic. The vote achieved was about 0.4%, which was devastating. The enthusiasm of the party members was great but we were far to few. The voting public was either unaware of the Australian Conservatives or suspicious. I don’t know which.
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Peter C: It is not an accident that any halfway decent minor party on the Right that appears to be competent and not easy to mock just disappears off the ABC.
Imagine if the ABC interviewed Cory Bernardi as often as they put The Australia Institute or the Climate Council on TV?
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Where is the evidence they were competent?
08
There seems to be universal jubilation about turning WA into an inland New Zealand. However what about the longer term?
Does this mean that the citizens of WA have no widespread immunity? Does this mean borders will be closed until the
SARS-COV2 virus has degenerated into a less pathogenic organism? Will WA be vulnerable to, say, asymptomatic travellors?
Is WA hoping for a vaccine in order to open borders?
Have the citizens of WA any knowledge of the doubts, amounting in some countries to outright bans, about the fatal reactions
to some of the gene modifying vaccines. Have the citizns of WA heard that one college of physicians here in England have
authorised a new form of death certificate : CODIV (not COVID) : “Cause Of Death Is Vaccine”.https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSceptics
(could be satire – but still)
/comments/m58zev/todays_comments_20210315/gqztj4w?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
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The borders are open. All you need is your G2G.
10
That and the other questions apply to all states, including Vic where only 0.3% of the population have tested positive to the virus. Realistically/statistically 100% of people in Australia haven’t had the virus.
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CODIV.
This alerts us to the possibility that CV19 “vaccines” were developed in the same year as the most recent US Presidential election and may have the same level of reliability.
KK
10
Yep the majority of voters in WA are so compassionate they would deny the ability to say a final goodbye to a loved one in person or prevent a dad from being at a child’s birth or seeing their new born for months. But hey they can live their life in their little bubble as if Covid did not exist and that is all that seems to matter to to them and suff everyone else. All based on the scare that Covid is actually deadly to all when in reality you only have to be concerned if you are over 70 and if you are over 70 there are many health issues to be concerned about and take action to mitigate not just covid
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Cripes Red. Turn it up.
Tell that to the Wuflu dead please. But count them first. I’ve got 2,666,439 souls, most of whom would be alive today if their governments had followed Jo’s advice given about this time last year.
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Wuhan Flu is a killer. This is not a political issue. It has been life and death for hundreds of thousands of Australians. The first flu killed over 100 million people when the world had 1/5th of the number of people. Without lockdown, awareness of viruses, vaccines, prophylactics, a death toll of 500,000,000 would have been likely.
Like the original flu H1N1 in 1918, the second wave killed everyone, twice as many as the first. These things mutate to their victims. It’s a statistical selection process. We have to stop the first wave and eliminate it.
The UK had 1,000 dead people every day and it’s only twice our population. Currently down to 149 people a day.
What is a political issue is that WA did the right thing. That is why there was a landslide election result. The whole state approved. No one cared for Climate Change and carbon taxes and clean energy and lost jobs.
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Bright Red, there have indeed been some heartbreaking stories. The failure IMHO is the criminal lack of antiviral research. With proper research we could minimize the risks for the special most desperate visitors by giving them tests plus prophylactic antivirals, or possibly monoclonal antibody therapy allowing them to minimize the quarantine. Though it is a tricky game. Once one group gets an exemption…
And as Victoria knows, once one virus gets in, 7 weeks later 700 people a day are catching it.
But of course, with proper research we might find there is a real alternative to quarantine. Monoclonal antibodies could give a month or two of protection. But I have no idea how effective these are.
And as TDeF says, this will mutate. Sooner or later it won’t be so nasty.
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Morning Jo,
What bugs me most in this is that there was no one in any official position, or academic institution, who was tasked with the job of researching overseas clinical successes, alleged, considered or substantiated cures or preventatives against COVID.
…
That was a failure of management at both the political and Departmental level.
The examples of zinc, an ionophore and vitamin D were demonstrated to be effective and safe a year ago, but officially ignored. And the fast acting calcifediol and ivermectin options both produce major improvements within hours. Without adverse side effects.
…
These were even suppressed, criminally in my opinion.
…
Cheers
Dave B
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Come off it TdeF! The world wide death toll so far is only 2,669,260 and the WuFlu has been raging for over a year.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
When it is all over I doubt if we will have more than double those numbers.
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That is the reductio ad absurdum argument.
The death toll was the extreme if we did nothing more than in 1918 against the proposal that we let it rip. This time around, 100 years later, we know so much more. In 1918 they did not know viruses existed.
This time around most large cities in the world shut down completely. Not a car or person on the streets in places like Delhi! No aircraft. No cars. And even no bicycles. We know the enemy.
I am comparing the current situation with the obvious proposal that we do nothing and let it rip. And the argument for this was that it only killed people over 70.
And this time we are not waiting for a benign virus to dominate. The people of WA are thrilled to not have to sacrifice their families and quality of life to keep their economy going. And it has worked brilliantly.
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Agreed, but you need to reread the sentence.
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They’ve ever been an insular lot in WA always ready to turn up their noses at the barbarous “ES people” so shutting down the state comes naturally; I find it curious how easily covid balkanized Australia.
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Yes Sam. Lets ignore the WHO definition of a covid death which is totally ridiculous and means that a very large no of deaths are being assigned to covid which are patently not covid related. And lets not look too hard at the those dying “with covid” with clear pre existing conditions who are now written up as dying “of” covid. If a cancer patient got a broken arm and then died of cancer would we say the broken arm killed them?
We have what can only be described as an inaccurate and anti scientific approach on covid deaths that makes it impossible to properly ascertain the numbers.
The CDC has confirmed that 94% die with comorbidities and thus in truth one can only say 6% died OF covid. Put in that context your hysterical number drops dramatically , and shows just how maddening the typical govt response has been over a virus that for those under 70 can be described as being similar to the flu which has never been locked down for.
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The original Spanish Flu killed fit young men, trench fodder in WWI where it started. 90% men aged 20-50. You can see how the virus adapted to its target. The second wave killed everyone, quickly. This is the normal pattern.
Arguing that this mutation only kills old people and that they don’t matter is not only heartless, but would embed this virus in our society where it would mutate. The virus is mutating so fast and substantially that we can accurately track which version people have, tracing it to a hotel, an incoming traveler. The idea, the whole idea, was to keep it out, save a million lives and try to create a vaccine. This was not possible in 1918.
This strategy is so successful it will always be used to say there never was a problem. This is where our public broadcaster should be informing people, telling the scientific truth, but they are too busy trying to run the country.
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Prophet of Boom, I’ve explained why the “only 6% die of Covid” argument is false, here, and the pattern of Excess deaths which always peaks at the same time Covid infections peak means official covid deaths are an underestimate of the real tally during large surges.
