The Victorian Transport Association says thousands of truck drivers are crossing the state’s border each day without a permit and shunning testing requirements designed to shield against the NSW coronavirus outbreak. The peak industry body estimates between 15,000 and 19,000 trucks are entering Victoria daily, the vast majority from NSW. A Victorian government spokesperson said there were 9800 valid permit holders.
Author: peterimrich
“So, in New South Wales, as we continue to combat this in Sydney, what I want to say to those in Sydney is we’ve got to press on. We’ve got to continue to show that strength. We’ve got to continue to support each other. There are no easy solutions here. There are no silver bullets, just as there were not last year when Victoria went through their prolonged lockdown. This thing only gets beaten by suppressing it. Of course, vaccines can put wind at the back of those who are trying to achieve that outcome, and that’s what we have to do.”
If only we’d remembered to buy the vaccines, which are morphing here from a shot in the arm to a tailwind for those of us who are keen to stay alive or out of an ICU. If only we’d got them into peoples’ arms. We’ve had plenty of time to do both.
Spoiler alert: the day after his presser in which he publicly sends Gladys “Oliver” Berejiklian, who dares asks for more, away with an empty vax bowl, in another Oliver Twist (remember he played the Artful Dodger in his High School production, in 1982 – the PM or his fixer comes up with a solution. He has a secret stash of vaccine. Sceptics wonder if this just a virtual surplus vaccine derived by extending the Pfizer second shot from three to six weeks – against all medical advice.
(“I’d Do Anything” is the anthem of the resourceful pickpocket and street urchin). So well cast. Right on cue, The Dodger finds some more vaccine in a national stockpile that must have fallen down the back of the sofa – no- not that sofa. The next day.
As the learned Dr Sheep Devil Person aka Dr Jennifer Wilson tweets,
Morrison says he has “found” 280,000 Pfizer doses. But he couldn’t “find” anything when Queensland asked two weeks ago? Only the most vile person would play games with vaccines in this way.
You’d think Biden and the Democratic party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy. Why are Frito-Lays workers working ‘suicide shifts’ on the job? Indigo Olivier Read more So far this year, the Republican party has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population is usurping their dominance.
Source: Why isn’t Joe Biden doing all he can to protect American democracy? | Robert Reich | The Guardian
With prosecutors seeking a maximum sentence, Hale delivered a powerful handwritten letter describing his motivations to the court.
Taking their Money Event
Traitor Trump continued his madness by performing his carnival treason act in Arizona Saturday night. The man who caused an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th is still doing his grievance shtick with Charlie Kirk’s disgusting Turning Point USA (aka brownshirt) event.
Source: Trump’s Arizona Theme: Hate America, Love Me | Crooks and Liars
According to an Associated Press investigation, there were only 182 ballots, out of 3.4 million cast in Arizona, that had problems clear enough for legal review. Of those, only four led to charges, split evenly between two Democrats and two Republicans. Not a single vote was found to have been counted twice.
Depending on who the key stakeholders are, who makes donations to your political party, the decisions follow. In Victoria, it is unions that keep ALP Premier Dan Andrews in power and were therefore top of the list for consultation and action. In NSW, business interests keep the Liberals in power and it was business consulted first and whose needs were prioritised. This is not corruption. It is politics. You reward your backers, but maintain good relationships with diverse interests. It is simply pragmatic. Corruption involves the acquiring of a personal benefit. Corruption was how an eminent retired judge described the carpark and sports rorts that will follow Scott Morrison all the way to the next election. Although no individual minister or MP was personally pocketing a direct financial benefit, using public money to improve prospects with the voters and to try to hold on to power is a form of corruption of the electoral process.
Source: ‘Corruption’ can thrive in a space where weak regulation is parked
REAL CRIME IN AUSTRALIA ISN’T POLICED
Payments described as ‘waste of public money’ represent almost 14% of the $90bn program
Murdoch media is helping hide the callous Scott Morrison by favouring his public relations creation, the daggy dad, ScoMo, writes Paul Begley.
Australia’s media is the most concentrated of any democracy in the world. The largest stakeholders (and chairpersons) of the three largest media companies in Australia – News Corp, Nine Entertainment Co and Seven West Media – all have known links to the Liberal Party. The ABC is also chaired by Ita Buttrose, another person with links to the Liberal Party.
