Australia

@CrabbBrendan NSW has eliminated Covid? Extremely unlikely we'd go this many days without a new case if there was still Covid circulating? Barring HQ accidents. https://t.co/ehwewS0TAV

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @billbowtell still copying the UK, first restaurant and entertainment vouchers (NSW), now travel. Targeting highest risk areas for spread, border-busting. Also targeting marginal LNP seats.…

Has NSW had one nice word to say about any other State in this pandemic? https://t.co/ygWoCoXcMF

@MichaelWestBiz @BernardKeane how is the NSW $500 million 'Dine and Discover' program not just another grants rort? Tourist destinations and hospitality venues seem to have been packed solid for months, you can't get a booking. Just…

@GidMK am I interpreting this correctly? The log scale shows rate of change? Suggesting Australia's rollout is actually hitting its straps and may even be faster than the initial US and UK rollout? https://t.co/47NlJ6Voue

#auspol Do we ever get tired of populist fact-free public frenzies? For example on the Oz vaccine rollout. The same pattern of a stuttering start seen also in the US and UK. Standard logistics. Delivering population-level things is bloody…

@DrZoeHyde @GregDore2 Australia has agreements for 20 million Pfizer vaccine doses by end of 2021 (enough for half of us 18 and above). Domestic production is slower than anticipated. Could we negotiate for another 20 million Pfizer doses?…

#auspol estimated 600 million surplus doses of vaccine available in the US second half of 2021. Australia only needs 20 million more Pfizer doses to vaccinate the entire over-18 population? https://t.co/XZsoGxuyYr

@billbowtell @rajah_mich up to 600 million surplus vaccine doses possibly available in US 2nd half of 2021. Oz needs another 20 million Pfizer doses to do the whole over-18 population with that vaccine. Time for diplomacy? Domestic…

Service industries are about 80% of the Oz Economy. Do people remember that 'service' was what servants do? They were 'in service'. These are some of the worst paid jobs in the country, with the worst conditions. We've trendied them up,…

Australia has bought enough Pfizer to vaccinate all adults. Why isn't that being said? 20 million arriving later in the year, but 20 million before that time too, which could vaccinate over 50s. https://t.co/BNmKvfHu1l

Great piece by @CrabbBrendan and @profmiketoole . Oz in the same league table rush to vaccinate as fast as possible, as if you can end a pandemic within your own borders. Tragically, many poorer nations did excellent suppression in 2020,…

Is it too much for somebody, anybody, to ask why, with 40 million doses of Pfizer arriving in Australia this year, those can't be used to vaccinate all 20 million adults in the country?

#auspol @CrabbBrendan The Premier of NSW on radio this morning again arguing no need for daily reporting of Covid case numbers, hospitalisations sufficient. Normalising the abandonment of elimination as a key public health principle.…

@simonahac #auspol With the tens of billions spent on roads and tunnels in Sydney right now, why is nobody talking about traffic evaporation? https://t.co/tf5g223lvp

What Australia needs? Proper quarantine facilities, vaccine production capacity. What it's getting? A $600m white elephant gas-powered electricity generation plant, that nobody needs and which will drive prices higher.…

Australia has purchased enough Pfizer vaccine to cover the entire adult population. Just use it, even for over-50s still unvaccinated. It might take longer, but there's no way international borders will be rushing open any time soon.…

#covid19 a way to flip public framings of pandemic action. Countries encouraged to feel deficient if they're not vaccinating fast enough. Like Australia. But what if we said instead that countries who already eliminated Covid are just…

#covid19 #auspol it's incredibly difficult to challenge the public narratives around vaccines and risk without being immediately shunted into some loon anti-vaxxer, irrational category. But a few thoughts. 1/n The AZ vaccine repeatedly…

@rajah_mich would you still advise Australia to hold out for the most effective vaccine available? I see we'll have enough Pfizer to vaccinate all adults by the end of the year, is there a need for this great rush to use AZ?

#auspol about time we started talking about risk and undue haste with vaccination. As Science points out, a sound strategy for a country with low or zero Covid (like Oz) is to extend the vaccine rollout to allow different vaccines to be…

#auspol Australia's obsession with vaccination haste is 90% this: https://t.co/rAFpkGr9gW

#auspol another outbreak, in which NSW will no doubt demonstrate its big kahoonas by rejecting a short lockdown, in favour of 3 months of hotspots and laundry lists of rules, to save the Economy. While running second-last amongst States…

#auspol meaning...Australia's 50+ cut-off is too low. https://t.co/oBS1EVtbud

#covid19 #auspol we're into day 2 of the 'proportionate' NSW response. 2 known infections only. Huge and growing venue list. Long list of restrictions. If this isn't all wrapped up by tomorrow, why is this more proportionate than a 3-day…

#insiders this BS about 'low risk appetite'. Australians don't want the virus. They're smarter than these economic boobs who think getting the rubber ducks rolling back off the production line is 'normal life'.

@liammannix @CrabbBrendan to use NSW as an example, this shows a total of 7,342 vaccinations in the past 24 hours. Weekdays usually around 20,000. These are relatively tiny numbers? Hesitancy or supply? https://t.co/WX7SKOwaiW

@profmiketoole were the index cases for the multiple Sydney outbreaks over December-January ever found? I can't find anything that says definitively.

#auspol This is twice in 6 months that contact tracing has failed, as a primary strategy. Both times luck - that the virus didn't transmit further - saved NSW. Can our public discussion be more nuanced, instead of meaningnless slogans…

#auspol I'm sure there are other Australians like me who won't forget that their country, supported by experts, made them weigh 2 risks of death. https://t.co/MV38w7sdjP

@DrZoeHyde I know experts are reluctant to criticise other experts, but your view on those in Oz right now minimising concerns about clotting? Using population risk to tell people 'your risk is tiny'? For some people, the risk is 100%.

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#auspol #covid19 the public health path ahead isn't vaccine A or vaccine B. It's vaccine + other public health measures. Many Australians calculating that the other measures will buy them the time to access a higher efficacy vaccine with…

#auspol let's get it out to the regions Australia. And to the over-50s too. https://t.co/CjQmoLY4xW

It would be a great for the Oz community if our prominent public health professionals explained what 'living with the virus' specifically means, in public health terms? There are so many ambiguous slogans in circulation. @MarylouiseMcla1…

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#QandA Australia's sophisticated multi-dimensional pandemic response is now being thrown away in favour of 'vaccinate fast, open up'. The motto of the countries who have failed in this pandemic.

@auspol #covid19 why doesn't Oz: 1. do a UK and prioritise the *first dose* to as many people as possible 2. that way the existing Pfizer supply could be extended across twice as many people, to help with hesitancy. Efficacy of both…

@GregDore2 @profmiketoole @MarylouiseMcla1 Couldn't Oz do as the UK did last year, prioritise the first dose to as many as possible? That would double coverage, and importantly the amount of Pfizer doses available, for the hesitant.…

@auspol this isn't just about hesitancy. Using the highest efficacy vaccines is a better long-term strategic option for Australia. The endgame isn't opening borders, it's ending the pandemic, and getting as close to herd immunity as we…

#auspol Staggers me that parties can win elections for 25 years by spending billions on border measures. But when the border is being used to keep out a lethal pathogen over a very short time, we suddenly get this patronising 'Fortress…

#auspol much of the hysteria about the rate of vaccination in Australia is driven by the speed of vaccination in the UK and US. We need to look beneath the spin. https://t.co/K1Xlmjx45h

#auspol When did Oz's expert community sit down with international colleagues and decide the best global strategy right now is rich nations speed vaccinating with most of the world's vaccine supply? The only nations who can afford strong…

#auspol Vaccination today will make as good as no difference to this current outbreak, unless it goes on for months. Australia is still mixing up ending the pandemic globally and getting fast vaccinations locally. The 2 are in some ways…

@profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan I feel that anxiety is increasingly driving Australia's strategy, rather than the calm heads of most of the past year. https://t.co/ydb8lNA6F5

#auspol #covid19 Oz was never going to be vaccinated enough by now to prevent this. Instead of fixing quarantine and focusing on ongoing local elimination, the push to 'open up' (with vaccination rate as the Trojan Horse) is again…

#covid19 #auspol we learned what Oz hasn't learned. That we use a venal statistical instrument we call 'the Economy' to transform complex social issues into a handful of statistical indicators, framed to favour the interests of the…

#covid19 #auspol @billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 a thread asking some questions about global public health programs. 1/n Normally for an epidemic outbreak, for example Ebola, the country of origin is rapidly…

#auspol it's not 'hesitancy', it's those 50+ being plain fucking angry at the expediency of the Oz vaccination strategy. Not them being simple and resisting the science. NZ did so much better by putting safety first, and not rushing. Oz…

@auspol and/or cash for quarantine. The only reason Australia is panicking about vaccination speed is because quarantine continues to leak. NZ isn't panicking. https://t.co/LjMofZ620M

#auspol #covid19 one of the simplest ways to understand why Melbourne has required more lockdowns than Sydney is to look at the volume of movement in each city. Melbourne much less congested, more movement to restrict to prevent spread.…

#auspol NSW may be about to discover that a whack-a-mole strategy won't work, when you have an exponentially-growing number of moles. https://t.co/ll46RGHKt7

#auspol deaths are minuscule because Australia has had next to no circulating Covid, largely because of the dreaded 'lockdowns'. Progress in this pandemic will be impatience with the virus, not with the lockdowns. https://t.co/dORtGssuCk

#auspol everything about this thread makes a mockery of the bizarre shift in pandemic framing in Oz, where you could listen to the news and think we're lagging idiocy like the UK and US, because they're vaccinating quickly.…

@Globalbiosec @rajah_mich @DrZoeHyde can I ask a question? 1/n In the TGA weekly report today: "With the ongoing risk of COVID outbreaks in Australia and the potential for severe long-term effects or fatal consequences of infection, the…

@normanswan @CrabbBrendan can you explain Australia's vaccination strategy? The messaging is all about risk of outbreak. The demographic most at risk of such an outbreak are those 50+. They're offered a vaccine for which 2nd dose if jabbed…

#covid19 #auspol the narrative about vaccination to prevent outbreaks. Is it dangerous? US, UK, Israel, the fast vaccinators. 5-6 months in, still only 40-60% of populations vaccinated. Vaccination isn't a speed tool to prevent and control…

#auspol #covid19 Oz has reached a point where journalists understanding the politics and not the science, and experts understanding the science and not the politics, has stalled our thinking. 'Hesitancy' is the public sensing this.

#insiders 'debilitating' lockdowns. Know what's debilitating? Covid. And Oz hurtling down the idiot path of planning to allow the virus to circulate amongst vaccinated people. Surefire recipe to breed lethal variants.

#insiders we need to ask the question why so many Australians are still travelling offshore in a pandemic and needing to be quarantined upon return. That creates much of the pressure on quarantine.

#auspol #covid19 it's clear many here in Oz are just as casual about infecting children. Many of us were deliberately infected with measles and chicken pox and mumps etc. as kids, because it would 'do us no harm'. Now we vaccinate for all…

#auspol #covid19 the ABS' stringency and economic output reports are some of the most useful of the pandemic, but are rarely noted. The latest again challenges all the public narratives about lockdowns and economic impact. NSW mid-pack at…

#auspol #covid smart people need to stand up and smash the idiotic use of the 'hermit kingdom' insult, the 'we need to live with risk' spin from economic thinkers. As if Oz is running away from some more grown-up 'living with Covid'. 1/3…

#auspol interesting how quickly Oz shifted to the inevitability of endemicity, after being so strong on elimination in 2020. Strategic slippage, driven by economic 'live with the virus' thinkers, expert at continuously re-disguising their…

#auspol Australia would find it a lot easier to face reality without the ICEG. https://t.co/qITi5a49I8

Climate change. The volume of combustion gases humanity has released into the atmosphere in the past two-and-a-half centuries; I think it hasn't really registered with many the scale of what's occurred. Take the 2019 mega-fires in…

A prominent Australian infectious diseases expert was on radio this morning, being quite cavalier about the chance of children becoming infected in Australia. Does most of them little harm etc. None of this would get ethics approval for…

#covid19 #auspol the Delta variant will test just what 'proportionate' means in NSW. Until now it's clearly been political code for 'we don't do lockdowns'. https://t.co/ujLkUWYqu9

#covid19 #auspol dumbfounded by the ongoing advice on risk in this pandemic. Lots of patronising simplifications from supposed experts. 1/8 The risk to an individual of a clot with the AZ vaccine is tiny. That individual risk is used to…

#QandA what an underwhelming panel. And Australian business demonstrating again its lack of imagination, responsibility and its rent-seeking laziness.

#auspol saw multiple leading journalists run the line yesterday (again) that NSW somehow does public health differently. It's the job of journalists to take that sort of spin and unravel it.

#auspol #covid19 This is the risk assessment ATAGI used when first recommending use of AZ in Australia. The critical thing that I haven't seen mentioned is, at no time was the risk of an outbreak actually estimated. 1/3…

#auspol NSW fires up the gold standard again. I think that may even be a non-N95 mask. https://t.co/wd6DXjIYsM

#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#auspol I'm sure everyone will join me in 'strongly encouraging' the virus to go away in NSW. https://t.co/VAo0LKlucM

#auspol extreme libertarian politics has no place in a pandemic. It slaughtered hundreds of thousands in the UK, US, Brazil and India, and now NSW's leaders describe their public health approach in libertarian, political terms.…

#auspol remind me again why how fast Australia is vaccinating is some critical issue? Because we substituted 'opening borders' for 'ending the pandemic'? https://t.co/EXNVRT3KT8

#auspol be immediately suspicious of those who paid no attention over the past 10-15 years as educational outcomes in Australian schools went backwards, now calling to get kids back in school in the middle of a pandemic, for the sake of…

#auspol #COVID19Aus conservative governments began the pandemic not trying to prevent infection, but just making sure there were enough hospital beds for those infected. We've arrived back there again. /1 https://t.co/8ZmmWVqVIT I saw even…

#auspol #COVID19Aus we must fight rampant stupidity, it kills people. Australia IS 'living with Covid', that's why we have all the protections in place. Like you wear oven mitts for cooking. https://t.co/lycjtVtsMy

#auspol #COVID19Aus a good article. However many of these other drugs are used where there is imminent harm to a patient. There is no imminent risk of contracting Covid for most in Australia. If we're saying there is, why is there still no…

#COVID19Aus @CrabbBrendan very disappointed to hear yet another Oz expert on radio tonight say that we need to move away from 'zero Covid' and accept that we will have some virus in Australia. That IS zero Covid. We're already 'living with…

#auspol and with school holidays imminent. When NSW has pulled this off before, the fact they did was taken as a sign of good management, rather than the absence of risk management. You only get so many rolls of the dice...…

#auspol The Premier of NSW today again saying that her government resists lockdowns because it respects people's 'freedoms'. To me freedom includes freedom not to be infected with a lethal virus. But that to one side, why don't we.../1…

#auspol anybody seen the Public Health Order for NSW that came into effect at 4pm today?

#auspol #COVID19Aus the 'non-essential activities' NSW most needs to abandon are the deliberations of NSW Cabinet. https://t.co/d96VDb3CKn

#auspol #COVID19Aus imagine the long, late nights in Macquarie Street, where government spin doctors agonise how to spin an imminent lockdown, while Kerry Chant bangs on the door and asks them to hurry. /1 https://t.co/eNMMxvunNN 'We're…

#auspol #COVID19Aus great response from @CrabbBrendan to the question on 7.30 last night, about whether NSW is paving the way to us all living with Covid. "I don't think anybody wants to live with Covid." (possibly paraphrasing, going on…

#auspol #COVID19Aus something rarely noted in this pandemic is that workplaces are consistently exempted from Covid safety requirements. Take the NSW Public Health Order released yesterday: /1 Same basic text as the entire pandemic: "When…

#auspol listening to the up-talking BS from the NSW Premier. Be 'cautious' with the virus. Can't see it. Unbefuckinglievable.

#auspol #covid19aus Sydney NOT locked down. Spot the difference, to a lockdown. Whack-a-mole costs more, harms more people, creates even greater restrictions on freedom. https://t.co/AqRUNr9YZv

#auspol #COVID19nsw The Prime Minister: NSW shows the way to contact trace your way out of an outbreak without using lockdowns. The same nonsensical binary for more than a year. Contact tracing works up to a certain number of cases. After…

#auspol the same script across the world, coming to Oz now too. Always a new flavour of 'live with the virus'. The same people and strategy as those who choose to live with climate change. Apologists for the privileged status quo.…

#auspol #covid19nsw NSW Health doing fantastic work. But why is it acceptable that the Premier can still stand there every day and quite explicitly say a priority is 'keeping the Economy open'? Does anybody seriously still believe the…

#auspol #COVID19Aus watching the NSW presser. Offering this to help with the 'proportionate' response. Rate of growth proportional to existing value. Exponential. Not linear. https://t.co/NkX7hbYcFn

#auspol @normanswan an article from the SMH last year revealed NSW Cabinet deliberations about 'lockdowns'. Ministers choosing random lockdown-trigger figures, like 250 cases/day, divorced from any public health advice.…

#auspol #covid19aus @normanswan this article surprisingly attracted very little interest at the time. It shows a NSW Cabinet completely dismissive of public health advice. We were warned. https://t.co/LXDytpOSnc

#covid19nsw Those in the regions who have travelled to Greater Sydney since 21 June required to isolate for 14 days. Not seen anything about whether their family members must now do the same?

#auspol #covid19aus Covid 1, libertarian political bullshit 0. Given Covid comprehensively smashed the libertarian teams in the US, UK, Brazil and India, it's not clear why NSW felt selecting a live with the virus team would work better…

#auspol why have (many) experts and journalists alike not pointed out long before now, that the NSW 'proportionate' idea is in direct contradiction to WHO advice, from the beginning of the pandemic, to 'go hard, and go early'?

#auspol by vaccinating off a zero community transmission base, Australia is among a handful of countries leading the world's pandemic response. You must do both. https://t.co/DfAabWMKEZ

#auspol aged care isn’t just a sector of the Australian economy. Without immigration, the entire continent is just an aged care home. https://t.co/g6UV86GZHF

#auspol #covid19aus NSW planning for the next term, clearly making noises about a mitigation strategy for schools, while the strategy for the wider community is elimination. Not only contradictory, schools will become engine rooms of…

#auspol #covid19aus we have to challenge the ridiculous idea that Australia is now (apparently) lagging the rest of the world. The extreme narrowing of public health strategy towards speed vaccination as the metric of success. /1…

#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

#covid19 #auspol so interesting that we smashed flu in NSW last year, with national lockdown, but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021, with society broadly open for the past year. Potential long-term good (inc. economic) that comes…

#covid19aus #auspol they say history teaches us nothing. Usually you’d assume that meant over generations. Not a year. Australia announces roadmap out of the pandemic today, ‘at last’! Like it did last year, as pictured. Nobody remembers?…

#auspol #covid19 funny (not ha ha funny) that the inventors of the ‘Fortress Australia’ line, to mock public health control of a lethal pathogen, also spent more than 2 decades winning elections by building this. https://t.co/0dymoWCYDD

#COVID19nsw #auspol Matt Lucas understands a NSW ‘lockdown’. It’s a Boris lockdown-lite. https://t.co/OfB93vYKlw

#auspol #covid19 worth noting that 'live with the virus' advocates are mostly concerned with costs to the 'Economy' of suppressing Covid. For comparison, annual costs to the Oz Economy of influenza are over $40 billion. /1 A shift to an…

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#ausol #covid19 drivel, from beginning to end. 'Fortress Australia', another weaponised political slogan. Australians have loved Fortress Australia, when it meant keeping brown people out. Privileged whining when it's applied on the…

#auspol the same calculations worldwide, on climate change too. Public policy driven by attempts to maintain fragile coalitions of reactionary and populist conservatives. NSW's Covid strategy the same. https://t.co/o5BmDO1HUr

#auspol #covid19 vaccination data is the current currency of much pandemic analysis. Showing the apparent world 'leaders' in pandemic action. /1 https://t.co/PW6VhaC1xY You get a different story when you map deaths. Often the leaders with…

#auspol #coivid19nsw the NSW Premier just refused to classify teachers as essential workers for vaccine access, with school returning next week. They join the queue with everybody else. Pretty clearly seeing that the default will always be…

#covid19nsw Premier saying she wants this to be the 'last lockdown' for NSW. Current restrictions likely extended to ensure elimination. This pandemic would also be over faster if leaders would ask people to be ready to fight on, rather…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier saying her government avoids 'burdening' people with restrictions. While leaders continue to make restrictions the problem, and not the virus, this pandemic will continue.

#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1…

#COVID19nsw #auspol have a look at the contrasting lines here for the Melbourne Delta outbreak, and the Bondi/NSW Delta outbreak. Go hard/go early IS the 'proportionate' measure. https://t.co/QjNEeSUjYL

#auspol #covid19aus NSW's stay at home orders. An awful lot of people still going to work? https://t.co/dHuZyKfPAl

#covid19aus #auspol "‘[It] is not because schools aren’t a safe place, they are a safe place, but what we really need to do in greater Sydney is reduce mobility,” Ms Berejiklian said. Pay attention Australia. Once adults are vaccinated,…

#auspol #covid19aus more power to Gladys for strongly repudiating the boneheads in her own Cabinet who want NSW to live with the virus. Not often a fan, but good strong leadership this morning on at least that topic. Though just asked -…

#auspol #covid19aus Have been saying this for 18 months. It's only when this threatens peoples' lives that Australia now notices. A pandemic is a political event, not a biological event. https://t.co/kDPoKwvpkw

#auspol #covid19aus the economic forces opposing public health action in this pandemic first weaponised contact tracing, as some silver bullet. NSW showing right now how ridiculous that was. Now they’re moving on to vaccines, as the next…

#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.

#covid19aus #auspol I used a sophisticated algorithm to track the flow of Covid around Sydney in lockdown-lite. https://t.co/oDExCkot59

#auspol #covid19nsw would be lovely to move away from the naughty children narrative libertarians are forced into, 'if you all do the right thing', to 'come on NSW, let's smash this". You know, NSW, the collective, non-libertarian thing.

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it seems NSW is following its usual absence-of-risk-management approach. Sightseeing the exponential curve. 'Don't leave home', but leave all the businesses open, so people will be sacked if they do stay…

#covid19aus #auspol both the Premier and CHO refuse to answer about leaving businesses open in Sydney. Throwing responsibility back on the community. To what? Not go to work? 'Hey boss, not coming in today, avoiding Covid'. This is a train…

#auspol #covid19aus by not ruthlessly challenging the NSW Government's 'live with the virus' statements at every point in the past 18 months, we've arrived. https://t.co/IIsH9hHRMd

@covid19aus #auspol does NSW want to wait until Christmas to beat this outbreak, with only Stage 3 restrictions? Or swallow its pride and go for Stage 4? Guess which is better for the ‘Economy’? Nothing to ‘balance’ here people.…

#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet.…

@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Health Minister, asked to define 'essential work', says that's a matter for an employer and their employees. In other words, if you can't sell the lingerie without staff there, they're essential. Looks…

#covid19aus #covid19nsw this one didn't get a lot of airtime when reported a few days ago. Proposed traffic light system for schools in NSW and Covid. The amber level is key, where cases are in a community. Schools are the greatest…

#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw I noticed this last year, see circled in red. What that was doing on a public health sign is a mystery, except insofar as it reveals the true underlying agenda in NSW. We're living the consequences.…

#covid19aus #auspol it’s abundantly clear that the NSW strategy is about 90% designed simply to retain Cabinet unity. The refusal to define ‘work’ of any form is a strategic device to leave as much work as possible open, to appease the…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Matt Lucas’ brilliant impersonation of Boris, this is literally the NSW Strategy. They’re not stupid, they want businesses open, and their strategists have found a way. They pretend to be doing public health…

#auspol #covid19nsw workplace mobility data is worse (i.e. there's more people moving around for work in Sydney) than last week. https://t.co/CL9UbW9R6f

#auspol #covid19aus Fantastic, pointed question about the loose Sydney restrictions from @aclennell Other journalists note - go hard, go early, with your questions.

#covid19nsw #auspol pressure building daily is showing that the NSW Government is still running a 'live with the virus' strategy alongside the eliminate the virus rhetoric. 'Live with' meaning 'businesses open'.

#QandA can we please ask whether Australia plans to vaccinate children?

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier’s dismissive snigger yesterday - literally a snigger - when it was suggested to her that Victoria’s essential work guidelines had been effective, was one of the most disgusting and revealing insights…

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier ‘won’t hesitate’ to use harder measures. Going to need my dictionary here.

#auspol #covid19 "That's not how Australians live. We live with risk and ill fortune or poor health — even death — everyday." Stan Grant, mistaking everyday risks, for risks that grow exponentially and overwhelm a whole society.…

#covid19aus #auspol finally attention to vaccination of children, in today's NSW press conference. Encouraging signs.

#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance…

@covid19aus #auspolthe league table view of vaccination again. All of those other countries/regions have orders of magnitude greater transmission and death than Australia. A global pandemic strategy would reflect that, and place Oz much…

#covid19nsw #auspol looks like the mole responsible for leaking NSW Health data on daily cases may have been the same person who publishes the daily case numbers to Twitter...

#COVID19Aus three regional towns into 7-day lockdown in NSW now. This is all just locking down the State, one region at a time, and it might be faster to just do a Victoria and lock the lot down.

#auspol #covid19aus the NSW Premier today said NSW has stopped the exponential growth of cases. Hmm. https://t.co/RWEriNvpd8

#COVID19Aus #auspol together with removing the NSW Government for lethal incompetence, can we de-register journalists whose only question is 'when will you lift restrictions'? The grown-up version of 'are we there yet?' The virus is the…

#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N Both the PM…

#auspol #covid19aus haven't been following the numbers closely, but from memory Victoria seems to be getting on top of the Delta outbreak there? That thing the NSW Premier says 'nowhere else in the world' has done? Twice now, in Victoria?

#auspol #covid19 so much of the daily hysteria doesn’t match the data. This is without much supply at the Oz end, and limitless supply at the bottom end of the graph. https://t.co/oNqPpp6r5L

#auspol #covid19 the only meaningful pandemic metric. If you think Australia is now running far behind the rest of the world, move there. Barring continent-level genocide in the next 6 months, we’re going to win by several laps.…

#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#auspol #covid19aus we have found the lethal virus in our midst. And it is called Murdoch. Our road to Oz-Trump continues. https://t.co/RlHLCC5Cx8

#covid19aus #auspol only some sort of constitutional removal of the libertarians disguised as a NSW Government can save us. https://t.co/jceIxs1zTq

#auspol #covid19aus I think the federal LNP are lethally incompetent. But sometimes the daily team sports of Oz politics misses the important details. We’re already vaccinating significantly faster than the UK and US, even without any…

#insiders as always, all journalists with no public health expertise to counter idiot assertions. Vaccines won’t control the Sydney outbreak, the timescales are unworkable. NSW needs to escalate its NPIs.

#insiders again, idiot journalists trashing ATAGI, because they don’t have a single millibyte of public health knowledge between them. Australia’s outbreaks are due to poor quarantine. Countries who have used AZ extensively having even…

#auspol #covid19aus the refusal of even many experts to resist the gibbering hysteria over vaccination rates astounds me. How often do prominent Oz people say we're running last in the world? Musings on this graph /1…

#covid19 #auspol today's reading, NSW Cabinet, is from the Book of Leviticus. https://t.co/8Zq2SOOklr

#auspol #covid19aus it's called federalism. It's what made us succeed in 2020. Also curious that other experts, right up to the Nobel level, have suggested vaccines are not the solution to the Sydney outbreak. Another expert freelancing as…

#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is…

#covid19aus #auspol those confused about the NSW strategy (or absence of strategy). Always go back to peoples' core beliefs. https://t.co/3hgF75vRb6

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus clear now that NSW is falling back on a UK strategy. Relying upon vaccines to fix an absence of restrictions. I pity those working in ICUs.

