Markdun

Jack, so it seems I’m not the only person with a perfectly good smartphone that’s more than 5 years old! I’d like to know why the reverse onus of proof, ie. why isn’t it up to someone enforcing the regulations to prove you are not vaccinated? If it’s good enough for murder, rape etc that the onus is on prosecution, why not for breaching health regs? Isn’t this one of those freedoms, innocent till proven guilty?

Jack, so it seems I’m not the only person with a perfectly good smartphone that’s more than 5 years old! I’d like to know why the reverse onus of proof, ie. why isn’t it up to someone enforcing the regulations to prove you are not vaccinated? If it’s good enough for murder, rape etc that the onus is on prosecution, why not for breaching health regs? Isn’t this one of those freedoms, innocent till proven guilty?

Bull, a couple of points about the ‘facts’. Yes, vaccinated people still get infected and pass the disease on....but much less (around 50%) than vaccinated. Yes, vaccinated people also get sick and die from Covid, but a great deal less than unvaccinated....around ten times less (this is the 90% efficacy of the vaccine. And yes, if vaccinated people behaviour changes significantly they can spread the disease more than say unvaccinated person who stays isolated, wear masks etc. so on this point only you are mostly correct. On your claim of a 1% death rate you are just wrong....where does that figure come from? The infection fatality rate, or case fatality rate is somewhere between 2 and 4%. But this hides a lot. For the over 70 year olds the infection fatality rate is around 20%.....so for every 10 people over 70 who get the disease, 2 will die. For over 60 year olds it over 5%. And it’s not surprising that in populations with high vaccinated rates have high numbers of vaccinated people sick and dieting in hospital....remember that 1 in 10 vaccinated will succumb to the disease just like an unvaccinated person. And in a densely populated city like Singapore with lots of high rise apartments it would not be surprising to see Covid infection rates high despite high vaccination rates and a more educated and intelligent population, because vaccinated people still get infected and spread the disease albeit less than unvaccinated. The question for us in Australia is whether to use the public health benefit (reduced transmission) from rising vaccination rates to reduce the incidence of Covid circulating in the community and reduce deaths substantially, or to piss this dividend away to open up for business and travel, accepting a significantly high ongoing death rate of around 40 people per day (again remembering that this would be a death rate of 400 people per day for us if we weren’t vaccinated)? Someone else mentioned the view of Covid being like influenza....it’s not. The medicos are learning it’s quite different....unlike the flu, Covid damages other organs than the lungs (heart and blood clots are examples) and also unlike the flu, Covid somehow interferes with gaseous exchange in the lungs. All this tells us is that it is just plain bull shit that there will be ‘post Covid’, or coming out of Covid, or snap back to normal. It will become endemic, and will need to be managed forever more. The question is how is it going to be managed, and like climate change, how will people adapt and the economy restructure to be viable into the future?

I’ve been busy finishing the second hanger’s doors, and filling in the soft spots on my runway before the next rain. I’ve done a few local flights and the Area Frequency is very quiet and there are all these bitumen runways (highways) with not a car or truck in sight available should the iron thermal call it quits. Flighty’s person A vaccinated versus person B unvaccinated does have some merit, but it is wrong.....stay with me Flighty. Let’s take a population pre-vaccine and no lockdowns. The R0 of the Delta variant in such a group exceeds measles R0.....around 8. So for every infected person...they reinfect a further 8. Introduce lockdown ‘lite’ NSW style and the R0 drops to 2. Introduce vaccination and the R0 drops to 1 (50% reduction in transmission). Give vaccinated people more freedoms, and the R0 will jump back towards 2, ie. the same spread for unvaccinated in lock down. This is the reason or logic behind giving greater freedoms to the vaccinated (ignoring their less, in proportion, hospitalisation than unvaccinated)....it is treating them differently to achieve similar outcomes (passing on the contagion) for the two groups. My R0 numbers are just my guesses, but they are roughly correct.....it’s very hard to determine because so many factors influence the number, particularly people’s behaviour. I would also add that in some European countries travel by ‘fully vaccinated’ still requires two recent negative Covid tests....as does WA. The challenge for Gladys is to strike a defensible ‘loosening of restrictions’ for vaccinated people that doesn’t see R0 going above 1 for this group....unfortunately her rhetoric, and experience in the UK and Israel, suggests it will.

