May 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Elections are glorious. I think there are only 21 countries in the world who still mandate a vote. The conservatives will keep trying to remove it here. It's only by requiring the apathetic to vote that we avoid politics run by zealots and extremists. #auspol
Governments thought Covid was a 'supply' problem too, late last year. Greater supply of Covid to the community would end the pandemic, apparently. And it did, for about 6000 people, who no longer have to worry about it.
I wish we'd been allowed to vote on 'living with the virus'.
Ambition would be genuinely trying to stop people catching colds and flu every year as well. All caused by filthy air, as cholera was by filthy water. Some say you can't get people to take something seriously, if it's invisible. I dunno, the Economy manages it.
7-day average for deaths has hit 42 now. We need the election out of the way so that hopefully somebody in Canberra can do some grown up public health work. Including reporters, @michellegrattan and @michaelpas two of the few who still draw attention to this disaster. #auspol https://t.co/tnx5niZcBl
@MichaelPascoe01 the correct handle.
I think we've arrived at Stage 4. https://t.co/G9ljKl9oRi https://t.co/eQJrQJwdLL
The government who doesn’t believe in government, will fund election promises by…getting rid of more government. Who saw that coming. Further diluting actual expertise in Canberra, replacing it with more populist buffoons with Napoleon complexes. #auspol https://t.co/b1ZepCXuol
Huge kudos to @michellegrattan and @MichaelPascoe01 for being two journalists who are calling a spade, a spade. #auspol https://t.co/7NrQM1UeXV
This is true. Only one of the contenders has a fat gut. https://t.co/7QcnIwN146
If Albo really wants to hide, he should go on Sky News. Nobody watches it. https://t.co/J82WCOu6Na
More accurate in the case of Australia to say that one faction in our internal politics, the extreme libertarians, forced a change to national strategy by using one state, NSW, as a Trojan Horse with Delta, to break the national elimination strategy. https://t.co/aPcilWaK1v
Public health professionals have political views too. And you can’t do public health without involving politics, because what’s good for the public is a question of politics. About time these core political beliefs became part of the discussion.
We're midweek, and already another 34 dead in NSW. Given our public health 'strategy' (using that term very loosely) is 'get vaxxed', why is nothing even being done about those hopeless vax numbers circled in red? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/sIZgdmbmCV
The PM this morning. All of the Covid deaths in Australia are apparently 'with Covid', not from Covid. And the CMO and CHOs apparently believe this too? Ask them, somebody. Let's get it on the record. The stats already take that distinction into account. #auspol https://t.co/qv3eO7RYAt
"The Prime Minister said if re-elected the government would continue to act on the medical advice because it has allowed Australians to live with COVID 'without fear'." I haven't seen any aetiology of Covid illness and death that includes 'fear' as a cause.
"Common cold" coronavirus reinfections (with the same variant) are very common (2–3/year in studies before 2019, sometimes only one month apart)." Mitchell Tsai Is this true @CrabbBrendan, @Globalbiosec ?
Who remembers the entire nation put on hold for a week in the last LNP term, while they argued over who was going to be leader? And they won the next election. Voting has lost pretty much all connection with the assessment of basic competence.
PM, talking about Covid. “We want to put that in the rear-vision mirror. We’re putting this pandemic behind us and all the intervention of government in our lives.” Am thinking maybe it was the lack of 'intervention' that killed nearly 6000 people this year.
The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job. Rubbish. Short 🧵/1
It’s absurd that we recognise competence in every other profession with objective criteria, except politics. If an electrician sucks and your house burns down, there are all sorts of standards and regulations that will hold them to account. Not for politicians. /2
So long as they can keep finding ways to drum up popularity, their job is safe. That popularity can have no connection at all to their knowledge and skills in their portfolio areas. Imagine doing performance assessments at work, using popularity as the only metric. /3
This IS what populism does with democracy. Take the current federal government, which on so many objective measures of good governance has not only failed, but wilfully failed and deliberately undermined good governance processes. Why they resist an integrity commission,…/4
…it would apply objective criteria to political performance. And the stunned disbelief many feel every day with Covid, where governments around the world deliberately ignore basic public health practice going back 150 years. That’s objectively, criminally, incompetent. /5
But it can all be ignored, provided they can find a way to maintain popularity. We desperately need democracy to have much more rigorous criteria to qualify people for office than just how popular a person can be. That’s a recipe for living permanently in high school, with…/6
…jocks running the whole school. In fact we had many checks and balances and criteria to do this, it’s just that in the past 30 years in particular libertarian politicians have done everything to undermine and remove them. We went from ministers having to immediately resign…/7
…for gross incompetence in their departments, to them flicking responsibility to officials, to replacing officials with hand-picked advisers, to openly saying that any sort of checks and balances are ‘public autocracy’. These people are pirates, hijacking democracy. /end
The PM is relentlessly trying to bed down US and UK-style libertarianism here. All the ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ guff. But who invented government? We did. All of us. To help us, to provide economies of scale for our greatest problems. /1 #auspol
What libertarians really mean when they attack government is, they don’t want those economies of scale. They want ‘economies’, where they and their wealthy friends get to keep most of the goodies. Always ask a libertarian who created government, and who staffs it. /2
The answer is always - us. All of us. Governments weren’t rolled off the back of a a truck by oppressive somebodys. We created them when the problems our societies had were too big for any of us to deal with alone. It was a vastly more efficient way of fixing things. /end
Things Australians need no longer ‘fear’, and can therefore now pretend are over. The PM’s method. - bushfires - floods - cancer - heart disease - inequality - etc. Yes, ridiculous. But we swallow it, for Covid.