#auspol #covid19aus I want to retweet this one every single day. Australia following the mindless weaponised rubbish from overseas, that get the jabs in arms, and the pandemic will be over. It’ll help, but it isn’t enough. Hugely dangerous…

#auspol the comparison with other everyday risks is not the point. Risk exists within a context. The context in NSW is a government refusing to adequately restrict circulation of virus in the community. If it would do that, people wouldn't…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Premier today talking about the 'ripple' effect of people 'not following rules'. This is how libertarians work. Abrogate their own responsibility to do anything (restoring our 'freedom' from government). Then blame…

#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs.…

#auspol #covid19aus during the Black Plague, whole towns were quarantined, not to protect the people in them, but to protect the people outside them. People inside the quarantined areas were left to die. W and SW Sydney, welcome to the…

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus trying to find expert analysis of National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (their 3rd, the first 2 disappeared into irrelevance). You can’t predict the weather more than about 3 days out…/1 https://t.co/sJgSbnCxfn …but again…

#auspol #covid19 I’m glad we ditched public health measures to protect our freedoms in NSW. https://t.co/YuEyg80yeZ

#insiders #auspol the 2 things Health Hazzard says will end the NSW lockdown - individual behaviour and vaccines - both notably require the NSW Government to do almost nothing.

#covid19nsw Government incompetence is what brought AZ back into play in NSW in the risk calculations, cynics would wonder if that’s the reason no further restrictions are being added. The first clotting incidents will be interesting for…

@sallymcmanus #auspol #covid19aus not sure which union covers contact tracers, but I bet if somebody were to look at their working conditions right now in NSW, we’d see the slavery saving the NSW Government’s flimsy Covid strategy from…

#covid19nsw #auspol The Premier says the expert advice she's received from NSW Health and experts at National Cabinet is that Covid isn't a problem for those under 20. Let's release that advice, hey? Because right now it (if it exists)…

#auspol #covid19aus modern conservatives have a rat cunning. Watch them daily steer Australia away from an elimination strategy, using the NSW and Queensland outbreaks as smokescreens, towards the idiot UK strategy. Let virus spread, use…

#auspol your chance of being a billionaire in Australia is about 1 in 700,000. It doesn’t stop economic zealots running the country with that as the defining rationale for the Economy. https://t.co/rS4vzW8SFH

#COVID19nsw #auspol when asked why the numbers in NSW aren't going down, the Premier blames - the people. No clearer proof of the direct conflict of interest in a political libertarian running for public office.

@covid19nsw #auspol I'm guessing GPs in regional areas of NSW offering second AZ doses at 4 weeks is just their individual judgement of the situation in the State? Not a wider NSW Health judgement call of the situation in the State?

#auspol #covid19aus a disaster, spreading further every day, killing more every day, infecting more every day. Every day what does this change in the NSW approach? Nothing. https://t.co/TPggzLHMTu

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the Premier with the daily magical mantra about vaccines. Get vaccinated, yes. But it won't stop this outbreak, the NSW Government needs to do its job. What happens when you follow the wealth advice, and not…

@auspol #covid19nsw #covd19aus 'Delta is like nothing we've ever seen'. NSW Premier, who obviously failed geography. Victoria is next door.

#auspol #covid19aus fortress, hermit etc. Like restoring cargo cult tourism, slave labour through temporary visas and migrants with skills we're too lazy and stupid to cultivate here is some sort of 'open' Australia. https://t.co/D1d0axGCoG

#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

#auspol #covid19nsw the daily press conference, where we gather to watch the virus spread all over Sydney and beyond, while the NSW Government does little to stop it, and chastises us for not stopping it for them. https://t.co/sHW0GxeLMQ

#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#auspol #COVID19Aus #nswlockdown watching the NSW outbreak is like watching Armageddon with your streaming set to quarter speed. Slow-motion train wreck. Seriously, the NSW Government needs to be constitutionally removed from power, for…

#auspol #covid19nsw the difference between NSW and Victoria is that NSW will be dragged kicking and screaming to proper NPIs, infecting and killing along the way. The cynicism of these libertarian fuckers, to keep businesses open, and then…

#auspol #covid19aus Jack Lang was removed as NSW Premier by the NSW Governor in 1932, using the reserve powers (also used to remove Whitlam), because he wouldn’t follow a national plan agreed to by other Premiers. Can we think of another…

#auspol #covid19aus to expand on this. Twice now the reserve powers have been used to remove elected leaders. Both were Labor politicians. Both for trivial ‘economic’ reasons. Nothing shows better how the Economy is really just a tool of…

@Globalbiosec are you still tracking doubling rate, for NSW?

#auspol #covid19aus this is the Brains Trust who daily listens to the wealth advice, I mean health advice, in NSW. https://t.co/fVYyNrK7ah

#auspol #covid19aus Australia needs its equivalent of Independent SAGE in the UK. A group set up by experts once they realised the UK government was using SAGE (our AHPPC) only as human shields. We need expertise unconstrained by National…

#covid19nsw #COVID19Aus the Premier says we don’t have exponential growth in NSW? We don’t have it with cases doubling every day, but it definitely seems to be there at a doubling rate of around 10 days?

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw this advice to businesses from the NSW Government is interesting. They're seeing transmission even in fully masked workplaces. https://t.co/vstjVaYMpi

#COVID19nsw #auspol more dire numbers for NSW today, spread into even wider areas of the State. NSW Government response? Nothing. More blather about 'jabs'. May as well be Boris Johnson doing these press conferences. Whitlam and Lang were…

#covid19nsw #auspol cases under investigation disappeared from the NSW public data yesterday (and didn't return today). Today break-down of cases by LHD also disappeared. Data issues? Or deliberate omissions?

#auspol #covid19aus hands up if you were disappointed this PM press conference wasn't to announce the removal of the NSW Government.

#COVID19Aus #auspol NSW Premier saying further restrictions won't work, because it's 'Delta'. How many days of this same repeated bullshit do we have to tolerate? And now, blaming the people. The circuit-breaker the CMO mentioned - time to…

#COVID19Aus #auspol NSW applied stronger restrictions to the alpha variant of Covid than what it's using against Delta.

#auspol #covid19aus NSW presser degenerates into the usual tabloid blaming of the public approach. When you elect libertarians and their idiot ideas start killing people, isn't it astonishing how quickly their anti-rule passions convert…

@auspol what a treat today. NSW press conference where their failure to do anything is rationalised as being the public's fault. Again. Followed by the PM solemnly re-parroting his climate change slogans in relation to the IPCC. Who is…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus another day, spread into teh regions. Still no change to NSW strategy, in fact more fairy tale projections of freedoms with 70% of adults jabbed. National Cabinet or the Governor must step in.

#COVID19nsw #auspol is there a tipping point which will prompt the 24 members of NSW Cabinet to extract their heads out of their collective arses? https://t.co/OEgtkDCBgU

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol probably the most stupid thing I’ve seen in a while, and it’s a tough field. I also wouldn’t put it past the NSW Government to try this, as Trump did. The Premier has expressed this as her wish many times.…

#auspol #covid19aus I can identify the 'handful' of people non-compliant with public health efforts. 24 of them. The NSW Cabinet.

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus can somebody, anybody, at the NSW press conference just yell out for the Premier to shut up and ask if this daily bullshit is for real?

#auspol #covid19aus I was amazed when this story was published in 2020 that it got almost no attention at all. It shows very clearly why what we're seeing right now in NSW was always going to happen, and was never about 'health advice'.…

#auspol seeing the vacuity of National Cabinet in this press conference. No decisions of note, Powerpoint summaries designed to promote the federal government. The national crisis in NSW gets mentioned, but no actions, no decisions.

#auspol #covid19aus the federal CHO re-states the NSW idiot libertarian line, that the solution in NSW is people following the rules. So, we just watch the exponential increase and spread daily.

The health advice for the Western and far Western NSW outbreaks? ‘We’re sending more vaccines’. NSW clearly into Tory-UK land now, no attempt will be made to control spread. We’re going to jab our way out. Sorry, we’re going to do…

#auspol #covid19aus is it just me, or are pandemic experts saying less, the worse the situation in NSW gets? Shouldn’t they be saying more? Why can’t they organise some sort of united group to call out the tragedy unfolding?

#covid19aus #covidnsw #auspol people of Australia. Meet the NSW Cabinet (2019 photo). Bringing Covid to your town soon. https://t.co/LTnremyPbH

#Covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW lockdown from this afternoon looking very likely.

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol are we getting a bit too excited here? No real changes to the restrictions in Sydney (that aren’t working), with this just hopefully keeping the regions out of harm’s way a bit longer? What did I miss?…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW is not in ‘total lockdown’. It’s extended its existing lockdown measures - which aren’t working - to the entire State. Delta isn’t the problem. This is the Economy variant. Businesses remain largely…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW restrictions predominantly limit social activity. They do much less to restrict work. The NSW Cabinet still wallows in the fantasy that the ‘Economy’ is separate to the lives of its people. Until that last fantasy…

@covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol contact tracing is broken: NSW Health is introducing a new measure to ensure people continue to receive prompt notification of their COVID-19 positive test result. Confirmed cases will receive a text message…

#auspol #covid19aus as NSW case numbers continue to climb the exponential curve, I do worry that the Premier has already reached PLS (my new public health term). Peak Lecturing Shrillness. So far PLS hasn't slowed case growth. Closing…

Congratulations to @aclennell for trying to interrupt the continuous barrage of BS from the NSW Premier.

#COVID19nsw #auspol #covid19aus every day I'm staggered at just how naughty we all are in NSW. It's an epidemic of naughty, apparently. Imagine if your working hypothesis is 'one State in the Federation is much naughtier than the others'.…

#covid19nsw #auspol 100%. The reason NSW can’t turn its numbers around is that it refuses to close more workplaces. Still trying to save its Economy, rather than its people. Doesn’t even occur to it that those are the same thing.…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol new messaging from NSW today. No 'as low as we can get the cases'. Just 'learn to live with Covid'. NSW as Australian pioneer, showing the other States the way! Exponential growth will put an end to this…

#auspol #covid19asu NSW Premier and PM both still peddling the fantasy that there's a manageable amount of Covid. The old live with the virus, mitigation fantasy, they've been itching to have it back. https://t.co/lkgBjLW0Te

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus the only 'balance' in the NSW approach is between the competing factions of NSW Cabinet. Our strategy is piecemeal because it's about protecting the Premier's leadership, not public health.

#auspol #covid19aus we need a leading journalist to convene a roundtable of top public health experts once or twice a week, to comment on NSW's approach. How about it @David_Speers? At the moment they're just individually tearing their…

@auspol #covid19aus the fundamental uselessness of National Cabinet illustrated by the fact that the debacle in NSW doesn't even appear to be on its agenda today. The 4-stage national plan is already redundant, thanks to NSW, and they have…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw Covid cases now in the 3 largest WNSW regional towns. And in many smaller regional towns. This is what click ‘n’ collect looks like now in regional NSW as well as Sydney. Looming catastrophe.…

#covid19nsw #auspol to be brutally honest, these protestors are orders of magnitude less dangerous than the NSW Cabinet. What they do pales into insignificance next to what the NSW Government refuses to do, every day.…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus police would have orders of magnitude greater impact on containing the pandemic in NSW if they sent only 2-3 officers to Macquarie Street to arrest the NSW Cabinet. Cabinet cares even less about viral spread…

Professor Makris has reinforced this several times now. I’m surprised it hasn’t filtered through into discussions in Australia. @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec https://t.co/awI21SxDYS

#auspol #covid19aus I wonder what other States feel about NSW saying that unless every other State follows the NSW strategy, they’re not acting as a true federation. Just staggering arrogance, from the State already using the national…

@RichardfromSyd1 morbidity climbing in Israel. Suggests NSW’s hospitalisations have a long way to run. https://t.co/p10R4GE9ju

#auspol #covid19aus if you're a bit light on the political machinations that lead to train wrecks like NSW, this will help. https://t.co/D7Wa8LPWeS

#covid19nsw #auspol the transition (back) to full 'live with the virus' strategy in NSW now complete. Unrelenting lies and bullshit every day. Misrepresenting Doherty yet again. The only thing that can force a change is people refusing to…

#covid19nsw #auspol how you feeling out in the small regional towns, NSW? When asked about maintaining no spread in regional towns, the Premier's answer? "Get vaccinated".

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the key elements from the Doherty Report which are not being prosecuted daily in NSW press conferences. For those who don't understand it or are too lazy to read it, which appears to be most political…

#auspol #covid19nsw When asked late yesterday whether opening up with hundreds or thousands of cases still active in the community was a problem, the Director of the Institute said ‘the outcome is the same, but the load on the public…

#auspol #covid19aus the thing to remember about a pandemic is, it only gives you an illusion of choice of action. You can go 'softer' or 'harder', but the former becomes the latter, in time, with added deaths, morbidity and economic…

#covid19nsw #auspol please NSW journalists, please interrupt the Premier to say not suppressing case numbers violates both the Doherty Report and the National pandemic 4-stage plan.

#covid19nsw #auspol sadly NSW now rapidly approaching the point where the BS and blather from the NSW Government is exposed as utterly powerless against the catastrophe it generated. The only silver lining in pandemics, BS has nowhere to…

#auspol a tip for journos interviewing employees of the NSW Government, like NSW Health staff. They're not allowed to speak about what they know and see. It violates their employment conditions.

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw nearly 1000 cases infectious in the community today in NSW. And the government's response? Talking about opening up. Only health system collapse may stop this lethal madness.

#auspol #covid19aus we had the PM quoting Batman this week. The NSW Premier is surely Macbeth: "I am in blood stepped so far, that should I wade no more returning were as tedious as go over"

@auspol #covid19aus not one word about ventilation in schools in the NSW school re-opening timeline. Knock me over with a feather.

@juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1 @Mike_Honey_ the announced threshold for allowing NSW school re-opening when stay at home orders are lifted and the community transmission in an LGA is lower than 50 per 100,000 population. Do we have that…

Viewing the UK from afar (Oz) the past nearly 2 years, that's almost the government strategy in a nutshell? Over the top straight into the German machine guns, with apologies to Blackadder?

Thanks to @rossleedham for digging this out. The current metric NSW is considering for deciding whether a school should be re-opened, from the CDC, is the cases per 100,000 LGA population. NSW suggesting 50. That’s in the high risk range.…

#auspol #covid19aus weasel words. ‘Optimising’ public health measures = reining in uncontrolled spread in NSW. You’d hope. https://t.co/GoNwvPzTGr

#auspol #covid19aus Australia can’t. But it will, if the PM and NSW Premier get their way. https://t.co/gB61GAXXQb

#auspol #covid19aus Greg Hunt regurgitating the laughable ‘kids need to be at school for their mental health’ line. Why would anybody believe conservatives on schools? Oz school performance has been in free fall, and they just fund…

#auspol #covid19aus a message for the NSW Government and our PM. https://t.co/jdPUbikYIM

#auspol #covid19aus come on Australia, you know how to do this. In a pandemic that number 30 absolutely must stay at 30. https://t.co/sVmuTMOSSj

#auspol #covid19aus another great intervention from Allan Saul. Summarises the entire NSW situation in under 5 minutes. Fascinating how vaccination also makes contact tracing harder, because more people become asymptomatic.…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus cases under investigation in NSW hitting new records every day. How about at least one question at today’s NSW press conference on the overwhelmed contact tracing, and how that means the 70% and 80% figures…

#covid19nsw #auspol here's a tip NSW journos. Read this and throw away all the other questions you had planned for 11am today. This is all you need. https://t.co/tn6gOP0szD

@covid19nsw #auspol the NSW Premier saying (again) that case numbers aren't growing exponentially. It's hard to keep track of the lies, there are so many. Again lying about Doherty modelling and the National Plan as well.

We talk about variants. Every variant to date has been produced by a political ideology, generating mass infection and mutation. A new variant today: the 'let's bring Aussies home at 80%' variant.

#auspol #covid19aus it would be a delicious irony if NSW, after banging the ‘live with the virus’ drum for weeks, now starts to drive numbers down. https://t.co/4IWJOGlVzp

#covid19nsw #auspol sigh. Please, somebody, anybody at the press conference, point out that 70/80% Doherty figures are totally reliant upon functioning TTIQ. Which NSW doesn't have.

#covid19nsw #auspol the NSW Premier today comparing annual flu deaths to projected Covid deaths. An average flu year about 600 deaths. Covid deaths opening up at 80% projected to be over 25,000.

#auspol #covid19aus "...the Queensland premier is being alarmist here, as the dramatic figures are based on minimal restrictions and only partially effective TTIQ capabilities". 'Minimal restrictions' is 'opening up' (NSW plan). TTIQ…

#covid19aus #auspol the ‘pingdemic’ of the UK, coming to a town near you soon. Where we don’t trace infections to try to shut them down, we just let you know you’ve been infected. Like replacing policing with a ‘you’ve been robbed’ app.…

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

#covid19nsw #auspol ah, the 'exciting' times in the next few weeks, where ICU numbers and deaths climb and we open up in NSW. Thank you Premier, fine linkages there.

#covid19aus #auspol would love to see polling on how many Australians would prefer 'freedom' from lockdowns, or freedom from Covid.

#covid19aus #auspol NSW moving to 'heroic' front-line workers phase. Standard libertarian playbook. Like the feds do with firies when their inaction on climate change incinerates whole towns. Put the last line of defence into the…

#auspol #covid19aus if Jacinda would only watch the daily NSW pressers, she’d know that you can’t eliminate Delta. Ooops. https://t.co/BEiF6OassQ

@OrinCordus how's that 1550 surge capacity ICU in NSW sound to you?

#auspol #covid19aus the sentiment work the vaccine rollout team do suggests only 79% of Australians plan to get vaccinated. This is a very precise measure of how much your democracy has become infected with populism. The US and UK…

#covid19aus @DrZoeHyde The big fix appears to be on again for schools, as it was in 2020. Both times very limited Oz data used for assessment of Covid risk, when there's voluminous data from overseas available. Have to wonder if that's…

#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde @RealOzSAGE I was going to do a detailed break-down on the latest NCIRS report which the NSW Government used today to assure people sending the kiddies back to school is safe. But maybe.../1…

#nswpol #auspol still waiting, weeks in, for somebody to point out at the NSW press conference that the 70 and 80% figures are irrelevant without functioning contact tracing. Doherty requires it. And Burnet require all current restrictions…

#auspol #covid19aus pity we can't refer 'you can't eliminate Delta' to ICAC as well. But they are very busy with NSW Government stuff already. https://t.co/BzWy2CSeZI

@jmodoh #auspol #covid19nsw #nswpol can you ask at the NSW press conference whether the level of contact tracing required in the Doherty modelling for 70 and 80% openings is actually being met in NSW? With specific data/numbers on CT…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it's a new low in NSW governance that the NSW Premier first reiterates the worst case and death numbers are in the weeks to come, and then says the government will now no longer front the daily press…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw maybe the NSW Cabinet is going to Hawaii for a holiday. It's a favoured location for LNP leaders during natural disasters.

#nswpol #auspol the NSW premier today justified her ending press conferences by saying it was part of 'learning to live with' Covid. Nobody blinked. You don't live with a virus when it's in fucking pandemic phase. https://t.co/il4330oEWC

@RealOzSAGE these are the types of online presentations Independent SAGE do in the UK that I think you could do in Oz? Would fill the void left by the NSW Government too. I also think Gabriel’s message here is a powerful one.…

The definition of a pandemic is an epidemic that crosses international borders. In NSW Covid isn’t even an epidemic, it’s something that only happens in the poorer LGAs. https://t.co/0jf3jnIExW

#auspol Vital insights from @RealOzSAGE. Covid is unlikely to become endemic, it will remain an epidemic disease. Not 'like the flu'. And the 'peak' of NSW cases depends on current conditions and restrictions. Each change to those…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

#auspol #covid19aus you can argue yourself blue in the face every day here with those who didn't notice Australia's pandemic strategy remains elimination of community transmission. Despite what the PM and NSW Premier say, violating their…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia's choice of vaccination strategy has been mostly based on risk of Covid illness i.e. oldest and most vulnerable first. Less said I think is that this is another shift towards a 'live with the virus strategy'.…

#auspol Imagine if Australia had nuclear powered: - vaccine procurement - progressive taxation - funding to public universities, schools and hospitals - political donation laws - controls on political grants schemes - independent…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @MichaelSFuhrer I think we were discussing a week or so ago what might constitute the threshold between partial TTIQ and broken TTIQ. Latest NSW epi report. Thoughts? Data also 2 weeks' old. Seems to be a…

#auspol #covid19aus suspect a fairly common story out of Western Sydney, friends of mine. Family with adult son and daughter living at home, son with 2 kids of his own. All adults double-jabbed. Son works in aged care, has been isolating…

#nswpol #auspol some other blithering idiot NSW Minster saying ‘Australia can’t stay closed forever’. If you don’t put the fire out, it will keep re-igniting. Doing a half-arsed job just means we’ll all be back here again, saying all the…

#auspol #covid19aus Australians rise to this sort of challenge. Don’t open up before they all get the chance. https://t.co/78PpnSrCJO

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus NSW Premier warning people of dramatic escalation in case numbers even at 80% adults double-vaxxed. The vaccines will protect us from harm. I’m sorry, but an epidemic by my understanding is defined by number of…

#auspol #covid19aus #nswpol you see, NSW can do it, for road deaths. Costs a fortune and restricts peoples’ ‘freedom’ too. https://t.co/3aoal5sRta

@auspol #covid19aus Singapore, with 77% of its total population fully vaccinated, is finding schools are a major source of spread. As the UK found as well. Here in Oz hand-picked experts are assuring parents ‘nothing to see here’.…

#covid19aus #auspol The normalisation of throwing kids under a bus. Pertussis deaths in the past century. Pre-vaccinations, annual deaths from whooping cough in Australia were in that 50-120 range. Significant morbidity as well. /1…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

#auspol #nswpol this is on the NSW Government's main page. "70% to reopen NSW" is surely not only false advertising, but also appalling public health practice? The false expectations this sort of thing sets up creates all sorts of problems…

#auspol Roadmaps that actually follow the National Plan and Doherty modelling apparently create despair in people. Better to just make one up, with fairies at the bottom of the garden, like NSW. https://t.co/73Ga9TMGjK

#auspol #nswpol can’t add childhood vaccination to the roadmap, but can let construction rip unvaccinated. Those who doubt that the NSW Government is run by business, for business - what more do you need? https://t.co/M2Uggbzdq2

#auspol #covid19aus the only thing that might slow the 'live with the virus' variant is a national strike. People refusing to get vaccinated or to send their kids to school until all of the roadmaps include time for *all* Australians,…

#auspol #nswpol a lesson from the pandemic. Betting on two flies crawling up a wall, it's true for Australians. Re-frame the entire pandemic on reaching some relatively meaningless 70 and 80% figures, and people will stop paying attention…

NSW is preparing a Covid-saturated environment for them, to make them feel more at home. https://t.co/FpLMrdbs6E

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW will soon re-open, at an *average* adult vaccination rate of 70%. Danziger’s famous cartoon comes to mind. https://t.co/7MBNmI7GKu

#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the…

#auspol #nswpol it seems the NSW Government realised the daily press conferences were useful after all, because they get maximum public attention at least once a day. Utterly irrelevant live ads now being added, like addition of new…

#auspol #covid19aus I often say that NSW and the feds follow the UK lead in much of their pandemic thinking. Here’s another box we’re about to tick in Oz, mass and deliberate infection of children. Even modelled in the Doherty…

#auspol #covid19aus I’m guessing people who point to graphs like this are told ‘yes but the illness is mild in children’. Come on parents of Australia, draw a line in the sand before this is us. https://t.co/s0owIVF8Qh

#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, through farming and business mostly. They were formed to…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

Hats off to the @GrattanInst and @stephenjduckett for calling it so early (July), and it's still bearing up well. There will be nothing like 'normal' life back until populations get to at *least* 80% total population vaccination. /1…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus the NSW 'roadmaps', just bits of paper with dot points, with little implementation planning behind them. All of this ridiculous complexity because we won't do the obvious thing and just wait until most of Oz is…

⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@OrinCordus⁩ in which we see that the NSW Government interprets ‘partial TTIQ’ to mean ‘careful, there’s virus about’. https://t.co/112aawa7xq

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

The further NSW Health senior staff get from Macquarie Street, the more they're able to call out the elephants in the room. 'Freedoms' the problem, children most at risk. Nearly all under-10s in the regions this week. @RealOzSAGE #nswpol…

#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1…

Australia will need to remind NZ that the 'spirit of Anzac' was actually a detailed plan to have your young mown down by machine guns. https://t.co/k6Tv5tGmag

#auspol #covid19aus speaking with people I know, I don’t think it’s widely understood that this ‘herd immunity’ strategy with children is also the Australian National Plan. https://t.co/EnqfmQob0x

#auspol #covid19aus @AlanKohler asking all of the questions most Australians aren’t asking. The answers may hit them like a truck, leading up to Christmas. https://t.co/MbfbLpuvIW

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus what is wrong with the parents of Australia, that they see this in the UK and want the same for here?Parents I know are too busy applauding ‘poor Gladys’, as she resigns for corruption. The Gladys who approved…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus welcome to 2021, where civil disobedience will become wearing a mask to work in NSW.

#auspol #covid19aus in our slavish copying of the UK Covid strategy in NSW and Canberra, we’ve moved to the next step. Where experts ‘only advise’, and ‘it’s politicians who make the decisions’. Meaning they ignore the advice. Like they…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus hands up if you’re cheering on ‘Freedom Day’ in NSW, on Monday? The day we start infecting the kids! Our 6-child Premier leading the charge. Act 2 - we start sending them down the mines again, they should never…

#nswpol #auspol @RealOzSAGE Masks on the only unvaccinated group left in NSW ‘ludicrous’ and ‘restrictive’. If it walks like a Trump, and blathers like a Trump, it’s a Minister in the new Perrottet Ministry. A Deputy Premier even.…

I’ve forgotten who shared on Twitter today that Rotary gives more money to the WHO than most countries. Including Australia. https://t.co/bp56RZwNBq

#auspol #nswpol As NSW gives Covid its freedom tomorrow, the libertarian brotherhood in the UK, having also argued to smash borders open and get people moving again, has settled back into libertarian life. Restricting people moving,…

Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools. And there’s something really important here that it made me…

#auspol #covid19aus “…the biggest challenge for Australians will be getting used to hearing about high numbers of confirmed cases. Even in vaccinated societies, the virus continued to circulate, but people did not end up with severe…

#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public health concepts in this pandemic, and hospitalisation is…

#auspol #covid19aus not a pesky public health sheila in sight. NSW is back, run by private (very very private - ssh, ICAC) industry. Gambling, booze and real estate back in the driver’s seat. A warm feeling, that our sacrifice has restored…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW and Canberra follow the UK in pandemic thinking. NSW for example is now at the ‘take back control from experts’ stage (UK, 2020). If that goes wrong, they’ll spin that as ‘poor advice from experts’, as the UK is…

Would love to see a @RealOzSAGE assessment of the NSW schools ventilation report, given also that OzSAGE got a mention! https://t.co/nztf3Hs9Ep

#auspol tales of freedom in NSW. Shared the OzSAGE ventilation guidelines with staff at work. Response: "just an ad for air conditioners". I asked 'what's our fresh air replacement rate in this building?' Response: 'no idea, we'll just…

The Reverend Dom proudly owning NSW’s journey into the abyss. I guess it might be a step up from Gladys pretending her ideas were Kerry Chant’s ideas. #auspol #nswpol https://t.co/mQljAVrwDv

Worth remembering that in the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, the unvaccinated are mostly young kids, who can’t yet be vaccinated. The kids the Deputy Premier of NSW said it was ‘ludicrous’ to protect with masks.

Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

Ultimately the extent of the culture wars are an optical illusion. Minority viewpoints amplified to high volume inside narrow media channels. Creating an apocalyptic impression of end of times and mass support. It’s a bit Wizard of Oz,…

I agree with Walter Lippmann (from his 'The Phantom Public') that we have a far too idealised view of what politics is, and how it works. And this drives our cynicism towards it. Some quotes to see if you agree. /1 #auspol…

The extraordinary pace of vaccination has upset all of the modelling (in a good way). Many countries look on with envy at how Australia mobilises the community for a challenge. We need to understand how Australia builds and maintains a…

Struggling with the euphoria in Melbourne, opening with only half the city vaccinated, with over 2000 cases per day. Why did we even bother, Australia, in the past 2 years? Why not just surrender to the let it rip crowd at the beginning?

'Living with' an infectious pathogen. Whooping cough a recent example. Australia had a 4-year pertussis epidemic between 2008 and 2012. 40,000 cases in 2011 alone. 140,000 all up. An example below of the public health action taken. Not…

Men in dark conservative suits, discussing Australia’s public health planning. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ygctKmYkGn

The UK as a guide to NSW pandemic strategy. Boris’ new framing and spin? ‘We have very high case numbers, we always said we would’. Action? None. Watch Dom say the same if cases take-off here. Has warned us high case numbers are coming.…

This will be why the NSW Government removed mask mandates for gyms and dance classes this week. Their current public health strategy seems to be ‘hide NSW Health from public view’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wvBbRGpHDF

#auspol #covid19aus Nick Coatsworth on SKY right now, bashing Burnet mask studies and trashing the idea of masks in schools as being scientifically unsound. Maybe he could comment on Covid school safety studies based on a sample size of 18…

The ‘service sector’ employs about 90% of Australian workers, and generates about 80% of our GDP. We’ve forgotten that ‘service’ historically meant servants. One ‘went into service’. What economic mumbo-jumbo is hiding is that most of us…

Where I live, this is the official advice from the NSW Department of Education, via NSW Health. A nationally prominent medical practitioner is providing the advice I’m re-Tweeting, to the public. This seems a breach of professional…

Not sure I've seen a presentation more slogan-rich and information-empty than this one on net-zero, the 'Australian way'. Even the slides are just slogans. #auspol

“…the rate of confirmed infection was more than 10 times lower in the group of participants who had received a booster…boosters…may have an impact on reducing transmission…” We’ll only use them for harm minimisation. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

The politics of zero. We’ve had 2 years of outright assault on the idea of zero Covid (both in the eradication and elimination sense.) But take this NSW Government strategy statement, and replace ‘The NSW Road Toll’ with ‘Covid morbidity…

Have friends and family in Germany who say ‘Australia shouldn’t be locking people down’. 100,000 dead there, and ‘living with the virus’. No surprises how that’s panning out. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/da44NBwJ81

So they’re getting it under control? Or some smoke and mirrors here? On the ground I’m seeing very little attention to case locations and tracing. Many locations never even make it to NSW health notifications. @RichardfromSyd1 @rossleedham…

NSW schools to trial RAHT. Includes use for surveillance testing. Would be nice to see a basic mask mandate as well. Ventilation seems to be a lost cause. #auspol #nswpol #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/VwRjKkOqSm

@normanswan didn't see anything in the ATAGI booster advice about the varying duration between AZ doses in the Australian community? Everything from 4 weeks to 12 weeks. Possibly coming in their January 2022 update?

I have decided that because the contribution of my income tax to Australian life is infinitesimally small, I should no longer pay it. It will not be missed. https://t.co/Ro8z1CF1At #auspol

@9NewsAUS @7NewsAustralia @abcnews how about running this NSW breakdown past the Deputy Premier in NSW, to ask if he still thinks masks for kids in schools are 'ludicrous'? Would it hurt the NSW Cabinet to require masks in schools until…

There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they win because they’re organised. Unions have always been the…

Australia used Thalidomide. The US didn't, based on FDA advice. I'd recommend people follow the FDA strong advice to vaccinate kids aged 5-11 too. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/0rT6atxZ50 https://t.co/SG6NoiVrPE

NSW shifting to the UK model of turning much contact tracing over to private citizens and their phone notifications. With case numbers dropping and far fewer mystery cases, wouldn't this be the time to actually ramp up the gold standard…

Well done to the ABC for this digital journalism piece. It highlights the trap of believing too much that the daily political debate represents underlying realities. It rarely does, maybe more than 90% of the running and changing of the…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

Another expertise-free #Insiders, @andrewprobyn and @PhillipCoorey fresh from a European junket, opining that the rest of the world is leaving Oz behind. At the exact time Europe is descending into another Covid winter, with more than…

People overseas see the public health achievement in Australia, of getting most of us vaccinated with minimal infections. The people here in OZ who opposed public health measures every step of the way are now claiming the victory is purely…

Remembering 2 of our leading journalists, fresh back from Europe, said on the weekend Europe was leaving Australia behind. In coffin construction, maybe. Same continent, same ‘live with the virus’ from last year. Same lethal outcome.…

680 children have died of Covid in the US. Over 100 in the UK. Experts in Oz say we need more data to assess risk to children from the vaccines. Those vaccines aren't going to kill hundreds of children. Get on with it. #auspol #covid19aus…

Not sure the 6-month gap to a 3rd dose should be the blanket model in Oz. Lots of AZ in use here, and LOTS of people had their second AZ dose well under the 12 week mark, and were promised boosters as an incentive to do it. #auspol…

@profesterman no more Sydney daily analysis?

Mr Hunt said while he expected children to be able to get vaccines shortly, caution was needed: "(Regulators) will work to make sure that there are no corners cut in ensuring the safety and protection of our children." (Corners = masks and…

Still not seeing commentary in OZ about wildly varying intervals between AZ doses. Very large numbers of people had compressed intervals between dose 1 and 2. The OS data suggests strongly this will matter. The US had compressed intervals…

Spent yesterday dealing with a single Covid case in a business. Via SafeWork Australia and NSW Health. Tied the whole business in knots, for 2 days now. It's clear now the PH burden is being deliberately shifted to business,... /1 #auspol…

We all remember this? People mocked for worrying about clotting risk, with AZ? 4 per million. The same mockers now say extreme caution is needed with Pfizer in children. Oz running at about 10 (mild) myocarditis cases per million. #auspol…

Australia's Covid ball and chain continues to do what he does best. Get in the way. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/uwSSiCARfl

NSW makes it official. The gold standard of contact tracing no longer much bothers with it, because 'vaccination'. Pandemic must be over, somebody better tell Covid. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus https://t.co/5ESL02XWOi

The question for NSW seems to be, where to from here? Most of the cases in the blue circle are children, so cases may decline as they get vaxxed. If enough of us get a 3rd dose, it may drive NSW towards elimination. We know Covid is an…

From the guidelines the NSW Government has issued to business to manage Covid in the workplace. Note the continued fantasy of 1.5m. But airborne included in residence time in a room. Vaccination makes all contact casual or low risk.…

The new NSW Health guidelines regarding ‘venues of concern’. If your kids are wondering what to train for when leaving school, I suggest WHS litigation, based on the underlined bit in red. Decades of guaranteed income. #auspol #COVID19Aus…

If ‘living with the virus’ will require big annual population vaccine coverage, flu vaccines are a guide? We only tend to get big coverages for vaccines administered at childhood. Flu vaccination estimates for <65 years, for Oz.…

‘We’re waiting for more data’ here in Oz. Is it coming by post and stuck in the Christmas mail? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/A2bexF1FN3

For a brief period (May-November 2020), Australians were the healthiest they'd ever been. The period the libertarians described as oppression, and 'we can't live like this forever'. The Empire Struck Back in 2021. #auspol #covid19aus…

New @RealOzSAGE modelling for NSW through to June 2022, taking into account degree of contact tracing and under-12 vaccination. Still to my knowledge the only peer-reviewed pandemic model we’ve seen used. #auspol #covid19aus…

"Minister for Health Brad Hazzard said COVID booster shots would be an important part of keeping the community safe through the summer and New Year." Most of the NSW community won't qualify until well after New Year. #auspol #covid19aus…

This Department of Health national Covid restriction checker is a pretty useful tool. NSW will soon have nothing left to populate it with, but 10 points for trying. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/OQf4hZdM9S

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

Australia’s public health team swings into action. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/uFWJUSoUFc

The data calls out the lie of these protests. The overwhelming majority of Australians have no time for it. But ideas are a type of virus, libertarian fantasy is getting its claws into many Australians, aided and abetted by populist…

There are a lot of pretty (useless) cloth masks in the Australian community. https://t.co/DfePTsAiSd

A leading political journalist on #Insiders describes vaccines as ‘our only protection’. There’s a due diligence requirement to learn even basic public health ideas, in a pandemic. Massive fail, week after week, from our Canberra gossip…

‘Live alongside’ a virus. The simple, lethal appeal of the metaphors used by spin merchants. To unpack this one, how do you live ‘alongside’ a virus? Does it sit on the seat next to you on the bus? Can you wave at it in the next aisle of…

“National Cabinet agreed that the Commonwealth and state and territory governments will continue to pursue a suppression strategy, noting the objective is to limit the rate of Omicron incursions into Australia, rather than eliminate it at…

“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding when Pfizer can be rolled out to 5 to 11 year olds.” Focus on…

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

Covid-19 workers compensation claims, NSW. Under WHS law, employers have a duty to eliminate Covid-19, unless not ‘reasonably practicable’ to do so. Until now many employers have defined that reasonableness as ‘can I be bothered’. It won’t…

Safework Australia. Last dot point, 'wearing masks'. In NSW most workplaces dumped masks because the PHO no longer required them. It won't hold up in court. Many businesses using vaccines as their main (or only) control measure. The…

One for the ventilation experts. Advice from the NSW government, to business. The first highlight - many workplaces are not providing masks, and nearly always not appropriate masks when they are. Second highlight - hand washing and 1.5m…

‘asap’ in Australia = months of waiting for most, with vaccines being thrown away. A day late, and a dollar short. Again. This time we HAVE the vaccines, but won’t use them. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/9QEhjLHNSI

During fires, do we allow people to return to their normal lives, to ‘live with’ the fire? No. Why do we do it for a pathogen that’s already killed more people than WW1? 60 times more Australians already dead of Covid, than the last huge…

The surge in informal voting for NSW local government elections is attributed to the absence of 'How To Vote' handouts at polling booths, due to Covid. Many assumed these were 'how to pick party X' flyers, all these years. But for many…

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

The first rule of modern conservative politics. Look after the private sector, and the private sector will look after you. Our Gladys heard your love Australia, she heard you say ‘get a lucrative job in the private sector.’ #auspol…

SKY Australia is just relentlessly ‘on’. Like all good propaganda arms of governments, re-working the spin every moment of every day. Yes NSW infections are rising, but it doesn’t matter people, there are no deaths. #auspol #covid19aus…

@YouAreLobbyLud might need to drop in an elite Australian paediatric team to get those schools re-opened. https://t.co/NKZRktLWeL

“Test, trace, isolate and quarantine measures, alongside public health and social measures such as mask wearing, remain key to ensuring COVID-19 cases in the community remain within clinical capacity.” National Cabinet, 10 December. Bears…

Pubs and clubs leading the way. Property development, booze and gambling are pretty much indistinguishable from the NSW Government. Expect no action. https://t.co/um06leZWzP

Hey Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus

The chief economist for the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce described masks this morning as 'sand in the cogs of consumer confidence'. This is what we're up against. Business isn't a thing. The Economy isn't a thing. There are just…

Dominic Perrottet, today with Alan Jones. Saying the quiet bits out loud now, the pure libertarian fantasies at the heart of the NSW Covid 'strategy'. We're now the UK. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/6ZuvwnMeNl

Freedom Day NSW! Take that mask off and suck in some Covid, to spice up your Christmas with loved ones. Let's all drink to The Economy - Cheers! #nswpol #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/1pkT5SrDUq

The UK Covid experience: this week in NSW is another step along their path. First the 'pingdemic' of app notifications has begun. And now the definition of a close contact has been kneecapped, to prevent wide social paralysis with rampant…

Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19…

The NSW Government's new campaign. Classic libertarian stuff, reframing a collective emergency as individual responsibility. https://t.co/B0W8EjbMEc

I think in Oz libertarian politicians sometimes don't realise they're talking to a pretty small minority. It only works if you make it about aspiration, status. Like schools, and tax. Public safety? Not so sure. Very small and whiney…

With Australia spending over $300 billion to fight Covid, what consequences should there be for NSW leaders who ignored all of that and decided to just let Covid rip? Outside politics these people would be in jail. #covid19aus…

NSW could advise here. ‘Relax more restrictions’. https://t.co/1aJ0ekzSpp

Going back to this. Why would we make a lagging indicator the trigger for further public health action, as our PM and NSW Premier are keen to do? Why haven’t reporters picked up on that? Why do some experts repeat the same mantra?…

Strange that so many still come out for testing each day, if NSW is keen to live with Covid. Maybe they love the nasal swabbing, bit of a fetish thing. #nswpol #covind19aus https://t.co/kOjYwuEAF5

I always suggest looking to the UK for a glimpse into future strategies employed by the PM and NSW Premier. This may be next. #covid19aus https://t.co/TtNbnp1gbE

NSW ‘treating people like adults’, says Premier. If you want public health restrictions to control Omicron, you're a child. Libertarians ARE children, spoiled rich kids who never did a day's real work in their lives. Their 'freedom' is…

Have we noticed the gradual shift in Australia, from ‘always following the medical advice’, to the medical advice having to write pleading letters to politicians, like a constituent asking for their potholes to be fixed? #auspol…

It's only thanks to the voters of Australia that we no longer have to listen to Tony Abbott. The voters of NSW will hopefully follow suit with Domicron. https://t.co/c2T4H1hQVV

NSW is 2.23% positive that Dominic knows what he's doing. https://t.co/3W74f889ok

Australia used a lot of AZ. And still nobody official says that, when discussing boosters. https://t.co/O8AnH4YjJu

"If we have 25,000 cases a day in January, the NSW health system will not be able to manage. It will be in a complete crisis. That's all there is to it. It's that simple." Professor Adrian Esterman

Massive real-world libertarian trial. Several weeks where most of NSW stopped wearing masks, because ‘nobody told them to wear one’. Now they’ve been told to wear one, they all put one on. A population chafing at being told what to do?…

To use this graphic again. Imagine if thousands of people in NSW were getting whooping cough, or TB, every day. And that most of them weren’t going to hospital. Would we say ‘all good, let it spread’? I think we know the answer.…

The chaotic, infected NSW mess is? The Queensland Premier’s fault. (Libertarians particularly like making women to blame.) Friends already repeating this new brain-worm back to me in conversation. Libertarians talk strategy every single…

The NSW Government also rapidly weaponising this with new spin (‘might cause rise in cases’). So the growing mess is: 1. the Queensland Premier’s fault, and 2. this lab’s fault. The party of individual responsibility. #COVID19Aus…

This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

Spoke with a GP today who said the system of GPs overseeing peoples’ Covid self-care at home in NSW is collapsing. #COVID19Aus

From a nurse in NSW Health. “We are short staffed every shift by about 4 nurses. Cannot recruit any more staff, no one is applying. Staff are resigning because of the new protocols and workload. We have had pandemic pay relinquished, so if…

How is it acceptable that in the midst of the current emergency, the latest NSW epi report takes us only to 11 December last year? #COVID19Aus #nswpol https://t.co/wQO9zfGLlF

Nearly a third of all people tested in NSW yesterday were positive.

Australians have had a low tolerance for libertarian ideas. The 2014 Budget, a libertarian fantasy wish-list, is empirical evidence, it destroyed that government in 2 years. My gut feeling is libertarian pandemic strategies will be even…

History. Polio. A mostly ‘mild’ disease, for those who caught it. Did we say ‘ok let’s just let everybody get it?’ We know the answer. In an average year, polio killed 50-100 people. Covid has killed >2000 Australians, in less than 2…

Monkey-see, monkey-do. On exactly the same day, on opposite ends of the world, libertarian Oz and the UK announce the same changes to testing. ‘The aim is to prevent prolonging isolation for workers’. No public health justification,…

Media and politicians are silent on the ongoing risk to regional areas. Take Bathurst, a prominent regional NSW town. 120 cases registered yesterday, with the LHD saying that’s certainly an under-count. Most regional towns have few if any…

NSW Crisis Cabinet meeting today to discuss significant new restrictions. ‘Live with the virus’ usually only lasts a few weeks, before reality and BS meet face-to-face. #covid19aus #auspol

NSW Government announces pissweak non-measures that seem based mostly on the old droplet mythology. And projects 4500-6000 hospitalisations, and instead of saying ‘we’ll try to reduce that ASAP’, says ‘that’s within capacity’. Preventable…

No mention (that I saw) in today’s presser about regional cases. Let’s pick Western NSW. A 350 jump in 1 day. Bathurst, the example I used yesterday, went from 120 yesterday, to 257 today. That’s the Deputy Premier’s home town. Heard…

In Western NSW, NSW Health forced to replace virus suppression with HCW recruitment. ‘Know any nurses’? You can smell the desperation. #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/pi4YXhIhVk

Worth looking at the numbers in this thread to see the growing disaster in regional and remote NSW. Not mentioned in public discussion. https://t.co/UN9QXfszDl

Severity is the magic key that unlocks all of the politics of the pandemic. Using polio again as example, which was mostly mild, in the majority of people who contracted it. Covid the same. But both are public health emergencies. /1…

Christmas 2021 should be remembered as the time the people of Australia, tired from 2 years of fighting Covid, were thanked by their governments by infecting them with it. #auspol #COVID19Aus

Listening to Anne Ruston vomiting up ‘talking points’ on The Project. The clusterfuck that is Australia right now is a ‘gear change’. Never, ever vote for neoliberals or libertarians. This clusterfuck *is* the actual physical…

Signatories to yesterday’s ‘Infect All of the Children for their Mental Health’ declaration here in Australia need to take note. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/lzw905kSEx

Latest NSW Government report (13 January) says NSW Health has 15,230 Covid patients under care. Most will be in the home (well in excess of the capacity of that care modality). NSW Health projections from last week (graph). Maybe we should…

“(PM) says that modelling work was presented today relating to NSW to get an understanding on how the return to school may impact the workforce.” Note that. Not the kids. Not the teachers. The workforce. We’re all pit ponies now.…

National Cabinet announces the solution to the shitfuckery of Australia 2022, is to return to Australia 1822. Get back to work, you slackers. And you can bloody well work infected with Covid too.

It’s difficult to see anything except social implosion within a month, in most of Australia. The alternatives seem: - Omicron magically going away, or - renormalising widespread disease and death as normal life. The US and UK are well down…

Politicians in Australia are living the pandemic rhetoric in reverse. From endemic attention to ending Covid, to epidemic bursts of effort, to sporadic indifference. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/chHIR2ufel

Australia really dropped the ball on testing. And it started already with Delta? https://t.co/UQs8Bb5uzz

Precious from Brad Hazzard this morning: “Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across NSW who you expect to be looking after you if and when you end up in our hospital system.” Say it in the…

"NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant has warned there will be a high number of COVID-19 deaths over the coming days, due to the extent of community transmission of the virus." She's off-message there. Mild, Kerry. Mild.

Domicron: NSW needs to 'push through' the Omicron wave. Every time I've surfed, pushing through a wave has led me to...another wave.

Kerry Chant: - we don't know when the peak might be - schools will drive case numbers - current vaccines won't make the pandemic end - NSW should expect a year of continuing epidemic waves. https://t.co/CtpRUhOlka

So we passed the 3-week mark since Christmas. And as night follows day, deaths followed hospitalisations, followed cases. Remembering these infections were a deliberate political act, to win a PM an election, and give the NSW Premier a…

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will…

Nothing to fear people of NSW. Room at the hospital for the kids. https://t.co/7C160s9R6U

NSW now forbidding anything less than a surgical mask in schools. Will be interesting if they also forbid anything better than that. My kids will be wearing better. https://t.co/stjhmDzJw8

This is the full advice to families today on NSW re-opening. Ventilation pretty cursory, though HEPA units were mentioned in the announcement as well. https://t.co/33COs1pMM6

We need kids back in school, so that Australia can continue its decline towards the bottom of the OECD. Spare me the bullshit about us caring about education or mental health. There was little meaningful action on either, pre-pandemic.…

Covid isn’t the first example of the NSW Govt. choosing to ‘live with’ a natural disaster. The Hawkesbury floodplain is projected to have double the number of houses in coming years, all of which will be in the worst flood zone in the…

The South Australian trial really did try to reduce CO2 with air purifiers? Had they been drinking? https://t.co/4yeg6lwBri

Josh Frydenberg says the approx. $260 billion Australians have saved in the pandemic will fire economic recovery. That 'saved' money barely dents the 2 trillion in personal debt. Debt generated by devolving collective public services to…

A week ago the NSW Government quietly signed an exemption to Public Health Orders to exempt employers from reporting Covid acquired in the workplace to SafeWork NSW. Now they only need to if an employee is hospitalised or dies. #auspol…

"The NSW WHS legislation is a risk-based framework that considers what is ‘reasonably practicable’. SafeWork NSW appreciates that exceptional circumstances require flexibility on the part of the WHS regulators...". /1 #auspol #covid19nsw…

So at this point the only thing stopping 3 doses being called 'fully vaccinated' is that only 35% of Australians being fully vaccinated didn't run well with the election focus groups? https://t.co/pXsOge6jS1

Decoupling. From mid-2021, UK cases settled into a new non-zero baseline. But deaths followed, and have also settled into an ‘endemic’ 3-figure state. Omicron then caused a rise in cases, and deaths followed. There’s no decoupling so far,…

My gut feeling that Australians don’t support libertarian fantasies (see again Tony Abbott’s 2014 budget) is getting support from the latest dire polling. Let’s hope this holds. https://t.co/cXaQHyrjEz

Those 'bumps' are the children, teachers and parents of NSW becoming infected with a lethal virus. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/c9hR9Cb5Jv

The 'push through' narrative from the NSW Premier. At what daily case numbers, hospitalisations, ICU and deaths will we have reached the other side? Serious question, it's not defined. The UK reached a constant stream of hospitalisation…

One of 3 ‘endemic’ puff pieces from the ABC today. Highlights: 1) “Professor Jenkins believes the virus will soon become endemic on the east coast of Australia…/1 https://t.co/GFMPprFhJR …(and many other developed countries) which means…

Life in libertarian Australia. My wife is a teacher, and in the absence of any measures from the NSW Govt: - I put an air purifier in her room. I didn't ask. - I got her better masks, KF94. - I got her to measure CO2 levels in her…

A good one for every single journalist in Australia to read. I've not heard one of them press a politician or expert in 2 years to say specifically what they mean by 'live with the virus' or 'endemic'. Press and press, make them spell it…

Notice some in Australia talking about 'off ramps for masks' in today's papers here too. It's a global, coordinated Covid minimisation movement. https://t.co/aqJmAxDPZ6

Less than 1 week into the new school year, my youngest (10) is one of only 4 students in her class still wearing a mask. We can and should blame the NSW Government for this. But also, that's a lot of parents who aren't insisting. We get…

Anybody else planning to off-ramp these political co-morbidities come May? Getting (this) government out of the lives of Australians? #auspol (No response needed, just a vote for anybody else. Except Clive and Craig.)…

School cases building now in NSW, more each day. Parents notified of confirmed cases, but not of close contacts (close contact kids disappear, not even teachers are told why). Of TTIQ, only T is operating. It’s theatre.…

Two (true) stories from inside NSW schools that highlight how RATs have become the new public health magic beans. 1) A teacher came to school for 2 days, with symptoms, 'because I tested negative on my RATs'. /1 #COVID19Aus 2) A year 3…

Granville was called the ‘disaster that changed Australia’. 83 people died. We’re currently doing 7 Granvilles every week, with Covid. And leaders are ‘pleased’ with this. Look in the mirror, Australia. At what we’re becoming. #auspol…

NSW Teachers Federation leading the charge on school infection. Remember this in the coming weeks. https://t.co/Mbz959CdXK

Imagining the people who would still be alive today if we'd admitted Covid was airborne, and NSW hadn't decided to let Delta rip. https://t.co/xeUxGPoVK4

The only public health measure NSW Cabinet can be bothered organising in schools, will be gone. After only 4 weeks. Refusing to use public health measures to beat a pandemic. And now suppressing the evidence of that refusal, at pace. Not…

Stacks of RATs at my local chemist today. $11-$12 each. Nobody is going to pay that longer term. And nor should they. Testing in NSW is now beyond a farce. And that's the plan, hide all the evidence of what's going on with infection.

Who qualifies for a (free) Covid test in NSW? Outside schools. Nobody. Once chemists are stocked with RATs, only a doctor can get you a free test. Even the vulnerable groups listed need to do a RAT first. The LNP were outraged by…

People in Oz mostly follow government health orders. They may have no interest in the science, but people will assume it's safe to not wear a mask, for example, if the government says you don't have to. So much for 'wanting government out…

I’m already rehearsing my response at work when the NSW Government removes all masking mandates. “I take my scientific advice from scientists, thanks, not politicians.” https://t.co/CxGMlEbiJm

You can just feel National Cabinet following Boris down the ‘no need to isolate’ rabbit hole. Already in NSW so few people are bothering with testing that the horse has probably bolted. https://t.co/XUtInkBhOr

With Australia’s huge Covid prevalence now, an Australian Covid strain isn’t out of the question. But good luck spotting it. https://t.co/Pnp7dxLLBr

After the first week of school this year, the NSW Government quantified the infection numbers in schools. Have we seen an update since then? They hold that data, it doesn't appear to be available elsewhere. #nswpol

Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let's talk about the ONS survey and trends here. /1 #auspol…

Ongoing ANU polling shows how populism fails. The country is clearly unimpressed with 'Let it Rip' Covid, but is powerless to do anything in real time because populist democracy is only constrained by elections. /1 #auspol #COVID19aus…

The Twitter algorithm doesn't pick it up. But what's really trending in Australia? Death. https://t.co/6fqWxiPrvP

The only thing we know with certainty about schools and Covid in Australia, is that we know almost nothing. The data is suppressed. If there's nothing to hide, publish the data. https://t.co/rE64wLETgN

Is it really that difficult for somebody to ask the Premier, or NSW Health, what the infection numbers have been in schools after week 1? #auspol

The UK debating the removal of free tests. Imagine having free tests. $40 billion in unnecessary JobKeeper payments, but we can't have free testing, in a pandemic. The corruption of pandemic data, on which most journalists are silent.…

Victoria has had about 10,000 Covid cases in schools, in the past week (according to the ABC). NSW? Who knows. Actually, the NSW government knows. #auspol

Not seeing anything in the NSW public health orders (which haven't been updated in weeks) about the new ATAGI 3-dose requirement. Nothing about early childhood staff and 3 doses either. The entire infrastructure of NSW Covid ground to a…

If we were sequencing, or heck, even testing much, in NSW, we could trace this coming. As it is we’ll just potentially see an uptick in hospitalisations and deaths before the boss of the battery hen farm in Macquarie Street adds more…

Yesterday we got details about school infections in NSW. Over 20,000 children infected in the first 2 weeks, more than 500 staff infected last week alone. Is it a headline? No. In populist democracy, elections are Prom Night. All focus is…

For the time poor, today's NSW press conference. Premier: 'the pandemic is over'. Kerry Chant: 'no it's not'. Health Minister: 'Kerry Chant will be taking some well-deserved leave'.