Turbo, not only do you misrepresent what I said, the information you provide is not inconsistent with my assertion. Australia has helped PNG, but it has done the bare minimum. Other than extract vaccines from the WHO’s Covax program for poor countries, what have we done....very very little. The issue about vaccine availability is both price and supply on a global scale. Rich countries queue jumping (the queue of need) with dollars both drives the price up and directs supplies (which are scarce) away from those in most need AND has and is contributing to thousands of deaths. You used the word ‘stealing’; I didn’t, but morally I think it is much the same. Because Morrison spectacularly failed quarantine, vaccination has become a disorderly mad race for us. And yes Morrison did fail quarantine spectacularly. He even boasted that at 98% effectiveness quarantine was good......and this is with thousands of inwards travellers each week. This would be like saying aircraft safety is OK when there is a crash and burn of one in every fifty flights. At an effectiveness of 98% quarantine (a federal constitutional responsibility) was designed to fail (but I doubt anyone in government or the Dept of Home Affairs actually even thought about it). I have had a lot of experience in government both in Australia and NZ and been on first name terms with PMs and Ministers....most of whom’s political persuasions I disagreed with. I can’t recall any I’d refer to as evil...most were idealistic and doing what they thought best for their country, state or territory. However, I do consider Morrison extremely evil. What person with a scintilla of compassion or moral fibre would suggest that a policy to open the country up for international travel and reduce other public health measures (except vaccination) will result in increased deaths of loved ones, but that’s OK because you can go to their funerals and to church? And to boot he tries to moral wash his evilness with his religion. Morrison’s evilness extends beyond the moral. His prime ministership is increasingly fracturing not only the federation but also democracy and the rule of law. This is a PM who accepts his ministers spending our money contrary to parliament’s legislation. This is not just the rorts programs, but also Robo Debt. They knew Robodebt was unlawful, but they did it anyway and are continuing with it. Rex Patrick won his FOI case, but has the government handed over the documents or appealed the decision? No, they are just refusing to comply with the law. There are, or were, many good people in the Liberal Party who are now despairing in how it’s been taken over by the reactionary right that has a veneer of acceptability and civility, but isn’t.

Jack I don’t disagree. Some countries have tightened up their borders and quarantine so they can have a longer period, better managed, not so desperate vaccination program, buy vaccines at a lower price and reduce demand so more is available to poorer and more afflicted countries....like NZ, Taiwan, South Korea. Other governments have squandered their country’s geographic isolation, deliberately sabotaged their borders & quarantine, thought nothing about bidding up the price of vaccines (hey, because it’s the public’s’ money not mine who cares what the price is’) and reduced the amount of vaccines available to poorer nations...oh that’s us, Australia. It’s not just commercial and money, it’s also plain bad and selfish governments. I used to think Morrison just had no moral compass. I no longer have that view. He has a moral compass, not ‘amoral’, but immoral and decidedly evil.

This is not what I read earlier but nevertheless it says much the same. https://theconversation.com/most-covid-deaths-in-england-now-are-in-the-vaccinated-heres-why-that-shouldnt-alarm-you-163671 I’m not sure where they get the twenty fold reduction in hospitalisation (of vaccinated people) as the tested efficacy of the AZ vaccine is a tad over 90% and this correlates pretty well with the ten fold reduction in deaths that countries like the UK are experiencing (& which is a compelling individual benefit from vaccinating). But it becomes very muddy and complicated once you start breaking the data down by age cohorts. Regarding Israel and lesser extent the UK, keep in mind the testing and measurement of vaccine efficacy is NOT immunity to Covid infection but avoiding hospitalisation or death as a consequence of infection. Infection (& transmission) of Covid by vaccinated people is still very much a thing. Earlier research indicated infection and transmission was reduced by 50%, but this has effectively been wiped out by the increased R0 of the Delta variant AND the behaviour of vaccinated people....ie. ‘I’m vaccinated so I can go to the nightclub, travel and shop’. I don’t think it’s the waning effect of the vaccine yet....but I could be wrong on that....lots of vested commercial interests wanting booster shots for rich developed countries!