One dose will not protect you! Yesterday the Premier of NSW Gladys Berejiklian offered ‘guidance’ that alarmed me to the core, because it was the absolute opposite of what the science is currently telling us. Australia, please heed this warning: the time to use the AstraZeneca to stem the Delta Outbreak in Sydney has passed and I cannot be more clear on that. Below are a series of correct explanations toward incorrect assumptions left by the NSW premier at the NSW press conference on the 23/07/21.
Source: We need to know the truth – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Recent data confirms Australia’s economy is currently being managed more ineptly than at any time in the last sixty years, reports Alan Austin.
Source: Morrison’s recession: Australia’s worst since records have been kept
Normally I am not into Democrat-on-Democrat grousing, but one of the things that differentiates and frankly, distinguishes us from the GOP is our ability to handle criticism and self-reflection, resulting in actively seeking paths towards ethical enlightenment and improvement. While in no way should we ever, EVER allow the fascist, misogynistic Republican party off the hook for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the highest court in the land, we can and should be actively trying to remove him now that we hold the tools to do so. Consider this list of reasons, spouted off by Elie Mystal — quite possibly the only human capable of pulling me out of vacation mode to write a post for work.
Source: MSNBC Analyst Ticks Off Reasons Kavanaugh Is An Impeachable Sleaze | Crooks and Liars
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Source: Amazon Is Creating Company Towns Across the United States
“Where there is a potential to put more vaccines into NSW, even beyond what we’re already doing, well, of course, we will seek to do that. But we are not going to disrupt the vaccination program around the rest of the country,” he said after a meeting of the national cabinet.
Source: Pfizer doses to be spaced out in NSW crisis, but state fails to get change in vaccination program
Friday marked 100 days until the critical COP26 United Nations climate summit starts in Glasgow and the milestone was marked by renewed urgency in climate action. Alok Sharma, the Conservative UK cabinet minister who will be the formal host of the Glasgow talks, used it to write to relevant ministers around the world and call upon them to raise ambitions. “Although significant progress has been made, we must be honest that collectively we have not yet delivered at the scale and pace that science requires,” read his letter. “The world will be watching in Glasgow and it is our shared responsibility to rise to the challenge.”
Quotes from the movie, Forrest Morrison: “Life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re getting unless you look at the bottom of the box and then all the chocolates fall out.” – Scotty
”Listen, you promise me something, OK? Just if you’re ever in trouble, don’t be brave. You just run, OK? Just run away.” – Jenny
“I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what polls are.” Scotty
”Run, Scotty, run!” Rupert Murdoch
”Stupid is as, stupid does.” Barnaby Joyce.
Sixty million of the Pfizer doses will be delivered in 2022 and another 25 million in 2023, in addition to the 40 million already due to arrive in Australia this year.
Source: COVID Australia: Morrison government buys Pfizer boosters, ATAGI says just get jabbed
Phil Valentine’s family says he regrets his position and pleaded with listeners to get vaccinated.
Source: A Conservative Radio Host Mocked the Vaccine. Now He’s Hospitalized With COVID. – Mother Jones
Justice Corrupted
They, with Alito, are the Supreme Court majority. The ones who all but ended voting rights and allowed for even more secrecy in dark money to flood our system. What they have planned for next session is even worse. The Supreme Court is packed with dangerous ideologues, and a few corrupt ones, too. Now President Biden and Democrats have a chance to, well, unpack it. To dilute the Trump/RNC/Koch/Federalist Society’s malign influence and balance it out with four or six or however many additional justices. It is imperative. It is existential.
On Wednesday, 20 July, The Prime Minister did three radio interviews. During the third on Melbourne’s KIIS 101.1, he was asked by the host Jase Hawkins to apologise for the “nightmare” of the vaccine rollout. “Can you honestly say to me that the government has taken accountability?” he said. “Like, I have never heard the word ‘sorry’ – ‘guys you know what, sorry, we did screw it up, but we are getting it right now’.” For the entirety of the interview, Jase tried to elicit the word “sorry” from the Prime Minister. It was like trying to extract blood from a stone. He did, however, manage an admission of sorts that he was responsible for Australia being last on a list of nations well ahead of us with their vaccination programs.