It may take years before we can even estimate how many of the deaths above the official tally were due to covid and how many were due to people avoiding hospitals etc or due to the lockdowns. But it is obvious that when city hospitals were swamped with covid patients the deaths from heart disease, stroke and clotting disorders peaked at the exact same week, or one or two weeks earlier. This was also true of dementia — those patients are at high risk of Covid, but it is hard to explain how their deaths could have been raised at the same time due to them avoiding visiting emergency wards at hospital.
Many covid cases were missed due to inadequate testing – especially in the first wave. Due to Covid’s anesthetizing effect people with it sometimes don’t even realize their blood oxy sats are perilously low and their lungs are so damaged.
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Jo
So you agree with the WHO definition or the UK idea that somehow if somebody has had potential contact with somebody with covid in the last 28 days then their death is OF covid? I would hope not!
I agree many cases were missed, which is why we had those ridiculous 3% etc die from the virus figures.
I still say we have grossly overreacted and stupidly not even bothered to apply a risk based approach. I wish I had kept the link but many months ago I listened to a Manitoban Professor saying that if covid had not been publicised we would not have known it was there.
Just open up, stop the testing, stop the hysteria and practice sensible hygiene and make Ivermectin, Vit D and HCQ plus zinc readily available and it will all seem totally normal.
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You’re preaching to the converted here PoB on on using known efficacious treatments.
Unfortunately, not all governments see it that way. They’re wrong, of course but that’s how it was/is.
In light of that, and in the absence of an effective vaccine, quarantine and border closure is the next best effective solution. Nevertheless, it comes with costs.
So does death.
00
” if covid had not been publicised we would not have known it was there.”
Just talk to an actual ICU doctor instead of listening to academics in universities that have never treated a single patient. That Professor was in a fantasy land. Perhaps at the time, he simply had no idea. ICU specialists are all saying the same thing from Brazil to Iran, to Italy, Spain, Australia, and Singapore. Watch the videos.
00
Perhaps we better shut down due to the seasonal flu that we get every year. A lot of people die from that too!
10
I agree … the evidence is coming in now and it’s clear that lockdown is essentially useless for controlling a virus, and mostly intended for political purposes to control a population.
Border controls and quarantine have worked (somewhat) for Australia despite being badly implemented. I believe that other factors such as high vitamin D levels ended up in our favour, and possibly there were early mutations of a similar virus in Australia already in 2019.
If anyone has a link to weekly stats for various causes of death in Australia 2019 and 2020 that would be very helpful. I am looking for any surge in respiratory deaths out of season late 2019. Thanks in advance!
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Not so. The lockdowns have obviously succeeded everywhere they were done properly and with border controls. The economies that are booming are predictably the healthiest ones.
The worst plan was letting the virus in, then letting it run amok, overrun hospitals, and then bringing in a lockdown as a last ditch desperate measure while keeping the airlines flying in infections and simultaneously NOT researching antivirals that could keep people out of hospital. And then to compound the stupid, by releasing the lockdown with many infections still running and with open airports still bringing in new cases, it sets off a repeat cycle. Whereupon the docs said “the sooner the lockdown the shorter it is” and so the politicians delayed the lockdown until it was right out of control. The UK and parts of the US have this rolling failure worked out to a tee….
I can believe left leaning pollies will do all kinds of short sighted and self serving things, but I have yet to be convinced that the left like lockdowns. What’s there to gain? They can’t use their Frequent flyer points, they can’t show off at their charity balls, or attend their COP203 conference. It interferes with vanity displays. They can’t drop their children into childcare, or hire a maid or a pool cleaner. For the upperclass climbers, a lockdown means homeschooling their own children. Can you imagine?
Mail in voting is an obvious win in the right political situation obviously. And that was the perfect storm for the USA. But it wasn’t what was driving things elsewhere.
The truth is the lockdowns are the last and only choice when incompetent rulers failed to do all the sensible things first. But the Right has been completely absent on the need for border control.
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Yes the left love lockdowns Jo. The left want greater control over the people and to shift the private sector into the public sector. That’s exactly what lockdowns do – kill free enterprise and grow the public sector and/or dump them on welfare payments. Ask private tourism operators for example. Remember Queensland’s world renowned tourism industry? Now in tatters thanks to a left state government.
Daniel Andrews in Victoria put all of his state into lockdown when his government lost control of quarantine on multiple occasions. In WA Mark McGowan put all of Perth into lockdown when you had a breach from quarantine.
By contrast NSW through far better management only locked down a few suburbs of Sydney during the Northern Beaches outbreak over Christmas. That is now forgotten, nobody died and NSW’s economy is doing well without iron ore.
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Queensland tourism industry would have been saved if NSW and QLD had shut borders in June to Vic. With no virus in NSW / SA / WA / NT and Tas, and New Zealand, we could have all been flying to Cairns for a holiday in winter.
One of ScoMo’s big failures was not to talk the small, clean states into a travel bubble with each other, and NZ, and clean islands like Palau, Micronesia, etc. Instead all the little clean states were supposed to just open their doors and get infections from the big two careless ones. That’s what killed tourism.
Mark McGowan might have opened the border to SA or QLD or TAS if he felt assured they could guard their borders to Vic or NSW if needed. But those states gave no indication of doing that, and ScoMo and Gladys in NSW especially pushed for the exact opposite of that.
Cookster, The left are happy to hurt private businesses for sure, but a short sharp successful lockdown cleans out the virus fast and saves businesses. What the left want are the stupid open border ineffective long rolling lockdowns. EG US and UK style. Its a perpetual state of tracking people and crushing businesses.
The crazy Right need to stop getting distracted, and focus on issues that matter — get antivirals past the gatekeepers, and shut the borders before the virus gets in. Protesting about All Lockdowns (as if they are binary 1:0 things) is too late, too simplistic, it’s counter productive and exactly what President Xi want the Right to do.
30
If lockdown only works with border controls then how do you know the lockdown did anything useful? Might have been the border control that solved the problem.
What counts as “done properly” and why? Clearly in a modern economy it is impossible to isolate everyone in their homes all the time. No country did that, even in Wuhan they went out to buy food and designated “essential” workers continued doing “essential” things.
If you want to compare Perth and Sydney lockdown policy to most of the world, the rules were mild and people could do most of the things they wanted to do. Is that “done properly”? The results in Australia were very good … how much was luck and how did you measure that?
Compare for example Denmark, which had a brief 1 month border closure, then has voluntary quarantine when you come from overseas (they ask you to do it, but no heavy handed enforcement) and some quite low level lockdown rules (people who live there say most follow the rules most of the time, but it’s not so strict). They had one of the lowest death rates in Europe, and yet they measure significant numbers of positive cases within the country so the virus is in there. Hardly anyone dies of it in Denmark. Why are they so good, amongst so many other nearby countries that were much worse?
BTW in my opinion the mink slaughter was useless and pure wastage.
