Just a few things about hotel quarantine - because everyone seems to be talking shit to idiots and have learned nothing over 12 months. Which is not surprising in contemporary Australia where everything seems to have become a choose your own adventure fantasy /Thread
1. Just because the Feds can do something under the Constitution, doesn't mean they have to or should, because states can still legislate in the absence of Fed legislation. Do you want the Feds running quarantine? Really? That mob of useless incompetents who couldn't run a bath?
2. But! Because the Feds have constitutional power, they also arguably have some semblance of responsibility, if through nothing else than funding because of the enormity of the vertical fiscal imbalance. They were given constitutional power for real reasons here.
3. For 12 months now, anyone without Covid Brain has argued that quarantine facilities outside of the CBD should not be a substitute for HQ, but an expansion, that also brings with it more risk management options to substantially reduce the probability of HQ related outbreaks.
4. Any quarantine facility must be close to internationally capable airports, with existing water, power and sewage infrastructure, *in stand alone cabins*, and close to full service tertiary hospitals. Not the desert or mining camps in Woop Woop.
5. This means, effectively, that NSW is out here as a destination, as health infrastructure follows population, most people live in and around Sydney, in a densely populated environment with few options for this. NSW should take a back seat and STFU for once.
6. *The State* has a responsibility not to give people diseases in quarantine. HQ was never fit for purpose for all cases, and it shows by having an infection rate that while 99% successful, would be considered a failure in most other critical health units.
7. 15 or so new quarantine facilities is a further six to eight thousand people a week on top of HQ. If we did this when it was first called for - nearly 12 months ago - all Australians would be home, and migration and international students would be coming in.
8. We'll use these facilities in this way for years - they are not white elephants - and if you can't figure out in your head how these facilities can provide ongoing use for a range of beneficial social policy programs in the future, you are a moron and should be quiet.
9. [REDACTED stuff about a bunch of ignorant deadshits who aren't experts in anything and should log the fuck off] /ends

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More from @Pollytics

2 Apr
The Federal government was responsible for 4 things during the pandemic.

1. Border management - a no brainer, yet they still took too long to get their act together and were entirely responsible for the first wave. It wasn't NSW & the Ruby Princess, it was the Feds being useless
2. Quarantine - the States took it on as a stop gap measure as they had the resources to provide for the immediacy. The Feds have done nothing since, but play one state off against the other over a third best, temporary solution. We should have all Australians by home now.
3. Welfare - money into household's pockets and links to businesses to respond the massive shock. What we got was the largest ever rorted government payment program in Australian history that is an embarrassment to the word "governance"
Read 5 tweets
14 Mar
Thread on how many people I can get to unfollow me via my views on 12 months of the Covid prism. The following isn't about normal people and debate, it's about those people who think they're important and special. This is a very important caveat.
Not sure what was worse over the last 12 months. Everyone thinking they're epidemiologists, or epidemiologists thinking they're public policy specialists on everything from health system administration to apparently solving the vertical fiscal imbalance. Settle down.
The one thing we do know is worse, is one very particular sub-cohort of the IT profession who are very much like engineers in their predictably limited modular understanding of the universe, but where engineers learn and evolve and are much, much better at maths.
Read 11 tweets
5 Jul 20
Things the States need to learn from what's happening in Victoria, because this won't be the first time that these issues will occur over the next year /Thread.
1. The public aren't cretins, don't treat them as such. The difference between lockdowns (broad, area based, preventative infection control) and quarantine (specific locations under emergency) should be publicised as such. The panic saved by not using "quarantine" is illusory
2. "Quarantine" as a measure needs to be formally defined, with the protocols around it formally defined. It cannot be detention as a legal definition. It needs it's own definition with rights and obligations of the state and those under quarantine defined.
Read 10 tweets
21 May 20
Can we talk about border closures for a sec, because there's buckets of bullshit going on and people don't seem to know what happened early on. 1/n
Firstly, the Feds say they have no advice to close borders. That's because the Feds don't get that advice, as it was agreed that border management was purely a state matter at the very beginning of the national cabinet process.
To say the Feds have no medical advice to close borders is like saying the Feds have no advice on the need to prosecute speeding drivers. Of course they don't, it's not their business and it was *agreed* from the start that it wasn't their business.
Read 9 tweets
23 Jul 19
<rant> I look around at Australian politics at the moment and shake my head. On any specific example (big or small), if the ALP won't help themselves, why should they expect anyone else to step up and help them?

Let's have a couple of examples.
First off, a minutia thing (yeah, so unfashionable, but it's the building blocks of reality). Then a bigger Fed thing.
Palaszczuk's CoS got funding for a startup he has an interest in. He should know better(!) - BUT! - it wasn't a grant. It was a co-investment with private VC firms, where they effectively make the decision, and gov fronts up a maximum of half the investment dough.
Read 12 tweets
6 Jul 19
I need to have a fucking rant
I love this "ALP votes for tax Armageddon" Left fight. It's really healthy - Labor needs a bucket of shit poured on them, *even though* it was the only decision they could organisationally take at the moment as they're completely broken.
I hope everyone puts the boot in and encourages them - nay, forces them - to take a long hard look at themselves. A generation of political failure, where even the victories have been crushed in either post policy changes (NBN, NDIS etc) or historical narrative (GFC)
Read 10 tweets

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