I was with you all the way till this Skip. The ‘not-for-profit’ gambling dens/so-called football clubs, Catholic club, Labor club, in the A.C.T. get tax free on the basis of them spending dollars on community programs of ‘their choosing’. So it ends up being a mates’ rotting of who gets funding. Sure there are lots of deserving community grants made, but those aren’t necessarily the priorities I, or even the broader community (in the form of an elected parliament) would make. Why can’t I then decide to spend money that would otherwise go to public funds via tax to my pet priorities, eg. I don’t want my tax money going to subsidise mining companies, agriculture or the military. I say make em all pay tax and have our elected representatives decide the priorities through appropriations laws....of-course this fails when ministers don’t comply with laws on spending public money (like McKenzie) or when parliament abrogates their responsibility by purporting to delegate to the finance minister the power to shift funds from one appropriation to another. (I say ‘purport’ because in my view that provision of the FMA is invalid as an impermissible delegation because under the Cth Constitution only parliament can make an appropriation, not the executive.)

Here is some data....might help when comparing proposed policies for Australia like get population vaccinated and let it rip, or as ScuMo said in Parliament last week, ‘yes, people may die but you can go to their funeral and to church’. UK daily death rate is now tracking around 1.6 deaths per million per day and many of these deaths are of vaccinated people (last I read on this it was just over 50% vaccinated). And this is after they have had Covid kill the most vulnerable. That means if we follow this approach....vaccinate, ‘freedoms’ and open up borders sans quarantine etc we can expect 40 deaths per day or around 15,000 deaths per year. This is still roughly in accord to my previous ‘back of the envelope’ estimate and is consistent or less than estimates of some expert epidemiologists. It is of-course much more than annual flu deaths, road deaths, or estimates by experts like Doherty which were based on low incidence of infection with ongoing TTIQ (track, trace, isolate, quarantine) and lockdowns. Second graph is vaccination rates. I haven’t included a graph of daily infections...but that graph does show infection rates doing the usual up and down waves, including in vaccinated populations. The big difference in vaccinated populations is that the death rates and hospitalisations are greatly reduced, but death rates and hospitalisations remain significant nevertheless. I agree fully with previous comments about us having to change our behaviour, like fly-ins to private airstrips, avoiding mass transportation (trains, large passenger planes, quarantine and negative Covid tests for international travel...as many European countries now do) ongoing into the future....ie. no back to the way it used to be. Covid with climate change is making it all very depressing....it feels very much like Neville Shute’s ‘On the beach’, with us here in Oz just waiting for the inevitable environmental disaster to roll on down from the north. And we also appear saddled with a completely incompetent government which is becoming less democratic by the second. I feel for my children and grandchildren.

Onetrack, like a confirmed liar or perjurer in the witness box, anyone who believes anything uttered by a politician without independent corroboration, is on pretty shaky ground. In any sort of crisis, truth from government is the first fatality. And to that extent Flightrite might have a point. However, we do have good, trusted and reliable sources of information.....like the World Health Organisation’s twice weekly press conference pandemic updates, our expert epidemiologists, virologists at universities, etc etc. Thus, it may be true that governments lie, but this does not mean the pandemic is any less real. As to the ‘rest of the world is opening up’, I can only guess what that means. Australia’s economy has been doing relatively good compared to other countries. Most economic activities and trade continue...albeit not trade based on movement of people across borders like tourism and commercial airlines. But that is just some economic restructuring (like increased working from home) that needs to occur to enable us to ‘live with covid’ without large numbers dying from covid. And I’m glad Australia’s is being left behind other countries in the Covid death league tables (though it seems there is a growing view we should join the other loser countries like the USA and the UK). I must say I’m pretty disappointed in the so-called ‘freedom marches’.....the idea that ‘freedom’ is a right to go to mass gatherings, nightclubs etc, but not freedom from arbitrary detention without trial (law just passed in federal parliament yesterday), or that people can be charged, convicted and gaoled in secrecy, or that our federal parliament has time to amend voting laws to establish a barrier for small political parties to fairly participate in election (mainly to noble the New Liberal Party), but no time to provide laws so citizenry can vote electronically. Spacey’s also got a valid point about curfews.....but I think the rationale is not infection control but police resource management. A person out bushwalking, or flying their single seat plane is similarly not a great risk of being a super spreader. I’m caught in the NSW lockdown because I’m at my airstrip, which ought to be in the ACT border zone, but because the ACT govt defined the border zone by where the postie does their run (postcodes) instead of LGAs, we are technically outside the zone.