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We know the lockdowns or some form of restriction on the population movement worked because the fall in new cases was almost always found with a 12 – 14 day lag which is exactly what we expect of a an average 5 day incubation, plus delay in testing, and one week of symptom development to the point where people seek a test or hospital.
We know lockdowns work because they also stopped transmission of nearly every respiratory disease spread through aerosol or droplet. EG flu. We had a summer season of influenza running here in March last year. Border control didn’t stop that. Lockdowns did.
The UK could have stopped Covid so easily. Instead they locked 66 million people in homes but allowed flights to bring in new cases every day. The extra cases totally neutralized the lockdown — bringing the Ro effectively back to 1 — keeping the surge going and stopping the lockdown from clearing out the virus. It was sabotage.
A lockdown is not a binary 1:0 situation. It’s a spectrum of behaviour changes that reduce the Ro. Treat any graph or study that reduces it to binary as meaningless.
In some high trust societies it may well be possible to do restrictions voluntarily. And in sweden half the nation live alone. Clearly voluntary guidelines didn’t work in Victoria where many people were found to be flouting lockdown rules until they were enforced via proper hotel quarantine.
We also know in Victoria that a single breach of the border became 700 infections a day within 2 months, and that was despite postcode lockdowns — chasing outbreaks and being two weeks behind a dumb virus is a dumb strategy. But we also know Victoria had inadequate track and trace and testing. Once cases are above a few a day, contact tracing becomes logistically nearly impossible. One loose guard in Perth had 150 close contacts and 400 casual contacts. The numbers rise in a factorial way.
On NSW: Sydney did much better than expected, but was playing with fire. How many times were they rescued simply because the taxi driver / symptomatic person on a train etc, was not a superspreader? That was just luck. Their contact tracing was excellent but they are only one superspreader from disaster. Christmas and New Year were not that much fun I gather for the Northern beaches. That was sad to see.
Here in WA we have had some luck too, it’s not all been great management. But we watch the news of constant small outbreaks and lockdowns in Sydney with schools, suburbs, gyms and what not being regularly closed — and reduced numbers of people at all large events — smaller weddings and funerals and stadiums etc, and all the hassle and anxiety and job loss that goes with that, the tracking required, plus the maintenance of huge contact tracing teams and we don’t envy Sydney-siders at all.
We are tired of Gladys lecturing us to take more hotel quarantine people while it appears she accepts more than Sydney can safely handle. (Though I am very sympathetic to the need to bring Australians home, and I want all states to handle more, but safely).
If NSW had not left their own border open in June to Victoria, they could have avoided the next three months of random closures. The virus did not have to reach NSW or QLD. They shut the border anyway, but three weeks too late. How much does three extra months of random closures and the 4m2 rule, as opposed to 2m2, at pubs and restaurants hurt businesses? Was the three extra weeks of border traffic worth the three months of losses that followed?
Here in WA — until the short 5 day lockdown in Feb — we would hug and shake hands like there was no risk, which there wasnt. We are back to that again. How much is that worth? It’s a lifestyle thing.
Whether the NSW strategy is better than the WA strategy depends on a cost benefit that depends on estimates of how long the virus will dominate for, how big tourism is, how many roads there are on the border etc. Will vaccines work? Will the virus mutate? Will the vaccines be any use at all in six months with a different mutant. Whats the cost of one case at a billion dollar mine? Will vaccines cause ADE?
And the biggest most unspoken question of all — would the widespread use of antivirals or monoclonals change everything? Why aren’t they being actively researched. Why is it illegal for docs to prescribe HCQ or Ivermectin or Bromhexine against Covid here in Australia? Why are we not doing widespread Vitamin D campaigns to test and treat deficiencies?
PS: The Mink slaughter was essential. Sadly. The risk of a new nasty variant is simply a catastrophe waiting to happen.
20
much worse? really? excess deaths in other nearby countries are pretty similar apart from sweden that was a bit higher. They are all sitting on lower than trend excess deaths right now.
00
Yarpos, vague “averaging” is meaningless. There are 20 variables that matter, and any analysis of excess deaths has to be on a city or county level and week by week or it blurs the result to an empty platitude. In places where the virus overwhelmed the system the Excess deaths were higher than any weeks in the last 20 years.
“Lower than trend” excess deaths is a common predictable feature in other places (outside the surges). That only shows that lockdowns save more lives (in the immediate short run) by stopping the spread of infectious diseases that we think of as “normal” – plus fewer car and workplace accidents maybe. Track the excess deaths against the daily new cases and the cause of those trends is obvious. Covid kills and lockdowns are successful. (They may be wildly expensive, sabotaged, or unnecessary because we should have used anti-virals, but that is a different debate).
20
Mmmmm lockdowns succeeded “everywhere”. I dont think so, there are enough examples between US State and EU countries to indicate lockdowns are just one approach not an answer.
00
“Mail in voting” is evil. It destroys the concept of the secret ballot.
It brings more difficulty in chain of custody – the control of procedures and follow up audit.
With more authoritarian governments, and more lefty thinking, we will see more of this mail voting.
30
What may well have come out of the WA disaster for the Libs and Nationals is the clear idea that going Green and Woke is not popular. Still there are many LINOS who think they can appeal to Green voters and trust their ‘rusted on’ supporters to keep barracking Liberal. Malcolm Turnbull has still not worked that out. WA has shown no one is rusted on.
The devastating vote against the liberals should show at a National level that the idea to shut down coal power, industry and mining and open borders was never going to win new voters and keep old voters. So much for Zac and his brave new woke world and energy policy, which was to have no energy.
Then you get the UN/EU/Woke Open Borders in the middle of the greatest pandemic in a hundred years, as is the policy of the new Biden administration and the EU. It is designed to finish what the CCP started, the destruction of Western democracies.
And the Great Barrier Reef is not dying. And the seas are not rising. And the world is not getting hotter. America has just had its coldest winter in 30 years and politicians are still talking Global Warming. Where?
How can you appeal to voters with policies no one wants? Not even people who have voted Liberal all their lives.
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And where are our Climate Change bushfires this year? There is plenty of bush left. Why isn’t it all ablaze again? Or do we have to wait for the fuel load to build up again. Why doesn’t anyone believe the ABC?
Who really believes what the media tell us. And it is good that Christian Porter is suing the ABC and Louise Milligan, the same reporter who was so active and actually won an award for succeeding in jailing Cardinal Pell for a year for crimes he could not possibly have committed, even a crime against one man who denied it happened. And the head of the ABC is surprised at the defamation suit? Who else releases a book stating a man is guilty in the middle of his trial? What chance did he have of a fair trial? Where is their apology to Pell? And where is his compensation for the crimes of the ABC in demanding his incarceration?
The ABC would love the results in WA. They would be wrong. Labor won because they ran on a very conservative, WA First platform and the Liberals went with the extreme left ABC. And as a new poll just showed, over half of Australians would not pay one cent for their ABC. Australian families are all paying about $200 each for the ABC/SBS. Why? Only WA Liberal politicians watch it.