Decades of privileged European imperial lifestyles (including the colonies, US and Australia), of treating life as a big travel junket, a collective Grand Tour, decides to go down fighting. Russia, China, the rest of Asia, look on with…

I think 3. is the issue in many countries. Australia's public health journalism is letting us down. Obvious questions not being asked, for 2 years. Like wtf 'live with the virus' even means. https://t.co/8DZoOTqzQ5

This is libertarian Australia. These beliefs will transform Oz into the US and UK, in pretty quick time. Aren't these beliefs working out well, for them. https://t.co/h8hm5nphA4

Australia needs a national surveillance survey. Politicians are deliberately trashing data to hide public health damage. “For any real-time health surveillance system to be reliable and cost-effective, it cannot rely solely on…

NSW have done it again, with schools. Testing to cease for schools, with the Premier saying research shows transmission is extremely low. The NCIRS research used ended on 17 December 2021. At the red arrow. Last time, NCIRS data was used…

Still staggers me every single day that Australia is now operating a system where millions of people have to pay for their own testing, in a pandemic. Not even the libertarian loons in the US and UK went that far. We have no visibility of…

Cannon-Brookes could buy The Australian, Daily Telegraph, Foxtel, the Herald Sun, and Nine Entertainment , and have change compared to what he's prepared to offer for AGL. And shut them down. Would accelerate the transition to renewables…

A love letter to the expert Covid minimisers here in Australia too. https://t.co/Mau9A2x4iw

Hey, any journos out there who want an easy story. How about somebody call out the claim from the NSW Government on low Covid spread in schools? Based on NCIRS data collected before Omicron and Christmas? Kinda seems important. #auspol…

Just a tip to any politicians watching, those brutal by-election and fed election polling results mean 'we Australians don't want to live with this fucking virus'. You won't need a focus group.

NSW's guidelines for chickenpox are about to be significantly more stringent than its guidelines for Covid. And no, this isn't a problem with the guidelines for chickenpox. https://t.co/SBhohgXHIm

Why did Australia debate and reject ‘living with the virus’ in 2020 and 2021, and go on to spend 100s of billions suppressing it, and then completely capitulate to the virus after Delta? Both parties. Simple: expertise was deliberately…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Spread in schools is 'extremely low', said the NSW Government this week, referring to 2021 data (but pretending it was 2022 data). In 2022 Covid is feasting in schools. Apparently it's better for the kiddies. https://t.co/RyBoJRLh13

Here we are nearly at the end of February, and the ‘weekly’ NSW epidemiological report, about the only useful Covid data the NSW Government now release, is still the 29 January version.

Two of my kids are still wearing a mask. Next week the NSW Government removes all school mask requirements. This weekend we'll discuss what to do. One is still weeks away from a 2nd vaccine dose. 21st century Australia feels like 17th…

Early polling suggests people don’t want to live with the virus in South Australia either. Covid may clean out the entire National Cabinet, given time. Also look at how much young men are attracted to the LNP. There’s something in that I…

Hey #insiders, remember this? Still killing more people every day in Australia that at any other time of the pandemic. https://t.co/AojdS1bWBD

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

It's all very Old Testament now, Australia 2022. We've had plagues (mice), pestilence (Covid), now floods. I'm feeling that direct link back to the text in many of the government's policies. https://t.co/CgXmyLLfix

Schools in NSW have now been back almost exactly one month. Either a lot of kids have caught Covid at school, or we have a major truancy problem. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/MXCihTnvgL

I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the NSW Government introduced the same rigorous methodology for tracking Covid cases, as it uses for allocating grants prior to an election. You collect the data you want to see.

Prevalence is still the main game, I think. Not least because a pandemic is defined by case numbers, not severity of outcome. Will the NSW/Australia case numbers plateau at a high rate, like right now? Or go down? Is Covid a permanent…

The most recent NSW Government guidelines for Covid isolation require people to restart isolation, if somebody else in their household develops Covid while the family is isolating and they haven't been distancing from them. Haven't seen…

Has any member of National Cabinet, from the PM down, wished ANY Australian a speedy recovery from Covid infection, in the past 2 years? Infected Australians have been statistics. Some of National Cabinet don't even mention deaths. #auspol…

A Covid death every 30 minutes in 2022, in Australia. 'The pandemic is over'. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/DMqF5xPFUl

As an ex-teacher, I’ve tried as well to point out that the NSW government was never going to take ventilation seriously in schools, when they still haven’t even bothered tor remove unflued gas heaters. We all remember these from our youth.…

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for the image. Isn't it remarkable that hospital admissions got to almost EXACTLY NSW public hospital system capacity? And despite cases being 3-4 times more than the 25,000 per day projected by the Health…

Have been away a few weeks. Did anybody solve the issue of availability of (decent) MERV filters in Australia to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes?

I suspect that the deliberate infection of the Australian community fundamentally misreads how Australians perceive the role of government. Australians are not at war with their institutions, as those in the UK and US are. South Australia…

So, if you’re a journalist, isn’t now the time you’d ask the NSW Government why it removed masks in schools, claiming cases are ‘extremely low’ there? #nswpol https://t.co/WgRs9B8U78

Ah The Australian. Megaphone for the myth of the Economy, the conservative substitute for society. A con job 50 years in the making, slowly unravelling. https://t.co/qqZMAFjdlr

When I hear people say 'so what do you suggest, we lock down forever?', I'm reminded of the detailed, nuanced public health strategies we use for other infectious diseases. Like this, just one part of the NSW control strategy for…

Are we seeing any reinfection data yet for Australia? @Mike_Honey_ @dbRaevn @DeadInLongRun @juliette_io @datapossum @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/o637SLzfS6

Clock is ticking on the Australian winter. It may reflect 3rd dose vaccination demographics in the US, but still pretty substantial waning here. And this is for hospitalisation. https://t.co/1HL1yrgWSO

The hypothesis that most of Australia thinks 'living with the virus' is a crock of shit is so far supported by polling. https://t.co/764UuXMZO6

It's an indictment on media self-regulation that SKY News is even allowed to operate in Australia. https://t.co/j7mLBtxatb

This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC) and early-mid 2020 (national lockdown). A few implications…/1…

Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks…

Anybody remember being told to go to work or school, with the flu? Every day, some new normalisation of the indefensible. Don’t think this won’t happen in Australia. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RYC0aJ9fnX

"The NSW Health spokesperson said the best way to avoid COVID-19 infection was to remain up to date with vaccination against the virus." Maybe it was a cleaner or canteen person at NSW Health.

This took some doing. And with Oz cases said to be perhaps 10x what we’re actually seeing in testing… https://t.co/gULwle8W8Q

So, non-LNP members of NSW parliament. Now's the chance to reverse the State's Covid 'strategy' (a flattering term for it). https://t.co/vGgUyXzTrd

I think it’s worth focusing on the scale of National Cabinet incompetence in 2021-22. Also, electorally I think that Victoria-driven outbreak in 2020 was maybe much more fundamental politically than we realise. Let me show you another…

Another 58 dead last week in NSW. That's 58 people not living with the virus. https://t.co/0DGMQ0b0K9

It says something about Australia in 2022 that we need philanthropists to fund a review of our pandemic response. https://t.co/mQB4Epd23M

I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, where's the risk management? https://t.co/sZpB0ZeGV5 h/t…

The NSW Government has doubled its leave provision for employees, it seems. When booking your leave, use the ‘Kerry Chant’ code to automatically turn 3 weeks into 5 or even 6 weeks.

The biggest mortality group right now in NSW is the triple-vaxed. Not because the vax doesn't work, settle petals. But because by not restricting spread, the virus is reaching all of the most vulnerable people anyway, who are now left with…

The 'don't mention the war' Covid strategy. This makes the front page. 91 people have died of Covid in the past week and a half, in NSW. https://t.co/AhVybeE5py

Fewer than 50% of kids under 11 in NSW have been vaccinated. There’s a public health PhD in there, about why this is.

That's 49 for the week, come on NSW, we can crack the half century! Keep living with that virus. Let's see if we can get to a Bradmanesque average. https://t.co/kIxe1YZ9z2

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

Smashing it, NSW. 58 no longer living with the virus last week. 67 this week, with a day to go. Must be time to relax more protections. https://t.co/U70tXxJhxO

Come on Patricia, enough with machine-gunning the government’s talking points. As if anybody in Australia even cares who Richard Marles is, let alone what Ministry he’d like to have. #insiders

NSW school holidays are underway. Read any significant changes in case numbers with that firmly in mind, I think. Perversely, reduction in spread from kids being out of school will be used as an excuse to have even fewer protections in…

This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure,…

The election narratives from both sides will be mostly irrelevant. Letting Covid rip violated the Australian expectation of what governments should do. Covid even removed Trump, and that's in libertarian heartland. Carnage may be on the…

About 6000 Australians have died since the NSW Government unilaterally decided during the Delta wave to shift the Australian strategy to let it rip. That's not far off the Australian lives lost at Gallipoli.

This is a Covid election, as the US election also was. The journalists who cover it won't see it as that, because they haven't registered Covid as a story to even write much about for 6 months. But the infected families of Australia see it.

In today's trivia, name 6 Australian political leaders who have abandoned "any interest in Covid whatsoever". https://t.co/P8qsFtn0BO

Australians hug the coastline in our homes and holidays in desperate denial of most of the continent we occupied. Travel is our passion i.e. being somewhere else. We’re never just here. We have no understanding of place.…

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

@KateEMcCann @SophyRidgeSky @queenchristina_ just some observations from here Down Under, on the UK shift to the Australian way. We’ve had a couple of decades of this already, it’s all very predictable how it will play out.…

“The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.” Innes Willox The intellectual vacuum at the top of Australian business. Where…

Another over 200 Australians no longer living with the virus in Australia this week. Let us worship our god Mammon, on this holy day. https://t.co/8T8WL2YKtO

74 people died of Covid in NSW this week. Watch the vid. Why aren’t ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns mocked as ‘hysteria’? Road safety is hugely expensive, and complicated, and takes decades, and impacts every single person.…

We desperately need a change of government in Australia. The character of the leader drives a lot of voters, they don’t pay much attention to anything else. Albanese is coming across as bumbling and apologetic, which is inexcusable with…

Has there been a single survey or poll in Australia to sound out the public on whether it wanted to ‘live with’ Covid? #auspol #covid19aus

@theprojecttv discussing removal of Covid protections without any questioning of several hundred thousand being infected per week and a couple of hundred dying, This is ‘where we always wanted to get to’, apparently. Australians all let us…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

The per capita/percentage minimisers are some of my favourites. By their logic the World Trade Centre attacks would have been 3 times less bad if they’d happened in China, and more than 10 times worse if they’d happened in Australia.…

Dear National Cabinet. In the last 4 months, since you let Covid rip, Covid has killed more people in the country per day than any other event in Australian history. And we have vaccines. The greatest failure of government in all of our…

The Opposition Leader and candidate for PM gets Covid mid-campaign, and Covid still won't be an election issue. Sing it with me: "Australians All Let Us Rejoice For We are Dumb and Free..." #auspol I had meant to tag @YouAreLobbyLud as I…

72 no longer living with the virus in NSW this week. A day to go. How much death is acceptable? Anybody in the press gallery fancy asking, on the election hustings? Or are we all still focused on fractions of a percent of some idiot…

The original United Australia Party of 1931-45 performed the same role as Clive’s. To vacuum up cranky conservatives on the fringes. Conservative politics in Australia has been a reactive movement to protect entrenched privilege. The ALP…

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

Australia was in the Vietnam War for ten years. Just over 500 Australians died. 5000 Australians have died of Covid in the past 5 months. Can I just clarify that this Tweet isn’t an attempt to minimise what happened in Vietnam. It’s the…

NSW Health's guidelines for allowing close contacts back in the workplace include the possibility of employers requiring all employees to wear a mask. I'm betting we won't see that, in most cases.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

"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…

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…

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…

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

On this election eve Australia, you can choose between a government who doesn't believe in government, and...anybody else at all, really.

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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

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…

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…

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

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

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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.…

Every day this is the public health messaging I see in NSW. https://t.co/99ZhhUFeMR

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not…

Did monkeypox give up in Australia already? Everything seems very quiet. https://t.co/7Vx2iNDett

Has the Australian community ever been this sick? Hospitalisations as the key metric, hilarious, it’s a microbial sewer out there. You can’t do even the most basic social or work thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks.…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

For years FB frustrated me, Australians use it overwhelmingly as a social/community thing, not for debating. Then the penny dropped, it’s our communitarian culture, doing what it does, making everything about community. As Hsu et al found:…

Public health is defined as the health of the population as a whole. We’re all vaccinated for infectious disease, vulnerable or not, to prevent illness, not just death. How is the level of illness in Oz right now not a national crisis?…

There’s been a clear attempt by ultra-conservative politicians in Australia to replace our communitarian politics with US and UK-style ‘personal responsibility’. (Of which these same pollies demonstrate none.) It’s untenable to allow…

‘Mandatory, compulsory.’ Politics is cultural. In Australia these words have never meant ‘government giving orders’. They’ve meant the community, through its elected government, looking after the community, through collective action. We…

It’s nearly 75 years since the 5-day, 40-hour working week was approved in Australia. As I enjoy the long weekend, that seems a long time since any great advance for working people. Wages don’t grow, hours don’t decline. They already stole…

Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes…

Remember when we threw all the strawberries away, as a potential risk to public health because some dimwit put needles in some of them? Covid is killing over 300 Australians every week. I guess by analogy we're throwing the Australians…

There's not a single number here that has moved meaningfully in months. The State has given up, in every way. And I think it gets worse, in terms of our ongoing public health. #auspol /1 https://t.co/nOFQTUqI4Y Fewer than half of the…

Personal responsibility health = 6000 Australians dead this year. Personal responsibility gas and electricity = no gas or electricity. I’m seeing a pattern.

Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid.…

Paradoxically, progressive voters are the main cause of populism. The most divorced from the basic realities of power and how it’s exercised to bring about change. Conservatives rarely protest, they know it changes hardly anything. They…

Look at from around September 2021, when the NSW (at that time under Gladys) and the federal LNP decided to unilaterally change Australia’s Covid strategy to…no strategy. The perversity of calling everything after that time on the graph…

The funding shortfall at Netball Australia sounds like the equivalent of about half the annual salaries of an NRL or AFL team. Seems a ridiculously small amount of money for somebody to find, for a sport with far more players.

@powell_robs @ErinVincent1 have you seen the format of ‘The Pledge’ from SKY UK? The disparate viewpoints engage in conversation with each other, rather than just express individual views through a host. Add key experts and I think it’d be…

7-day average, deaths, Australia. Still going up, has been for months. Imagine being a leader telling people this is a new normal. When's the Royal Commission start the ALP promised? They may end up in the stand too. #auspol…

Over 1300 Australians have died of Covid since election day. 'No major hitches'. #auspol https://t.co/w1ZFnChw09

I’m not sure one leader or expert for hire framed PH measures as freedoms here in Oz. Despite us living the truth of it for nearly 2 years. The ex-PM had a rat cunning, describing them as ‘lockdowns’ from the beginning and their absence as…

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

Same pattern the world over. Listen to the actuaries and the insurers they advise. Having to put dollars and cents against Covid statements cuts straight through the BS. Many insurance folk here in Oz are also still working from home. They…

I don’t remember life in Sydney pre-lockdown including pretty much every person and place I know swimming in viral soup. Wait until we see how ‘scarred’ they are 5-10 years from now, from repeated infection. https://t.co/oR5xV1myXU

Data wonks, is there an easily accessible data source of Covid deaths by postcode, for Australia? #covid19aus

Over 1600 people have now died of Covid (not with, of) since the election. More vaccines and quarantine is good, but the vaccines don’t stop Covid, and quarantine is a bit moot when we have higher Covid density inside than outside…

NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious…

A couple of weeks ago 40 deaths in a day was around the national average. Now NSW is mowing them down in those numbers, alone. Political and health leaders who say nothing more needs doing, smile for the Royal Commission camera. #auspol…

The 7-day average for daily deaths is actually going down, though NSW is going against that trend. https://t.co/5Qy947FhIM

Wastewater testing would help right now to assess the level of Covid in the community, given that RAT and PCR testing is a farce. As with everything Covid in NSW, it appears to have descended into minimising inaction and secrecy. Anybody…

BA.4 and BA.5 clearly feasting on the NSW community. And this based just on the pathetic numbers of PCR tests still being done. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7l2HPPViP9

Wormtongue in LOTR whispers magical bullshit in the ear of the king so that it becomes the king’s entire reality. His eyes cloud over, no longer taking in what’s happening. This is now Australia, suffering from sloganitis. Twitter is full…

Was reading the NSW Health mission on their Twitter page while accessing today's numbers. "Healthy people, now and in the future." Hats off to them for continuing to try, with government refusing to back public health. 23 more today who…

When was the last time any Australian politician, from any party or even an independent, mentioned Covid? When not explicitly asked about it. #auspol

Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

Less than half of Australia has had a flu shot this year, despite free jabs and urgent messaging. Covid vaccines still stalled. Politicians did this, minimising the risk of infection for economic purposes. The public health system may not…

Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No waves. It’s a mountain of persistent and growing infection. /1…

Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas time. Because we’re still killing less than them, or something.…

Colin has done something so important here for Australia. Share with your friends and families too, who are told nothing about what’s going on. https://t.co/yfGMra0ZU3

Sharon Lewin this morning, quite correctly restating that the national Covid strategy is reduction in severe disease and death. That's what's tying our hands. We need it to be a public HEALTH strategy, against DISEASE. Against infection.…

Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running…

More minimising fun with numbers, this time the ABC. Look, Australia is doing well! We’re killing relatively far fewer than the pandemic bloodbath overseas! Maths and language are the biggest weapons of this pandemic. Have a look at this…

Hospitalisations and ICU numbers climbing steadily in NSW. Vaccinations (our apparent strategy) haven't budged in months. How much is NSW Cabinet paid? Is anybody doing anything? https://t.co/fsm81iSdL1

It seems we're not going to see mandatory masks, in NSW anyway. Too many years of libertarian Liberals in charge. There was a time a mandate was just a community decision, to protect the community. Not some ludicrous imported freedom…

Brad Hazzard’s plea for wider eligibility for a 4th dose of vaccine would be more admirable, if the NSW Government’s only motivation for doing it wasn’t their determination to do nothing else. Let’s ‘follow the health advice’ again, and…

I think Peter did Australia a service with this Tweet. An articulate guy across much of what’s going on in society. But had absolutely no idea of the scale of the Covid disaster. Demonstrates so clearly the magnitude of the political…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a business-unions accord on IR. How about using that same model to…

Albo repeated this exact same drivel in a press conference this weekend. It killed thousands in NSW after Christmas. Politicians who don’t understand that public health is something THEY invented, staffed by THEIR staff, to beat pandemics,…

Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protections. A critical insight into how key medical people are…

It took the PMG 40 years to install a telephone service to every part of Australia, no matter how remote. No remote areas were sacrificed, no Australians told to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their phone connection. Nobody said ‘we…

Here’s @StevePriceMedia belting it out of the park. This is a lesson for everybody, keep it simple. Infecting the entire nation is unjustifiable and insane. The AIG - this is how Australian business wants to appear? #auspol #covid19aus…

Who has personal responsibility for NSW? That's a job I think, a well-paid one. https://t.co/HWUiejNsIq

Omicron wave 1 was largely caused by the (then) pending federal election. Omicron waves 2 & 3 will be caused by the pending NSW and Victorian elections. It's why they won't act, for fear of spooking donors and voters. Never let…

More than any country, Australia knows how to mobilise as a community for a disaster. But rather than tap into that, effortlessly, political leaders imported culture war nonsense from the US and UK, saying Covid mobilisation was taking our…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

37% of Australians now have no statutory sick leave. Brought to you by the party of getting government out of peoples' lives, and business into them.

Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.

“…we need to look at the periods of time in which we are forcibly requiring people to not be able to work and provide for their families.” NSW Premier, describing the suffering we inflict upon people by ‘forcing’ them to rest away from…

More NSW Premier: “…we have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick you can go to work.” With HIV, this is what we did when we told HIV+ people to keep having sex with other people without…

This is what NSW provides as guidance for those who get Covid. While you're responsible for notifying all of your personal contacts, it's entirely up to your workplace whether they tell any of your workmates. They rarely tell anybody,…

"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay…

The NSW Premier goes to the emergency Herd Immunity Taskforce meeting to discuss Covid being out of control, with a suggestion to relax protections even more. Like the UK and US conservatives, tax cuts will be the next ‘cure’. Complete…

'Push through' NSW! The promised land of mass morbidity and mortality awaits. Come into the light. https://t.co/DdWyCLRJ8u

Many say that it's difficult for an employee to prove they caught Covid at work. It is. But in NSW at least, for a long list of 'prescribed jobs', they don't have to. The employer has to prove they *didn't* catch it at work. #auspol…

Something about Twitter. I rarely use it as a mobilising tool to try to generate wide public action, because most of the public never use it. (Last estimate I saw was less than 20% of Australians). But the small proportion who do are often…

Something no journalist I’ve seen is asking is ‘what’s the endgame of Australia’s Covid strategy?’ Given the vaccines don’t stop infections, and infections always lead to hospitalisations, deaths and economic havoc. #auspol #covid19aus

Australia demonstrates so well that there are no waves of infection. The waves are public health action, of varying intensity. We are the waves. Descending wave is strong action, ascending weak. Prolonged strong action is flat.…

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

Still waiting for Australian teaching unions to get serious about Covid. https://t.co/CmjjMtJsTa

Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect…

The huge Omicron wave over Christmas was the previous PM in pre-election mode. NSW and Vic are allowing catastrophic infection levels because their leaders, like Morrison, fear spooking voters. Covid will only be over when we get…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

Climate deniers talk about 'baseload' power. Which they think means minimum supply, when in fact it means minimum demand before you have to start switching off power stations. Look at this, solar panels in Australia may remove baseload…

It seems the 'new phase' of the pandemic in Australia is just the old phase from the UK and US. Maybe we got a discount for it being second-hand. https://t.co/LBfpk8ZsXf

Social behaviour is led, it isn’t spontaneous. Why are Australians not wearing masks? Because they were led to refuse them. People ‘take their lead’ from…leaders. The politicians who led the ignore Covid and masks strategy? There they are…

We’ve shot past 70 deaths per day now. Still climbing. Australia’s most lethal disaster was Spanish Flu. We’ll easily go past the deaths in that pandemic in 2022, with no controls in place to stop this continuing into 2023 and beyond.…

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

Football, of all varieties, seems one of the most powerful ways to ignore reality. The UK is on its knees, but football keeps everybody drunk on the hopium. Here in Oz football was one of the Covid dambusters. Its team sports mechanism is…

Fines disproportionately impact poorer suburbs because that’s where most enforcement activity is focused, as with other crimes. NSW even ring-fenced a virus into poorer suburbs, to allow wealthier people in the State to continue to live…

In rich nations, it seems we assumed a pandemic would be like a football game that gets washed out, a temporary inconvenience. Rather than a Battle of the Somme type event. 'One more push', almost the exact words the NSW Premier uses for…

Some say the red arrow represents the point where ordinary Australians had had enough of fighting Covid. No. It's where the previous PM began his run for the election. JobKeeper ended months earlier at the purple arrow. Most had not been…

The plundering of Australia's gas reserves by fossil fuel multinationals is populism at its finest. The royalties? We're giving it away. How did this happen? Politicians signed contracts they didn't understand. They bypassed the officials…

33 of the deaths notified to NSW Health for today were people who could still be alive, if National Cabinet was more than a photo opportunity to pretend something is being done. https://t.co/LFeH7HLh7x

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

For other Australians whose memories stretch back more than 2.5 years, 'mandates' just represent 'standing by your mate'. A classic Australian value. https://t.co/f3wOg3KyiO

Even if it’s true (it isn’t) that ‘Australians won’t tolerate more public health protections’, so what? I was a teacher, most kids would rather do nothing at school all day. It’s not an option. If you put your hand up for election, do your…

Polio was eliminated in Australia in 2000. It took 44 years, after introduction of the vaccine. It was mild in the overwhelming majority who were infected. A society reshapes everyone’s life to protect the vulnerable. An economy isolates…

Just once in 'open for business' NSW you'd like to feel that electing a government = getting a government. The libertarians don't even hide their determination to remove government from our lives. Booze, property development and gambling…

Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

"Australia, despite the myths we tell about ourselves, is a rule-loving nation, with a deep respect for authority and an antipathy to social liberalism." Osman Faruqi Rubbish. Watch how Australians deal with bushfires. It's not love of…

An expose into the way top officials are neutered now by populist politicians in NSW. We've all watched Utopia, it's not parody now. What's less seen with populism I think is that this infects an entire culture. Look at the constant…

Clearly determined to head-off public health action from Day 1. He wanted joint health and finance portfolios, to him this was an economic emergency, not a health emergency. Unlike the UK we managed to remove the vampire squid from the…

The Teal shift isn’t a rise of ‘independents’. It’s the re-assertion of the root of all Australian life - community. It was community-led action. We’re a communitarian nation. We govern the way we deal with bushfires or floods. As a…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

The major drought in the UK is prompting the same conservative chest-beating about building more dams as we’ve seen for years here in Oz. Saying dams are the solution to droughts is like saying buying a bigger wallet makes you richer.

NSW has spent a fortune installing security fencing around schools, ostensibly to prevent trespass and vandalism. But the fences are also to keep kids in, to assist with absenteeism. Tell me the story again about lockdowns taking away…

Since Australia adopted a ‘prevention of severe disease and death’ strategy, there’s been orders of magnitude more of both. The proportion getting access to ICU treatment has also plummeted. If National Cabinet was a corporate board, it’d…

Illustration of how the pandemic is intrinsically political. The greatest difference in ‘epidemiology’ here? The political beliefs of the different nations. Same virus. In Oz, the loss of control of the virus in 2021 was entirely due to…

Two things jump out here. Firstly the high number of deaths even in younger age groups. And also how much more lethal Omicron was than Delta, in Australia, despite desperate attempts to spin the opposite belief. #covid19aus #auspol…

Australia exports more than 70% of its agricultural produce. Also easily the greatest source of environmental destruction in Australia. We’d be so much better off closing most of our farms, and opening a lot more mines. Both are…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

I don’t want to join the pile-on against institutions. Politicians corrupt institutions. But for Australia too, the job is disease control and prevention. Not death control and hospital bed management. A society that is widely diseased is…

43. History will have a reckoning for the thousands killed in Australia this year. Politicians, experts and journalists who did nothing while this happened should think long and hard about their testimony at future Royal Commissions and…

Australia shifted from Zero Covid to Net-Zero Covid. Net-Zero Covid is the culling of unemployable vulnerables. Economically that’s a ‘balanced’ approach.

Australia made community the centre of its politics. Other countries mobilise around territory and political ideals. It’s an astonishing innovation, making social relationship the core. It’s now failing, the ‘Economy’ is sucking the life…

AIHW’s “Australia’s Health 2022” concludes as in the image. It also states that while 2020 and 2021 outcomes show continuing good health for Australia, this was dependent upon the strong action it took to fight Covid. No ‘the pandemic is…

We miss how Oz politics really works. Australians act as a community. All through the 20+ years of federal LNP resistance to renewables, Australians ignored their bullshit and as a community installed our own solar, at world record pace.…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

Not really getting any better, is it? Still a busload dead a day, in NSW. Not one word from the NSW Government, not one question to them from journalists about this production line of death, month after month. #auspol #covid19aus…

Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Instead Saudi Arabia may still be, with our help. It should be humiliating to us as a nation that these Australian companies have to work with the HQ of world oil, because of 3…

Chris Minns, opposing strikes in NSW. Typical modern progressive, completely house-trained by conservative ideology, the best offer to the public being a (supposedly) more compassionate version of the same ideology. The ALP full supporters…

The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definitions of society, and replacement by the unfettered flow of…

UK news saying heat pumps cost an average of 10,000 pounds to buy and install. Err, are they made of gold? I’m having 6 installed this week here in Oz for just over a thousand pounds (equivalent) each.