#auspol A close election result is still bad for Australia. It means that blatant incompetence and corruption doesn't sway votes. That's how the US and UK began their descents into populist madness. Competence is objective, it's not about parties, your team. This isn't footy.
Sharon Lewin on radio this morning, on the PM's assertions that everybody is dying 'with Covid', not 'from Covid'. As the ABS have said, only 10% are dying 'with' Covid. And for that 10%, Covid is still listed on the death certificate as an associated cause of death. #auspol
For those interested, here's the ABS clarification about dying 'with' Covid. #auspol https://t.co/W4im7JkHvb
The rare soothing experience of somebody who knows what they're bloody talking about, on Twitter. https://t.co/MsXksMN2X1
Watching political libertarians every day trying to return society to the time before we invented government. That time that sucked so badly that we invented government to fix it.
Getting this sharks feasting on the rotting carcass of a whale vibe about humans and microbes now. https://t.co/FmkarMOBXi
Remembering HIV in the late 20th century, how we made at least some attempt to control the spread of an immune system-smashing pathogen. Now we’re happy to let the entire globe get infected with SARS2. It’s hard to over-egg the catastrophic way that may end for us as a species.
@QandA ah Gigi is back banging the freedom drum. Political libertarianism is the crown of thorns starfish of democracy.
@QandA all sides captive to the housing industry myth of a lack of housing supply. There is no lack of supply.
@QandA why are we listening to a political libertarian economist for the umpteenth time on Q&A on a public health problem they simply don’t understand?
@QandA Again, not one public health expert on the panel, to discuss Covid. Opinionated waffle that advances nothing.
One of the best things I’ve learned in this pandemic is that when we talk about a disease being ‘endemic’ in poor countries, what we really mean is it’s out of control and we’re doing nothing to stop it. Which is also what ‘endemic’ Covid means in rich countries. https://t.co/8GfMC52erJ
It takes an outsider to see us for who we really are. Unlike the US libertarians, who are trying to undermine Oz from afar, Damien came to live here and discovered something profound about us we’re forgetting ourselves. A required vaccine against the libertarian pox, a must-read. https://t.co/HAIDl0uXoL
@samanthamaiden and @David_Speers suggesting (I think correctly) that a large part of the big pre-poll and postal voting numbers is people trying to avoid Covid. The thing politicians and most journalists dare not name. #auspol
I feel it's important politicians and the public understand that if Covid is damaging the immune system, like HIV does, that it takes 8-10 years for HIV to turn into AIDS, in people. Even a 'mild' Covid infection is potentially a ticking time bomb.
47 people have died of Long Covid in Australia so far. That gets very little publicity, it's reported (if at all) as a morbidity problem, not mortality. #auspol #COVID19Aus
Dan on fire here. For politicians and minimisers, it's the time for reckoning. https://t.co/yNBazgfbzP
On this election eve Australia, you can choose between a government who doesn't believe in government, and...anybody else at all, really.
Election logic is actually pretty simple. Walter Lippmann used to say that a public votes in a new government when problems overflow politics and start to enter their lives. Representative democracies delegate problems to politicians, they don’t want them back. /1 #auspol
It’s not about specific policies, or even ideologies. That stuff is for the true believers. If ordinary life has got too hard and too complicated because political problems aren’t being solved, the government changes. That’s it, the end. /end
Is it possible Covid wipes immune memory for other pathogens, as measles does? https://t.co/XGXFLdHS7s
All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s immune memory, for solving problems. /1 https://t.co/TsgCn5JpId
Libertarian politics makes us live an eternal present. Problems proliferate like rolling snowballs gathering snow, because the institutional mechanisms for dealing with them are increasingly sidelined and then destroyed. Much of the reason we see the Chinese for example as…/2
…’authoritarian’ is because their decisions are made more by institutional mechanisms than populist whim. They embed the past in their present. That slows things, it restricts options, but because history has taught them some things should be done, others not. /3
In the West we’re trying to live an eternal present. Problems solved generations ago are now recurring, because we’re gutting our institutions. Our collective memory. Our societal immune system. It’s no coincidence libertarian conservatives from the 1950s onwards have…/4
…relentlessly attacked institutions. All the media networks they bought and created run constant anti-institutional propaganda, morning and night, 365 days of every year. Weaponised concepts like ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are staples. Powerful existing interests know…/5
…that institutions restrict their freedom of rampant profiteering. But their genius has been to use this institutional vandalism as a way to capture the minds and votes of the people it hurts most. Ordinary working people. By selling the idea that…/6
…these institutions are the ‘elite’, restricting their freedoms. As the institutions decay, the living experience of these ordinary people decays as well, and these same libertarians use this damage to mobilise these same victims to the libertarian cause. /7
There is a deeper level here though I think that is less seen. Critical advisers to the libertarians and neoliberals have been churches. Churches have millennia of experience in mobilising people, they invented our societies. And you only need to study a little history…/8
…to know that Church v State is the engine room of nearly all Western history. (Earlier it was church v monarchs, but the same essential battle.) It astonishes me that even educated people don’t see the apparent dysfunction of Western democracies today as just a continuation../9
…of that battle that has been waging for centuries. Have Tweeted before about how churches and religions have been attacking secular institutions for most of modern history. While political libertarians are often only rapaciously greedy grifters, churches are using them…/10