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The ABC?
Seriously!
Their ABC is a green-left insurgency.
The greatest newspaper in Australia, “The Australian”, published the results of a survey of the ABC in today’s edition (Page 3):
When asked whether they think the ABC is “more left wing” or “more right wing”, almost two thirds (66.1 per cent) of respondents said the national broadcaster was more left wing.
Furthermore, almost four out of five Australians (79.2 per cent) would not subscribe to ABC television if it were to become a subscription service like streaming giant Netflix.
Among the ABC’s core audience of those aged 55 and over, just 15 per cent of respondents said they would be willing to pay for a Netflix-style subscription service if it replaced the national broadcaster’s TV service.
And, tellingly:
Of the respondents who identified as Labor voters, 60 per cent said they thought the ABC leaned “left”;
https://theaustralian.smedia.com.au/HTML5/default.aspx?publication=NCAUS
Paywalled. However, it’s worth the subscription.
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Oops.
Apologies TdF. I misread your last para.
🙁
20
Agreed. Thanks for the link. It was an amazing poll which confirmed what everyone knows. It’s our money and their ABC. Accountable to no one.
In an internet age, we do not need or want to pay for a public broadcaster, especially a very biased politically active one which hates Catholics and the Liberal party as much as Louise Milligan. And she received a journalist prize for her hit job on Cardinal Pell during his trial.
And we certainly do not need an ethnic broadcaster at our cost. In fact in a fully automated world, we do not need a BOM. And what has the CSIRO done lately, like the last 80 years? Did that cloud seeding ever work? How about the automatic shearing machine?
Collectively at least $5Billion, especially when you add in those ‘Clean energy’ quangoes. And what is dirty about coal energy? CO2 is as clean as H2O. Invisible and essential. And H2O is by many orders of magnitude the worse greenhouse gas. We are being fed science and political lies by their ABC. Remember the ABC physicist Robyn Williams with his 1 metre a year rise in sea levels? Will they ever apologise for anything?
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But what about there role as “emergency broadcaster”? its critical. Who will send young “Scoop” McTavish to report breathlessly from the fire ground decked out in their pristine CFA jacket? Who will give us all the news that we got from the emergency services app and the web hours ago? and who will do all the “how do you feel” interviews with those recently burnt out. Priceless. Their. ABC.
101
mmmm I we seem be down a few tropical cyclones as well, but the BOM has toggled to fewer/bigger so when the inevitable big one comes they can say we told you so as if having periodic big cyclones is new news ( the people who lived through Tracy, Winifred, Yasi and the like would differ)
Anyway its nice that our brothers and sisters up north get another year off.
00
Spot on, Sam. In a recent interview, Ita Buttrose accused the Newscorp media of being “skewed”. This proves beyond doubt that Buttrose has been shackled by the ABC left. The great tragedy of this is that ScoMo is too cowardly to take on the ABC. In my opinion, the ABC should be privatised or broken up (and good riddance).
150
The local media in WA are very favourable towards Labor and Liberal Leader Zac Kirkup totally missed the opportunity to point out Labor hadn’t actually done much other than close borders. Plus, the Libs “no government CO2 emissions by 2030” was just plain bizarre.
And many jobs in WA were saved by Federal Liberal Government money via Job Keeper funds, yet WA Labor looked good because of it.
Having said that, Kirkup is one hell of a likeable bloke. Maybe in a few years with a bit more life experience and wisdom he might come back and do well.
41
Based upon the election result I hope Zac Kirkup stays a long way out of politics forever. Absolutely hopeless. When Mark McGowan was pointing the finger at NSW and making disgraceful “whack-a-mole” comments where was Zirkup? WA’s economy and the state budget looked good mostly than to iron ore exports and the resulting royalties. McGowan gets zero credit for that.
30
Western Australia was shut down and China was booming at the same time.
Please Explain why China has no cases or deaths for about a year with out a shutdown?
China added 257 billionaires in US dollar terms as of August,
https://qz.com/1919974/china-created-a-record-number-of-billionaires-despite-covid-19/
https://www.bing.com/covid/local/chinamainland
20
“Please Explain why China has no cases or deaths for about a year with out a shutdown”
Easy, they lied. There’s a lot of that going around.
Look at the USA for example, over the past year they record almost no deaths from influenza. Wow what a lie that is.
Just last week where I live our top health official inadvertantly mentioned the annual number of people who die from flu every year and it was the same number as last years Covid deaths, proving that the so called pandemic was just another flu season. Oops! (And not a single journalist called him out on it, the cowards) He should go to prison.
52
Klem, watch out for the false “flu” analogy. We changed our behaviour totally to ensure the deaths were “the same”. In an ordinary year we let the flu run amok, don’t wear masks, lockdown, social distance — and basically sick people turn up to work to share the germs. So despite all the controls/laws/tracking/tracing/etc, if the deaths were only “the same” — that shows that Covid is much nastier than the flu — (which we wiped out in WA entirely. Deaths = 0 under these conditions). – Jo
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Well we do have a semi successful vaccine for flu, so it doesn’t ‘run amuck’ every year, and this year probably people were more diligent in having flu and pneumonia shots. Maybe this years’ shot was a good one? Compare 2017s flu season here and worldwide, and you get some pretty high numbers. So the vaccine obviously suppresses the numbers from most previous years, so you cant say this is so much worse because the flu is just allowed to run amuck.
On another note on elections and diversity, Labour has a strong tendency to promote women, especially if they are facing an unwinnable election — Kerner in Vic, and Lawrence in WA. That is a great way to show how diverse you are. Peter Beatty must have raised some eyebrows in the party when he retired, and put a woman in charge of a stable govt? Putting a woman in charge of an unwinnable election at least gives you some brownie points.
10
Not at all. Most of the flu protection is natural, not vaccine. One natural infection gives lifelong protection to that strain and partially to related strains. The Vaccs need boosters each year because they don’t generate long term protection, and the strains keep changing. And it is well known that flu vacc efficacy is only 40 – 60%. Some years it is only 25%.
Because Flu has been circulating forever a lot of the population has some good natural protection — that was why Swine Flu of 2009 was not as bad among the elderly as they expected. The elderly had natural protection from decades earlier.
This years flu vacc was mostly irrelevant because there was no flu. We couldn’t’ even assess it’s efficacy in Australia. Lockdowns stopped the ongoing flu. Borders stopped new strains. After April the vacc was probably a waste of money.
But SARS 2 had a potentially wide open field of targets to infect. The attack rate was going to eclipse a normal flu year x 3 to 5. (Flu strains infect about 20% of the pop in any given year).
Sadly, Covid protection may not be as long — we just dont know. But antibodies to the flu can be found in your blood 50 years later, yet antibodies to covid appear to only last a few months.