There is quite a bit of published research on the effectiveness of the Covid PCR test. False positives are very rare...probably less than 1%. False negatives are more common....maybe 10% (a fair amount of variability in the research). So getting a positive Covid PCR test result when all you have is the common cold would be very rare, less than 1 in one hundred tests.

And here is Morrison dog whistling people to go against State governments and not giving a fuck about deaths. Not a lot difference between him and Trump. ’Our goal must be to help people overcome those fears and not give in to them, because this cannot go on forever. This is not a sustainable way to live in this country, without those freedoms that we all cherish. We understand, all sensible Australians understand, that there’s had to be restrictions, there’s had to be curtailment of what we can do during the course of a global pandemic. The virus doesn’t respect ideologies, it doesn’t respect any of these things. It’s just a virus, and we have to deal with it, and Australians get that. But equally, they also know there has to be a plan out, there is a plan out, and we need to move forward with that plan.’

Like I said, the current convention is that military use in domestic civil actions is that they (a) only do so on request by a State government; and (b) are under direction of State authorities. But the law is unclear....the call out of the military in the Hilton bombing was without a request from NSW and was without NSW State command. The question is the extent of federal Executive power. And yes the Federal Executive (ie. ministers and civil and military etc) ought to be subject to Acts of Parliament, but as we have seen in the various ‘rorts’ funding programs, and the Robo debt debacle, they don’t seem to care about complying with the law of the land. Most people are aware of the divisions of powers in our Cth Constitution between the States and the Cth, and that any ‘residual’ powers are with the States, ie. the Cth only has the powers given to it under the written constitution. But the Federal Government has asserted fairly recently that it has the residual powers of Crown discretion. If I recall correctly this was raised in the High Court on the chaplaincy program, along the lines that even if the federal parliament couldn’t make a law to fund religious activity, the Cth could use the Queen’s discretionary powers to do so anyway. The Cth lost that case on other grounds so it wasn’t tested. But Cormann still gave the Constitution the big finger by effectively overturning the High Court decision that recipients pay the money back, by ‘forgiving the debt’ to the Cth. As to Spacey’s comment....the UK is not a constitutional democracy, nor is it truly a federation of states as Australia is. The UK also doesn’t have separation of powers between parliament, the judiciary and the executive, nor constitutional sharing of power between member states and federal government, all of which were very deliberate elements in the framing of Australia’s commonwealth to protect citizens from absolute power. Yes, I know the UK claims to have some separation of powers, and has divulged some power to parts of the disunited kingdom like Scotland and Wales, but this is all at the discretion of Westminister.

There aren’t a lot of them in Australia. Try Anne Twomey, or George Williams, or go to some recent online seminars on the topic. Even read some reports by the Parliamentary library for example on the unlawful/unconstitutional expenditure of public funds by the federal government. You are just plain wrong on the military being used in thousands of civil matters, unless you include the S&R actions...which is under the direction of State authorities (declaration...I was once ‘rescued’ by a naval helicopter as a teen bushwalker caught in floods. The oPeration was under the control and direction of NSW police. I have since been a rescuer on military helicopters a few times...also under direction of the police...and the military were, by a large degree, far more competent than their police controllers). The issue isn’t the use of the military per se, nor the competence of the military, but the use of the military against civil law. The police are subject to a range of limitations on their powers (and there are cases where these are breached). But it is a different matter for the military whose chain of command is through their commanding officers and their commander in chief, the Governor-General.