…as warriors in this long game. Churches and religions never gave up the idea of regaining control of societies. As above, they basically built the societies we live in, in many ways to them it’s the justice of having what they built, back. And please don’t misunderstand…/11
…me here by assuming I’m taking a side in this battle. I actually think both sides have legitimate claims. Democracies have a pretty poor record so far, compared to the millennia of church-led society. No matter what outcome we get, what this is about at an even deeper…/12
…level again is whether societies can function for any length of time without a unified system of beliefs. Societies are made of beliefs, it’s their raw material. The democratic ideal of absolute pluralism of belief can’t actually function in the most practical ways. /13
No matter how much we may want to worship diversity and pluralism, at the end of the day in the nuts and bolts of running a society, people have to agree on things, or you get what we’re seeing now. Chaos. Each to their own leads to endless war of competing belief systems. /14
For years we celebrated this diversity and pluralism, because our institutions provided a safe space for us to exercise these freedoms. But some of those beliefs are now destroying the institutions themselves, and there’s no coming back from that. Societies have tectonic…/15
…plates just as continents do. We’re feeling them grind against each other right now. We have to return to these core facts about all societies, about belief and unity of belief, if we’re to save ourselves. And that’s going to be a lot harder than somebody just saying ‘ok…/16
…you all have to agree with these ideas now’. That won’t work. Unity of belief is a long process of persuasion and seduction. That’s what churches did for all of those centuries. /end
Walked past a local polling booth and none of the usual election atmosphere was there. People queued for miles, some in masks. No democracy sausages cooking. Another public carnival the Covid deniers have ruined. So many voted early to protect their health.
Saw Domicron interviewed at a NSW polling booth. He goes to the polls in less than 12 months. Never forget. Every single member of that National Cabinet should be wiped out electorally. The Australia of 50 years ago would have jailed them. https://t.co/nRNne9YMTj
No matter who you vote for, the beautiful thing about Australia is how many of us treat an election day as a national event, like a grand final. We need to not lose sight of the basic community nature of what makes us who we are. Most of the rest of the world has nothing like it.
For 30 years the LNP has been trying to introduce the neoliberal/libertarian politics of the US and UK. Those beliefs are poison to a communitarian Australian culture. Those furious at what we’ve done with Omicron are mostly so because of this assault on our deeper culture. https://t.co/bPKE84OwAv
Standing ovation to the @AusElectoralCom I doubt many know the enormous complexity of organising any election. To do it for the whole country seamlessly - it’s a mind-boggling task. #auspol
In live crosses to different seats, notable that LNP candidates have predominantly LNP-TV (SKY News) on in the venues. The party now lives in that tiny bubble. #auspol
The shift in the LNP John Howard introduced, towards US-style neoliberalism/libertarianism, has now gutted the real ‘base’ of the LNP, falling to independents. The lunatic Right of the LNP have gutted the party from the inside out. The party of the 50K who watch SKY News. #auspol
Anybody else smiling at the thought of how much money Clive has pissed up a wall in this election? Australia doesn’t want Trump wannabes. #auspol
A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1 #auspol https://t.co/yvJvjPG0aC
The election of John Howard to lead the Liberal Party to the 1996 election was an event only those who lived the Howard and Peacock wars of the 1980s and 90s can really appreciate for its significance. A divisive figure within the party for most of his career to that point,…/2
…he’d been written off as unelectable by his colleagues multiple times. His not infrequent playing of the race card was just one indication to the Liberal Party of the time of his unsuitability to lead a mainstream party in modern Australia. But persistent infighting left…/3
…him as a last-man-standing candidate for that election. A Steven Bradbury moment. It marked the end of 13 years of continuous ALP rule, an ‘it’s time’ moment’ in politics. Howard just had to be there pretty much to win, Australians were in the mood for change. /4
His victory would potentially end the Liberal Party itself, nearly 3 decades later (today). If you focus on the daily thrust of political issues, you can miss the longer-term patterns. But senior Liberals at the time knew the danger. During his term they even campaigned…/5
…directly against him. The ‘Not Happy, John’ movement, spearheaded by John Valder, President of the Liberal Party. And then luminaries like Malcolm Fraser, a prominent Liberal ex-PM, resigned from the party in disgust as well. And in our current election campaign others such…/6 https://t.co/N86oq4lAIL
…as Ian McPhee, another senior Liberal of the 1980s, have said the party has been damaged perhaps beyond repair. Howard’s success as our second-longest serving Prime Minister highlights a truth not often told about politics. That most political success happens to pollies,…/7
…not because of them. Howard presided over an unprecedented explosion in government revenue, due to a mining boom, itself driven by an unprecedented orgy of global debt-financed speculative investment. ‘Times were booming’ in ways nobody had experienced before. /8 https://t.co/lma9hOL91q
Domestically many Australians were becoming wealthy on the capital gains from their homes, which skyrocketed in value, fuelled by the same cheap global money. This is the sort of thing that makes people feel like whoever is in charge must be doing a great job, as Google…/9
…(the company) sometimes says, ‘revenue fixes all problems’. It seemed like Australia had reached the promised land, of unending prosperity. Howard and Costello delivered one big spending budget after another, making hay while the sun shone. /10 https://t.co/ZLxG2eLFvG
You don’t lose elections showering pretty much everybody with everything they want. And thus the actual change to the Liberal Party culture Howard was introducing underneath all of this orgy of revenue and spending met little opposition. And those changes were profound. /11
