Peta Credlin: Dan Andrews is running the most incompetent government in Australian history
Never before have Victorians ceded so much power to government and never has a government been less worthy. Join me in publicising a new hashtag: #wheresthebloodyplandan, writes Peta Credlin.
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At different times in this pandemic, as Australians all of us have signed away our freedom on the promise that government would protect our health and preserve our prosperity.
In Victoria, especially, people have been asked to accept a degree of control that’s totally unprecedented — supposedly for six weeks but with no reassurance that it won’t be indefinite.
Unless you’re employed in food, health or utilities, almost no one in Victoria is working normally. Most Melburnians can only leave home, legally, for one hour of exercise and a solo trip to the supermarket (all within 5km only) and are locked up at night.
There have never been general curfews in Australia. Never. The nearest thing was probably the blackouts in coastal towns during World War II. Curfews happen in places under martial law or enemy occupation.
Yet that’s the fate of 5½ million Melburnians.
There’s even talk of rationing — again, totally unknown, except in wartime or during strikes in specific industries — all because workers in supply chain jobs like distribution centres are being kept at home.
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I can’t go to work at Sky without carrying papers to prove I am a “permitted worker” — shades of occupied Europe or the Soviet bloc — otherwise it’s a heavy fine.
The police and military have been patrolling the park near my home, presumably to detain curfew breakers and to fine people who spend too much time exercising or travel too far to do it or, heaven forbid, sit down on a park bench.
All this because less than two years ago, a majority of Victorians bought the Premier’s well-rehearsed media spin, and elected the most incompetent government in Australian history.
I can’t fathom how anyone can still defend him, but given he’s assiduously delivered the hard left’s agenda, there’s a handful of the usual suspects trying to desperately rally support around a hashtag #Istandwithdan.
Well here’s mine: #wheresthebloodyplandan?
For months, our liberties, jobs and general wellbeing have all been steadily eroded by a Premier who is treating democracy, and accountability to the people, as an optional extra to be dispensed with, whenever he deems it necessary.
The state parliament has been shut down, media conferences are long on spin but short on candour, and while there’s an update on the daily tally of new infections, deaths, and hospitalisations, none of the ‘expert advice’ supposedly driving decision-making is shared.
Disease specialists have now gone public to demand greater transparency, but they’ve been rejected too; as have calls for the release of genomic modelling that will tell us exactly how much of this outbreak is linked back to failed hotel quarantining.
Last Wednesday, even the judge heading up the toothless inquiry into the quarantine debacle said there’s no legal reason why the Premier or ministers cannot answer questions on the issue. Her intervention didn’t change anything, the inquiry still doesn’t have the power to compel witnesses and documents, and its reporting date has now been pushed out from September
to year’s end.
Thank god, some in the local media subjected the Premier to tougher questioning last week, because that’s the only accountability that the Victorian government faces.
And we also saw some Victorian-based federal MPs finally speak up too, after months of being told they couldn’t criticise Andrews, given the whole facade of National Cabinet unity.
Never before have Victorians ceded so much power to government and never has a government been less worthy.
We need our parliaments to sit so there’s at least some check on how these powers are used because the prerequisite to good government has always been a strong opposition.
Even during the blitz, Winston Churchill insisted parliament sit. Here too, wars never stopped our elected leaders being accountable. yet last week the Victorian government tried to claim parliament was “not an essential service”. So, Dan Murphy’s can stay open, but not the people’s house?
Things are really crook in Victoria and I’m not talking about the virus.
PLUG LOOPHOLES FOR OUR STUDENTS’ SAKE
I learned to think at school but I learned to challenge my thinking at university.
Thankfully, I studied law and politics and history at a time when we were encouraged to write and speak freely. After all, the real benefit of a university education is supposed to be as much about the development of lifelong intellectual curiosity and self-discovery as it is about the framed paper at the end. Or it used to be.
Today, more and more domestic students feel they’re being used to help the foreign students pass subjects because foreign students are a revenue source the universities have become addicted to. And a student who fails enough subjects doesn’t come back.
Increasingly, the weight given to exams and individual assessment is being shifted to “group assignments” so that those who are proficient in English carry those who are not; lecturers who resist cop flak and domestic students cop a heavier workload.
You might think that Australia requires students to have a certain level of English to study here, and we do.
But universities have become adept at creating ways to exploit the loopholes; it’s effectively sanctioned plagiarism and it’s time the federal government took action, given they regulate the sector.
THUMBS DOWN: Critics of Israel Folau — unhappy that a man of colour refused to take the knee for Black Lives Matter at a rugby match overseas. Seriously? First he’s pilloried
for being political off the field, now because he’s not political on it. The bloke can’t win.
THUMBS UP: The NSW Premier for (finally) making quarantine compulsory for any travellers from Victoria. Now, make masks compulsory. Victoria only did it when it was far too late. Learn from their mistake.