If you make a lot of noise, you can create the impression you’re a mass movement. Like SKY News Australia, ‘living with the virus’, and the Victorian Liberals. https://t.co/uKSAEskYpC

This 7th ending of the pandemic in Australia is headlining the Spring festival of stupid, starting in only a few days. Nothing like sunshine after a long winter to deactivate what little critical thought we have left.…

Who cares what Australians think about reality? This belief alone will ensure they DO rise. https://t.co/a18SekWEyo

The US, UK and India were famous Covid outliers, with uncontrolled tsunamis of infection. The democidal debacle overseen by our National Cabinet since late-2021 puts them all in the shade. There must be consequences for this collapse of…

NSW will go to National Cabinet with an ambit claim of no isolation at all (the failed UK model), but will sell 5 days’ isolation (the failed US model) as some sort of compromise. And the winter wave apparently didn’t overload hospitals.…

The origins of the 5-day isolation period (down from 10 at the time) in the US. Any half-decent journalist could trace the lobbying behind the NSW Premier’s obsessive push for the same reduction in isolation period. #auspol #covid19aus…

National Cabinet members only comment on Covid to suggest removing protections. More than 11,000 Australians are dead from Covid this year. How is this not the largest news story in modern Australian history? 11,000! https://t.co/TSqsrmyn5Q

Another favourite is people who come back from the US or Europe and prattle on about how ‘they’re just getting on with it’ (Covid). Meaning they’re ignoring it, and here in Australia we’re ‘behind’ because we’re not ignoring Covid enough.…

As an Australian, I'm preparing for the abolition of the NSW Premier at the 2023 election. https://t.co/pSBDbaP9co

The ALP knows these tax cuts are a Trojan Horse to destroy progressive income taxation in Australia. That was the LNP plan, has been for years. But Albo worries breaking an election promise will be unpopular. Popularity is the Achilles…

Australia is doing a national production of Oliver Twist. Don't worry about auditions, all 13 year olds get to play Oliver. https://t.co/X9miBjaDs7

“We have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick, you can go to work.” NSW Premier. The new 'just like the flu'. Except nobody caught flu 4 times a year. Nobody has months of annual sick leave.…

The LNP are a coalition between two fundamentally different belief systems. Agrarian socialists (Nats) and free market neoliberals (Libs). About all they have in common is hatred of Labor, and unions. If the ALP and Greens formed a…

When governments announce more spending on skills and training, just remember the largest beneficiaries are usually the business community. More corporate welfare, the amount Australian business spends on training its own workforce has…

Australia is on the brink of eliminating HIV. It's taken 40 years. Those who are 'tired' inside 3 years with Covid can contact the same mental health lines they offer to those forced to live in Covid soup. https://t.co/2o2fl1VOLD

What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

The 'preventing serious disease and death' strategy. The greatest failure in public administration in Australian history. The greatest mass casualty event. I tag auspol here because that's what the political discussion should be about, but…

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

The Oz data is still being published daily, just not here, to meet international data-gathering requirements? That's where OWID gets its data, via Johns Hopkins? https://t.co/qxIq1TzwcT

I don't think it's possible to re-Tweet this one too many times. Australia didn't 'lock down for 2 years and then open up'. All that white space = most of the 2 years = no lockdowns. The longer periods towards the end were premature…

Australia’s Head of State needs to be…Australia. The landscape, for want of a better word. Indigenous people see themselves as part of it, and even a European scientific culture is discovering its agency. Nations that don’t re-ground in…

I think we need another public holiday to commemorate all of the thousands who have died in Australia this year from a mysterious disease that disappeared in late-2021, leading up to an election.

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

Phil Coorey this morning saying who knew August was the pandemic's deadliest month in Australia to date? This is the National Cabinet information suppression strategy, to make Covid fade from view while it mows down thousands of…

The reduction of publication of Covid data in Australia happened just after the month that more Australians were killed by Covid than any other so far. Is there more than a handful of journalists in this country actually doing their jobs?…

Loving her work. The National Cabinet virtual hook up today may as well be a Fortnite gaming session, for what it will achieve for Australia. https://t.co/7O2GA2kSKW

In NSW, Covid is not listed in the Public Health Act as a vaccine preventable disease. Which is correct. But it does contradict the political assertion that vaccination has ended the pandemic. https://t.co/hFVh3yLbd7

So does Australian government believe in the WHO or not? Or just Pentecostal raptures? “Still is an acute emergency” in my understanding of English doesn’t mean ‘we’ve moved onto the next phase of the pandemic’. https://t.co/0vWGLkc1gk

NSW has had average speed cameras for years, for heavy vehicles. The government refuses to use them for cars. I suspect more libertarian, populist nonsense about freedom. Nothing energises the libertarian project more than cars.…

@AdamBandt, @DavidPocock @JacquiLambie hold the balance of power in the Senate. Given both major parties' policy on Covid is to pretend it's over and do nothing, these 3 hold the only hope for Australians tired of compulsory infection.…

Despite all the rhetoric from Premiers and PM about reduction to isolation periods, NSW Health continues to emphasise the importance of 10 days. They try, deaf ears alas in Macquarie Street. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/1BK9aKP0L5

All the rubbish about not being able to afford to take stronger pandemic action. Much more was spent in the last war (this is UK data, but same for Oz), and it led to decades of unprecedented prosperity. Investing in the country does that.…

That last sentence is the key. 'Australians' are doing all the work, and government will give some (of our) money. So essentially, government is doing nothing. Also ALP, money just for the 'vulnerable' is pure free market politics.…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

Consistency, thank goodness, so now if you accidentally hop on a Melbourne tram in Sydney, you won’t be confused about different rules. https://t.co/UI2aQeY9sF

Anecdotally Musk’s Starlink has almost brought tears to the eyes of some people in remote Australia. It’s taken a foreign billionaire to deliver modern telecommunications to the bush. Our governments just want tax cuts.…

The extraordinary coincidence of every single vaccination metric flatlining in Australia on the feel-good Covid is over boosterism lead-up to the federal election, and not budging since. I wouldn’t let a politician even walk my dog.…

Australian government spending as % of GDP. Politicians say that Covid spending couldn’t go on forever, but why is the choice government spending on public health, or nothing? Businesses are required by WHS law to prevent Covid spread.…

A great example of the disconnect between the hot air in daily political discourse and realities out on the ground is renewable energy. I’m not sure many Australians realise the utter phenomenon it already is in Australia. The AEMO stats…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

More people died this week than last in NSW. Must be time to relax all restrictions. https://t.co/LCp0JM9ItR

This is the NSW control guideline for whooping cough. Also a vaccine-preventable disease. This and the influenza control guidelines both recommend isolation of the infected. How much of the State's public health system does the Premier…

The CMO said today we need to stop treating Covid as an ‘exceptional’ infectious disease. Which other infectious disease killed 252 people in Australia this week, and infected 40,000? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/HQMzGANsZ9

Since the beginning of the pandemic, taxpayers in Australia have provided: - $29 billion in direct health support, and - $314 billion in economic support. A couple of critical questions here. /1 #auspol #covid19aus 1) Who’s going to jail…

One climate minimising strategy is to say renewable technologies need a lot more rare earth metals (they do), so they're unrealistic. This is Australian extraction of rare earths in tonnes. Ignoring populist hot air for a decade.…

Missed this in The Australian back in August. No need to build nuclear reactors, there’s a huge one up in the sky sending us energy for free. Science, hey. https://t.co/V5S52tqlw3

Many riches to be mined in here, as always. One that jumped out at me is the nearly 100 deaths from Long Covid this year, in Australia. National Cabinet may come to regret suppressing data, it gives the actuaries even more (deserved)…

Thanks to @dbRaevn for more beautiful data visualisations. Imagine saying 2022 is the ‘perspective and balance’ year for Australia. Or that this ‘new phase’ of Covid means progress. Millions drunk on meaningless slogans. #auspol…

The dropping of isolation requirements dovetails nicely into upcoming Victorian and NSW elections, just as the explosion of Omicron cases coincided with the lead-up to the federal election. National Cabinet’s only function is electoral…

Non-Indigenous Australians never really engaged with the landscape they found, and huddle along the coasts as a home base for frequent overseas travel. When the void at home gnaws on them, they travel inland instead to try to accumulate…

Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see link at end). Symptomatic disease first. (Experts welcome to…

Australians re-elected the LNP multiple times over the past 30 years on the back of staggering broken promises. The ALP are numpties, thinking being the good boys and girls of politics will shower them with votes. Biden similarly…

Andrews is doing this because he has an election coming up. Elections are popularity contests. Popularity destroys democracy, and ruins health and lives. The overwhelming majority of infections and deaths in Australia in this pandemic have…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

See the culprit? Elections. My local member is swamping us with taxpayer-funded glossy colour ‘news’ about their drip-feeding of politically-targeted novelty cheques over the past term. Ready for the NSW election. Meantime many local roads…

So is Australia a rogue Covid state now? We don't even bother with WHO reporting, which to my knowledge is required under international law? Anywhere else we should be looking? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/MmgvfISVUY

Under disability and anti-discrimination legislation in Australia, building owners are required to make their buildings accessible to those with a disability. What are they doing to cater for the ‘vulnerable’ for Covid? The same as they’re…

A measure of just how much elections destroy public administration is that Australia now has weaker Covid protections than even the US. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the ritualised popularity contest.

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

I can't tell you who to vote for, but I can "strongly recommend" you don't vote for either the NSW or Victorian Premiers. https://t.co/mGctsNiB1h

Halloween is big now in Australia. That festival of death where everybody puts on a mask. Like the other 364 days of the year during Covid. But with masks. https://t.co/1XcJQ0e05k

I know a lot of NSW teachers who quit last year. Not one of them has said it was about wages or working conditions, even though those aren’t great. It was Covid. https://t.co/O8pRq4jgqf

The power of Australian politics is the community. Not the same thing as ‘the people’, or socialism, or capitalism, or any of those European imported categories. Australian life has always had a community focus. It’s quite rare, it’s…

As Saul Griffith says, the cheapest energy in the world is Australian rooftop solar. There’s a lesson in that. While elected ideologues dithered, the Australian community started solving the energy problem without them. The community is…

Speaking to somebody who works as a contact tracer with NSW Health. Their contract (focusing mostly on aged care) was cancelled, the moment the isolation orders were dropped. Gold standard something, don’t know what.

There may be a mask there, somewhere. It gives a fair indication of no change to Covid strategy if they win i.e. they’ll do nothing. Vote independent, the parties are well past their use-by date. Refocus Oz politics back on community…

NSW already has a personal responsibility gambling strategy, it’s going swimmingly. We should now expect public health/Covid messaging for major events that says ‘please infect responsibly’. https://t.co/3Qs04kR9TH

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The big drop in deaths was SA. NSW and Victoria not a lot different to the week before. Still killing a busload a week, each. https://t.co/eFzzZ0a2s4

I've seen some updated Covid advice from schools, following the ending of isolation requirements. All I've seen say that's the change they're making, i.e. no isolation. 'Attendance will be prioritised'. No indication of any WHS…

The sweet welcoming message in NSW when you try to register a RAT result. (Not me with the RAT result, thankfully.) https://t.co/aJZRK8x5g9

It seems difficult to find the actual report. But reporting suggests it's written with the pandemic in the past tense. Does it talk about Australia's Covid INaction since late-2021? https://t.co/hcXgU6l4nZ

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

Election results and polls won’t tell you who leads. Statistics will tell you the real story, these from the Australia Institute for example. The LNP still say the answer to the energy crisis is to ‘pick up the phone to the gas companies’.…

Everybody in Australia in 2022 knew that one of the highest risk groups for Covid was aged care facilities. But the residents were still infected and died in huge numbers. It showed either that you can’t ‘protect the vulnerable’. Or that…

I really hope Teals dominate Vic and NSW elections. But because they’re escalating critical issues that should already have been core business of government. How they’re forced to do it, by trying to make this action popular, is a damning…

⁦@KarenCutter4⁩ this isn’t correct? “In Australia, which had a reasonably severe flu season during its winter…” https://t.co/2jsMUiuCWV

You get a sense here of how National Cabinet has possibly destroyed the Australian public health system. Political expediency to win votes turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into an anti-vax breeding ground.…

When the NSW Government says something is 'over-engineered', think of all of the houses it allowed to be built on floodplains, because planning was apparently 'over-regulated'. Now structural engineering will be your personal…

In which a prominent Australian epidemiologist says we need to ‘ride’ Covid waves. Maybe it’s like a Covid theme park, and this is one of the rides. Silly me thought epidemiology was mostly there to stop continuous waves of disease.…

Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

‘Immunity debt’ is really public health debt. Australia swapped an established and powerful public health approach in late-2021 for a neoliberal, libertarian political approach to a pandemic. It privatised the pandemic, as part of the…

The problem with US-based democracy theory is that it only knows the cartoon extremism of the US experience. So everything is these boring big binaries of authoritarianism vs ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’ action, centred on elections. /1…

NSW was the advance guard in destroying Australia's then public health strategy, which was working brilliantly. This was all about politics, and keeping the NSW cabinet unified. Just as federally the LNP sabotaged climate action to create…

Australia should never forget that what it now calls 'opening up' from the pandemic in late-2021 was really 'Gladys trying to shore up her numbers in NSW Cabinet to prevent overthrow by a Perrottet-led opposing faction'. We see now what…

The big slaughter over summer for the federal election is easily beaten by the mass slaughter for the Vic and NSW elections. Daily average deaths now still over twice what they were at Christmas. #covid19aus https://t.co/LwSXOsueZx

The Australian community has been smashing the rest of the world in energy transition to renewables. Our current crisis is entirely due to elected fools providing no infrastructure to use this tsunami of renewable energy. Elections are the…

This is what an actual health minister says. Why Germany is what we call an advanced economy, and Australia is a big quarry with kickbacks at the gate for local casual staff. https://t.co/BQOxcAr3Lx

Contrasting German and Australian Covid leadership. https://t.co/SmHPTa21va

Has anybody been able to access 3M 9210 Auras in Australia? With the braided elastic? https://t.co/viELfX2rTd

Victoria, then Queensland, now NSW. It’s like a State of Origin of stupid. https://t.co/8FYh2ZI2yu

Headline should be "States Ignore Danger in Varying Ways". I love that NSW is "open and free". Libertarian slogans to fight a pandemic. Like bringing a knife to a gun fight. https://t.co/VyDTUcYMEu

The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.

My understanding of advanced epidemiology gleaned from the NSW Premier today is that this is easily fixed. Those who ‘feel sick’ should stay on the ship. And everybody else should get off and wander broadly through the community.…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

The magnitude of the public administration failure in Australia from late-2021 is best shown by comparing with the previous world champion Covid imbeciles, the UK and US. Yes death rates in Oz have been much lower. That’s due to the virus…

Singapore is being used as a guide for what to expect with our current wave in Australia. Singapore had about a 10% greater level of stringency of public health restrictions at the time of its wave, and nearly 25% greater booster rate for…

US parents following the NSW Premier's advice. Pity they don't have any sick leave, and are either being fired or getting no income. https://t.co/K0ApBN8KVr

It's the darndest thing, that the Oz community apparently stopped tolerating Covid measures the exact second 'Freedom Day' was announced by the then PM, and NSW Premier. All change is led. 'The people' is a fiction. https://t.co/Gv7c5ejjO0

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all the way through, our economy as a result here in NSW is…

Throughout the pandemic NSW has been at the bottom of the economic indicators. Infecting its population has unsurprisingly done nothing to improve the 'economy'. https://t.co/5MKVwDEOyz

"Health authorities in NSW have asked people to resume wearing masks in public indoor areas and on public transport, although they have stopped short of reintroducing mandates." They don't have the authority to introduce mandates? Only…

@Mike_Honey_ @RichardfromSyd1 are there are meaningful estimates of Reff for the current variants in Australia?

Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered…

Can we ask the prominent Australian experts who have consistently advocated for our current Covid strategy whether it included killing an additional 13000+ Australians so far this year? Was that a deliberate plan? #auspol #covid19aus

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

Can the Infinite Covid crowd explain to me why we can isolate people with mumps for 9 days, but not people with Covid? Mumps kills on average less than 1 person a year in Australia.

Australia 2022. Where a workplace has compulsory drug and alcohol testing, which requires people to remove any mask they're wearing, in an enclosed environment with a production line of staff coming in and out.

@KarenCutter4 is today NSW epi report dissection day?

Karen's weekly NSW epi report analysis and breakdown of the weekly NSW Health Covid numbers aren't to be missed. https://t.co/rqaAAypgyw

Working Dog nailed this, years ahead of its time in Australia. Institutional expertise meets vacuous populist politics. It was hilarious, now it’s scarily our lives. https://t.co/PWOQYhb8s6

If you’re a journalist, there’s still time to mention the thousands of Covid deaths that are happening in Australia this year. And to ask if that was part of Covid being ‘over’, as many of you have written. Your reputation and integrity…

A shout out to all Australians about the #VigilAgainstCOVID today. People taking on personal responsibility for the public health action governments of Australia are not taking. @AlboMP

Australia is still averaging about 15 deaths per day, from Covid. That’s over 5000 deaths per year, and significant and disruptive morbidity for many thousands more. Surely this isn’t the new normal? What are the KPIs for arriving there?…

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on. One of the sponsors was the NSW Teachers Federation. Call me a…

@KarenCutter4 NSW epi report analysis coming today? Sorry to be needy ;)

Here in anti-authoritarian Australia, we let Covid rip into aged care homes because...freedom. And anybody have a copy of some National Cabinet minutes they can share with us? https://t.co/ic9kI3c7Kd

Want to vote for a National Cabinet censure motion? "We the Australians who don't want to be infected with a lethal virus multiple times every year for the rest of our lives, censure National Cabinet for replacing a public health system…

Stay tuned for this, as well as Karen's weekly unpacking of the NSW epi report. And if you're not following Karen, now is a great time to start. https://t.co/ULtTMSTPq2

Karen’s forensic weekly dissection of the NSW epi report is a Twitter highlight for me. If you want one of the best windows into what’s really going on with Covid in the community, watch for this thread on Thursdays. https://t.co/XvSxb4ov1Z

Happy Christmas Australia! Keep buying from your sick beds, the economy needs you. https://t.co/RxPawtRzDC

The ‘end of Covid exceptionalism’ means still killing well over 100 Australians a week, and calling it ‘a new normal’. https://t.co/I9kWXe7OzS

So many stories of people so sick, churning through RATs at $10 a pop to try to get to the bottom of it. I'll never forgive Australian governments for not only releasing a pandemic virus into the community, but then also making them pay…

So China will relax restrictions under the 'Omicron is mild' banner. Thousands of Australians would remember us doing the same. If they were still alive. https://t.co/UOyRHLaXTX

Grandparents on both side of the family now hospitalised in the latest Covid surges. No sympathy please, it’s not about that. They took every precaution possible. They were isolated from social life, and still got infected. The…

We know reasoned debate about pandemic science is getting no cut-through at all. It's time for prominent Australians to get angry, and to express that anger daily. That might actually shift narratives and agendas.

You superstar ⁦@KarenCutter4⁩ ! This sort of thing may shift the pandemic in Australia. Did they contact you? https://t.co/2Bq6J6eGMy

An update on this. One sent home because the hospital was deemed a much too risky place to be. So HITH instead. The hospital, too risky. Australia, 2022. https://t.co/TQN9sdWIhH

1) Why do these tougher questions have to come from the public? What are journalists paid for? ‘A lot of people have said’ would be a fail in a first-year journalism assignment. 2) I never agreed to any ‘deal’. Consumer law has stricter…

I’ve Tweeted about the same here in Australia. The narrative that we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years is absolute rubbish. For most of that time much of society was open, and the virus was controlled. https://t.co/RQbaFTvk3f

This is fantastic news for Australia. Welcome, @dgurdasani1 https://t.co/WC6MVyz7xZ

Australia should be the richest country in the world. Read this for how 3 decades of LNP government pissed it all away for a few piddling donations. Elections destroy democracy, it’s what made this possible. https://t.co/HWYSkfBrTO

Electricity generators in NSW often have contracts with local coal mines to supply at a set rate. Just curious how a cap on coal prices impacts that, anybody know?

Australians have spent more than 20 years being the top dark blue line. But in elections it’s voted for the pale red line. I can’t think of a better example of how the choke point of genuine democracy is elections. Explain it any other…

As journos join millions of other Australians in Covid-spreading Christmas parties, maybe they can share ideas for 2023 penance for the public health disaster they co-inflicted on the Australian community in 2021 and 2022, together with…

The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

Just one of the luminaries in Australia who has been patronisingly telling us all we have to live with Covid. A quality team, the Covid minimisers. https://t.co/T1LOD0ii2j

We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without contestation it collapses, it ceases to work. As we’re seeing with…

In the UK the Tories are throwing everything they have at protecting a dying generation of stale privilege. Adopting Oz-style refugee-bashing, and accusing unions of killing cancer patients. You can viscerally feel the ‘know your place’…

Finally on GBD, it was drafted at an American free-market think tank. Have a look at the articles on their site for the flavour of extreme libertarianism they endorse. This is now Australia’s public health policy. Under a LABOR government.…

From the AIER. Sponsor of the ‘protecting the vulnerable’ Covid policy adopted by the Australian Labor government. If you lie down with dogs you’ll get up with fleas. They do know they’re being played by the extreme Right of politics,…

Tragically @KarenCutter4 is on holiday (which she deserves), so looking at the NSW weekly epi report without her guidance. - lead summary point is that ‘we are likely to have reached the peak in infections’. - this based on stable PCR…

We’re hopelessly vulnerable to basic political strategy. The UK Tories for example, battling domestic chaos, right now running a so-obvious distraction campaign against refugees, copied straight from the Oz playbook. The ‘evil people…

Before the end of 2021 in Australia, what was ‘locked down’ was SARS-Cov-2. We stopped it spreading widely. The propaganda victory of the libertarians is to substitute people, for the virus. We weren’t locking down people. Being at home is…

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

Australians travel obsessively, accumulating ‘sights’ like we used to collect stamps. Trying to rediscover a grounded sense of place, by going to lots of places. But it just marks us as children of empire. A ‘big lap’ is our own domestic…

We’re at about the first anniversary of letting Covid rip in Australia. The replacement of a world-leading public health response with…nothing. Just mass, repeated infection.

Those who will minimise any Covid disaster in China by saying they should have vaccinated more, need to remember that Australia stopped vaccinating when it let Covid rip too. And will likely kill 25,000 people this year alone, while…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

For Covid minimisers, the pandemic is not a novel and lethal virus spreading globally. It’s State intervention in economies. That’s what they see as the actual disaster. Our previous PM and the NSW Premier are in that camp.

“A year later, and Australia has embraced a great forgetting with almost no historical parallel.” https://t.co/Q00bnSPmCd

“I don't think it fundamentally would have reshaped the approach that Australia has taken to managing the virus this year.” James McCaw. We didn’t manage the virus this year. A free-market libertarian think tank wrote our Covid strategy.…

NSW ensured that only hospitalisations and ICU numbers are half-useful metrics to assess how we’re going. Maybe a hint of Covid from Santa in the pipeline here. https://t.co/M1PhfAkZI4

The Tories are allowing the NHS to collapse. They despise it because it’s State-run. They’re doing what Maggie Thatcher did to trains and coal mines, to health. Here in Oz we still shell out billions per year to prop up private health…

Somehow the idea of allowing infection of the entire population, repeatedly, and then miraculously titrating the resulting serious illness to the number of hospital beds available, appeared strange to not one major journalist in Australia…

The thing that’s amused me the most about reactivating discussion about lockdowns, is the number of people who think they’re a crazy idea. But who think living with an uncontrolled pandemic is common sense. As I watch an Australia…

The argument that we can’t do stronger Covid action because it will hurt the poor hardest is one of the most toxic pieces of nonsense of the pandemic so far. Close to 700,000 Australians were lifted out of poverty during Covid. And rapidly…

Applying this to say Spanish Flu, in Australia during that pandemic. About 40% of the population was said to be infected. The herd immunity threshold for that pandemic influenza was around 74%? So nowhere near sufficient to halt the virus?…

The UK and US both suffering from Long Libertarianism. Australia is still in the earlier stages of the chronic disease. Tye libertarians actually relish the destruction, they’ll feel no need to do anything. This is their actual plan.…

Hybrid immunity spin is being ramped up in Australia right now. Some people have had Covid 5 times in 2 years. Time to call enough, and particularly from health professionals campaigning under this same banner. You expect idiot politicians…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

I’ve added number of infections to my profile. Would love Infinite Covids to do the same, so we can see to what extent they’re walking what they talk. I’m un-Australian in the race to rich hybrid immunity. The shame.

I’m still waiting to hear how experts who say Covid is going swimmingly rationalise stories like this. Or the 20,000+ people dead last year in Australia as the direct result of our Covid strategy, deaths they never warned would occur, and…

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

Dressing in a Nazi uniform disqualifies a person from office. Well over 5000 people have died under the same politician’s let it rip Covid policy, in NSW. I feel that kinda already disqualified him from office.

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

Worth remembering this government, like the one before, is still sitting on over $100 BILLION in unnecessary tax cuts. $32 million available for Covid mitigation, on a contested basis. If every school were to receive $25,000, that would…

In NSW, if your job is listed below and you catch Covid, it’s assumed you caught it at work, if claiming workers’ compensation. The onus of proof is on the employer to prove otherwise. Note under (o), additional jobs are: cafes,…

As far as I know and according to the NSW legislation site, the attempt by the NSW Government to repeal the Covid provisions in the Workers Compensation Act still hasn’t been passed. Surprised this hasn’t been more reported.…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

Covid-related workers compensation claims in NSW, end-August 2022. From SIRA: https://t.co/sXox4snDa8 https://t.co/HRDaUNW1fo

The NSW Liberals are very open why they’re trying to water down the Workers Compensation Act again, for Covid. To save business money. If claims are going to be that expensive, surely that means Covid is out of control in the workplace?…

My mum is just one of hundreds of thousands of Australians locked down by a sea of infection in the community. Catching Covid would likely kill her. So she’s stuck at home, for another year, unless we remove the infection lockdown.

More Australians died of Covid in 2022 than died of the Spanish Flu in 1918-19.

Red arrow marks the beginning of the real Australian lockdown. Covid’s lockdown doesn’t even end at your front door, people isolating from other family members inside their own homes. You can’t do the most basic act in the community…

The Victorian election told us the loudest anti-public health action voices in Oz are a tiny minority. Why are we still listening to a word they say? It’s smoke and mirrors, a con.

This is such a common comeback to pointing out more people died in 1 year of Covid in Australia than did during the entire Spanish Flu pandemic. It’s irrelevant that there are now more of us, unless you think we now have more ‘spares’.…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

This is the great lie of what happened in Australia. That we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years, and then ‘opened up’. For most of that 2 years we lived very free lives. Free of infection too. https://t.co/IWVOXDW2We

Qantas does performance art piece over the Pacific representing Australia’s Covid approach from 2020-23, landing back where they began. https://t.co/JqnRpY2wqc

Yep. Humans respond to change rather than absolutes. NSW for example recorded 120 deaths this past week. But because that’s been a pretty consistently high number for months, the wider perception is that the crisis is over.…

Anything NSW can do, bromance Vic can do better. Don’t be concerned, National Cabinet is busy using its strategy of hoping the virus away to protect us. https://t.co/TGCm78CJK1

Australia and NZ showed how this could be done. It was the political libertarians in the UK and US who drove global spread, by deliberately obstructing public health action. Libertarianism is the cancerous politics of the privileged.…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

Do we know yet what booster Australians will be getting for SARS-Cov-2, when they get their flu shots this year?

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

Damien is bureau chief for the NYT in Oz. He sees Australia better than most Australians. The community-based politics he discovered here has been under assault by the LNP trying to graft US and UK-style libertarianism onto Oz life. Our…

Current polling suggests a comfortable victory for the ALP in NSW, in March. Hooray. However have they made any statement on Covid? It appears they’re using Albo’s small target strategy there, which could mean no change if they win.