Howard introduced Republican US culture-war politics to Australia. Small-government libertarian fantasy, completely at odds with the essentially communitarian history of Australian politics. He once quipped that the Australia he dreamed of was one where a person would see a…/12
…Rolls Royce drive past, and say ‘I want that to be me’. Aspirational American-dream politics, where the poor would be recast as the not-yet-rich, who just need to aspire and work a bit harder. Again the public pays little attention to the ideologies of politicians,…/13
…if times are good they let them indulge any ideas they like, nobody is really listening. But these ideas were not just completely at odds with how Australia works, but also with the history of the Liberal Party itself. A ‘moderate’, mainstream party that did embrace…/14
…aspiration, but without the anti-institutional angry passion of American libertarianism, and definitely without the use of the attack-politics of race and other scapegoating. All Howard specialities. The moderates in the Liberals have been fuming for nearly 30 years. /15
Now the heartland of the historical Liberal vote, the expensive suburbs of modern Australian cities, have fallen to independents. Independents who have targeted those old Liberal values that Howard, Abbott and Morrison trashed during those 30 years. /16
What was always a marginal rump of the LNP, the hard-Right faction, has hollowed out everything else. Nothing much else is left. Here’s a way to really feel the genuine existential threat to the Liberal Party even surviving. The man most likely to lead them now, to rebuild…/17
…that lost mainstream Liberal voter support? Peter Dutton. One of the leaders of that same rump hard-Right faction, a zealous warrior for everything that has now cost the Liberals their core vote. One of those who spent the past decade confusing…/18… https://t.co/MZlRq3Wu0q
…the fewer than 50,000 regular viewers of SKY News Australia with the Liberal Party’s base. That may in fact now be true, the only real base it has left. /end
Australian political parties pre-John Howard didn’t talk about their ‘base’. For all parties their base was the entire Australian community. That’s the Australia we need to get back, with the (base) attack politics of the UK and US expelled. #auspol
Chris Kenny blaming voters for the loss of blue ribbon Liberal heartland is the clearest indication yet that if the Liberal Party is to survive, it has to either close SKY News down, or stop visiting it and equating its bubble with the Australian community.
Chris getting angry, and trying to slap us out of the ridiculous complacency we’re being encouraged to live by venal half-witted libertarian politicians. https://t.co/h1UW3XVNYv
Hey @SkyNewsAust, keep running that ‘so-called independents’ line, even though the election is over and won. I’m sure it will motivate the so-called independents to support a Royal Commission into you and the rest of the so-called independent Murdoch media.
Would love to be able to see the thoughts in Dominic Perrottet’s head last night, as the election results unfolded in NSW. Less than a year to the NSW election, and he’s not a moderate Liberal.
It feels good to have got the government out of our lives. #auspol
The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not so much by geography or class…/1 https://t.co/tSiWENNnem
…or ideology, but my something more simple and practical. It defines itself by community. A much more complex and sophisticated idea than we think. Many countries have little or even no real experience of community life. No community sport, for example, something we assume…/2
…is how everybody lives. The core of Australian life has always been the practical negotiation of achieving collective aims, together. Putting out fires, helping with floods, building parks and other community resources, surf lifesaving, ALL voting for who is to represent us. /3
An election in Australia is a community event, with its sausages and its election night count. Not ‘compulsory voting’, that’s the language of Europe and the US. It’s a community activity, for Australians government isn’t some other as it increasingly is for those overseas. /4
We see government as just a bigger community group, like a big RFS crew. None of the Big Brother rhetoric, we know government is just people like us, doing stuff that we as a community want done. Australia needs to bottle and market how it thinks about community, because it…/5
…could save the world. The politics and wars of territory and identity overseas always lead to rivers of blood, throughout history. Australia is a ruthlessly pragmatic country, because it replaced territory and identity, with community. It didn’t even realise it was doing it. /6
My theory is this way of thinking about collective life emerged from the basic fact we were dumped here, as a penal colony, on the other side of the world, at a time when a distance like that meant we may as well have been relocated to another planet. That isolation drove…/7
…a practical focus on how to get by. Without cooperation, we were dead. Unlike the ideologies and territorial claims that drove nationhood in the rest of the world, Australia is maybe the only nation ever formed by the necessity of working together, to survive. That’s where…/8
…our unspoken idea of community came from. I would also wager that we picked up a similar communitarian focus from the indigenous Australians we encountered, who by all accounts have a very similar way of approaching life. There’s a long story still to be told I think about…/9
…how much of what we call the ‘aussie’ way of life is actually a hybrid of ourselves and indigenous Australians. But that’s a vast topic. Having just finished another national election, this essence of our lives, the community, hit me again. You can’t unsee it. /end
That sweet moment when your mother reminds you you're old enough to have had a smallpox vaccination.
Bridget Archer on RN this morning hitting the bullseye. Saturday was a victory over tribal, ideological politics. Better tell SKY News Oz, which is still telling everybody the problem is we weren't tribal enough. Australia is still barren ground for US attack politics. #auspol
Interesting that so much is made of the primary vote, in a preferential voting system. It's doing its job, aggregating peoples' desires accurately. Seems better that people get at least their second or 3rd choice, than some tiny 1st choice winning, as happens in the UK.
