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“It’s time”, as some readers will remember, was the Labor election slogan that ushered in the late Gough Whitlam’s disastrous time in office. Well now it’s time to dust off that slogan for another Labor disaster. It’s time for Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, now easily the world’s champion lockdowner, or locker-down if you prefer it, to get lost.
He won’t of course. He’ll cling on like a piece of chewing gum stuck to your shoe until he has to be scraped off. Unfortunately for their own freedom, too many Victorians don’t seem to mind their state limping around with this encumbrance. You’d think they’d be starting to feel the blisters but complaints are muted, partly because the media have ganged up with the government to portray opposition to Andrews, and especially to his COVID policies, which is just about the only thing people think about in Victoria these days, as antisocial if not outright treasonable. At this rate Victoria is well on its way to becoming Australia’s own little outpost of the kind of tyranny one of Andrews’s pin-ups, President Xi in Beijing, exercises over his unlucky subjects.
The Westminster system under which we allegedly live doesn’t envisage dictators among its public functionaries. But Andrews is one, to all effects. He’s the boss — and doesn’t he just love it, throwing his weight around. As such, he has done a lot of damage in the seven years he’s been entrenched in power. It has helped him that he has been untroubled by rivalries from lacklustre colleagues or serious challenges from Victoria’s risible “opposition”. Nor can the state’s supine parliament scrutinise him; he’s had it shut down because of Covid and rules by “emergency powers”. As a result Victoria has been transformed from a reasonably well functioning democracy to an incipient autocracy. Suspicion and mistrust are in the air you breathe there (through a mask of course). Neighbours are officially encouraged to be snitches and dobbers (so much for “Aussie values”). The “garden state” is becoming the gulag state.
Andrews’s word is law, his lightest utterance translated into policy by the teeming horde of bureaucrats he has turned into an instrument of his personal will. As in all totalitarian regimes, the bureaucrats are closely watched, Andrews’s “personal staff” of junior enforcers recruited from the universities having been deputed to keep them under observation, presumably for signs of disloyalty. When even the house journal of Victorian leftism, The Age, murmurs (it doesn’t want to be too critical of the boss) that under Andrews the public service has been unacceptably politicised, something must be wrong.
Andrews has shamelessly politicised the police too, dressing them up to look like shock troops in a Netflix churn-out about some futuristic dystopia. Clad in these battlefield accoutrements they engage in running skirmishes with anti-lockdown mobs, chasing each other across the tram lines of Melbourne’s streets, endangering everyone around. (The tram lines add a quaint soupçon of their own, giving the flavour of a riot in communist East Berlin, tram lines being ubiquitous in news film of such events.)
The military get-up is a visual declaration that the police are at war with the public. The enmity is palpable. The attitude the police show to ordinary citizens – aren’t they supposed to be public servants? – is summed up in a freeway hoarding I saw showing police booking an errant driver. “Catching you” is the key phrase. “Dan’s Gestapo” someone has daubed over it.
Did Andrews not realise that militarising the police might have the psychological effect of making demonstrators more aggressive too? Does he not realise that by effectively making the experimental and still dubious procedure of COVID vaccination obligatory he is alienating many fair-minded people who oppose coercion and care about their consciences? Not only that, but he’s also instituting a de facto apartheid between vaccinated and unvaccinated (a good example of the contradiction always inherent in leftist propositions: apartheid is only not OK when the separation is based on race). And what about the principle of “my body, my choice” endlessly harped on by Andrews’s back-up chorus of unsavoury feminists? Oh, of course, that’s for a different choice – that’s in favour of Andrews’s infanticidal abortion laws. It doesn’t apply to jabs. Another leftist contradiction.
You have to admit that Andrews has been pretty successful for a figure not noticeably endowed with great gifts of intellect or imagination. Like most of the bosses of contemporary Victorian Labor, he’s never done a hand’s turn of real work. Like them he went straight into the bearpit of Labor politics from university. For a time he was a “party organiser”, whatever that means (it was also the pseudo-occupation of that world-class leftist washout, Barack Obama). At least those earlier Labor stalwarts had humped bales on the wharves or driven railway engines. They knew what backbreaking work felt like. Andrews and his lot haven’t a clue, and it has shown in their failure to understand Victoria’s economy with its base in thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, now, thanks to the restrictions decreed by Andrews’s government, somewhat fewer in number and getting fewer.