Here is a screen shot of the ‘freedom March’ in Guyra NSW. Seems appropriate. We need to be very cautious about civil unrest, particularly when it is formented, in part, by government ministers’ whistling to neo-fascists. There is growing concern in senior constitutional lawyers that our current federal government are consistently testing the limits of Executive power, and this is particularly in relation of using the military for domestic civil issues. My understanding is that currently the military can only be sent in on the request of a State govt and the military must be under the direction of State officials (ie. not their usual chain of command)....but this is a practice untested in courts. We even had the recent spectacle of Morrison having the Cth side with that Qld nutter Clive Palmer in the High Court to overturn WA emergency border controls. Of-course, there is also the increasing practice of putting uniformed military throughout the federal public service.

Bruce, oxygen can be toxic for newborns. My sister was working in a Sydney public hospital quite a few years ago and was called to their A&E department as she was the only trained midwife on duty at that hospital. A pregnant women from a MVA brought into the emergency department died and tge A&E doctors delivered the infant via Caesarean section. The infant was born alive and spontaneously breathing etc, but was a bit blue...as they usually are, but otherwise totally fine. The A&E doctors decided to give tge infant 100% oxygen...against my sister’s loud protests that it would kill the baby (but what would a nurse/midwife know). The oxygen killed the baby and the A&E staff recorded that it was born dead. Water can also be toxic. Several cyclists have died in an event that involves a long distance ride through Death Valley in the USA. Drinking too much water to avoid dehydration was the cause..,water toxicosis.

Octave, I think we are mostly in agreement. But you did use the word ‘resentful’ of those individuals who choose to defer getting vaccinated at this time. I also think you will find I’m definitely not against vaccination, nor am I am against promoting it. Where I think I differ, is that I think we have to do both....vaccinate AND the maintain the other measures like lockdowns, quarantine etc. sure vaccination may reduce the frequency, extent and length of lockdowns, but I expect we will need these into the future to avoid unecessary deaths and serious illness. The idea of getting back to relaxed international travel just with vaccination, I think, is dangerous and delusional. I also think that promoting vaccination by saying it will eliminate lockdowns and restrictions on mass gatherings, wearing masks can be counterproductive because it supports the view, ‘I’m vaccinated, I don’t need to be careful of spreading the disease to others’. I accept I’m probably in a very small minority who think getting back to normal is not a desirable objective. But with climate change people are not going to really have any say, because our normal is no more.

Do you have the same moral indignation towards people injured in small recreational plane crashes taking up scarce hospital resources, or football players, kids injured at pony club, people who smoke cigarettes or women getting pregnant (or the men that ‘seeded’ the pregnancy), all of whom have made choices that impose public health costs and take up scarce hospital resources? I note the quote you put about the safety of mRNA vaccines, but that’s still just someone arguing a case drawing a parallel, not empirical research. I, like FB, was cautious (hesitant) about the Covid vaccine, and would have much preferred to wait and see how things developed, giving time for a more orderly and morally defensible vaccine roll-out to those in most need first (eg. health workers, other countries more afflicted than us) as per NZ, but because of the total failure of our federal government to have effective quarantine (which initiated the Sydney cluster) and the NSW’s belated Claytons lockdown which let it spread, I re-assessed my risk and brought forward having the AZ vaccine. In my view it’s a bit rich to damn someone for having a different assessment of the balance of risks. Australia being an isolated island had the opportunity to have effective quarantine....an opportunity not available to many nations...eg Europe, Africa etc. However our hapless PM seems to think a quarantine system that literally guarantees releasing contagious people out ( ie,98% effective means that for every one hundred people going through quarantine, two emerge infectious!). It’s like having a light switch that is 98% effective in preventing a user getting electrocuted, just 2 in every hundred uses of the switch results in death. I also think FB is correct about the mass pro-vaccine hysteria. It’s as unhinged and irrational as many of the irrational and unhinged anti-vaxxers.

Yes, but FB has a valid point. First, the approvals of the Covid vaccines are ‘emergency approvals’ under the WHO guidelines, and in Australia the TGA has given conditional approvals. Also some of the vaccines are ‘novel’, eg. mRNA ones. Hence the uncertainty over long term efficacy and safety. And there have not been the longitudinal studies of them over time. Second, in the USA for all its hopeless health system (probably the worst in OECD league tables), does have a public compensation scheme for people injured by ‘approved’ vaccines (which is very very rarely required to pay out). Here in Australia, the federal non-government gave indemnity to medical doctors who were concerned about being sued for harm caused by the Covid vaccines (and therein lies the thought that the doctors view the risk is real), but as usual the government left the public citizens out in the cold.....just as they did in tort law reform which effectively makes it almost impossible now to sue a doctor for negligence (but was good as far as flying dangerous small aeroplanes).