The ‘focus on severe disease’ to date is killing hundreds of Australians per week. https://t.co/In9fIutqa5

“Just as quickly as the most extreme measures of the pandemic became the norm, so too have they faded into the background.” The most extreme measure of the pandemic was pretending it’s over, and allowing Australians to be repeatedly…

They update flu shots every year. Australia’s boosters to date are for older variants of Covid. There’s no talk at all of any new vaccine for 2023 either, globally. This is the ‘balance’ economic politicians talk about. 100% economy, 0%…

That’s us too, Australia. https://t.co/kWcjzvo5gE

George Monbiot’s latest piece for The Guardian. School starts again in NSW next week. For another year, no meaningful action has been taken to prevent spread there. The Doherty modelling earlier in the pandemic modelled the mass infection…

An outrageous number of dead Australians. In one week. https://t.co/z17rN4EsH1

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

The LNP’s $100 billion+ gift of public money to private health insurance companies, since 1997. Australia couldn’t find more than $30 million (contestable grants) to fund Covid mitigation in schools. https://t.co/N0fqz3Dg4l

Another 86 reported dead from Covid in NSW this week. When I say reported, I mean in the NSW epi report. Not by journalists, ha.

“However, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas on Tuesday said parents were loving the consistency of knowing the same rule applied to everyone.” But with Covid, everybody can bring it to school whenever they like, hey Peter.…

NSW bringing its own save-Medicare strategy to today’s National Cabinet. Kill a few busloads a week, will take the pressure right off the health system. https://t.co/pRIRALlJA4

From what I can figure out, National Cabinet plans to fix Medicare by repeatedly infecting all Australians with Covid.

I follow Kris’ Tweets every week, because as far as existential threats go, this one could make Lapstone in the lower Blue Mountains the new Sydney foreshore. https://t.co/Z1joRXz2qF

After 30 years of anti-renewables politics, the Oz community has built so much rooftop solar capacity, it’s overwhelmed the grid’s capacity to distribute it. (AEMO graphic.) Oz politics functions via community, not by Left, Right,…

Australia’s top 10 natural disasters in history. In a clear first place and still streaking away from the field, Covid. It only took the lead AFTER we said the pandemic was done, in late-2021. How do leaders not end up in jail for this,…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

The most honest assessment from a politician I’ve seen in some time. Though a a cautionary tale to all expert advisers to government, notice the first thing the Minister does is throw the advice under a bus, blaming it for the short and…

James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reason not mentioned, that political leaders deliberately led a…

90 dead in NSW this week, according to the epi report. Some quite young. A couple of busloads, that seems to be a sort of baseline of ongoing death. https://t.co/Ulj8PkrBNy

As a member of the public, what to do when NSW Health recommends you wear a mask in healthcare settings, and medical professionals who work there say the opposite? https://t.co/ITlBMkPg4q Is this one of those AHPRA things, @YouAreLobbyLud…

I have expert-fatigue. I can’t remember a time in the past year for example where NSW Health wasn’t recommending masking in indoor crowded places. But then the media is full of expert opinion directly contradicting the need to. Social…

Who’s ‘we’? The 20,000+ who have died because of Covid in the last year alone in Australia, I had no idea they’d died of ‘fearful doctor’. Will have to Google it. https://t.co/JaGPVHA5fD

Tim Brooke-Taylor died right at the start of the pandemic. While quite old he was also in a tier of society that usually manages to avoid public health problems. He may be a good entry point to discussing the politics of individuals and…

While here in NSW we wait for a March election, to swap out one group of politicians ignoring Covid for another, in Turkey a senior architect points out that elections are responsible for the earthquake deaths there. Popularity can’t solve…

#insiders The Stage 3 tax cuts shouldn’t be much of a problem for inflation, because hardly any Australians will get them, and those that do will shunt them off to accounts in the Caymans.

Aussie brains still in lockdown. https://t.co/s6OHpL93Vj

The Audit Office of NSW, school attendance trends. Kids were escaping already before the pandemic, the continuing decline in attendance follows the same negative slope. Anybody who’s worked in secondary schools knows missing school is not…

Watch for this building push in Australia, to match the UK. Not even ‘stay home if you’re sick’ now. For both workplaces and schools, the sick will be expected to attend to prevent social collapse. https://t.co/vgVXxTWMNf

Attendance rates dropped by over 4% in Australian schools in 2022. (Multiply by number of kids and that’s a lot of kids away.) Attendance level (who was there more than 90% of the time, a key educational metric) fell over 21%. Acara…

8,141 Australians died at Gallipoli in WW1. Its a nationally iconic event. 2-3 times that number died from Covid in 2022 alone. It’s barely even mentioned. Incompetent leadership is often blamed for the former. The deaths were led into…

By my reading, there have been more than 1000 Australians in hospital for Covid in Australia every day since 27 December 2021? Graph ends 3 Feb but there are still more than 1000 today, I believe. https://t.co/UNkb5SYh2Q

To go back to this. The spin is that we restricted transmission of Covid while we got everybody vaccinated, to protect the vulnerable. But actually the vulnerable kept right on dying. Politicians had no intention of ever protecting them.…

If we could just get it down to 1 busload of deaths per week in NSW, instead of 2. https://t.co/ynPAPdYs7R

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

Journalists wrote about Covid when politicians disagreed about it. That gossip is all political journalism now is. 20,000 Australians died because of Covid last year, but because all politicians cheered that on, there was no story.…

Super, introduced by Paul Keating, is the most extraordinary transfer of national wealth to ordinary Australians in our history. Which is why the LNP despise it, with passion. The first time in all of history where ordinary people hold…

Was going to comment on some of the minimiser brain farts in Oz today. But I see the rest of the world noticed them, and you can’t better what they’ve said themselves, for ridicule.

If Albo saw some of Australia’s most senior Covid advisers and their professional trolling colleagues online yesterday openly advocating for dirty air, to great international embarrassment and amusement, would he wonder if he’s been…

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

45 dead from Covid this week in NSW. The dirty air doesn’t seem to have helped them. https://t.co/Xxqz23oWhe

6025 people have died from Covid in NSW since the current Premier was anointed. Election in March, just weeks away. #auspol

The death numbers last year and into 2023 would have left the Australia of only 20 years ago aghast. The breaking of Australian society that’s been going on right under our noses is stunning to see in its endgame now.…

There are about 2900 vehicles for every service station in Australia. But you rarely get a large queue. Understanding that will also be key to rolling out EVs. EVs can charge at home, meaning we already have millions of service stations…

Sport is always sold as a health thing. But the much more important thing community sport does is train Australian democracy. In some countries, it doesn’t even exist as an activity. It’s where we learn many of our community-building…

School kids and their parents driving repeated waves of Covid into the wider community? One Australian minimiser loves to say that spread in schools just matches the wider community. Probably because that’s where the spread starts.…

In a week where (astoundingly) leading health figures openly mocked action promoting clean air, it’s worth remembering that all Australian governments have been committed to that since 2015. https://t.co/f4Wd86Iwh1 @RealOzSAGE

Is there any reasonably current estimate of SARS-Cov-2 antibody levels in the Australian population?

As a leader, admitting vaccines don’t stop transmission in the workforce gives you two options. Stop requiring them, or ramp up other workforce protections. No prizes for guessing which option the NSW Government chose.…

Reading the most recent seroprevalence data for Australia shows huge antibody levels in the population, near 100% for spike protein antibodies. When does herd immunity start?

Shaping up to possible minority government in NSW. Which may be a good thing, neither major party intends to do a thing about Covid. https://t.co/ImEYlKDkbT

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

Australian politics is communitarian (look it up). Not capitalist, socialist, Left or Right. All through the climate war decades, Australians ignored the BS and went about installing an entire new national electricity generation system…

Failing to meet child safety standards is pretty much every school in Australia right now. They’re nearly all Covid incubators. https://t.co/ukPPUZ0war

NSW copied this scheme. People will remember the vouchers. Designed to break down psychological and emotional resistance to being infected. Sold as helping the economy. https://t.co/TS5ZShTws5

One of my favourite pages to refer vax-and-forget people to is the list of control guidelines for infectious diseases, in NSW. Many members of the public are not aware these controls even exist, or that they’re applied 365 days of the…

Always a critical thread, with each update. Imagine a team of leaders overseeing the death of 20,000 Australians in a year, and it’s not the biggest story every day. https://t.co/xRABNyENws

If your weather forecast consistently predicted snow in the middle of summer, you’d go elsewhere for advice, hey. But like a dog returning to its own vomit, Australia keeps returning to the same ‘keep calm and do nothing’ advice.…

From @EricTopol. I remember looking at annual costs to the bloody ‘economy’ of influenza, pre-Covid. It ran into the billions, in Australia. Clean air is one of the best ROIs imaginable for modern economies. https://t.co/vO1hktEItE

The UK government is in electoral trouble. So it’s using the Australian way, to drum up votes. They all swap strategies, we’re using their let it rip Covid strategy. (They literally do swap strategies, often they hire the same…

Hard to beat this as a promo shot. Love Circus Oz. https://t.co/daz6NFCYGR

Regional Australia will need an additional 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are projected to retire between 2020 and 2025. This is what running your society as a free market economy for 50 years does. No planning, no…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and still climbing. Between 3-20 times more than any other disaster…

From the PwC ‘What Workers Want’ report. 1) Employees rank pay and well-being as the top drivers attracting them. 2) Almost half of Australian employers have no intention of updating their employee value proposition to attract talent. They…

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

The projected money on nuclear subs for Australia is about 13,000 times the money allocated (on a competitive grants basis, across multiple infrastructure categories) to Australian schools to fix their ventilation.

Australian society, strip-mined by foreign resource companies. With the laughable royalties then vacuumed up by older Australians. A society is a ‘circle of life’, intergenerational. An economy is just plundering, of this social wealth.…

People huddled around a single TV at Sydney Airport in 1969, to watch Apollo 11 on the moon. What was the last ‘moonshot’ you can remember society pursuing? The accelerated destruction of the public began just afterwards, in the 1970s, and…

The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free-floating individuals, interacting. Driven by a sophisticated…

Of the 22 registered Covid deaths in NSW this week, 4 were at home, and had a Covid diagnosis prior to death. What situation may produce that? @KarenCutter4?

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

The fact the government which spearheaded the deliberate infection of Australians, leading to thousands of deaths, is even still in the running in the NSW election, tells you that electoral democracy is useless. Not democracy, which is…

I’m calling it early. Covid wins the NSW election.

So the never-elected-as-Premier, who unleashed the worst public health disaster on NSW in its history, is gone. (Yay.)

Chris Kenny on SKY blaming the ‘moderates’ in the NSW Liberal Party for the election loss. Years of the echo chamber of SKY has now sent the entire Australian mainland red. I reckon that’s a better place to look, for blame.

The loons over at SKY have decided Matt Kean is to blame for the election loss. The only member of the train wreck NSW Liberals that actually keeps them as an option for sensible, ordinary Australians.

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

If concerts spread Covid? Simple, don’t go. Except the people who do go turn up in your schools and workplaces, the next day, to spread infection. ‘You do you’ assumes Australia is 25 million separate mini-societies, independent of one…

We fixed the GFC by ‘going households’. Australians re-built electricity generation in this country in the past 30 years at the household level. Electrification of households addresses cost of living as well as climate change. Fast. The…

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

Not mentioned in the NSW election was the LNP’s attempts to alter 19B of the Workers Compensation Act. 19B says employees in a long list of ‘prescribed’ employment don’t have to prove they caught Covid at work. The employer has to prove…

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it. 36 of us here in NSW certainly don’t any more, even if we used to. https://t.co/uGgh2T10Jl

Reading different interpretations of what’s going on with Covid. What swings it is the actual reality of what’s happening. 20,000 dead in a year, in Australia. Those who were in charge of our response in 2022 got something seriously wrong.…

Before we had vaccines (2020), the WHO was certain letting people catch Covid was a bad idea. In Australia about 5 million people didn’t get even 2 doses of vaccine. Is that ‘achieving herd immunity through vaccination’? Those 5 million…

It’s quite something that Australia made you pay for your own Covid tests before the US did. But let’s buy subs, and have big tax cuts. https://t.co/U5m809chfD

This is still the NSW Health advice. We need to make health departments completely independent of politicians, like the Reserve Bank. Then they can mandate again, instead of recommend. The RBA doesn't 'recommend' interest rate rises. But…

The problem isn’t that we can’t disagree well. It’s that we’re discussing most things at all, rather than just let them be managed by competent people while we get on with our lives. Something the rage farmers over at the Oz could take…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger Australians. It reminded me again about Paul Ewald’s mission.…

NSW, Gold Standard train wreck again. Makes me so angry, with people forking out their own very scarce money for months to buy these. https://t.co/ZongK3deOQ

The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges off LNP non-policy with values-based capitalism (a laughable…

Perfect example of how societies are 100% social, not political or economic. The ALP is slow to do this because it knows millions of ordinary Australians resent the unemployed getting more money. They see them as lower status. Also why the…

The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

There's good stuff here, and just getting this process happening was an achievement, for which we owe people thanks. But we're also cycling back to the earliest days of this pandemic in the underlying assumptions. /1…

On current projections the median age in Australia will be almost 50, by the turn of the next century. Like many Western countries, our future is as an (unstaffed and under-resourced) aged care facility. https://t.co/B0fqJBF5WH

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

3 million Australians live in a home that belongs to another Australian. That's our 'supply' problem. And you'd expect a growth in home ownership to lead to a reduction in rentals. But rentals grew as fast. Existing owners adding to their…

There’s nervousness amongst some air quality professionals, about far-UV. I think upper room UV is more accepted. Either way we don’t hear very much about UV options in Australia? They’re apparently extremely effective, and almost set and…

We need an accompanying survey of NSW Health staff attitudes to their current situation. I doubt it will seem a good news story then. https://t.co/eWZl4Cblr3

The NSW Government stepping up Covid action in some schools, due to a surge in Covid cases causing great disruption. Some kids being sent home, staff required to wear masks, large indoor events cancelled. None of it makes the news.

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

You see, it can be done. The same NSW school I was told about which reintroduced masking for all staff and sent sections of the school home to study, is also imposing compulsory RATs for all students still at school. Every day.

Hands up if you know when school went back in NSW. https://t.co/vDWYad17Po

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

Australia should have listened to Saul Griffiths for this budget. Instead it listened to business, on hydrogen. Joe Biden listened to Saul. https://t.co/m9Oj7eDL0r

Turn this into what I call a case-based Covid Tweet. 59 dead this week in NSW. That rolls off the tongue fast, notice? Now imagine knowing those 59 stories, in their specifics. The huge network of failed public health practices it would…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

85-year old friend of my mother’s hasn’t had a 5th Covid shot, because her GP ‘said he doesn’t believe in it.’ Australia, 2023.

Great piece ⁦@ColinKinner⁩ and ⁦@BlairWilliams26⁩. Australia won’t reset because the public isn’t compatible with an economy. All that survives is ‘the vulnerable’. Which isn’t a public. https://t.co/IY2X6NLSu0

The Brits wasting their time analysing arguments over immigration, when the whole thing is just the Tories copying the Australian LNP, in a desperate attempt to get their poll numbers up with some classic dog whistling. Imagine weaponising…

Astounding that many young people I talk to are active, almost rabid, followers of Gerard Rennick. This is young people without any history of conservative political (or any political) belief. The Right in the US is using social media to…

The problem isn't too few houses in Australia. It's too many Australians owning 3 of them, and too many others owning none of them. Another Labor government beholden to the 'supply' mantra of big donors. https://t.co/CzEZas4ghz

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

The pattern for diphtheria in Australia. Vaccination lead to virtual elimination. But I am curious, why did it need 30 years from introduction of the vaccine to get to virtual elimination? https://t.co/TFnd9r07bg

Australia's communitarian (not capitalist, not socialist) politics is best seen in community-driven change, like the massive installation of solar panels, and Clean Up Australia Day. It's a unique model that no party is tapping into. It's…

Another example of how Australia's communitarian politics works. Our political parties import their ideas from tired old political debates in Europe and the US. Missing how this country actually works. It will mobilise immediately and…

Australia even turns elections into community events. It's a unique model, not focused on the individual or on government (as Europeans and Americans do, in their politics based on European nationalism). It's focused on community. A lot of…

It really is only a handful of years ago that Australia still did public health. Even the Murdoch press was into it. https://t.co/LGx5CG65Dw

The reason Albo is powerless to make the magnitude of changes needed in Australia is that the ALP spent years in the wilderness without developing a single political strategy to enact rapid change. Nothing but small target politics,…

This section of the NSW Public Health Act is interesting. Covid-19 from what I can see in Schedule 1 is a Category 2, 3 & 4 condition. https://t.co/mv7PEfD6hI

Social media. Mobilising stupidity, anger, violence. But hey, some of my best friends are on social media. Or something. Right now undermining Australian democracy with loon brainwashing imported from places like the US. The platform makes…

People can ignore 200 Australians dying of Covid every week, but a rock star dying prompts an avalanche of 'vale' social media posts. From people well into and past middle age. Society is a high school.

The NSW Health department still strongly recommends masks. Showing that the only people who've 'moved on' are the people who would rather trust a politician with their health, than a health professional. Let's see how that works out for…

Because we stopped doing them in NSW, when the free market fairies decided that getting people back into coffee shops was more important than keeping people alive. https://t.co/irp5i8tm11

Because the forces of public health minimisation are pushing hard against lockdowns again, time to re-Tweet this. All that white space is 'not locked down'. The NSW lockdown towards the end was also caused by ring-fencing poor suburbs, not…

The red circle is what gives us a remnant feeling of there being a shared Australian public identity. The blue circle is what’s coming, and a big part of the reason something as basic as fighting a pandemic attracted such resistance.…

Any recommendations for a portable HEPA filter, in Australia? @DrPieterPeach ? Anybody else had good experiences with a particular model?

Dutton and Morrison both playing the ‘all Australians are equal’ card in opposing the Voice. Classic feudal conservatism. Accumulate all the power and wealth, then say that’s the natural equilibrium of society, which regulation will…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

A common response if you question organisations about their Covid measures, is 'we're following government advice'. You need to press them on which advice that is. NSW Health advice for example would mean a lot more people wearing masks.…

A friend suggested all Chris Minns will bring to the problems in NSW is a better haircut.

Superb conversation with @CrabbBrendan and @c_s_wallace on the desperate need for a circuit-breaker at government level, to return sanity to public health in Australia, with Covid. Every day I think about that circuit breaker. I fear the…

In conversation with @c_s_wallace and @CrabbBrendan on his podcast, @markgkenny mentioned the narrative about the public being tired of Covid action. That narrative was part of the Covid minimisation messaging. Australia endured much worse…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

NSW had the same scheme. Not just economic, designed also to normalise mass infection, to break down resistance to sharing infected spaces. Dominic Perrottet spoke openly about breaking down hesitancy. Grooming the population for…

By my rough calculation, these worst train disasters of the past decade killed only about a fifth of the people Australia has killed with Covid, in 2023 alone. Nobody has suggested living with train crashes. https://t.co/8PPnrBfNbC

I track the UK news, because what happens there often follows here, as conservative strategists share IP. Australians will know ‘Stop the Boats’ only too well, nothing to do with immigration or boats, everything about winning elections. /1…

@ajcdeane and @jennykleeman discussing ‘Stop the Boats’ on SKY Press Preview. Australians endured 20+ years of this spin from conservatives, now borrowed by the Tories to help stave off electoral oblivion. Dog whistling. It morphed into…

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

Australian journalists should watch O’Connor’s questioning in full, and hang their heads in shame that they weren’t asking these questions themselves, repeatedly, over the past 3 years. #auspol https://t.co/AovdE63FCX

One of the more staggeringly stupid things the LNP did in Australia over the past 30 years is take our stupendous natural resource advantages, and basically hand them over to foreign mining companies. Many of them should be in jail.…

@KarenCutter4 what's the relationship between all-cause mortality and excess deaths? Given the former is here described as being within normal variations? From this week's NSW epi report. https://t.co/krthNCe0U2

Lucky people over 90 aren't vulnerable to Covid. We're protecting the vulnerable, I read it in the paper. From this week's NSW epi report. https://t.co/gfukhlXLze

The only shots Australians are doing now are lined up on a bar. https://t.co/94HzyRmiqx

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

Life was pretty free pre end-2021 in Australia. Travel was the main sticking point, and dam-busting bomb that broke our public health. But we had purpose-built quarantine facilities at a cost of $1 billion for that. Rapidly abandoned.…

The reason Australia abandoned public health in late-2021 was the same thing that is destroying all democracies. Elections. Scott Morrison wanted a happy, ‘pandemic is over’ vibe to begin 2022, election year. Remember this message?…

In Australia’s black summer fires, I remember almost no real attention to air quality. The pandemic has changed us. Now the US very focused on air quality. Proof again that the anti-public health crowd are a loud hysterical minority.…

Populist politicians are a disgrace. Listening to Albo and Chris Minns eulogise on the terrible bus crash in the Hunter last night. More than 8 times as many people died in NSW last week, from Covid. Week after week. Not a word from them…

"This indicates that transmission continues to occur in the community despite decreases in case notifications." Latest NSW epi report, about sewage testing data.

The toll HCW workers pay on our behalf to keep an economy going. How's the economy going, by the way? From the latest NSW epi report. https://t.co/cs7gDuzywv

We wouldn’t have a childhood immunisation schedule in Australia, based on the current advice from some of our prominent health professionals. https://t.co/Z50MC2ELyC

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

205 people died of Covid in Australia this week. To get a visual feel for that number, this is about 150 people. Add another 60, a large coach load, and you’re about there. https://t.co/NDGQNFMkCQ https://t.co/A11mTuxhm5

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

I love watching netball. And with that in mind, Australia took forever to select a team for the World Cup. You can’t tell, some bizarre choices there.

I assume the engine room of medically-trained dumb in some Australian universities immediately fired into gear with their anonymous troll groups, to troll Williams' account. https://t.co/loDaGfnmBW

This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example most of our lives in the West are now almost completely…

Just to reinforce this, Australia's response to Covid was great public health. But the LNP has an ideological hatred of government. A populist group was their way to bypass the public health built into our federalist system, a wedge…

Building hybrid cardiovascular immunity in the UK. Are we at the point yet where senior medical figures in Oz advising the government will provide advice that actually relates to human health? https://t.co/iTGzMGbMYv

Heaven and Earth was moved to find the source of this continuous avalanche of death in Australia. Finally a drone found the wreckage of the public health system. https://t.co/lN4fKsnsjn

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

The frustration of genuine expertise in this pandemic is palpable. But expertise has never translated directly into political action. Even the collective of a university doesn’t. Humans solved this problem though. They developed…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

I’m in remote Australia for a few days. Being there highlights the weirdness of the concept of ‘remote’. Remote from? The assumption being that the real Australia happens somewhere else, and these other places are remote from that real…

The most numerous occupants of Australia’s vast interior now are feral camels, feral goats, boomers towing caravans, and jocks in 4WDs ‘conquering’ it. When you can escape the boomers and jocks, and allow the stillness there to encompass…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

All-cause mortality and excess deaths seem the main window into public health impacts of Covid now? This week’s NSW epi report. https://t.co/wfu4zV67J2

If I was a politician and saw what ICAC and Royal Commissions have been finding in the past few weeks, I’d be a bit worried what they’ll make one day of about 200 Australians dying a week due to government policy. https://t.co/EkzORHUfFk

A photo from a regional newspaper. And current NSW Health advice. The gap? Total absence of political leadership in public health. https://t.co/9nWd7OUaJc

Refused to go to a full day training session at a Sydney hotel that had no Covid protections, no risk assessment of any kind. When will WHS law actually be enforced?

The only public figures calling for a Covid RC are those who are sure it will focus on all the libertarian nonsense about removal of freedoms. Imagine penning this piece, and not once mentioning the more than 20,000 Australians who died in…

Re-Tweeting the list of occupations in NSW where if you contract Covid, you’re presumed to have caught it at work, for the purposes of workers compensation. You don’t need to prove it. 19B of the Act. Under (o), add cafes, supermarkets,…

The workers comp claim data (https://t.co/JPUBXNVU7k) suggests NSW workers still aren’t fully accessing workers compensation for Covid injury. As per my earlier Tweet, in many occupations, the worker doesn’t even need to prove they caught…

For those who missed @latingle’s fantastic Quarterly Essay at the time about the deliberate assault on the Australian public service, the week of Robodebt might be the time to revisit it. https://t.co/Wo9VAa1iRG

Saying Covid is a Class 3 Biohazard (more a laboratory classification) isn’t as powerful I think as noting it’s a Category 2, 3 AND 4 condition in the NSW Public Health Act. Being in public with a known Category 2, 3 or 4 condition without…

Until late-2021, community spread was well controlled in Australia. At about the red cross or just before, a handover should have taken place. To WHS, to maintain that control. It never happened, instead we shifted to ‘personal…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

WA provided free flu shots. Public health is about government doing its job. It’s a disgrace that people are having to pay for their own Covid testing, in Australia, and funding their own privatised lockdowns, with their sick leave. During…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

Like I say. The social segregation of Oz society begins in schools, deliberately engineered by the LNP since John Howard to dismantle decades of public institutional life. They despise the public, because they despise the State. Zealots.…

And another. This not a ‘crisis’ for the LNP, this is what was intended. Heavily incentivise the shift to private, and make it an aspirational thing (status). A deliberate engineering of new social and cultural norms for Australia.…

The embarrassment that Australia now is. Friend in a university tutorial, which was cancelled last week because the tutor had Covid. The tutor was there this week, masked. Said ‘I’m still testing positive, but my GP said I’m fine to work,…

The article doesn’t mention that knowingly going into public with Covid and not taking precautions, in NSW at least, is an offence punishable with up to 6 months in jail, under the Public Health Act. Covid is a Category 2, 3 AND 4…

Imitative rivalry at work. Large numbers of Australians didn't change their minds in only a few months. They've shifted to the other 'team' because the issue was deliberately turned into a rivalry by the No side. Nothing is more addictive…

The 2019 bushfires in Australia produced astronomical amounts of carbon pollution. But globally, we’ve produced more than 100 times that on average, every year for more than 260 years. How did we not notice? Internal combustion. The fire…

Even the name, "NSW Health", reflects a time when health was a public thing. NSW had (or didn't have) health. Now sitting there unable to do anything because populist elected morons sideline it in favour of their own petty careers, through…

Australians should be able to buy as much vastly overpriced gas they already own from foreign companies as they like. Or something. https://t.co/hHfwsvUkAD

Australia's 'orthodoxy' is attacking cricket. England's Bazball is just T20 cricket, in a Test. Sometimes they'll get lucky, mostly they won't. Law of averages. It already lost them the Ashes. They still choose to believe it's some new…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

It says a lot about Australia’s conception of itself that @frontiertouring’s ‘regional’ shows for Paul McCartney are Newcastle and the Gold Coast. Regional, ha. But then we call pretty much the entire country ‘the outback’. Huddled along…

Everything we call 'politics' is the tiniest thin veneer of hot air, overlaid upon the actual material realities of life. A total waste of time and resources. Like the NBN, reality always said we'd need full fibre. We wasted how many years…

Albanese’s misdiagnosis of Australia’s problems as ‘division’ is catching up with him. Division is a political strategy, turning issues into team sports. People LOVE it. Twitter and all social media and elections exist because of it.…

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is…

What's the non-Doom version of 20,000+ Australians dying per year because of Covid? https://t.co/vRhTfeUQYY

What was the reason the federal and State health departments weren't chosen to do this job? They surely have this expertise, it's one of their core reasons for existing. I think this is a vital question for Australia. There may be a simple…

Excellent. And while we're putting the spotlight on consultancy, again can we ask why critical pandemic planning in Australia was outsourced to the private sector? We have health departments. https://t.co/sFfRxqoqWw

The East Germans used almost these exact words. Pure populism. Hugely effective, populism is an electoral H-bomb. There was an unspoken agreement never to do this, because wise heads knew it ends in catastrophe. It was done anyway. /1…

From the Australian government’s information sites. We need to continue to fight the spin that replaces our focus on infections, with hospitalisations, severe illness and death. There’s wisdom and bitter experience in defining epidemics…

Ouch, latest Australian excess death analysis from the actuaries. For the first 4 months of 2023 3,300+ excess deaths. 6% above the long-term average. That rate projected to rise even further. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/PUTmqZGp8I

Australia often mistakes jingoism for national unity. Social media is like petrol on that fire. Will be back when the collective orgasm subsides, and the unity with it.

