It is almost 11am .... and our daily Gladystan briefing awaits ..... always wondered what living in Melbourne under the Dan Andrews regime was like, and now, being the open minded people we in Sydney are, we get to experience this, too.
Gladys appealing for more testing ....
50 new local cases of community transmission.
26 infectious in the community.
'Things will get worse before they get better' #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
Brad Hazzard seems to have been 'benched' for this press conference. We need the minister for the "Hunger Games" here.
Will just add here that - if the media and politicians had been doing their job in hammering Canberra on Vaccine acquisitions, when it was clear in January it was off the rails - none or little of this would be necessary. #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
This deputy police commissioner saying nice things about S-W Sydney .... which would have been good a few days ago. No one in Fairfield or Bankstown caused the Commonwealth Govt to royally foul up Australia's vaccines acquisition and rollout.
Journos now pleading with Gladys to basically leave Sydney an economic Chernobyl like Melbourne under Comrade Andrews. Not everyone can work for the ABC or SBS. Indeed, it is those people whose taxes fund the ABC and SBS. #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
If you know single people acutely aware of their singleness when things were remotely normal, how they must feel with media positively gleeful about lockdowns is beyond me .... for a lot of lonely people, this is just the worst of times.
Still surprises me, in the very home of association football, and notwithstanding all the petulant history, esp on the Scottish side, that the four British "home" football associations cannot in 2021 join together to form one "British" football team. #ThreeLions -> Four Lions
Yes I know the history of why .... The Scots, who as Billy Connolly (no relation) said, are the only football side that does a "lap of shame", actually have the most to gain here.
The British Lions in Rugby are a far more interesting team than any of the four British Home unions and there is no reason why a British football team would not also finally achieve the same & be more reliably competitive esp in World Cups. We are a long way from 1872 etc.
This is all great etc but with shutdowns of bars and restaurants, there is a huge casual workforce that lives job to job for rent etc. They will need rent & eviction moratoria as well. These vulnerable have no union or lobby group. Sydney is in a coma.
This site in a few days will be media losing it online as to why large groups of young (esp foreigners stranded here on visas) will slyly congregate in Bondi & Manly when they have no money, no sources of support & everything in Sydney is shut down.
Massively buried lede here: "That referral and the subsequent investigations have produced two briefs of evidence, which have sat with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, Sarah McNaughton, SC, for more than a year."
Why?
One of the clouds hanging over Brereton is the actual evidentiary foundations of his report & all its damning conclusions. What may be acceptable for an Inspector-General's inquiry will not always be acceptable for a criminal trial in a Ch III court before a jury.
"Those statements have been gathered by a small AFP team of investigators which, since June 2018, has been probing some SAS members over allegations they directed the murder of Afghan prisoners." How were these statements made? What inducements were offered? How long ago?
Sydney, generally, and the nation as a whole, would benefit a good deal from a media that did not catch pneumonia when it ventured west of Newtown ..... #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
Shorter Media: "I cannot believe all these migrant families have functional relationships between parents & children & they look after each other...they do not abandon their parents & then go overseas, only to complain on social media about quarantine" #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
Welcome to Sydney lockdown day 13 .... Good morning to all on this sunny but cold, lockdown-ish, Sydney day. The Sydney CBD is dead - it may not be Melbourne dead, but, for Sydney, this is dead.
Sydney is full of people from somewhere else - media now pointing accusing fingers at ethnic communities for not being North Sydney, or young foreign people stranded here on visas, is one of many things to hate about this era. #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown
In the now existential battle between our lilywhite Covid paranoids (reflected in the media) vs Sydney's family-oriented, multi-generational ethnic communities (who the media attack), not hard to work out who to sympathise with. #COVID19nsw#Sydneylockdown