20
Klem there were two deaths from flu last year in Australia and thousands of lives were saved because, as Jo said, people didn’t spread it around like they normally do.
This has been the real eye opener, big pharma in Australia is probably going to be out of pocket this year as people behave sensibly.
73
Good point Klem.
Trying to extract details of causes of death from National Statistics in Britain and Australia, as examples, is nigh on impossible: they access has obviously been skewed to make the truth hard to get at.
Any admiration offered politicians for so called “strong leadership” of response to the CV19 Pandemic might be tempered by another perspective : PeterC’s comment certainly is relevant.
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/03/political-obliteration-the-right-sold-out-their-base-on-sovereign-borders-and-climate-change/#comment-2413424
01
And you believe that?
C’mon man
51
Au contraire Kevin. China had the most brutal shutdown anywhere. They welded people into apartments. They cut their economy by 80% for the entire month of Feb 2020. After that, they stamped out the small outbreaks as they happened (but no doubt also distort the real numbers).
Not surprisingly — it costs a lot to extinguish the virus, but once done the economy booms back as soon as it can. It’s a strategy that pays off in the medium to long run, unless there was a cheap treatment or a useful vaccine very soon.
The deadliest thing for an economy is to try and run half hobbled in rolling waves for month after month.
PS: Western Australia had a very weak lite lockdown. Most people still worked. Kids only missed a few weeks of school. But we only had 15 cases of community spread. And we had warm late summer weather. Victoria had 700 new cases a day and it was midwinter. If only Dan had managed the border better, or started the lockdown sooner.
103
China surely lied about their numbers.
People reported funeral pyres lighting up the night sky back in February and March 2020. Their official cases barely increased after Wuhan settled down, but that’s impossible when other outbreaks occurred in various places.
The Occam’s Razor approach to China is that the official stats are junk and should be ignored. They regularly lie about economic data and anything else that suits them, so it fits the same pattern.
81
I couldn’t agree more about China lying with stats. But as we saw, despite the cover up, something awful and extraordinary was happening all through Jan and Feb in China last year. If their ongoing surges after that were as bad, could the CCP cover up something of that scale entirely? Could they stop the West knowing that mass factories and flights were stopped, that there were mobile funeral pyres? That aerosol clouds were forming or not forming?
Occams razor suggests that whatever the CCP knows about this virus, their attitude is that it must not be allowed to spread widely as it did in Wuhan etc. Obviously the CCP is not doing the harsh lockdowns to save the lives of its senior citizens or out of humanitarian care. Obviously then, the CCP use lockdowns to save their powerbase: the economy, the factories, and to out compete the West.
The CCP will be delighted that the West is allowing the virus to still fly in over open borders, while they are not.
20
The assumption that China, having used cruel controls and restrictions, now has the virus under control, may be another error.
I answer to Jo’s two questions- yes, and yes. I have great confidence in the ability of China to control their media (as well as ours).
00
Impossible to build 40 Coal plants and at the same time social distance wear masks and have shutdowns AND no Covid deaths?
https://www.bing.com/covid/local/chinamainland
China ‘built over three times as much coal plant capacity as the rest of the world in 2020’
https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/02/04/china-built-over-three-times-as-much-coal-plant-capacity-as-the-rest-of-the-world-in-2020/
Study: China’s New Coal Power Plant Capacity in 2020 More Than 3 Times Rest of World’s
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/study-chinas-new-coal-power-plant-capacity-2020-more-3-times-rest-worlds
And the biggest joke!
“You can still get infected after you’ve been vaccinated”
https://theconversation.com/can-vaccinated-people-still-spread-the-coronavirus-155095
“Australians who are vaccinated for COVID-19 may still be able to transmit the virus even if they don’t get sick and have no symptoms.”
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/covid19-australia-vaccinated-people-may-still-be-able-to-spread-virus-experts-warn/news-story/6d0ef1885f090675bc45d8d8ac8f72e8
Can vaccinated people still spread the coronavirus?
February 27, 2021
1. Does vaccination completely prevent infection?
The short answer is no. You can still get infected after you’ve been vaccinated. But your chances of getting seriously ill are almost zero.
Many people think vaccines work like a shield, blocking a virus from infecting cells altogether. But in most cases, a person who gets vaccinated is protected from disease, not necessarily infection.
11
Great analysis, Jo. What else can I say?
30
The Western Australian state election was a disaster on multiple fronts. McGowan relied upon public ignorance and WA’s traditional fear of “Easterners”. So much for us being one country of Aussies.
WA’s greatest Covid-19 threat was not from state borders but international borders. Yet WA was still accepting international travelers into Perth and the virus leaked from Perth quarantine. McGowan, a New South Welshman, exploited the wests isolationist sentiment but there was no viable opposition.
The other point Western Australians like to raise is per capita arrivals. Except Perth does not process returning travelers on route to other states like Sydney does. When Queensland and Victoria closed their international borders it was Sydney who picked up that cost and risk. The gold standard is NSW who learned from the mistakes of the Ruby Princess cruise ship nearly 1 year ago. NSW kept borders open except briefly to Victoria when they lost control of quarantine and demonstrated shambolic contact tracing which resulted in over 800 deaths mostly in aged care.
In Sydney were were not cowering in our homes under lockdown except for a brief stint in March / April last year and on the Northern Beaches over Christmas. Otherwise restrictions in NSW are very similar to those in WA – social distancing etc. NSW’s economy is doing very well and we are not swimming in inherited iron ore royalties thanks to China.
McGowan will revert to his socialist ideals and the dominance of upper and lower house will mean energy policy delusion won’t be far behind on his priorities. Lockdowns are loved by socialists.
But of course the blame lies primarily at the foot of the WA Liberal party and the inexperienced “leader” they put up. Woke policies and a lack of fight were a disaster.
70
Restrictions and social distancing were increased in NSW for most of 2020 compared to WA. 4m2 v 2m2. Larger Weddings, funerals, stadium crowds, more dancing etc were allowed in WA for months at a time when they were not in NSW. That was obvious to west australians, though perhaps not to people in NSW. Blame the Ultimo-centred media for not telling you how free we were.
Taking more incoming Australians is good and admirable, but there is a cost benefit point where the system has a higher risk of a breach.
Cooster, careful with labelling 2.5 million west australians as both arrogant and “in fear” of the eastern states. You might look like you were proving their point, if indeed there is a single west australian afraid of “an eastern stater”.
You wouldn’t want to look like an arrogant, ignorant eastern stater… 😉
00
Sorry Jo, I didn’t want to appear arrogant. But over here most are very happy with our Premier and don’t take kindly to be told how to manage Covid with far greater arrivals and risks than Perth. I won’t forget McGowan’s Whack-a-mole slur as will most Sydneysiders.
