(Shades of Trump). Coalition staffers may have taken classified documents after election loss. Labor’s Sen. Anne Urquhart has told senate estimates Services Australia investigated two staff in Linda Reynolds’ office for transferring data off government network.
Oh, Lindy. "Senator Reynolds’ office was emailing a large volume of official documents from government email accounts to a private Gmail account," Sen. Urquhart said. “I understand the documents in question were marked with the classification ‘official’." theguardian.com/australia-news…
Sen. Urquhart then said she was told the staff members felt they had to go along “with the theft of the classified documents” because they were directed to do so by Reynolds. Services Australia chief executive officer, Rebecca Skinner, declined to answer.
(Further shades of Trump) Sen. Urquhart then suggested Services Australia consider referring Reynolds’ conduct to the soon-to-be-established national anti-corruption commission, which Skinner took on notice. (Move over Stuart Robert, Lindy's coming through on the outside!) #NACC
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The greatest damage of #Jobgrabber's shopping spree through cabinet isn't in the sordid mechanics of it, but rather in the reputational damage it causes; democracy is fragile and exploitable, convention is optional, rules can be flouted, trust in social structures diminishes.
This broken ground is where despotism flowers. Trashing the rules, the laws, the expectations we have of institutions, is the modus operandi of half a dozen actors across the globe - Trump, Boris, Morrison, Erdoğan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary. 2/3
That these buffoonish, cynical, not very bright, yet profoundly cunning actors, rise at all, succeed at first, remain dominant for a time and then inevitably fail by their own sheer vanity and nasty temperament, is a post-modern phenomenon no one is close to understanding. 3/3
In terms of risk, with the rise of Omicron, we are right back where we were this time last year when there were no vaccines available at all. The same uncertainties, the same supply problems, the same confused & ideologically delusional messaging, the same incompetent Liberals.
The difference is there is now no appetite left - no political wiggle-room - for lockdowns, curfews, mask mandates, or border closures that might help prevent an Omicron surge...
Meanwhile, the booster rollout is patchy and confused. The numbers don't add up. GPs are in the dark. The official messaging is blasé and unconcerned. Because of when I got my 2nd AZ shot, I can't get a booster for another month. By then, millions will be fighting to get it.
I'll be posting some random memes from the extensive back catalogue of the #MemestreamClassics collection, apropos of that being what everyone does, this time of year, yeah? Recycling tat? Here's a little taste of Tony... (Not my meme!)
The ICAC revelations are as nothing compared to the unseemly hagiographies for a disgraced premier who CHOSE to quit BECAUSE SHE MAY BE SOON FOUND GUILTY OF CORRUPTION! The suckhole bourgeois elites who trade blandly mediocre uni degrees for careers in media are a dumb joke.
Historian Peter Turchin theorises cleverly, with abundant historical data, how a glut of over-educated elites eventually begins to sap social integrity, this happens when too many qualified but self-serving individuals, all of a type, form cliques and cabals of opinion...
This homogeneous identikit elite faction eventually can do no more than unconsciously conspire to spin discourse in ever decreasing circles. They almost don't mean to do this, but as their careers depend on assimilating a dominant paradigm of - let's call it mediocrity -
@MrKRudd "This smug bloke made a political career of rubbishing Labor’s world-beating GFC response, which avoided recession & saved livelihoods. Now his budget figures have 5-times the deficit and 5-times as much debt, he is seeking to erase his past. Not if I can help it."
4 Feb 2009. "Opposition to vote against Rudd's $42 billion package" SMH
@KevinRudd ...with Murdoch’s blessing, [Morrison] expects Australians will simply forget how [Liberals] tried to wreck the economy by opposing stimulus back then [in 2008-9]. They won’t.
KEVIN RUDD: 4 Feb 2009. "I'm not going to haul up the white flag, the Libs have said recession is inevitable, I'm not in the defeat game, I'm in for throwing everything at this."
He's having a laugh.Keynes used the term pejoratively: "decisions to do something positive...can only be...the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits..."
The emptiness of the political urge to just "have a go," is derided by Keynes as rash, "there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations."
Just lay that Keynesian template over any of Morrison's plans and it fits. Compare the bungled vaccine rollout, a triumph of agitated animal spirits over carefully weighted assessment of benefits and probabilities.