Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
It’s so telling when the self-proclaimed “numbers” person drifts into politics and starts using words like “utterly inane” and “nonsense” to describe matters other than statistics.
We are living in an authoritarian state, now. If you could get your head out of the numbers for a moment, you’d see that many Australian are being told, on pain of criminal liability, that they can’t visit their families and friends and can’t travel more than a specified number of kilometres from home. There are police and ADF members on the streets enforcing those restrictions. It suits Scotty that a lot of the consequent ‘blowback’ hits the state premiers rather than him.
The Commonwealth coerces the states, financially, all the time. And the government doesn’t need to make a law that can be stopped by the Senate, to achieve the outcome. And a spending bill that originates in the Senate can be blocked by the government in the House.
The Commonwealth has enough power to take over and run the response on a nationally consistent basis. Its failure to do so is a political decision, plain and simple. It’s probably a blessing in disguise though, because we can only speculate what a clusterf*ck it would be if Scotty or what’s-his-name on the other ‘side’ stepped up.
Sorry mate, I respectfully disagree and don’t ascribe that level of cunning to Scomo.
He has been weak as p1ss throughout; announcing National cabinet decisions only to have the state premiers walk them backwards as soon as they leave the room.
Sadly for Australians, the rest of Scomo’s cabinet are mediocre at best, the opposition is anything but, and the state premiers have been playing politics from the start and running rings around Scotty from Marketing.
There will be an enquiry or royal commission in due course, but as we saw with the Coate and Brereton enquires, the vigour with which they are pursued varies.
Before the inevitable #istandwithdan responses pour in, I don’t really care.