After Ruby Princess it was very difficult to be critical of open borders NSW. A far superior contact tracing system is what McGowan didn’t want WA voters to know about. Plus I got the distinct impression reading comments from Western Australians that they thought Sydneysiders were all cowering in our homes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The difference between Sydney’s Northern Beaches outbreak and Melbourne’s hotel quarantine disaster was contact tracing. On lockdowns agree a short sharp lockdown can work but that can also erode business confidence and puts more workers on welfare in states not supported by iron ore exports. Lockdowns need to be considered very carefully. Had the Nortehrn Beaches outbreak only locked down a few suburbs. I know I live in that area.
40
Explain how in a democracy where one person equals one vote how you can gain 90% of the seats with 58% of the votes? Conversely the Liberals may not deserve any more but with 24% of the votes they should have 15 seats. We do need a better system, a fairer system and one that accurately reflects the composition of the electorate. I suppose the New Zealand set up comes close.
33
Lawrie. This is not a Senate style vote. The votes can vary widely with each electorate. The numbers of candidates in each electorate can vary widely.
So in an electorate with 2 contestants the person who receives more than 50% of the primary vote wins.
However in an electorate where there are 6 contestants the person who receives only 25% or less of the primary vote may eventually be declared the winner.
Thus the overall percentages state wide has little bearing on the overall results.
30
On two party preferred the Labor Party was preferred by more than 68% of voters. The Libs got what they deserved.
10
58% means that 42% did not get the memo, were they wrong?
97% of scientists… 3%, were they wrong?
My friends in peppermint grove changed their vote for the first time ever, and their reasons were not about the lockdown, or the border closure more about strong actions and leadership, both missing from the other side. (For those not familiar with Perth and its suburbs PG is very much upper class, and as such very conservative)
38
‘… strong actions and leadership …’
In handling the pandemic, otherwise party affiliations would have remained the same. West Australians have a strong desire to seperate from Australia, they loved the lockdown and border closures, felt right at home.
00
Didnt you just know Fitz would have friends in Peppermint Grove?
22
‘ … 97% of scientists… 3%, were they wrong?’
Climate science as opposed to political science, its hardly relevant, but the atmospheric scientists definitely got it wrong.
31
Rubbish el gordo, in both cases decisions are made independently on the data that is available.
14
Yeahhh, 97% agreement on climate catastrophe? Maybe look a bit closer. An oldie bur a goodie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewJ6TI8ccAw&t=181s
01
This has been covered in previous discussions, Cook’s 97% is a fallacy.
31
not according to NASA. but I do know that some less than credible sites support an alternative view
However, this is what I am referring too
“Technically, a “consensus” is a general agreement of opinion, but the scientific method steers us away from this to an objective framework. In science, facts or observations are explained by a hypothesis (a statement of a possible explanation for some natural phenomenon), which can then be tested and retested until it is refuted (or disproved).”
for those who do not have the skills here is the link
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/#:~:text=Among%20papers%20expressing%20a%20position,the%20scientific%20consensus%20on%20AGW.%E2%80%9D
but El gordo it is the same process for both groups of stats originally quoted. If one (climate) is wrong, then the other must also be wrong as well
Do you understand?
21
Yes sir, but as its off topic we should adjourn to the open thread.
00
Ok – yes I should have stayed more on the topic
01
Actually, many super rich folk in ‘Peppy Grove’ are quite left. I think this stems from a guilt (possibly implanted during posh Catholic schooling) that being rich is a sin and so they support trendy woke causes to make amends.
10
Agree with Jo in regard to the popularity of borders. I noticed a deal of enthusiasm in regional Vic for Dictator Dans “ring of steel” around Melbourne. If it allowed life to go on elsewhere, people loved it.
31
The “ring of steel” was a bit of a joke actually. All trucks got waved through without inspection. In a couple of places you could bypass the checkpoint by using local roads, some within sight of the checkpoint. Which a lot of locals did as well as those in Melbourne who wanted to visit family in regional Victoria. Also, when the weather was bad there was no checking of cars. But you are correct, all it did was reinforce what I call the “germaphobes” or COVID alarmists in the regional areas. The ones that are still walking around outside with their masks on, even though there is no mandate for outdoor mask wearing. 🙂
11
Yes totally, we went through it a couple of times and it was a farce. My wife is mates with a VIC police officer and she said it was keystone cops for the first few weeks. Classic Andrews, just dump stuff over the fence and expect them to make it work. I think the real deterrent was the higher fines and the so called ring just provided theatre and a slightly higher chance of getting caught.
10
Whilst closing off boarders has been interpreted as a success it has come at a great cost. It’s turned states against each other it’s damaged the practicality of Federalism and when one state stuffs up it has led to pretty horrific home detention environment. It’s seen the sacrifice of many small businesses dismissed as collateral damage. I’m not convinced that we couldn’t have had a National approach that used the NSW approach on a National scale, isolating trouble spots whilst leaving the rest of the country open. In the end being an island and closing the National borders early was the one piece of critical action that gave Australia such a good COVID response outcome. All the state level measures including closing borders were secondary to the closing of the international border.
The fact that premiers who are mean spirited and dispassionate are now super popular reflects on us as a society. The fact that closed borders meant families were split for over 12 months, that people couldn’t pay respects to loved ones ,that children couldn’t attend their fathers funeral, that patients in need of specialist hospital needs couldn’t travel interstate, people died due to border closures.
Borders are really an arbitrary line and whilst there are official borders between states from a National perspective they can be drawn anywhere. I have no doubt that if the NSW system had been implemented on a National scale we could’ve kept the borders open for most of 2020 without the economic carnage that was inflicted. I couldn’t understand why the federal government didn’t declare a state of emergency ( similar to war) and have a truly National approach to the response.
Having set the precedent it worries me is that if we do get into a National conflict requiring a National approach each state will do its own thing.
Australia may think they’ve triumphed in this state based response to the battle but I fear in the future we will lose the war.
51
One leaked virus that shuts Hancock mining or Woodside could cost the nation $5b. Worth the risk? One virus spreading in the Kimberley means RFDS Charter flights for 6000 km return carrying highly infectious cases under strict quarantine to an ICU in Perth. We could burn money, or just shut the border…
A national policy could have worked, but didn’t. ScoMo and Hunt should have had strong borders from Jan 31 last year which would have saved the entire nation from any lockdown at all if done properly.
Our national Pandemic plan was a 56 page “flu” plan joke. Thank goodness some states got it right. The bigger the government the bigger the Swamp. Lucky WA was so small and backwards we don’t have many Brendan-Nelsons.
ScoMo’s national plan was to open up infectious states to as many states as possible. Jo Nova’s plan was to open up safe states. One plan spreads disease. The other spreads the economy.
Is it mean spirited to want for our citizens to be unshackled by lockdowns, our kids to go to schools, and our aged care residents to get regular visits?
If national borders were useful, why aren’t state borders useful if the national ones fail? Same principle. Where is the consistency?