Source: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Just before the Audit Office released its scathing indictment of the commuter car parks program, Australia quietly added the auditing profession to our skills shortage list. These two events really sum up the Morrison government – an outfit obsessed with tactical politics, wholly uninterested in governing, and contemptuous when it comes to governance. That we are running out of auditors shouldn’t be such a surprise. Sports rorts, female change room rorts, safer communities rorts – the sorry list goes on and on. But the commuter car parks program sets a new standard – a new low.
LNP Ignores the experts
Offshore wind farms are an increasingly common sight overseas. But Australia has neglected the technology, despite the ample wind gusts buffeting much of our coastline.
Source: Wind turbines off the coast could help Australia become an energy superpower, research finds
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has failed monumentally. Malcolm Turnbull before him failed and prior to him, Abbott, the destroyer, added to the damage of John Howard’s legacy. Why anyone under 35 would vote for the Liberals has got me beat. They would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Source: Wren’s Week: Liberal Party are intergenerational thieves
The Pilliga forests are a significant water, biodiversity and carbon sink resource, yet our governments want to turn it into a gas-field. Now is the time to rethink how we value and manage our irreplaceable natural resources.
Source: It’s the forest, silly! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Government forecasts are more than double the amount of doses CSL is able to produce per week when operating at maximum capacity
Source: Australian government’s Covid vaccine rollout forecasts don’t add up | Coronavirus | The Guardian
The competence a politician has and displays is the Bitcoin of the modern business. If you’re competent enough and present as such, with the typical confidence high-achieving pols have in abundance, your selling price is on the escalator. Just like the roller coaster ride Bitcoin traders know so well, when a political leader falters in competence and starts looking to be out of his or her depth your value takes a dive. Right now Scott Morrison is like Bitcoin. He spent 2020 on the rise – hitting unprecedented highs over time – but then slumped in the early months of 2021.
Source: From character to competence, ‘Scotty from Marketing’ is in a world of pain
The ‘it’s not a race’ vaccine mantra has been discarded, but the prime minister is still running around in circles trying to evade responsibility
Carlson, meanwhile, has refused to reveal whether he himself has been vaccinated, despite his on-air rhetoric. This week, CNN found that Fox Corporation – Fox News’ parent organization – has quietly implemented its own version of a “vaccine passport.” Fox has reportedly “developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status,” according to employee emails obtained by CNN business. The company has apparently encouraged its employees to self-attest in an effort to “assist the company with space planning and contact tracing.
Australia’s PM is caught between Biden and his Coalition partner while the country suffers. Watch the salesman promise what he can’t or wont deliver.
The importance of having a U.S. leader like Joe Biden, who has come to believe in the necessity of drastically cutting the emission of greenhouse gases, was demonstrated Wednesday when Japan announced that it was doubling its proposed cuts to carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. This according to Reuters.
Reversing 40 years of shareholder capitalism won’t be easy. But remember this: you, the working people of America, outnumber the corporate executives and big investors by a wide margin. Together, you can change the rules, and build a world where workers have real power.
Boris Johnson has abdicated his principal responsibility as UK Prime Minister – protecting and safeguarding lives – to let COVID-19 kill as many as 100 people every day as early as next month, say scientists.
Morrison’s advice “It’s up to you”
Except that was never going to happen. A brief perusal of Brad ‘Bradster’ Vinnard’s Facebook page shows a deep antipathy towards COVID vaccines, a love of Trump and other right-wing causes, and his love of Harleys. His Facebook comments were the usual hodgepodge of extremism and conspiracy theory, that the vaccines were unsafe, unproven, no worse than the flu, a means for government control, etc. Just the usual paranoid delusion so often seen by followers of Donald Trump.
Yes, sometimes Scott Morrison just rambles on with meaningless waffles and lies, but other times, he disappears and says nothing. Either way, his detractors are never satisfied… and speaking of Dutton and Frydenberg, apparently, Dutton thinks he has the numbers but without Mathias there to confirm them, he’s not willing to move. Josh was sure he had the numbers but after a recount, he discovered that he was short by sixty billion…
The sudden, global move to tax carbon puts billions of Australian coal and gas exports at risk, indeed this country’s largest sources of income. Hard on the heels of the EU’s carbon border tax declaration, the US declared a carbon border scheme. Others are poised to follow. Callum Foote and Michael West report on the immense risk to Australia’s largest source of income.