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than…

Imagine if Indigenous Australians had the same 'voice to parliament' as property developers do. https://t.co/r5RMNKkXo8

One day there will need to be accountability for the expert advisers to government and the public, whose strategy in only 18 months will kill twice the number of Australians that died during the Spanish Flu. They can’t blame the pandemic,…

This is the case nearly every day in Australia now. During the day wholesale electricity is not just free, its price is actually negative i.e. generators *pay* wholesalers to take electricity. At the same time retail electricity prices…

The total reversal of where we get our electricity from, in only 5 years. In 2018 (summer) non-renewables were more than double renewables. Only 5 years later, the mix is reversed. *With* a sabotaging government in charge. Australians will…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

It's why Australia 'opened up' too, because a previous PM wanted to go to an election as the person who ended the pandemic. His career ended, not the pandemic. Tell me again why elections are a good thing. https://t.co/LOijkoH9Xq

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

Two years ago, 18 minutes and 10 seconds into this presentation by the Doherty modellers, the previous PM interrupted to reinforce that what they were presenting meant 80% vaccination made Covid ‘just like the flu’. No it didn’t. /1…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

One of the great things to learn from Rachel Perkins’ wonderful Australian Wars series, is how much the very existence of the States was just as a mechanism to manage the massive land grab of that time. European Australians have always…

I think it’s fine to say we’re all ‘living with’ the harsh Australian sun. It meant world record amounts of melanoma with ‘healthy tans’. But we learned to live with it in a smarter way. We can do the same for air and infection, we’re very…

These fucking idiot platforms. Posted an image from the frontier wars in Australia, to FB. An image of Aboriginal Australians chained by the neck. The FB algorithm removed it for ‘nudity’.

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

To me one of the clearest ways to see the political kneecapping of public health is to compare basic infection control guidelines for other infectious diseases, with Covid. This is for influenza (NSW). Has been this for years. #auspol…

Density and supply ignores the elephant that’s always in Australia’s housing debates. We huddle the coast, with the vast interior mostly unoccupied except remnant mining and farming towns. Packing the cities more densely only reinforces…

The ‘gap’ we talk about closing with Aboriginal Australia isn’t to help them ‘catch up’ with the rest of us. It’s the other way around. It’s to get us to understand the Australia they created. If we don’t close that gap, we won’t survive.…

In a libertarian culture it's look out for yourself. Your vehicle, like your home, becomes your world. You want it big. It's a 'get out of my way' car. Europeans tend to have smaller vehicles, because they're more social. Guess which way…

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big solar and wind input. But why is the lowest demand point also…

The renewable transition is stumbling. It’s not too late to follow the Rewiring Australia lead and go households, with solar. The biggest emitters in the country. Immediate bill relief for households. Big cuts in emissions. Oz solar is…

The young in particular should feel some connection with Aboriginal Australia. Being dispossessed of land, and now also infected repeatedly with an uncontrolled pandemic virus. Squattocracy has been our governance model since settlement.…

The average Australian household spends about 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, eating out and travel and entertainment than they do on their local parks, roads, libraries, water, sewer and museums. Societies are high…

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too…

Who remembers Covid vaccination in Australia? Memories. https://t.co/Bz1CX0HQAi

The 4-day working week on The Drum. Business of course sceptical, the ball and chain around the nation’s feet as always. Australian business is lazy, entitled, rent-seeking. Just wants a perpetual lazy status quo with most national income…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production through supply and demand markets is mythology. All of it reliant…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

This would be an excellent discussion of 'closing the gap'. Australians asking themselves why they have to choke on smoke every year to stop our own landscape exploding. https://t.co/K34gorAOEE

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

Here's what a Health Minister used to look like. Introduced Medicare, and first disability services law, plus offensives against tobacco and alcohol, and a world-leading strategy against the HIV pandemic, now close to eliminated in…

You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1 We began the…

The Royal Commission into 4 deaths in the pink batt stimulus. Abbott said his government would "focus on ensuring that such a catastrophic policy failure never happens again." In 2022 about 20,000 Australians died under an LNP-led Covid…

The Covid inquiry will see A as the problem, and B as the solution. It will talk about ‘the things we got right’, without acknowledging those all stopped after A. It absolutely won’t admit that A is the only time Australia admitted it was…

Only a week until Daylight Stealing starts again in NSW. A very early example of us defining reality as what we want it to be, rather than what it actually is. It does great harm, and is rarely questioned. I despise it. @DavidJoffe64 this…

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

All politics is cultural. The changes John Howard introduced were a fundamental shift to Australian culture. One of the few nations focused on community as the centre of its life is now as rabidly private and individual as the UK and US…

About 20 times as many Australians died in 2022 of Covid than died in the Vietnam, Korean and Afghanistan wars combined. On current trends we'll equal Australian deaths in 7 years of WW2, in 2 years of 'living with' Covid. No politician or…

A great insight. In countries like Australia with great public health procedures and history, when a pandemic strikes, the public have almost no experience of the disaster of mass infection. So the disaster they *feel* is the public health…

What relationship does a non-Indigenous Australian have with their land? What transactional activity with it, that isn't some hippie numinosity, real estate sale, extractive industry or tourism? Something that doesn't treat it as a…

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

NSW had an eat out to help out scheme. I don’t think I saw a single journalistic critique of the stupidity of it. It was more sinister than just a fillip for the economy too. It was gaslighting, to normalise mass infection.…

Community-based organisation is the unique lynchpin of Australian democracy. It's been trashed by economy politics and populist blowhard politicians interested only in their petty careers. https://t.co/MSnbnaYG1U

Australia has 2 million more dogs than children. I bet if Covid killed a lot of dogs, we’d be doing more to stop it.

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

Tony Abbott called for First Australians to ‘integrate’ with European Australians, an old White Australia, colonialist favourite. Not once in 235 years has White Australia tried to integrate with Aboriginal culture. It still defines over…

The intrinsic stupidity of recreational travel is highlighted by Australians doing so much of it, and not even registering how ridiculous a No vote will seem to the international community.

Parliament without politicians would progress Australia in extraordinary ways. https://t.co/kszO6neyhL

Settler culture still dominates the Australian inland. The culture of imported slave labour, unchanged in 150 years. A loud No in the referendum from modern settlers. David Marr’s new book talks about settler culture, the crime part of…

Hidden by all the polly waffle of the referendum, Australia hit a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricity came from renewables, around lunch time. That number projected to hit 100% by 2025, less than 2 years’ away.…

You could say Straya has progressed from stealing land, enslaving, slaughter and child-stealing, to just telling First Australians to fuck off. It can surely keep the no-mentum going, finding ever more cunning ways to do the same thing.

Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things…

@simonahac @GriffithSaul are you seeing much appetite in Australia yet for the idea of virtual transmission lines, using battery storage to replace some transmission? Quite different to a VPP model? https://t.co/Fme0QJZKxs…

Mr 60/40 uniting Australians again. https://t.co/gwejwJAT8B

“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk”. That’s exactly what it was, and what NSW’s Dine Out vouchers were as well. Behaviour modification, normalisation of infection. Taxpayer’s money used to actively…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

Everything is dead in Australia. Except the economy. All of our politics pays no attention to anything, except the economy. That should be the giveaway that it’s a colonialist con, but all sides still speak of it like some underlying…

Some Oz schools now employing 'attendance officers', due to decline in attendance rates for students. I'm yet to see one action these officers list for parents that the school will be undertaking to improve attendance that includes any…

Yesterday's 'Biden Time' on Radio Sydney was cut to under 5 minutes while we listened to the B52's Rock Lobster, with Fran Kelly describing the studio dancing. I think ABC radio is going dumb in search of listeners. https://t.co/jtl1RYZptC

It's nice NSW Health acknowledges we're still in a pandemic, and not 'post-Covid', as many others say. Pretty telling that our only indicators of infection now are who turns up half-dead at ED, and sewage treatment plants.…

Asia and particularly China is far and away the most important international relationship Australia has. But our populist ninnies prosecute an Anglo UK/US culture war against the Chinese, while expecting them at the same time to keep our…

Meantime in his home country populist boofheads are still beholden to existing generators and grid providers. This could be such an enormous, fast and cheap win for Oz. And it would bypass all of the LNP’s bag of dirty populist tricks.…

Another window into our increasingly adolescent society is Halloween. The rapid growth of it as a celebration in Australia. If you go to one of the local events, what stands out is the passion adults have for it all, including the…

@ChrisMinnsMP why is NSW the only State not to use average speed safety cameras for cars? I’m over feeling like the patsy taking ‘personal responsibility’ out there, like for Covid, while adolescent boy racers in their 3-tonne wankpanzers…

I keep this, from December 2022, as a KPI for the hybrid immunity strategy. For context, I’ve circled in red the Delta wave in Australia. https://t.co/Q0bo1MzDBW

What is the 'mainstream culture' of Australia? Just about everybody who says this is already part of a cultural minority here, and lives in a 'mainstream' suburb like Toorak. https://t.co/7mTGJBW7S4

The utter contempt for public health and basic adult responsibility from politicians being revealed here was also matched in Australia, but we will likely never get an Oz enquiry to see the details. https://t.co/nwX4dN8KLR

A measure of how much Oz politicians have neutered our public administration is that the UK Covid Inquiry, which is extremely embarrassing to the ruling Tory Party, was commissioned BY the Tory Party. We're very unlikely to get anything as…

Happening in towns all over Australia. A symptom of a continent at a tipping point, and a nation without a clue how to live in its own land. Why it mostly voted No, because ignorance is bliss. https://t.co/q7LLPQXbkM

Australia has had 2 bad flu years in the past decade. Some compare Covid with flu. Covid is killing more people every quarter right now than a bad flu year. Like 4-5 bad flu years, every year. Minimisers say deaths will decline. As we run…

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

Now that the old White Australia staples are back, like Aboriginal assimilation and the Yellow Peril, can we peer through that fog long enough to sensibly ask if a US under Trump is worse than a China under Xi? (I would say yes, without…

Australian households and businesses and their roofs are the solution to a fast transition. Superb reporting. The government needs to understand this, and really fast. https://t.co/9we6m9UPUq https://t.co/VSFHlFRGAi

It would be extraordinary if the death of around 30,000 Australians in under 2 years by deliberate National Cabinet policy isn't examined in this Inquiry. https://t.co/u1gPtem1TJ

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

Another slogan, ‘range’. A real stumbling block for many in their transition to EVs. Like they need to drive 800km every day to buy milk. Most Australians drive about 30km per day, on average. https://t.co/C48IlerHMp

More people wear masks to mow the lawn now in Australia than in hospitals for infection control. https://t.co/PvInQ7G63G

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s…

Striking to watch contrasts between different political cultures. People from the US for example much more likely to believe change will come from mobilising lots of ordinary people. Australians focus more on accountability for their…

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

This is bold public policy, at LAST. We haven't seen that in Australia for decades. https://t.co/OFDnIP3uGh

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle fleet of over 10 million. It would be far too expensive to…

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for…

Australians use about 18 billion litres of fuel in their vehicles every year. Not difficult maths to multiply that by the current pump price to see the savings to the nation of shifting the national fleet to EVs. EVERY YEAR, not just…

And just on this, under the NSW Public Health Act, Covid is a Category 3 condition? Knowingly returning to work while likely still infectious, we should expect significant precautions will be in place? https://t.co/fQvs9TUxyv…

This one angers me. Australia, a public health beacon pre-pandemic, led by anti-government ideologues who made us buy our own tests, in a pandemic! All while prioritising massive tax cuts to the top end of the income distribution. #auspol…

Australia’s healthcare costs during the pandemic were dramatically lower than comparative countries, but also we had much better health outcomes. That’s because we used public health (for a while), rather than just dump the infected on the…

‘Look after yourselves’, is there any more graphic illustration of the train wreck public health now is in Australia? Of the substitution of public health with political ideology? #auspol https://t.co/ucqsggUIHd

A real insight into how societies are just social. Nearly all Australians won't benefit from these cuts. But politicians still fear ditching them, because *socially* people see themselves as nascent millionaires. They imitate and emulate…

Living with Covid doesn’t mean allowing people to catch it. Living with venomous snakes and spiders in Australia has never meant encouraging people to get bitten.

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

The opposite of ‘divided’, as in ‘Australians are divided’, isn’t ‘united’. It’s disinterested. Division generates attention and disagreement on things nobody cared less about or even knew existed. It’s a political strategy, to generate…

Any Australian Health Minister who said even a fraction of this would be fired. We're completely trapped inside the popularity bubble of electoral politics. Nobody will say even the most obvious things, for fear of scaring the horses.…

Like all the let it rippers, plenty of weasel words about difficult balancing acts. There was no balancing act, from Day 1 they looked for any way to undermine public health action, which they saw as a threat to the economy. Ditto here in…

The UK and Australian conservatives swap slogans and strategies. Both now electorally in trouble, and both dog whistling on immigration. Again. Not a single public policy between them, nor any interest in it. https://t.co/tATpjan9rN

While the LNP bleat fantasies about nuclear power, renewables are smashing it in Australia. Follow reality, not the exhausting stupidity of the popularity daily news cycle. https://t.co/XNCUvrVO7P

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

70,000 people want to barbecue themselves in a stadium in Sydney today. Worshipping at the temple of adolescence.

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

@EdConwaySky posted this yesterday, it's a topic that needs urgent discussion. The black line is the US. Australia is pretty close to that black line too. Studies say about 80 gigajoules per capita is sufficient for a good life. We're…

@MichaelPascoe01 landing a kick right in the sensitive undercarriage of Australia’s rent-seeking corporate leadership. Great analysis, linking it to the extent we (and the UK) own hardly anything, so are unable to apply pressure to…

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

Last night was a close-run thing for NSW. Enormous demand, very limited supply. We sat happily behind the meter, immune from it. We need this sort of scare to accelerate storage and renewable generation. https://t.co/nzp8rgbqAG

I've now had at least one of every single Covid vaccine available in Oz. 2 AZs, 2 Modernas, a Novavax and a Pfizer. It'd be nice if heterologous protection is an actual thing, anyone know where that thinking is up to?

Conservatives in the UK desperate now. Following the Australian script. Dutton is back there again too. Remember the days when political parties wrote policies instead? https://t.co/Z88S6f19Ol

It's a measure of just how entitled and lazy and rent-seeking much Australian business is that so much of our new grid is being built by foreign companies, eager to make well-deserved big dollars out of the transition. Our new grid will be…

Range is not an intrinsic property of any engine technology. ICEs have the range they do to prevent people turning up at service stations every day. Service stations and their networked infrastructure are expensive. Only 6500 of them exist…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

One for those who oppose regulation to markets/competition. Australian financial institutions. It was only with heavy regulation after WW2 that competition increased. With deregulation in the early 1980s, that trend went into complete…

Do we have an idea what the likely % infected in Oz is? https://t.co/prxPQDJ448

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

Flip this on its head. Where’s the ‘freedom’ of ordinary Australians to have affordable EVs? Why are we subsidising some of the most inefficient cars and filthiest fuel in the world? https://t.co/3Yjn57bK8q

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

Sydney joins the rest of the world in its annual celebration of Chinese culture, through fireworks. (China having of course invented them.) Not as good as our AUKUS fireworks though. https://t.co/gm17BqY7Zr

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics…

The most powerful political force in Australia right now isn’t the ALP, LNP, independents or any other elected pollies, or their donors. It’s rooftop solar. This isn’t just about energy, our political and business hierarchies were created…

To give an indication of how much aviation seems oblivious to climate action elsewhere, the fuel for the new Sydney airport will need to be trucked there, every day, there's no pipeline (yet). Up to 65 B-double trucks full of fuel, every…

I believe it's still illegal in NSW to go into public without 'reasonable precautions' if you know you have Covid. Punishable by up to 6 months' in jail and/or a fine. Section 52 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/B8f4L7yonV…

I guess the majority of Australians who don't even qualify for updated vaccines any more would want to know what 'vaccination works' against. https://t.co/YWOb2wqqGq Link: https://t.co/h21NBboldg

It’s illegal in NSW to go into a public place knowingly with Covid, and not take reasonable precautions against spreading it. Those who advise the public that reasonable precautions are a waste of time are actually inciting a crime. Itself…

Urgent Implementation of all Recommendations of the Australian Long COVID Inquiry - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/pQx0iaBqjI via @ChangeAUS

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

Opening a border during a pandemic should be as problematic as closing it. What about NSW acting unilaterally in late-2021, ignoring the nationally agreed elimination strategy? Should States be stripped of decision-making power only if…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

If we put aside the modern resurgence of Yellow Peril politics, can we honestly say dealing with a US under Trump is better for Australia than dealing with a China under Xi? https://t.co/7NSd6n6lzl

Cameron Green has an active Covid infection, and so stands off to one side of the player group. He’s playing. An accurate headline would be ‘Cameron Green plays while suffering from Australia’s third leading cause of death’.…

I can’t, with Australia Day. The jingoism and flags. The Australian character we pat ourselves on the back about is a hybrid outcome of an encounter with Aboriginal Australians over 200+ years. We gave them the big fuck you in 2023.…

Australian cricketer playing with Covid failed spectacularly. If he’d had a muscle strain, they’d have said he was playing with an injury. But Covid is obviously much less serious than a muscle strain. https://t.co/iXYh7z77Ca

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

I’m yet to hear ONE member of National Cabinet acknowledge the tens of thousands of Australians killed by Covid, as a direct consequence of decisions made by them. None of our Covid debates talk about deaths in any meaningful way.…

I haven’t been in this data for a while, but do we really not have any Covid vaccination data for Australia later than 2021? https://t.co/1QcEjCCzKI

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

Pathogens often follow a similar pattern to human societies. An invasion stage, with a lot of deaths, as pathogens fight to occupy territory (our bodies). Followed by a long occupation stage, where casualties shift to ongoing chronic…

I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and reading the literature you could come away being convinced…

Current wholesale price for electricity in Victoria, where its largest coal plant has gone down? $16,600/MWh. In South Australia, with its renewables? -$86.12. They're paying people to use it. Meanwhile the LNP is probably somewhere in Don…

This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalry. People will bankrupt themselves to try to climb this status…

We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

Australia's educational performance was in free fall for years before Covid. Pandemics are accelerants of existing problems. That we couldn't do something as simple as mandate open windows and HEPA filters when schools re-opened remains a…

Covid minimisers have decided to launch an assault today on Covid action using schools and lock-downs as their framing. Here's how Australian schools were performing internationally (PISA), from 20 years before the pandemic. Government…

In the past 20 years, Australian students' performance on science was a year behind the international benchmark. Maths was 2 years. Literacy 1.5 years. Covid exposed the pre-existing problems in the system. https://t.co/TuLBqvfJAw

Between 3 and 4 times as many Australians have died of Covid since introduction of government policy to allow continuous mass infection, as died at Gallipoli. We commemorate the latter, often as an example of ordinary Australians…

A friend just telling me about his first ever Covid infection, right now. I asked where he caught it. In hospital, caring for his father in the last week of his life. Well done NSW Health, icing on the cake in this sad week for him.

The all-out assault on Google search by search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing is a story that should be front page news. In a world where we outsource expertise to the web, Google Search is our gatekeeper. If it becomes compromised,…

German farmers want the opposite of Oz farmers, because there government *wants* to bury the cables (opposite of here). Reveals that in both cases it's really about anti-renewables, which in turn is about opposing "Lefties" and "Greenies".…

3 busloads of Australians dead from infection in aged care, in less than 2 months. Even 20 years ago this would have been a national scandal, front page news. You cannot set the bar any lower. https://t.co/sFKw7oLDOY

At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living in a ‘majority’ society, and why it isn’t anything like a…

Australians are used to ‘conditioning’ the air they breathe. Have been for decades. And their attention shifted to clean as well as cool/warm air, well before Covid, because of bushfires. Clean air for Covid taps into something we were…

ATAGI mentioned ‘vaccine fatigue’ yesterday. Getting needles isn’t fatiguing. Australia’s Covid vaccination data shows this supposed fatigue began for many as soon as the vaccine rollout started. It’s not fatigue, it’s anti-vax politics,…

We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated. Like most public narratives in this pandemic, that’s a…

The Plague describes an entire town locked down, to prevent a pandemic spreading to wider society. The anti-lockdown NSW Gov did this with the western suburbs of Sydney in this pandemic. That didn’t disturb them. What disturbed them was…

Do we know that waves are smaller? Christina is using UK data, NSW data seems to suggest that infection numbers if anything are up. https://t.co/llnbEVzTTy https://t.co/Sus9pgJtDZ

NSW Health advice. This is my age group. My mum tells me I had a humdinger of a case of measles in the late-60s/early 70s. I'm guessing this means they would assume I'm immune and no shots required. But even this varies between countries.…

A sad window today into the undergraduate culture-warring underbelly of Covid minimisation in Australia. A disgusting day. https://t.co/EvGd87tdG0

THIS. This is investment, building a new Australia. Focusing on households, which *is* the economy. Why we targeted households to avoid the GFC. https://t.co/FA4LpzQH9D

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

Michael Hoerger in a thread noting that Americans are getting Covid on average about once per year. I’ve seen similar numbers for Oz. Even more importantly, no sign of reduction in transmission, which is all that will end the pandemic.…

The most disturbing thing about this is that it appears to be a deliberate hit job at least partially engineered by SKY News Australia. So we have mostly unregulated activist TV networks now interfering in international diplomacy.…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

It’s tragically amusing to watch us fork out hundreds of billions to buy and build subs, to defend us from the country whose trade is pretty much the entire Australian economy. https://t.co/em3b4ipKeZ

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

Unless my sums are wrong, Australia currently has enough superannuation savings to pay for the entire aged pension for well over half a century.

We had granny flats in Australia when I was a kid. Now grannies own 3 homes, while their grandkids can’t afford to rent.

I think it should worry Australians that their retirement income system, worth nearly $4 trillion, is run by the same financial industry that brought us the Great Depression and the GFC. Government can’t bail it out if it falls over, it’s…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

The utter transformation of retirement into an orgy of consumption and travel has a cost that will continue to disenfranchise young, working people. The World Economic Forum estimates that cost for these 8 countries alone, including Oz.…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless savers, and will have difficult retirements. 1/3…

All change is led. So yes, it's not true an entire generation conspired to do this, no groups act in that way. But they have consistently, for 50 years, voted for the people who did. To pretend there's no culpability here is disingenuous.…

Anti-vaxxers grin from ear-to-ear every time an Australian politician talks about 'vaccine fatigue'. https://t.co/rUmdeSWvYo

About 3% of Australia own a caravan. About 99% of the moronic smirking emoji bullshit commentary on social media about EVs comes from this 3% of Australians. https://t.co/Sv1aKi2zji

The NSW Government’s FuelCheck app allows you to compare fuel prices by location, and also trends across the State. One of those things politicians who believe in markets create, thinking that giving consumers choice will drive prices…

One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

Remember when Australia had industry policy, before the LNP decided 'the market' would do all of that for us? There is no market. All change is led. The PERFECT symmetry of the red and blue lines here. https://t.co/JcjB9P921P

The sovereign citizen movement is an example of networked society and how to work it. As authorities slowly recognise, it’s driven by a tiny handful of people, with networked followers. Target that tiny handful, ruthlessly, and the rest…

At some times there have been up to 79 coal ships queued off the coast of Newcastle, very close to shore. Nobody much cared, it was a curiosity. Australia is on a fast-track to becoming an international laughing stock.…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

How does the Land of the Free (market) manage to have house price-to-income ratios less than half of us here in Oz? Well, it's an interesting story. Much of the magic happens in this building, Fannie Mae HQ. /1 https://t.co/NKI4H0ZCmb…

Now staying away from people while infected with Covid is an 'abundance of caution'. In NSW not doing that makes you liable for 6 months in jail and a large fine. Clause 52, Division 2 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/ODIVaHAaW8

The Tesla Model Y outsold the Toyota Hilux in March. The Hilux has regularly been Australia’s best-selling car since 2016. An indication of the massive shift underway. Roy Morgan research also shows more Australians plan to buy an EV in…

One of the news outlets asked on the weekend how the community comes to terms with the deaths in Bondi. I dunno, I feel Australia is excellent at coming to terms with deaths now. Lots of them.

The average Australian drives less than 40 km per day. But it’s too soon to switch to an EV because their range is only a whole week of driving.

If you wanted to stop all of the vehicles on Australia's roads, would you go to all 20 million driveways and drain the tanks? No, you'd drain the tanks at the 7000 servos. There are even fewer Covid breeding hubs than there are servos.…

I periodically repost this diagram from the ABS showing Australia's lockdowns. To counter the ludicrous hysteria in the narratives about them. All of that white space is most people living pretty normal lives. Believers in immunity debt…

Average E10 price in NSW this morning. How in the public narratives around gouging are we so focused on supermarkets, and not on OPEC and the oil companies? https://t.co/2uZ8aSyMrx

Australia is by many orders of magnitude the world’s oldest civilisation. Most of the history and meaning of that civilisation escapes modern understanding and is ignored. But it works on you, often unnoticed. It’s deep time, acting…

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

A comment on public policy. Thousands of Australian women have died of Covid. And are still dying. Nearly all preventable deaths. Nothing is being done. https://t.co/7lKgzPJ8hL

Comment on public policy 4. Over 25,000 Australians have been killed by direct policy of government on Covid, in less than 3 years. Nothing is being done.

I think we need to be specific here. NSW *politicians* do this. NSW Health will do whatever their masters demand that they do. https://t.co/1K1V6ysaqL

@theAliceRoberts is coming to visit us in Oz!

The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media gender team sports. The Council of Europe helps here. /1…

There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is…

The economic phrase ‘picking winners’ is a sure marker of a moron at work. Under the LNP Australia avoided picking winners for most of the past 2 decades. It turned us into a quarry for the Chinese and fossil fuel companies.

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

Political libertarianism has quite a foothold in Australia. Thanks to @ColinKinner for the tip-off on this one. This set of ideas is toxic to civilisation itself. And also laughably illogical and self-contradictory. These ideas must be…

The NSW Government was never going to do anything for Covid, in schools. It won’t even remove unflued gas heaters. Schools are likely the main hubs of Covid infection. This is why. The air in schools is filthy. https://t.co/d5I9a1KHfp

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

Checking again, what’s the best way to lodge a complaint to NSW Health about hospital-acquired Covid?