The Sydney track and trace program could not possibly have worked in Victoria unless they started in mid June. After that it was too late, and the virus had already spread too far. In mid to late June NSW was still letting in infected people from Vic, so the geniuses in charge there couldn’t even save NSW people from the Vic mistakes. Thanks but no thanks to making the NSW govt the rulers of the rest of us. We mean you no ill will but we can’t save you from your own government.
10
Jo, if NSW’s claustrophobic underground coal mines were unaffected by Covid even when the rest of the state was in lockdown early in the pandemic then there is virtually zero possibility that WA’s remote open cut iron ore mines would be shut down due to it. This is what the socialist in sheep’s clothing Mark McGowan wanted WA voters to fear. Normally right leaning WA voters will learn to regret their decision, although pity they didn’t have much alternative.
As for strong international borders, Mark McGowan could have stopped international arrivals into Perth but he didn’t. Andrews in Victoria and Palaszczuk in Queensland stopped their citizens from returning. So Sydney carried the costs and risks.
I was tired of reading online comments from Western Australians that Perth accepts greater per capita international arrivals than the national average – none bound for other states though! But WA always had more to fear from international arrivals than the virus being spread from other states once Victoria got its disaster under control by wiping out thousands of small businesses and protected by ScoMo’s JobKeeper stimulus. Yet we had McGowan banning people living in parts of NSW which were completely virus free. Then of course when Perth had its own escape from quarantine, nobody in Sydney had any sympathy, especially after McGowan’s “whack-a-mole” slur at the state with the gold standard.
We are one country Jo. That is the other thing people in NSW were put offside by. We are governed by national laws. State borders were never drawn up to shut off Australian citizens from free movement. If you check the actual record you will note that in Sydney we have been unshackled by lockdowns outside of the Northern Beaches for two weeks (a few suburbs), our kids to go to schools, and our aged care residents to get regular visits for many months now. But when Perth had a very minor outbreak from quarantine (note: not interstate) McGowan locked down an entire city of 2 million people. Daniel Andrews plays the same game in Melbourne. McGowan, like Andrews know their states can’t cope with even a small outbreak. That and politics are the real reasons for shutting the state borders.
But getting back to the subject of the article, I agree the “right” sold out their base. Zac Zirkup was a disaster and whoever advised him should also resign and stay as far away from politics as possible – or join Labor Greens. You would think lessons were learned after the Turnbull disaster and ScoMo winning the unwinnable election? But this cancer is a national problem. In NSW our energy minister is a lunatic.
10
This is the thing about chardonnay socialists like Peter Fitzroy….sooner or later they have to get round to bragging about their wealth or connections to people in wealthy suburbs. The comprehensive victory for the looney “climate change” believing left in Western Australia, does bring out its share of chest-beaters.
20
We are where we are because from day one Scott Morrison signalled loud and clear that he was picking up all the tabs. Political excesses flowed from it. people are basically selfish and easily spooked. We haven’t changed much.
60
Matty has it!
The name is ‘skin in the game’. Those who have secure and fixed incomes approve of lockdowns, those whose livelihoods depend on interaction, do not.
Australian States were able to pass costs onto the Federal government. To get more responsible decisions, make decision makers bear the consequences.
10
Interesting observation – Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and became president because Hillary Clinton foolishly lost four key Upper Midwest states. Under Trump, the Republicans just held the Senate and lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Under Trump, the Republicans lost the presidency, Senate, and House in 2020 – and the popular vote as well. A majority never supported or voted for Trump.
I agree that most Australians are reasonably centrist – and fairly conservative (with a small ‘c’) – but they are far from the Right: they are suspicious of all forms of zealotry from the Right or Left, very leery about Christians in politics, don’t much like the Big End of town, believe workers should get a fair go, and in general believe that there should be a substantial welfare safety-net, as well as universal health care, and aged care; but they do not like dole bludgers either.
They hold a healthy scepticism about the honesty and efficiency of governments of all stripes, but they don’t hate government and politicians as is demonstrated in the US. We have no equivalent of the MAGA crowd here, and nor are we living through culture wars or cancel culture. Most of the blatant examples of racism have been eliminated over the past four or five decades – Indigenous recognition is far healthier now, and it’s a source of pride and inclusion – same with gay rights, the rights of the disabled, and so on.
I don’t think there are any good reasons for people to “expect” the Liberal-National Party to somehow be the party of the Right – the LNP has not been captured by the MAGA frenzy, except in tiny pockets, and it does them no good. A fair number of working class types (“Howard’s Battlers” etc) vote for the Libs/Nats, just as a large cohort of the well-off middle class (the “Chardonnay Socialists”) will always vote Labor/Green.
I don’t think one could expect the LNP to be anti global warming either – lots of its members would support Australia’s initiatives in this regard, and agree with the scientific consensus.
Personally I think it is scientifically (and politically) irrational to export vast quantities of coal but shut down our own coal-fired base-power generation. There must be a sweet-spot – where a combination of sources are used to ensure sustainable, reliable, and “cheap” energy – so maximise the renewables where it’s rational and feasible to do so, and match that with the minimum base-power generation that the system must have.
I think it’s irrational to attack the LNP if they develop policies consistent with the above … global warming deniers may not have a major political party in this country it’s very much a minority position.
Same applies with immigration – I expect the average Australian (whoever he or she is) is generally tolerant, and in general welcomes the multicultural nation that we have become … there are over 80 nationalities represented in my partner’s primary school – and that would not be uncommon. And they celebrate all of this on various national and international days.
It’s a pretty good country in many ways – we have major issues still, but at least we are nothing like the US.
14
Dominion Voting machines made in China and the CCP only ones with the access codes?
10
You mean the voting machines which were used in almost no counties that had a swing to Biden?
22
A review of 10 key states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) finds that Dominion systems were used in 351 of 731 counties. Trump won 283 of those counties, 81 percent of the total. He won 79 percent of the counties that didn’t use Dominion systems. WP
22
I’m not sure that statistical evidence sinks very deep with some people, GI.
I have mentioned on here a few times that of all the states that changed their voting rules to allow widespread mail-in voting, and universal mail-out of ballots – not one of those states flipped from Republican to Democrat.
The states that did flip Democrat in 2020 either already had widespread mail-in voting from previous cycles, or they didn’t change the rules substantially to allow more.
But it makes little difference – people of a certain type wish to believe the election was stolen … so be it, if it provides solace.
03
Very noisy solace though
00
all that winning and so much loosing, funny things elections
10
My goodness – now we have a meta-conspiracy on top of the original Dominion conspiracy!
It appears that a whole lot of people literally cannot accept that the Orange Man (aka The Great White Hope) lost out to a fairly pedestrian career politician who is mostly charisma-free. Trump certainly can’t believe it either. But stuff happens.
The upside is that there is a now a professional team in the White House – rather than the crazy ideologues who used to prowl the corridors deep in palace intrigue.