Scott Morrison this week more or less trashed Australia’s top advisory body on immunisation, in remarks that were at best ill-judged and at worst alarming. On Wednesday Morrison told a news conference he (or the government) made a “constant appeal” to the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to review its advice on AstraZeneca according to the balance of risk. On Thursday he said on radio: “I’ve just simply said balance of risk is changing, guys, so how is that impacting on your advice, and it’s time to think about that”. The “guys” (and girls) on ATAGI are obviously as aware as anyone of the changing risk profile as cases increase.
Source: Grattan on Friday: Morrison wrong to try to influence advice from expert immunisation group
Biden isn’t Trump but he is America and should feel SHAME
For that reason, although by all Western standards it can be said that Cuba is a dictatorship, it is necessary to remember that the United States is the tyranny that created it, a brutal tyranny that has been going on for at least two hundred years. Cuba was the first great defeat of that arrogance and, for some reason, it has managed to resist for 60 years.
Source: Cuba and the US: The Difference Between Dictatorship and Tyranny | The Smirking Chimp
I was acting as Trump and his minions do: free to say anything, no matter how ridiculous, with no basis in observable fact.
Just days before it was hit with catastrophic floods, Henan endured a major heatwave, Bloomberg noted Wednesday. “The deadly flood shows the unpredictable impacts from climate change are appearing more and more often,” Zhang Jianyu, chief representative at the Environmental Defense Fund’s Beijing office, told the news outlet. “It’s a message to us that it’s time to strengthen efforts to tackle [the] climate change crisis.”
Source: In China, ‘Heaviest Rain in 1,000 Years’ Triggers Deadly Flooding, Landslides | Common Dreams News
Would Australia’s LNP ever be seen doing this? Destroying it’s own infrastructure “for the people’s sake”?
China’s military has blasted a dam to release floodwaters threatening one of its most heavily populated provinces as the death toll in widespread flooding rose to at least 25.
In my last piece, I looked at how Scott Morrison appeared to have lost the support of the man who truly runs Australia. There we looked at the column published under the name of Morrison’s dog, which left the Prime Minister beaten and bloody in an alley somewhere. This time, I want to look at NSW, again using the Errorgraph as the example. Similar to last time, I do not have the link to the article, but someone in my household buys this rag and so I have photos of the appropriate pages.
Source: Rupe’s Tantrum: NSW Edition – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Students and academics at the University of Melbourne are mobilising against the opening of a Liberal-aligned research institute on campus that counts conservative commentator Peta Credlin and the chairman of right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs as board members.
Source: Melbourne University students mobilise against Liberal Party-backed Robert Menzies Institute
Scott and Gladys were so intent on dividing the country they forgot that pride comes before a fall. They both failed the test of leadership blinded by their populist electioneering. Now they are looking at others to blame when all they need is a mirror.
Watching New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her “gold standard” pandemic management unravel before our eyes is a bittersweet moment for many people — Victorians, in particular.For months on end, Gladys has been held up as the model all should follow. We have heard that Gladys’ gold standard contact tracing was second to none. That her approach to handling the pandemic was far superior to her mere mortal non-Liberal counterparts around the country. Even that she single-handedly “saved Australia”.
Source: Liberal Party pandemic management: Exemplary — thanks, Gladys!
The prime minister has until next May to hold an election. The government has ample time to play catch-up with the rollout. If further outbreaks are contained and the elusive herd immunity is achieved by then, lockdowns will have become a thing of the past. The relief at being able to move on may obliterate current disquiet. Further, in normal circumstances, policy virtue is not necessarily synonymous with political success. The last federal election was an indicator of this. The Coalition triumphed despite a threadbare policy program. In other words, policy prowess is only ever one measure of a government’s success.
Source: Is the COVID vaccine rollout the greatest public policy failure in recent Australian history?
With growing criticism toward his poor leadership of our country, particularly through the pandemic, Scott Morrison’s popularity is slipping, writes Emma Dawson.
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.