Displaying items by tag: Public Policy

Is Australia the champion of Covid management, or did we - despite the current furore - just get lucky with a low number of deaths from the not-so-killer virus?  Explaining Australia's performance is important for many reasons, not least because what has been achieved has come at a great cost.  And on close inspection, our performance is nothing about which to write home.

Originally published in the UK's The Conservative Woman.  Explaining Australia's false claim to be a Covid policy superstar.

The nightmare of Covid hysteria and the crushing of freedom it has caused only grow afresh during an expected, relatively mild winter outbreak of an equally expected, overblown "variant".  Two questions are endlessly repeated by those who worry about these things.  One, how the hell did we get here?  And two, why did we give up our freedom without a fight?  The ground was long prepared for this.

Governments in Australia and elsewhere have longed for decentralisation, and pursued it relentlessly.  It never worked.  Could Covid madness be the answer?

Welcome to the Covid economy.  Depleted incomes, smashed small businesses, bullshit jobs, a whole new platform for crony capitalism, deserted main streets.  What's not to love?

The Anglosphere faces a crisis of leadership.  The West is now ruled wall-to-wall by second rate ideologues and/or chancers, either determined to change the global order or powerless to prevent the revolution we now face.

The governments, including Australia's, that have jettisoned freedom and the economy to save us all from a largely limp virus, are banking on getting away with one more big lie to get them off the electoral hook.  It is called a vaccine.

Conspiracy theorists are everywhere.  Sometimes, though, they are called acute observers, social scientists, historians, critical thinkers.  Governments and others may not have planned the Covid epidemic, but many with agendas are cashing in.  Call them convergent opportunists.

Americans face, as they always say, their most important election in a generation.  Assessing the merits of any president isn't always easy.  Assessing the merits of Donald Trump is a whole other thing.

When protest buses attacking Daniel Andrews get forced off the road by police, and when politicians abuse private sector executives for doing their jobs, there is clearly something very wrong with our public services.  It all goes back to an unhealthy 1980s obsession with privatisation and "new public management".