04
Precisely – that’s why the grown-ups here do not believe that you should whinge like a cry-baby if you lose an election – square up, be an adult, take it on the chin, and come back next time for another go. Trump went to water, and his followers followed him down that dark slippery muddy hole.
04
The same trend awaits the LNP in Victoria at the next election. It was bad enough at the last election. Michael O’ Brien ( the supposed opposition leader in Victoria) just survived a leadership spill this morning. Which is probably the worst thing that could happen. He needs to be replaced by someone with some vigour, some political will – a bit of aggro. I dont say that because I want the LNP in power necessarily in Victoria , just someone who can provide some form of effective opposition. Someone who can call Labor out when they stuff up – and believe me they are stuffing up big time! When the dust had settled on the last election and then opposition leader Matthew Guy was replaced with O’ Brien, the new incumbent pronounced that one reason he thought they lost the election was because their policies on Climate Change weren’t strong enough. Can you believe it?? They are clueless. If they just stuck to their core values of middle right politics and were strong in opposition they actually would surprise themselves how much support they have. I think the same applies for all states if its LNP.
10
Personally I think you misread the contemporary political landscape in Australia. Sure – there is a minority of voters who are sceptical of global warming, just as there is a minority with activist religious values, or in fact are anti-gay or anti marriage equality.
However none of these areas are ones where you can campaign for the negative – not one. People will not rally around candidates who advocate a wide range of ideas – they just are not election winners.
You cannot be anti gay, anti Indigenous rights, anti vaccine, anti renewables, anti multiculturalism, and on and on. It is a long list. For the LNP to win government from opposition anywhere will require leaders with a bit of zip, and a credible appearance of being better economic managers. But mostly it will require Labor governments that lose the plot.
They won’t win (in my view) by being against a broad range of progressive positions that are now very mainstream. Even in the bush, with the Nationals having green credentials.
03
” there is a minority of voters who are sceptical of global warming, just as there is a minority with activist religious values, or in fact are anti-gay or anti marriage equality.” mmmm, yes of course, that was clear in the last Federal election wasnt it?
20
Not sure what you mean at all – please explain!
I think Scott Morrison is a boofhead and an embarrassment. The LNP won because of Labor’s mishandling of an election they should have won … plus of course Bill Shorten was unelectable – a view I also hold about Anthony Albanese.
The ALP must get away from these ex-union apparatchiks who have Aussie drawls that can strip paint off a door. They also lost – ludicrously – because of their policy on franking credits, which was a totally reasonable and rational one – but it was spun by the Libs into an attack on retiree super pensions.
I’m not sure Morrison wins by being anti global warming, or anti gay, or in fact anti much else … the LNP avoids all these issues because they know damn-well they are popular out there in the burbs.
04
O Brien actually said it was the one of the main reasons he thought the LNP lost the last Vic state election. Not that they had poor candidates or the wrong policies or didn’t criticise Labor enough. You know, actually worked hard to be a viable opposition or alternative political party. I’m not fully convinced that the voters necessarily like progressive policies either. More and more people are getting quite sick of “woke” agendas. If you have strident politicians who can work through the alarmism of most “woke” subjects and explain the likely costs to people those same politicians can have just as much success as probably the Labor / Green/ Democratic camps. Lets take renewable energy. Most urban dwelling voters think wind turbines are just great. But the great majority of them have never seen a wind turbine up close, think the energy produced is cheap because the wind blows all the time and that they are somehow saving the earth as a result. By putting a real cost to renewable energy and explained in simple terms a lot of people will get it. Ever since renewable energy has been blended into our grid, power prices have significantly increased and as exampled by Texas/South Australia provide uncertainty of supply when conditions aren’t perfect. Also, as a result of higher power prices Australia (and significantly Victoria) has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs. You can explain that stuff to the voters and they will vote for you if you have sensible policies.
10
I don’t think the “woke” criticism from the Right has any position or traction in Australia … I know people try to use it, but I don’t think it works much.
Australians – in general – are far more generous and tolerant than the extremists in the US – there is no tradition of hate and abuse here. And race doesn’t enter our mainstream politics hardly at all. Trying to push the “woke” word to smear everything you don’t like from the alleged left … it just comes across as daggy.
00
This is way Off Topic but I’m not apologizing for it.
This has been riveting stuff.
America’s Cup yacht racing on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour.
Luna Rossa is the challenger and have been giving the defenders a hard time.
So has the wind – it’s been giving the Race Committee a sore head and both boats c. 7knots of wind.
Only one race held today instead of the scheduled two.
Racing so far has been in highly challenging light winds.
NZ now at one race to go — they’re on match point after winning race 9 this afternoon. Yesterday
started with both crews on 3 wins. NZ made 2 wins yesterday (the videos are something to see!)
Race 9 (today Tuesday 10/03/2021) was fantastic with the lead swapping several times.
Race 10 cancelled — re-aligning the race course to the changing breeze could not be done in time.
Score so far is:
9 races down. NZ = won 6
Luna Rossa = won 3.
It’s first to 7 races.
Jimmy Spittal (Australian) is skippering Luna Rossa’s Prada Pirelli.
He’s the master of the Great Comeback …
Racing resumes tomorrow. It’s first to 7 wins.
All races (as far as I know) are on YouTube.
(Yesterday was about 7 knots of wind and the boats were running at 23 + knots!)
10
That is a very healthy EROEI – we could wish for oil exploration to do this well.
But call me old-fashioned – while I have been interested in the America’s Cup since the late 1960s (Gretel and Gretel II) – I find these glorified aquatic skateboards really uninteresting to watch.
I like watching sailing where the hull is in the water – thanks very much.
11
Even the actual nationalist movements around the globe have failed to realise the popularity of borders, jumping on the libertarian platform of liberties liberties liberties when it comes to covid. They completely missed the boat to promote border control.
Those of the left who actually have installed border control have won elections easily, a landslide here. What a concession, to hand your weapon over to the left and watch them rally in popularity. Quite funny really.
The problem with politicizing and polarizing I guess.
00
I don’t know where “here” is.
00
WA voters are Xenophobic and Secessionist, and always have been (doesn’t matter if they are left, right, center or whatever). Of course they supported border control…it meant keeping the “Bloody Easteners” out of their state, and it wouldn’t have mattered which Party was in charge. As for the moronic WA Libs, serves them right for trying to sell a CAGW- based electoral platform.
10
I think that’s incorrect – NO party can win a majority of seats anywhere in Australia by denying AGW (I leave out the “Catastrophic” – that’s just a wing-nut addition). The realities are – for deniers – that their position is just not politically popular with anyone much at all.
You might not like it, but the majority goes with the overwhelming consensus.
01
Love your “wing nut addition”, Tilba. Proves that you must be a member of Extinction Rebellion. And it is also obvious you do not understand election platforms. If you think that (C)AGW is the only consideration for a State Election, then you are dumber than I thought. And as for “overwhelming consensus”, get out into the community and actually find out what people are thinking.
00