Her partner now has Covid as well. I mark these Tweets for no reply only because I don't transact personal life on here. I share the details only as front-row seats to the circus of Australia's Covid response. https://t.co/YzR651FHev

I’ve seen estimates that both in the US and Oz, people are getting Covid on average every 12 months. This factoid is trotted out to counter those who say people are getting infected multiple times per year. Is this the flaw of averages at…

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

The same social models repeat throughout history, just with different names. The landed gentry were once the great landlords. The Top 5 landlord occupations in Oz today are: 1. Surgeons 2. Anaesthetists 3. Internal medicine specialists 4.…

A reminder that in NSW if you go into a public place knowing you have Covid, and take no precautions against spreading it, you are liable for a jail term of up to 6 months. Section 52 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/z3m0ST1ltp

Australia should be the richest country in the world, per capita, for the next 2 centuries at least. What’s stopping it? Elections. Manipulated popularity games obstruct obvious physical realities. https://t.co/wZE6KWx1fV

The wealth and health of Australians improved immensely under ‘lockdowns’. And yet economic commentators still try to portray public health action as a catastrophe. It’s worth checking the think tank affiliations of all who make these…

At least 61% of Australians wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a nuclear reactor, and a sausage factory. https://t.co/yFnlIFuXxr https://t.co/8j8pikKu5Q

A prominent English motoring journalist counted over 150 successive EV-bashing stories in key UK media outlets. The status quo makes sure these narratives never let up. Only catastrophe will shift them. Flood the Australian car market with…

The climate deniers use their own special maths too. Absolute figures when they want to paint China as the great coal eating behemoth. The per capita figure embarrasses Australia. And even Germany. https://t.co/fOaZCQOT0f

More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

On a cumulative graph, flat means nothing is happening. In Oz's case, since Scott Morrison went to an election pretending the pandemic was over, in early 2022. That was the plan. It's actually deceptive to call our approach 'hybrid…

Many workplaces are relying upon NSW Health’s advice of ‘symptom-free’ people being allowed back at work. Not only is that public health gibberish, it’s also the least practical option. The same workplaces often require a doctor’s…

Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fashions are. Interior design, as an example. 1/6…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

The US has 88,000 tonnes of nuclear waste it can't dispose of. It's adding another 2000 tonnes every year. Some of their enthusiasm for AUKUS is Australia maybe taking some of that waste. Nuclear energy is energy for culture warriors and…

Australia should be the next Saudi Arabia. Not content with gutting revenue from our resources over the past 30 years, the LNP now want us to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of nuclear technology from offshore. And $50+ billion a…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

The LNP is trying to shut Australian renewables down. Companies from other parts of the world are queuing to invest in them. Not satisfied in gutting revenue from resource sales in the past 20 years, now they want to kneecap our greatest…

This is where the fossil fuel age in many ways began. Saudi Arabia's first successful oil well, Well 7. The "Prosperity Well". In 1938 it struck major oil. In a way 2024 is 1938, when it comes to energy. And Australia should be Saudi…

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol…

Have to wonder if the social media team at NSW Health were tempted to save time by writing “it’s a shitshow out there”. https://t.co/qteeze9C2J

Every day, with gas outages predicted and renewables rollout too slow, we’re getting closer to realising we should be electrifying households. As Rewiring Australia said. Direct action at the consumer end, not producer. Also drives down…

Sick and carer’s leave is up between 50 and 60% in the past two months, in NSW. How’s that for ‘balancing’ an economy against Covid? They’re on the same side of the see-saw.

Summarises everything that makes Australian nuclear a total fantasy. A world where the most popular politician once advised rinsing lungs with disinfectant, to kill Covid. We’re not seeing that popularity (electoral) politics is the…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

Infected co-worker returns to work today, because they’re ’symptom-free’, and ‘we’re following the official NSW Health advice’. Has been away less than a week. The workplace is near empty because of illness. Should mop up what’s left of…

One of the most popular groups running for local government in my area openly describes Aboriginal Australians as primitives, who were ripe for colonisation. It was only WW1 and 2 that suppressed the dumb, violent get-rich-quick settler…

My mum, the 80-year-old who got her first Covid infection courtesy of a NSW Health hospital, shared a story today. She went to have coffee with friends. 1/3 The friends have all recently been sick multiple times, all of similar age. Some…

That spending raised vast numbers of Australians above the poverty line, for the first time in their lives. The 'debt' they're now paying is with their exhausted sick leave. https://t.co/cczG93qqmP

Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we call elections. All those popularity contests do is weaponise…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

I shared the story of my mother here a month or two ago, 80, extremely vulnerable, a Novid until needing treatment in hospital for heart and lung issues. She then caught Covid there. I wrote to the healthcare body, who flick-passed it to…

A primary teacher friend has a kid in class today with known Covid (tested positive earlier in the week). Was off for a few days, parents sent the child back today, for the last day of term. Child still clearly has Covid, coughing and…

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum. Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler…

Maybe worth reminding people in NSW that if they work in any of the following jobs, if they catch Covid it’s presumed they caught it at work, for the purposes of workers compensation. The onus is on the employer to prove otherwise. Section…

What's the cheapest valved Aura people have seen in Australia?

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

The story of Australian governance not being told right now is the infiltration of local government elections, by groups in the US using social media. A lot of that infiltration is flying under the radar, people don’t pay much attention to…

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

Australian HECS/HELP debts now last longer than Australian marriages. When you translate what’s happening in our societies out of cleansing econo-babble and into the social reality of what we’re doing, the stupidity jumps out at you.

What gives me hope for the US election is that Trump already lost an election, at the height of his popularity. The only US President to lose the popular vote two elections in a row. 1/2 https://t.co/1aPEtXpJt4 https://t.co/TdweAwxbMs And…

I’ve not seen the BiVACOR discussed here, but we’re on the cusp of a possible medical revolution here? Clinical trials now underway. Nothing at the olympics comes within light years of the magnitude of this achievement. Daniel Timms should…

It’s nearly 3 months since this announcement. When I check the NSW Government page, it says the two levels of government are still figuring out how to pay it. https://t.co/Gw1WsqFcJ4

Watching beach volleyball at the olympics. One of the Australian players described as having been recently sick, and battling a bit for breath. Not quite the level of stupidity of the 5 currently infected water poloists playing on…

Who grew up in an Australian classroom heated by an unflued gas heater? And can remember the drowsiness, an indication of the crap exhaust gases we were breathing? Nobody loses cleaning school air. Many don’t even have basic HVAC, which…

‘Closing the Gap’ is a weird framing. The clear gap is the total incomprehension European Australia has of the land it lives in. The gap is tens of thousands of years’ experience, vs less than 240 years. Without the land, we’re all dead. A…

The people of NSW can be sicker than at any other time in modern history. But we must protect the CBD, apparently. Elections solve no problems. The economy is a killing machine. https://t.co/rjXDCl6Z6C https://t.co/oSOwjeyqbU

You know what was mandated for all Australians? Infections. Lots and lots of infections. That’s what we’re living right now, because of libertarian bullshit. https://t.co/K7QiBnqUrB https://t.co/qjfbWmneUr

As well as the impact on their ongoing health, the economic dries could ask, how much did Australia invest in the training of these athletes? Only to have those trained bodies infected the minute they arrived? https://t.co/fjPLhPpdFf

I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar panels, EVs and EV batteries. /1 https://t.co/xTEsxdujNX…

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints…

More than two times as many people die in Australia every year from human created air pollution than die on the roads. How much are we spending mitigating air pollution? https://t.co/t88aiDAHWu.

Tried reporting an anti-vax post from an Australian 'professor', about mpox. Encouraging people to ignore vaccines and just build their immunity. X has no mis/disinformation reporting options? I assume that's the free speech BS at work.

Australians shouldn't fear mpox, we have excellent public health procedures. (Can anybody remember which storeroom we put them in?)

In the UK election, now the US election, and in this and many previous Oz elections, conservatives play the immigration card. No public policy of any substance, except to dismantle government for their cronies. Meanwhile fear and hysteria…

Meanwhile in Australia, we're introducing legislation for politicians who behave like idiots in parliament. https://t.co/691DTfilUf https://t.co/dw5qKfw2sr

Nobody pays attention to local government. Right now in NSW towns are looking at takeovers from social media groups. Some are naked Trumpians. Media in regional areas is dead, already destroyed by SM. So there’s no scrutiny.

Because it took longer here in Oz for the massive public health action after WW2 in the Anglosphere to surrender to resurgent social hierarchies. Disguised as 'the economy'. We're now rapidly trying to catch up with the pack.…

Evidence that anything can be turned into a team sport. Australians use heat pumps without even thinking about it, they were introduced here before social media took over public life. In the UK it's game on. https://t.co/wIE45iojAG

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

I’m sure if asked, would say ‘hybrid immunity’ is Australia’s strategy. Minus any vaccination. Infection is Australia’s strategy. It’s not a strategy, it’s the shutting down of public health. https://t.co/pgVmcy4140 https://t.co/7ZeTyDTgKH

@alvelda noting that the Great Barrington Declaration has become the de facto public health policy of the US and UK. Also now Australia. Powerful read: https://t.co/OtMowzWsoB https://t.co/SbjxKuSV48

There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywhere, all the time, to run their campaigns. Another way to see…

It would be good to have an update from the CMO on the progress of hybrid immunity in Australia. National Cabinet is meeting today, would be an opportune time. https://t.co/Li324ves5q

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

The only thing that changes societies is catastrophes. Like Australia, whose only meaningful change to carbon emissions remains the impact of a pandemic. Described as a ‘disaster’ for the economy. The economy is the disaster. Just the…

Interesting things here. - plateauing of UK emissions in the 20th century probably due to de-industrialisation - the massive jump in Australian emissions with the introduction of coal-fired electricity - the staggering injustice of the…

I would recommend this over the advice of Australian infection champions. https://t.co/w3fT4b0Bmn

Working from home saved Australians $85 billion in transport costs alone. The pandemic was an economic bonanza for very many ordinary Australians. Catastrophes shift societies. It's why the status quo mobilised so fast to 'live with' Covid…

Not one insight here. Australia is a settler culture that has no meaningful relationship with its own (or any) land. It travels obsessively to suppress this existential discomfort. To continue the imperial model of accumulation of places.…

That black band (coal) overnight for NSW represents the perennial pointlessness of NSW governance. Daytimes are dominated by ordinary peoples’ solar (yellow), years ahead of government. I call the black ‘baseload black’. The slogans from…

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

The great electoral orgasm that was going to usher in massive change to the UK. The status quo won’t ever budge using elections. The US elections will be the same. And Australian. We’ll keep up the waves of euphoria and disillusionment,…

Another window into the substitution of society with an ‘economy’ was the PM’s launch of the revised aged care legislation. Described residents of aged care as those who helped build Australia’s economy. Complete inversion of means and…

The ‘authoritarian’ Chinese cracking down on gambling. Lovely contrast with the capitulation to gambling right now in Oz, in our ‘free’ democracies. I also love that Covid destroyed Macau’s casino economy. Only catastrophes force change.…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

The bizarre thing about this is that Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Humans don’t like competition. They like (yes, again) team sports. Holden v Ford. Woolies v Coles. Labor v Liberal. https://t.co/yjEXw0lo8d

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

Have seen this asked here, but is there a way to find Covid-safe dentists, in NSW? Particularly outside capital cities.

Seen at a major teaching hospital in Sydney. Trouble at mill. Living with Covid seems to mean living without nurses and doctors. https://t.co/byjtIUoHjT

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

Nearly 30 years of majority modern conservative rule in Australia converted it from an affordable public-focused society, into a user-pays ‘personal responsibility’ fan festival of the US Republicans and UK Tories. https://t.co/CL75PlR8lp…

@michellegrattan @c_s_wallace not only does Oz lag with version of booster, in relative terms nobody is getting vaccinated anyway. At the same time neither vaccination nor infection creates long-term immunity against Covid. We’re living a…

For many Australians, much cheaper groceries have been available for years. But they don’t shop there. The nonsense of ‘competition’ ideas, the competition is already there. Economic theory, politics and commentary has exactly zero insight…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

Turnbull one of the few on the Coalition side of politics in modern times to have actually run a business and make serious money. Now widely hated by the culture warring zealots that remain in the party, whose only skill is undergraduate…

This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal. Games of minority and majority. /1…

Australia’s determination to force an annual/seasonal flu model onto Covid, including with vaccinations, is a triumph of reality denial. The original National Cabinet and expert advisers that enforced this fantasy have all now cut and run.…

The Chinese industrial disruption that is (thankfully) shattering our status quo. The BYD Shark ute. Utes are central to our status quo psyche, a previous PM loved to reference them, for votes. Mocking EVs in the process. China is having…

If you really understand societies are 100% social, then you’ll understand why the Shark is a missile aimed right at the heart of our status quo. The truck/ute is a cultural totem for both US and Oz culture. The Shark is a brilliant…

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

“…one-in-six Australians are offloading unwanted possessions to raise money for travel, while 14 per cent took a second job, and 27 per cent sacrificed social activities for travel.” Public health never stood a chance.…

BYD’s hybrid Shark ute has its Australian pricing revealed tomorrow. It should be astonishing value. Motoring writers say ‘it only tows 2.5 tonnes, some of its rivals tow 3.5 tonnes’. No ute should be towing 3.5 tonnes, that’s a death…

Over at The Australian, they can't seem to decide if EVs are already in terminal 'nobody is buying them or wants them' decline, or are proliferating in such a 'mad rush' that they'll destroy the entire Western car industry.…

Those subject to doxxing on this and other platforms in Australia should remind the offenders that changes to the Privacy Act mean doxxing may soon attract a jail sentence. Keep receipts.

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

Somebody better send Eric a copy of the Australian Covid 'Inquiry' report, so he knows people won't support further measures. /s https://t.co/3wHMq18n6P

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

The nonsense narratives here in Oz yesterday (for the interminably umpteenth time) about ‘heavy-handed lockdowns’. What’s heavy-handed is individuals having to try to be a public health system themselves, every single fucking day.…

The people who argue on behalf of 'the people' of Australia, against lockdowns, are not the people of Australia. Lockdowns suspended the status quo, which had been screwing the actual people of Australia for years. https://t.co/id67Qkd8Gp…

The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate change and Covid. Elections create our greatest passion. The…

This is the new power demographic in politics. Young men. Often driving utes. And towing stuff. Unpacking status hierarchies. /1 (Image: https://t.co/KlpaW5WJg7) https://t.co/iohLUxNqr3 In all of the Anglo countries, this is the hot…

Fears Australia will be inundated with ridiculously cheap high quality vehicles. The humanity. https://t.co/75Xlm1em1L

I weighed up the various Australian US election coverage options, and decided on SKY News UK instead. The ABC tries, but it does such dull political coverage now. Lightweight.

In the battle of election coverages, CNN is winning for me. John King is like their Antony Green. SKY News Australia has ads for a banana sealing device, or something. The most intelligent thing on their broadcast so far.

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.…

The best favour Donald Trump could do for Australia would be to cancel AUKUS.

It'll be interesting to see how the Yellow Peril AUKUS narrative holds up as Australians are showered with bargain, quality Chinese goods. The US is on a fast-track back to the 19th century. https://t.co/mG0fAYJGMg

As the UK and US disappear down Anglo fantasies of lost empires, Asia is taking over the world. Paul Keating tried to align Oz with Asia, but met fierce resistance from the Queen and Country remnants here. It won't last. /1…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

NSW hanging on by its fingernails for this afternoon's peak. Nuclear reactors 20 years from now are as useful as a cock-flavoured lollipop (Dodgeball). https://t.co/eHJB90S1UO

Life is now social media. Telling a friend about the strain on the NSW grid this afternoon. Their response? “That’s because of all the EV’s we now have charging off the grid.” We live in a sloganocracy.

Australia begins pandemics with world-leading public health. It then leads the race to the bottom. The turnaround in our Covid response from world-leading to nothing at all is the greatest public administration failure in our history.…

Fascinating to watch the various status games around the world. Heat pumps are a complete non-issue in Australia, everybody has used them for years. In the UK they're a team sport right now. None of it is about facts. It's about different…

I mean who can we believe here, on energy? Australia’s top scientists and engineers, or an ex-Queensland cop? https://t.co/3THVAVIOBI

Australia is going nowhere on emissions. No amount of gradual planning will shift a status quo. It will just game the planning, as is happening. Only catastrophe creates meaningful shifts to a status quo. Like Chinese disruption with…

With what is it, almost $800 billion in proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, you’d have to say the Australian budget has been ‘nuked’. By the advocates of small government.

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” Chinese disruption allows you to bypass the idiot stalemate of our energy culture wars. Fuck…

If this election isn’t a test of the idiocy of electoral democracy, I don’t know what would be. A Dutton victory would destroy all of Australia’s natural advantages in the 21st century. Energy is literally power. https://t.co/Hab4CzqRh8

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

Why the ALP isn’t running a ‘Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is coming to turn off your solar panels’ line is a mystery. 4 million Australians have solar panels, and nuclear doesn’t play nice with solar. https://t.co/V15pTyi2ps

Looking back through old Covid files, you need history. Here, the previous PM, framing public health as the taking of ‘freedoms’ from Australians. Which being vaccinated will (he says) reverse. Now we don’t even get vaccinated. Only…

The ultimate determinant of power (in all senses of the word) is energy. The decision to shift Australia to nuclear, with its renewables resources, is akin to Saudia Arabia deciding in the 1970s to sell sand instead of oil. Except we’re…

Minimiser maths. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated as a disaster. Tens of thousands of people have died of Covid in Australia. Because Covid hasn’t wiped out most of the population, we’re told it’s not…

The sociopathic stupidity of Australia’s Covid response. A friend, a teacher, wanted a booster, ready for the next school year. Because technically their last was in February 2023, they were refused a shot ‘because it hasn’t been 12…

As we all glory in our free speech freedumb to say anything we like, I’m sure we all notice that severs any link between all of that speech and any sort of action. In Oz we call it pissing into the wind.

For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lunatic adolescent team sports we have instead. There’s little…

We’re too blinded by artificially engineered ‘war’ with China to see that they would be a far preferable major strategic partner for Australia than the farce that is now the US. https://t.co/RtfHAMaeNe

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

The ridiculous ‘debate’ on heat pumps in the UK shows the mechanism high status groups use globally to obstruct change. Turn it into a fake debate, team sports. Heat pumps generate no real team sports in Australia, because they don’t…

To be fair, dispossessing and killing existing populations and turning their land into biddable real estate is also the history of Australia. https://t.co/OT4fzICN4n

@PerpetualWinger you may know, is there any discussion about Covid vaccines being made available privately in Oz? Given that they won’t budge on 12-monthly vaccines, it may be an option for people who want them 6-monthly. Or maybe they…

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about…

Australian folk, best current valved respirator for Covid protection? Including best price?

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

‘We’ won’t do anything of the sort without a world war or catastrophic natural disaster. There is no we, without that level of disruption to status hierarchies. Australians got affordable housing after WW2. Governments built it as part of…

It’s very difficult for residents of rich countries in particular to understand that human will and rationality has little impact on how life unfolds. Rich nations assume that, and think information runs societies, because they’re rich and…

Earlier in the pandemic, in Australia we saw the process beginning that I often Tweet about. Catastrophe disrupting a status quo. ‘Lockdowns’ were tremendous for the poor/low-status, and terrible for the rich/high status. We know what…

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two connected things. Team sports (imitative rivalry), and what I call spec culture. /1 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr Vehicles are a dominant…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

Think about how perverse elections are. Today Australia waits to hear who ‘wins’ the right to try to deal with its problems. Like a football game. We don’t need the football game. It’s only interested in football, not the problems.

It’s more accurate to say SKY Australia were walloped in the election, the Howard-Abbott-Morrison-Dutton-Joyce LNP is really just a franchise of SKY Australia, one of Murdoch’s sewers. Not an analogy. They say the answer is even more of…

To rebuild the LNP, start by cutting the SKY News Australia feed to every LNP member’s office.

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

Saudi Arabia never built any nuclear plants because of its natural energy advantages. It wants some now because those natural advantages are over. Australia should be the next Saudi Arabia and ignore the nuclear distraction.…

The modern Liberal and National parties represent the smallest constituency in Australia, the SKY News studios. They should be allowed to secede and talk amongst themselves in their loon self-referential bubble, leaving the rest of us…

Housing is the perfect example of status, the currency of all human society. Both the 'Left' and 'Right' in Australia converge on the same idiot idea to fix housing. 'More supply'. It's irrelevant what political teams we have. 1/6…

The most serious commentators in Australia still talk about the government being able to ‘afford’ to do things, using its ‘budget’. Equating societies with household finances was always politics, to decimate public spending.…

‘Community opposition’ is a subset of belief in ‘the people’. Both are myths. There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Every time somebody evokes the people or the community, look for an activism in play from a tiny handful of people. /1…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1…

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

Well before Covid hit during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, I wore a mask when walking to work, to the amusement of colleagues. I also think ‘hazard reduction burns’ are designed mostly to save property, at the expense of the lungs of…

Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route information or education through a fictitious ‘people’, to get…

NSW prohibited vehicles rules for provisional licence holders disqualifies them from driving just about every best-selling EV. Which is a dilemma for parents who want one, unless they can afford to keep a combustion clunker as well. Most…

The fact the UK Covid inquiry is still going makes the Australian political hatchet job even more embarrassing.

Using your own nation’s extraordinary natural advantages in renewable energy as a pawn in your pathetic social media culture wars is beyond contempt. These are crimes against Australia and its future. Against the future of civilisation…

To me the ‘gap’ is global, between civilisations that last at most a few thousand years, and one here in Oz that has been continuous for tens of thousands of years. The gap is our almost total lack of understanding as to how that was and…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

People want to go electric, but are negotiating years of brainless propaganda on range anxiety (the average Australian drives less than 50km every day). Put a person in a PHEV and they quickly want the petrol engine bit gone. It’s like a…

Sydney yesterday had multiple crowds of people ‘standing with’ various causes. The day ended with everybody having just stood around. 1960s counterculture, still our culture. Protesting against the establishment. The empire of the kidult.

Friend of the family, early-80s, admitted to a major teaching hospital in Sydney for surgery for lung cancer. 60% of lung removed. Caught Covid in hospital. Hospital response? Sent them home.

Recently in Australia there’s been lots of talk of boosting productivity. Here’s a quick win. Target infectious disease in workplaces. Already a $7 billion/year cost before Covid. Immensely more now. https://t.co/stgc4yoFHH

Meanwhile the Anglo powers, including Australia, are spending hundreds of billions and re-writing defence strategy, to take on the ‘threat of China’. It must be the threat of ‘authoritarian’ rule. Unlike the freedom loving Trump and…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

The Republicans and Democrats in the US have swapped ideologies over the course of their history. Societies don't run on politics, they run on imitation/conformity, driven by status. Political parties will happily swap ideologies to follow…

What's the current Covid vaccine on offer in Australia, and are we expecting any refreshed versions soon?

This is how disasters are usually managed. Somebody with expertise in the specific disaster leads the response while politicians step to one side. Scott Morrison convened National Cabinet to drive a wedge between Premiers and their expert…

@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very dangerous misunderstanding. /1 https://t.co/OCFuRrJxZj…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s.…

Imagine a new world order where Europe and Asia (including Australia/NZ) all align behind China as the dominant superpower. And maybe even allow Russia back into the fold, it was the Americans that drove them out originally. 1/3…

Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. If you take a breath and step out of the daily debates, it becomes much more visible how we’re trapped inside something both artificial and deliberate. All of…

I saw republicans link this yesterday to the need to accelerate the shift to republicanism in Australia. America is a Republic. How’s that going? How did the Roman Republic work out? https://t.co/4FFFoN8aU3

Ending strong action against Covid was like this. In Australia there was clear popular support for strong action, but the minimisers repeated the fiction so often that people wanted to move on that gradually that became the reality. To…

One Nation and a populist Nationals under Matt Canavan wil be loving that @abcnews is reporting the severing of the main road link between Sydney and the State’s vast Western interior as a ‘regional’ news story, buried down the main pages.…

Hearing people at work openly lauding Donald Trump, and saying Pauline Hanson would continue his good work in Australia. Anybody in the same workplace who questioned this was labelled as having ‘TDS’ (Trump Derangement Syndrome, a US label…

Uh oh. Large numbers of Australians could be lifted out of poverty again. For the second time in their lives. https://t.co/yUeT37h0rT

The turnaround in Australian governance that Covid revealed, where leaders now cower to the social media mob and vested interests, is a disgrace to the history of the country. Australia was famous for its strong, innovative governance. Now…

I own an EV. There’s a real chance that with the pissweak void where governance in Australia used to be, I’ll become one of my employer’s involuntary taxi drivers for workers who can’t otherwise get to work, if fuel becomes scarce.

It took Scott Morrison about a year to dismantle Australia’s public health system, under Covid, via the invention of his ludicrous ‘National Cabinet’. An abomination in governance terms, completely at odds with federalism and its checks…

Stats for a fuel crisis. The fuel tankers that deliver fuel within Australia annually travel a distance equivalent of travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use probably over 200 million litres…

The dominant propaganda the fossil fuel status quo is rolling out in the face of the international clusterfuck we’re now living in? That renewable energy is only for the rich. We’ve heard that same rubbish before, the ‘inner city elites’…

Libertarians, cookers and kidults will be celebrating their victory in Australia. Where National Cabinet has agreed to ‘urge’ people to do things to save fuel. I remember urging as a new spineless nothing invented earlier in the Covid…

The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago,…

I can think of two other things Australians also refuse to use now. The Liberal and National parties. https://t.co/YoryYemffA

What does Angus suggest to fix the international Trump-created chaos? Be Australia’s own Trump. Make Australia Great Again. Drill, Baby, Drill. The Liberal Party is officially dead. https://t.co/YhZjTmxh6T https://t.co/2tqPpF495o

Australia has been producing well over 10 million tonnes of coal ash waste, per year, for decades, to generate its electricity. The vast majority of it just sits in big holes in the ground, in ash dams. Compare with the 90,000 tonnes of…

It would surely take almost zero political courage to dump the biggest albatross in the entire Australian budget. AUKUS. https://t.co/8wpzmBlPfA

Australia’s Trump cover band, playing all the hits. Isn’t Trump doing well, too. https://t.co/sIWwDRasQN

Last time I checked Australians were finally buying EVs, because embracing fossil fuels was sending them broke. https://t.co/rKsdTnqiLU

I’d like to say I’m never surprised by what the fossil fuel status quo will come up with as a way to avoid change. But the idea Australia will now become a major oil producer is maybe Peak Bullshit.

The comments under these posts are almost universally little Aussie Trumpies saying ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ Australian conservatives are at the ‘will drop pants for food’ stage of extinction denial. Using the destruction of Australia’s…

One of the many circulating weaponised propaganda pieces that people confuse with their own ideas, is that EVs are heavier than combustion vehicles. Nearly all of Australia’s favourite combustion utes and SUVs are heavier than all of its…

There are remnants of Australia’s superb public health system and pride in its achievements. Trashed since Covid. When a bunch of National Cabinet numpties sent everybody out to be infected, so that they could hopefully win upcoming…

The culture that the anti-immigration warriors say migrants need to ‘integrate’ with doesn’t even exist. It’s a Queen and Country fantasy from the 1950s. The true integration needed is a lot of old white Anglos needing to wake up and…

Because the institutionally-driven levelling of Australian society post both world wars, arising from repair after those conflicts, created a ‘we’. Starting in the 1970s, the ‘market’ alternative was targeted at this we, dismantling it.…

Things feel very reminiscent of Covid. Getting worse, but the political response is all about engineering calm rather than doing anything. Australia found another 100 million litres of diesel, yay! That’ll cover about a DAY of use. Let’s…

The Australian government, first on EVs (road user charges) and now on network costs for grid supply, is trying to fund the renewables transition by increasingly targeting Australians who have invested in the change themselves. By evoking…

It took 20-30 years between the introduction of combustion vehicles to Australia, and the existence of a widespread centralised fuelling network. EVs already well on track to easily eclipse that rate. Not least because a centralised…

The men and women who built the original Snowy Hydro scheme, a renewable energy project that helped create modern Australia, would surely feel violated by 2026 politics. Anti-immigration. Anti-renewables. A disgrace to their legacy.…

The RedBridge survey on EV use in Australia highlights something I’ve talked about for years. Politics is a completely decoupled layer of hot air rivalry, overlaid upon material reality. Material reality - ‘Reality Politics’ - is now…

Jane Caro on private versus public schools in Australia. The real reason people flock to privates is status. They’re perceived as a higher status place to be, and to give connection to networks of higher status people. All societies run on…

Here’s a window into kidult culture. Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. Kidults love dogs because they’re pliable and lavish us with seeming unconditional love (which is really more pack loyalty). 1/3…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…

“…actually on so many of these big challenges we’re facing, it’s not necessarily Left versus Right. It’s actually vested interests, and their stranglehold on the major parties, versus the Australian people.” @DavidPocock nailing it. And a…

Open questions now about a possible Prime Minister Hanson. Something I haven’t seen noted is that if that were to occur, she’d be Australia’s oldest first-term PM ever, by a considerable margin. Even Menzies’ long run ended when he was 71.…

The surge of Trumpian populism, in the UK under Farage and now in Oz under Hanson, is already interpreted as ‘the people’ taking power back. In reality it’s just one more elite, in rivalry with the existing elite. Both backed by big elite…

We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is…