FB, even if the first two paragraphs are true...I haven’t checked the data for Gibraltar, it does not support or prove the claim in the third paragraph, putting aside why anyone would believe anything associated with a deluded, imbecilic narcissist like Trump. Lets be clear. The Covid vaccines have been designed to reduce (not eliminate) deaths and to reduce (not eliminate) hospitalisations. And this has been substantiated in basket case countries (ie. ones that have let the virus rip) that then rely only on vaccination (look at the UK). There is very reliable evidence that Covid vaccinations are very effective (in the short term) of massively reducing infection fatalities and hospitalisations. Figures range from a minimum of a five fold to ten fold reduction in deaths and hospitalisations. If that’s not ‘working’ as intended, I don’t know what is. They were not designed, nor were they tested, to eliminate people getting the Covid infection or padding it on. Yet they still reduce transmission of tge infection by around 50% or a bit more. unfortunately with the Delta variants higher transmissibility, a reduction by 50% from vaccination, just delivers us back to where we were with the original Covid strain, not ‘herd immunity’ as was hoped. I know there are many people who simply believe all vaccinations work the same....like polio, diphtheria, tetanus....but unfortunately this is not the case. Some vaccines have marginal effectiveness, others only boost immunity for a short period (eg hepatitis). The main issues with vaccination programs from a public policy point of view is that they can divert resources away from other public health programs that may be more effective (think about potable water, sewerage systems, infant nutrition like breastfeeding, quarantine/isolation/treatment as for TB). Or in the case of Covid, shift collective responsibility to individuals (get vaccinated) instead of government (control the borders, have effective quarantine), or even worse, encourage people to get vaccinated by lying that this will mean other public health measures like distancing, travel, mask wearing etc can be relaxed, and thereby encouraging people to engage, or expect to engage, in risky behaviour once theyre vaccinated.

Total rubbish. The total murder rate for the whole of Australia is around 400 per annum (source ABS), so children in Qld can be nowhere near 10,000. Just consider how much we collectively pay to save a few score deaths a year with road safety works and regulations impinging upon our freedoms to drive fast, unlicensed and drunk. My wife’s view on road congestion (which also costs us a fortune) is to have no speed limits during peak congestion periods....if you want to travel safely, drive off-peak. As to the death rate among dark skinned people, I’d like to see some research. I scanned the research on Covid death rates...and there were quite a few, and they all consistently said the infection fatality rate was not related to race, but to age, and the age death rate relation was logarithmic. Of-course, this is not the same as infection rate by race. Vitamin D deficiency is well known for dark skinned people in high latitudes, particularly among people who cover their skin with clothes...perhaps that’s why the Scandies are frequently naked??? But it is also emerging in Australia as a consequence of being sun safe, particularly children. A couple of my sons mates at primary school were constantly getting into trouble for not wearing hats in the playground and as a consequence were often not allowed to run around outside. They happened to be very dark skinned aboriginal kids....another example where applying rules blindly equally results in inequality!

Pretty bad actually. Around 1500 dead per million of population so far. Compared to neighbouring Norway of 150 dead per million. But still less than basket case countries that allowed cross-border movement of people etc, like the USA (1,800), UK (1,900), France (1,700), and, of-course, Brazil (2,700). Keep in mind Sweden did pretty well considering they had a government MIA mainly because their population is well educated and despite not having lockdown rules, the vast majority actually headed advice to avoid contact with other people. Swedish friends tell us that many Swedes took off to their summer houses. Compared to countries that actually did lockdown with high exposure (ie. not remote like NZ and Australia), look to South Korea (42 deaths per million) and Taiwan. Below is a nifty graph of cumulative Covid deaths per million of population. The Doherty people are pretty smart. But keep in mind there are trade-offs. Yes, a vaccination rate of 80% will bring ongoing daily deaths down substantially, but it is a value judgement, not science, as to what level of deaths is acceptable. For example, the UK now has over 70% of tge population fully vaccinated (over 90% if you include ‘natural immunity’ ) and they appear to find 1.34 daily deaths per million (around 100 deaths per day) acceptable. This applied to Australia would be over 30 daily Covid deaths on an ongoing basis. So when people say we would be ‘living with tge disease’ like the flu, you need to keep in mind the flu kills around 3000 Australians per year....my estimate is that Covid would kill 3 or 4 times that number.....so it is not ‘just like the flu’. If you are a follower of eugenics and involuntary euthanasia, then I suppose the over 10,000 expected deaths per annum we would get from ‘let’s all get vaccinated and let Covid rip’, would be good because the greatest number of deaths will be the aged (not in the labour market) and tge vulnerable, and they are just burden to the economy’.