The idea of 'parachuting' candidates in. Some of our best leaders won't necessarily live where there's a seat available. Our system is designed to avoid intense local tribalism, to balance that against wider considerations. It's a productive tension, not an absolute rule. https://t.co/DvnfmV4m4Q
Those occasional experiences which jolt you into sudden realisation about how fast time can pass you by. I had one today when I heard it's 14 years since Natasha left parliament. 14 years! https://t.co/B2zeX1AQKD
Shingles really should now be re-named 'living with chickenpox'. https://t.co/L0qa6dU9Sh
I think it’s a mistake to claim the election result for any particular group. That tribalism is what the election is a victory against. It’s a victory for the community of Australia, reasserting community as our focus. Not mutually exclusive with it being a victory for women. https://t.co/KfNT8FTnqd
We’ve now spent 70 years trashing our collective institutions, and those who did it got away with it because private debt allowed us all to feel we were doing well. We had the illusion of individual prosperity. There is no such thing. This is the deeper pandemic story. https://t.co/sCZhi0Zwuh
The PM and Ministers have been in ‘briefings’ this week. From the people who actually run the country, and should, the Department heads. The mythology of politicians running the country needs to end.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd said the Australian public service “has been eroded through political appointees, private contractors and institutional decline”. K Rudd sees that the decline in our democracy is down to institutional decline. Who gets elected is a sideshow.
That the AEC even have to respond in this way is a testament to the vermin we've allowed to infect Australian political life on the conservative side, and in their propaganda media arms. https://t.co/xJCUpR8kPX
The Australia Institute tracked primary voting trends in a report in 2016. This last election restores the ALP to the trendline, followed by both major parties for decades. https://t.co/3AE1pOMzpU
The Liberal Party's primary vote has dropped for the past 3 elections. Alone it never achieves a primary as high as the ALP. The total primary votes for major progressive (ALP + Greens) parties exceeds the LNP primary vote consistently. https://t.co/vUMotbysnb
Why if you want a better representation of Australian political trends, you need to aggregate all primaries under broad labels like progressive and conservative, rather than parties and coalitions. https://t.co/Cec2UorhIe
Another thing that I don't think is widely understood (first of a few Tweets about Qld), is that in Queensland the LNP isn't a coalition. It's a single party. The Liberal National Party of Queensland. #auspol
Just to re-use this graphic, this is why the ALP is sometimes called the 'natural party of government' in Australia. It's the only party in most of our history who can win enough votes to govern alone. Only by cobbling together various coalitions of enemies are they defeated. https://t.co/svyDCsWNFl
It cost over $370 million to run the 2019 election. I'm guessing with Covid the 2022 poll could top $500 million. #auspol
Steve Duckett excoriated the outgoing govt. today for being asleep at the wheel with Covid. The ALP have inherited 9 years of neglect across every portfolio. The ALP builds things, conservatives flog it off to mates in the private sector, leaving a country in shambles.
It’s not so surprising modern conservative governments chose to ignore a pandemic. They’ve been trashing government for decades. It’s more surprising how many experts lined up to help them (unlike Lisa). It’s they who allowed the normalisation of this disgrace. https://t.co/4VzAeZ6OdH
Queensland is an outlier in federal elections. Paradoxically, it’s the most European and American in how it votes. The most receptive to small government, neoliberal and libertarian ideas. We don ‘t look enough at demography and geography in how we understand politics. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/WhC0lsLCLS
Queensland is actually Australia’s most decentralised State. While it has the one large capital, Brisbane, as all our States and Territories do, it also has significantly sized regional cities like Townsville, Toowoomba, Gladstone, Cairns, Mackay etc. /2
Have Tweeted before about how the enormous number of electoral zones in the UK, a nation only a fraction of the size of one of our States, encourages an intense tribalism there that helps explain the allure of libertarian ‘freedom’ politics to the UK voter. /3 https://t.co/lTB0jevK4m
I think this goes a long way towards explaining why Queensland behaves differently in elections. It’s much more territorial in its focus, because of how people and territory are distributed there. Much of Australia’s calm pragmatism in other States is due to the populations…/4
…there being highly urbanised, concentrated in the capital cities. Urbanised populations tend to be less territorial and therefore less tribal in their politics, as they focus more on the constant negotiation of occupying a shared space. /end
Happy-busy-good. Jon coins the perfect slogan for the idiocy of live with the virus. @YouAreLobbyLud https://t.co/HP5HeEuKQY
I was told by somebody who works as a contact tracer in NSW that their job will finish at the end of June, as there's no committed funding for contact tracing into the next financial year. #auspol
If the ALP win majority government, if they’re smart they’ll make sure the teal independents have plenty of wins, to give those electorates no reason to want to return to the LNP. #auspol
It’s that ‘rest of us’ which is new to Australian life, imported from the US and UK. Where the idea of a ‘public’ - all of us - is replaced with who can garner the biggest majority. https://t.co/X9EjeHDER0
1) ‘Endemic’ has always meant ‘in poor countries we don’t care about’. 2) We happily ‘lock down’ poor countries when diseases there might get to us . But refuse to restrict our own movement and activity in a pandemic, when disease here might get to there. Pandemic = privilege. https://t.co/TnkX4EDeF6
The US has a ridiculous number of firearms. And it also has a culture of violence, the two are indissociable. Why is the US so violent? That’s a key question, I think. And I’ll bet its hyper-libertarian viewpoint is the culprit. Each to their own = violence.
Let’s make media ratings a type of primary vote. SKY News gets about 40,000 viewers on a good night. Its primary vote is therefore about 0.2%. Compared to the ALP primary vote of over 30%. SKY’s trick is to make so much noise that people think they represent a widespread view. https://t.co/6Cb7LecsaN
Dutton’s dilemma is that to be an effective opposition leader in the LNP vein he has to be an attack dog. But if he does that he drives away the moderates he desperately needs to regain. A problem entirely of the LNP’s own making, by confusing Oz with the US. #auspol https://t.co/u31wOL5NQM
A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised. Urban = urbane. /1 https://t.co/xQy8XVgtB9
I think the battles between Left and Right in politics are really something else. They’re mostly battles of demography and geography. Battles of ageing populations, and of territory and how we occupy land. For example most Western countries are ageing badly, and have…/2
…shifted ‘Right’ (conservative) as they’ve aged. That’s not uncommon, older people tend to be more conservative in their beliefs, you’re not looking to change the world as you age, you’re looking to relax and enjoy the world you already know. But there’s more to this. /3
Look at the US electoral map. The rural heartland is so often conservative politically. The urban coast progressive. The same pattern we see in Australia. How you inhabit or occupy land matters in politics. The ‘shift to the Right’ in Western politics has been driven by both…/4 https://t.co/M57RrJRvVk
…the ageing of our populations, and the reassertion of rural life in our politics. It’s easy to see rural worldviews as a bit simple, as backwards in some way. They think daylight saving will fade the curtains, etc. (They don’t.) But a connection to land is something we…/5
…don’t understand well now. In our urbane metropolises, where land is more an address and an investment. But as we’re seeing with climate change, how we occupy land matters. More than anything else. It always has been a deep part of our actual identity. Our rural…/6
…populations are reminding us of that. This isn’t to say they retain some more authentic connection to land than the rest of us, because the urban/rural split itself is artificial. It’s not a chicken and egg question; the rural didn’t come first, followed by cities. /7
They emerged at the same time, they’re two sides of a single coin. We used to grow more of our food in our cities, and still do in some areas, where property developers haven’t won. The point is that flogging housing for capital gains has driven most of our land-connected…/8 https://t.co/yfxIPlriEH
…activities like growing food into more remote parts of the country, and the challenges and complexity of managing connection with our landscapes has been pushed out of our urban/urbane view in the cities. There’s politics around that, hard politics. Calling it ‘Right’…/9
…politics doesn’t say anything really useful. It’s partly the politics of how we occupy our land, which we in the West struggle now to understand. When our rural seats consistently vote conservative, it’s so often a vote against urban life. While in our cities we negotiate…/10
…an increasingly atomised politics of identity, and vote to shift clocks to give ourselves longer BBQs after work in summer, in the regions some basic physical realities of sunshine and water and soil never budge. So much of Left v Right politics seems this deeper battle. /end
Is this the ‘endemic’ Covid we were promised? About 10,000 cases per day in NSW, even more in Victoria? Or are we eugenically cleansing the population of the aged, and then we’ll get more flu-like numbers? Why do the Premiers of NSW and Victoria say nothing? #covid19aus https://t.co/Pc8Vs6hwrd
If the federal election told us anything, it’s that whining freedumb warriors don’t register politically. And yet they’re so often given as the reason we can’t go harder against Covid, because the ‘community’ won’t tolerate it. They’re not the community, never were. https://t.co/ofre59TvbD
Employers are often not revealing Covid cases in workplaces, quoting ‘privacy’ as their reason. If you read the guidelines, you’re supposed to tell your friends if you’re positive, but telling workmates is entirely at the discretion of the employer. https://t.co/LNG6CGgXN2
The same problem Teal independents targeted has an analogue in Covid. Where a handful of experts cloud the much larger majority scientific view on pandemic management, giving cover to Covid minimisation. OzSage counters this, but is there more we could do? #covid19aus #auspol
@simonahac do you see candidates on a stronger action against Covid platform as within the boundaries of Climate 200 eligibility, for funding? Given the close links between climate change and the growth of pandemics.
Libertarian politics is fundamentally at odds with everything about Australia’s community-based history and politics. Australia needs to urgently look at stronger regulation of all media, including social media, to protect its unique democracy. https://t.co/4MXPfGWmoM
‘Gaslighting’, political attempts to make you doubt your (very sane) incredulity at being asked to return to ‘normal’ life with the pandemic still raging. But it’s closer to a type of grooming I think. Gradually breaking down your resistance to being infected. #auspol https://t.co/vzlvliGVE2
Working or learning from home are apparently very bad. But DIY healthcare with a potentially lethal disease is now the Australian way. Is it not transparently obvious, what’s going on here? Pretty coloured memes don’t hide public health run by the business community. https://t.co/2mHzQzW1hN
Incidentally, for those who aren’t aware, the NSW Government runs a ‘nudge’ unit, as the Tories do in the UK. It’s very modern conservatism, seducing people into changes that they actually don’t want and often aren’t good for them. https://t.co/NYBoPukUv2
And the percentage of 5-11 vaccinated actually went backwards. Probably some new kids turning 5? If preventing the death of your citizens isn’t your core job National Cabinet, why do we need you? To keep business open? Dead people don’t shop. https://t.co/qfqbnRzMLA
These weekly death averages in NSW are Bradmanesque. Minimisers say ‘deaths aren’t always the same day they’re reported’. That’s OK then, maybe thousands died on a day just after Christmas and the stats are only trickling through now. https://t.co/z8bXlCfBF1
Do you skim friends’ social media feeds and see them in high-risk Covid activities, like big indoor social events, with no protections? ‘You have to live your life’, they say. There was a time that included fighting for the well-being of your community. Sometimes for years.