Well Turbo I don’t know where you have been the last few decades. COAG has been around since at least the late 1980s. Partly this was to make funding arrangements from the Commonwealth to the States more transparent, but also under COAG there were (are) various ministerial councils to better co-ordinate State laws across the country. That’s why there are model consumer law, food law, and road code, extradition of criminals from one state to another state etc etc etc They provide a framework to some extent for national consistency with each State/territory diverging when they see that is better for them. The minutes of COAG were public documents. Each member of COAG was an Australian government...all nine of them. Morrison’s ‘national cabinet’ trashed all this. The only saving grace is that the State premiers have stood up against him. And you seem to be confused about how laws are made. National Cabinet is nothing more than a secret discussion group, with ScuMo making an announcement after. It has no formal power....it’s just a discussion group...like COAG, but secret. For laws to be made each State parliament still has to enact them, or a State Governor still has to make the regulations.

Yep, and that’s why people need to be engaged with politics and vote in representatives not party hacks, and why we need the States....to prevent the concentration of power in one government. And also why we should be cautious of Morrison’s rebadged ‘Council of Australian Governments’ in the form of ‘National Cabinet’ which purports to bind the States/Premiers and could undermine the Premiers and State Government’s sovereignty and accountability to the people of the States through their respective State parliaments. It’s the State parliaments that are the bosses of the States, not the Prime Minister. Irrespective of the various ‘emergency acts’, in a real emergency courts are prepared to find that common law over-rides legislation. Hence, a motorist who refused to comply with a police officer’s direction to go down a one-way street the wrong way to not get in the way of firefighters fighting a fire was found guilty despite the fact the police officer’s direction was for the motorist to commit an offence. So I’m not sure whether the emergency acts do or don’t give more unaccountable power to the executive. It is true the High Court in WWII did give the federal government a huge amount of power to deal with the war. The question is, have we already had a coup without really knowing it?

In my view the chant and hysteria about ‘antivaxers’ is about as rational and anti-science as the extremes of many antivaxers. Ditto for attaching ‘rights’ to vaccination, unless there is a significant public benefit, like, for example herd immunity. But, but but....with this Delta variant with a high R0 and the efficacy of the current vaccines....that is not going to happen. So a vaccinated person might be 50% less likely to spread the virus....why would this be sufficient to gain added rights? The better argument is the one about mandatory bicycle helmets....vaccinated people are less likely to require hospitalisation.....(keep in mind that the majority of hospitalisations in the UK are now vaccinated people....that will happen here too when vaccination rates increase, but the principle still holds that there would much more hospitalisations for unvaccinated...about 10 fold). Again, attaching ‘rights’ or privileges to vaccination risks achieving the opposite....you might get a higher vaccination rate, but if those privileges result in more risky behaviour the 50% reduction in transmission might not be achieved. Giving employers the rights to demand medical procedures for employees is frightening. Many already seem to have the right to prohibit employees from engaging in political debate. Will this be extended to demanding female employees be sterilised or have a depo insert so the employer can avoid maternity leave, or that people not be members of particular political parties, or even telling people how to vote. It’s just another progression towards corporate feudalism. Anyway, we are all doomed. Climate change is progressing unabated, recent studies are predicting the Gulf Stream will stop within a decade.....so it’s looks like it’s going to be a slow version of that terrible story, ‘On the Beach’.