Every day this is the public health messaging I see in NSW. https://t.co/99ZhhUFeMR
I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1 #covid19 https://t.co/r18qBeWMZ7
Generally I think it’s fair to say we’re seeing people reinstate their pre-pandemic lives. That’s what personal responsibility apparently means to so many, ‘getting their life back’. Meaning their social activities, mostly. (Which actually isn’t personal, it’s social.) /2
The obvious clash here is that the pandemic is still going. For so many, taking personal responsibility for the pandemic basically means doing nothing, except returning to their pre-pandemic life. They’re not even just looking out for themselves, to protect themselves only…/3
…in some selfish way. They’re not protecting anybody, themselves included. Happy to go back to social ‘fun’ activities, their understanding of care for others is socialising with them. Encouraged by idiot politicians and some experts, telling them they’ll collapse in a…/4
…mental health heap if they don’t. We can all accept that our current leaders have no desire to lead anything, except a conga line of donors to the State and federal treasuries. But then left to our own personal responsibility Covid devices, we have choices. As Eyam did. /5
What did Eyam do? It ‘locked’ itself down. The town agreed that was the best thing to do, the moral thing to do. It cost many of them their lives, but they stopped other towns dying as a result. The toxic wasteland of modern libertarian politics sees personal responsibility…/6
…as a binary with collective responsibility. You either look out for yourself, or for others. Doing both at once, seeing those as actually the same thing, doesn’t even compute in this idiot belief system. The fact that what is best for the community is also what’s best for…/7
…you undermines their whole market Economy based fantasy view of society. You’re not ‘maximising’ your market return, doing that, apparently. But anyway, these zealots are way too far gone to bother with. I wanted to end by asking a hard question. /8
How are you dealing with your friends, family and work colleagues, in this era of personal responsibility? We can all (rightly) blame politicians and their hand-picked experts for this. But that’s getting us nowhere, they don’t care. But your friends, family and colleagues…/9
…might. How high are you setting the bar with them? I’m now at a point where I openly tell all of these people closest to me that if their beliefs and actions don’t include looking out for the welfare of our community, by doing everything they can to restrict Covid spread,…/10
…then we are no longer valuing the same things in life. And that it may mean I have no desire to have much more to do with them, I don’t respect them. Harsh words, which will change my life probably forever, leaving me isolated from many. But where does the buck stop? /11
How will anything ever change if we refuse to confront these brutal, tragic realities with the people around us? Constantly hand-balling it to politicians is a cop-out. We’ll be waiting forever for them to do anything, and they still won’t. It’s now up to us. /12
If you want to be popular, maybe re-enrol in high school. You’re a grown up now, do grown up things. That’s what ‘getting my life back’ means to me. Not pretending I’m back in high school again, with all fun, and no responsibility. /end
If filled with cash, then maybe. https://t.co/xnJTc5qCWC
The teal wave was a victory for the heart of Australian politics. Community. Community is independent of scale, it’s not local or global. It bypasses territorial war. I think it’s what makes Oz politics and life unique. We need to unpack more what it means, it’s complex. https://t.co/9U76CFylyg
“People are moving on when the personal risk is low. There’s nothing politicians or healthcare providers or the media can do about that.” (N Coatsworth) Public health was invented in direct opposition to this belief. As was pretty much our entire community life.
If people are perceiving their personal risk to be low, it may be because information on those risks is deliberately minimised or suppressed, like so much else about Covid. https://t.co/tnSTGoXqdu
Please don’t call it compulsory voting, it feeds the anger of the same parts of society who rail against ‘lockdowns’. Australians have always voted because they wanted to vote, the same way they wanted to put out bushfires. They saw it as something that needs doing.
“People are moving on when the personal risk is low”. I want to contrast this idea continuously with the Australia we actually know. No RFS firefighter for example ‘moves on’ if their own home and safety is assured. They’re there to save their community. https://t.co/4ilnnIUz9n
Has anybody seen whether refunds will be available for those who have already paid for flu shots? https://t.co/c9QpgzG4Dx
‘Because of lockdown their resistance is down to disease’, says layperson, parroting what politicians tell us. That the key to getting rid of infections, is to give everybody infections. Be that person who didn’t believe this rubbish at any point, when the history is written. https://t.co/TjrLotmuEl
‘The ABC Election Computer’. Do you reckon it has a name tag that says that? (I’m betting it’s actually a Dell.) https://t.co/KRa107fsDE
It’s taken off almost as fast as free Covid. And ‘it’s sticking around’ is 2022 for ‘living with it’. https://t.co/jk2PFxf11o
A recent study found that the cause of traffic is…traffic. The bigger the roads, the greater and worse the traffic becomes. This is the same as using infection to beat infection. It just creates…infection. Lots more infection. https://t.co/EURITv45si
Where I am today is some sort of approximation to Antarctica, with gale force icy winds. Should be bracing for NSW schools getting those windows open to ventilate. Maybe NSW Cabinet could come and meet in one of the classrooms, full of snotty kids.
Listening to the first interviews with the new LNP leadership team, not one indication they plan to shift direction at all. The strategy appears to be 'target the outer suburban tradies with more Trumpian dog-whistling, and that will compensate for us losing our heartland seats."
What led the Liberal Party astray in Australia, the 'bubble' they now live inside. Laughably tiny viewer numbers, but like Puss in Boots contrived to convince the ultra-cons they have an audience. The only pathway out of the wilderness for the Libs is to give up this delusion. https://t.co/XrUlUP5085
Seriously? This is just continuing the Howard-Abbott-Morrison agenda. Surrendering small-l liberal ideas, and shifting the LNP to a conservative party, kept afloat by culture war politics targeted at the ALP heartland? Isn't this obvious? It failed. https://t.co/hI5MV0816B
Let’s see how free vaccines goes for the disease the same leaders used as an analogy for Covid, to minimise peoples’ perception of risk. The same people who already stopped getting Covid shots. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/GPh8SSkSzk
The real issue I see here, about the way National Cabinet has trashed our public health system. 1) Cost wasn't the reason most people didn't get flu shots before. They never saw flu as serious enough to bother. /1 https://t.co/Djwgxq5aKq
2) This is why National Cabinet consistently used flu as a way to minimise peoples' perception of risk of Covid. 'Just like the flu'. 3) After spending months stripping away public health measures against Covid under the banner of 'just like the flu', now the messaging is.../2
...'flu is a real worry, all go and get vaccinated. It's free'. Covid vaccinations are free, they stalled months ago. For the same reason, people were led to believe the risk was over. Now flu is terrible again (it always was), but why would people listen? /3
If flu is now a terrible danger (it is), and Covid is 'just like the flu', can we go back to saying Covid is a terrible danger? And doing something about it? I'm betting...no. We've 'moved on' from Covid, apparently. Bloody hopeless, a vacuum, where leadership used to be. /end
“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.) Alone that’s wow. But it also means something else. /1
It means less than a quarter of society’s official wealth is held collectively. More than three-quarters is in private hands. We accept that because we’ve been conditioned to accept it. But we’re the ‘Commonweath’ of Australia. Not the ‘Privatewealth’ of Australia. /2
Decades of conservatism have created a really bonkers idea that the government is somehow not-us. It’s some other thing, that steals from us. Even though we invented it, because we wanted and needed it. And every person in it is one of us, doing a job for the rest of us. /3
It’s all us. We invented government to give economies of scale to social life. We can do so much more collectively than we could achieve individually. We should never see debates around tax as a tug of war between ‘our’ money and government money. Government is us. We made it. /4
If we want to invest more in collective things, by paying more tax, we should describe it as just that, an investment choice, with huge returns for us. And as Kohler says, we have to pay only a pittance more to erase a trillion dollar deficit. /5
That deficit is a starving of the Australian community of collective investment, by zealots and ideologues. Government had to borrow and print money to do necessary things, because these idiots held the country to ransom with their us vs government loon fantasies. /6
As I always say, the Economy is a fiction. It literally doesn’t exist. It’s these ideologues’ substitute for society, designed to funnel collective wealth into a minority of hands, of themselves and their mates. So much is held back by that nonsense, it’s time to end it. /end
One small correction here. The deficit spoken about is the annual budget deficit, not the overall debt, which would fall though with the deficit removed. All the same principles apply, artificially keeping tax to GDP low starves the country of collective investment.
My hope is that eventually we’ll see the ‘Economy’ as our own Emperor’s New Clothes. A political fiction designed to bypass politics with a handful of self-serving statistical indicators. GDP being one of them. We’re mistaking the measure for the thing. https://t.co/jXYjaOPSfU
Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and government-as-oppression. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/mxd5oGGzw5
Looking a bit more at this graph. Obviously astronomical spending in the world wars. But even more interesting is how quickly the debt fell away, after them. The wars triggered massive ongoing public investment, in manufacturing and other areas, like housing. /2 https://t.co/JhwVGSzLqo
Triangulating against GDP tells even more of the story. What followed the last world war was decades of prosperity. Boom times. To add history back to economics, as well as politics, you could say wars and pandemics are largely caused by the ‘economic’ strangulation of much…/3 https://t.co/RPb94V05Oa
…of society, and the huge spending then to fight the ensuing wars and pandemics restores prosperity and peace. Which is sort of the situation we’re in right now, except the ‘quality of spend’, as Jim Chalmers calls it, has been poor from the outgoing government. /4
Neoliberal, libertarian conservatives waste money by splashing it about as cash handouts, usually skewed heavily to people who don’t even need them. Rather than investing in public infrastructure, in the broadest meaning of that term. Because they don’t believe the public…/5
…is even a thing. ‘There is no such thing as society, as they like to say. Their passion is to remove the public sphere almost entirely. But really debt and deficits just means holding too much of our wealth in private hands. And settle, this isn’t a socialism or communism…/6
…argument. Just a simple argument about how a society allocates its wealth and resources. I know hard-core capitalists who argue to shift that allocation much more heavily to ordinary people, to ‘customers’ in the economic sense. Not a Marxist bone in their bodies. /7
There is no such thing as ‘business’ (another thread at some point maybe). There are only ever customers. A business can’t survive without customers, but customers can survive without a given business. /end
I don’t engage much with this stuff normally, but this story last night was disgusting. Black and white pics of Andrews to make him look like a shady mafia boss. Criticism of NSW’s open hearings, but then a whole story trying to crack the privacy on the IBAC hearing. Bizarre. https://t.co/NcECtfsnYs