Mind you, you can’t say Andrews is a stranger to the business world, as long as you mean the billion-dollar business world of tycoons and ostentatious consumption. He loves consorting with them, enjoying hospitality at their luxurious if meretricious residences. It was at one such, apparently, that Andrews fell down some steps and broke some bones. He was offstage for nearly four months, which at least spared Victorians his patronising daily lectures on what they’re doing wrong about COVID. He’s back at it now, scolding the public with an air of martyred patience as though he thinks anyone who disagrees with him about vaccination is actuated solely by the perverse satisfaction of annoying him.
Was it because of Andrews’s easy association with Victoria’s top business one per cent that he acquired the reputation early in his premiership of “getting things done”? It certainly wasn’t through balancing the books. His Metro Tunnel project is clogged with delays and a vast budget blow-out, currently around $2.7 billion. Then there’s the $339 million he gave away to the East-West Link contractors in 2015 simply to buy himself the crazed Green and NIMBY vote by dumping the project.
Andrews shows many of the absurder characteristics of Greenery himself. He has issued a meaningless “apology” to gays because the law was once against them. He allows “Safe Schools” to indoctrinate schoolchildren with “gender” fantasies but slammed the door on Christian religious education. And, though Premier of a state not a nation, he is cooking up a “treaty” with various Aboriginal malcontents.
COVID, considered as much a social crucible as an illness, gave Andrews the opportunity to turn Victoria into a state of lost freedoms. A Premier wedded to democracy would have sought to conserve the greatest degree of individual liberty consonant with the emergency precautions necessary to minimise the impact of the pandemic. Andrews, refusing to listen to any epidemiological opinion other than that of the World Health Organisation (i.e. China), went for the most illiberal and economically damaging anti-COVID strategy possible and spent over a year pursuing the chimera of total elimination of the virus. He’s belatedly abandoned that, but the case numbers in Victoria show his strategy hasn’t worked even in terms of containment.
Yet governments have had 18 months to bring the pandemic under control, ever since Canberra’s mendacious or deluded “two weeks to flatten the curve” promise of March last year. Victoria has had many more COVID deaths than any other state, most of them after a hopelessly mismanaged quarantine attempt by Andrews’s goons – for which at last charges have been laid.
“It’s time” all right, time for Andrews to go and let someone else try to restore hope and rationality to a suffering state. Andrews can’t, and even if he dropped his dictatorialism he is too closely identified with the misery the pandemic and his handling of it have inflicted on Victorians. An election is needed to clear the air. I know “the polls” say his government is doing a good job keeping Victorians “safe”, but safe from what? Only from the exaggerated perception of COVID’s capacity to decimate the community that Andrews and his not particularly well qualified “experts” whipped up to terrify them in the first place. Listening to people talk I wonder whether the polls have got it wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
My experience of spending the best part of a year living in Victoria, and of many of the Victorians I have known and worked with over many years, convinces me that the old adage that people get the government they deserve.
They truly are a weird mob.
Refreshing thanks Christopher to read a no holds barred article on the man with “brazen rat cunnning” and not a lot else. Apparently took six years to complete a BA.
Spent $500 million kitting his stasi police out in new intimidating black uniforms and giving them the green light to engage in thuggery against those Victorians who don’t share his authoritarian MO. When he’s not snarling and berating the citizens at his Press Conferences he engages in mendacity about the 4000 icu beds promised in April 2020 and despite video evidence, denies it all now. Same with the Federal offer of ADF personnel for hotel quarantine. He and his sidekick, smirky Sutton are a curse on Victoria with their mandatory vaccination policy, the longest LD in the world, the cruelty and oppression as are the MSM who as his megaphone, lap up his every word. The Liberal Opposition don’t get a look in from them. I know of no one who supports him.
Watch out what this crazed man will do before the State of Emergency expires on 15 December, to ensure it continues. It won’t be pretty
The devil himself will be his own undoing.
>” … at last charges have been laid [quarantine deaths]”
Sorry, but the “Dept of Health” has been charged – ludicrous. The QC representing said Dept will submit the plea of Guilty at the beginning of proceedings so there will be no need of witnesses such as Mikakos. Eleventy-billion $$ as fines will be transferred from one Govt spreadsheet to another for recycling and that will be that.
The enduring global picture framing Andrews’ reign is that of his politicised para-militaries as Darth Vader troops violently invading a tram-track East Berlin, beating up normal citizens for actions they cannot recognise as crimes. Not only did George Orwell produce accurate satire but so too did Kafka.
Branch stacking ? An “ALP party” rule, no biggie for those of us who just don’t care how they treat each other. Mis-appropriating public funds to do the stacking ? Criminal conduct, so hard evidence will not be found.
No practical, useful method of lancing this carbuncle … Fixed four-year terms just allow sufficient time to weather away adverse public opinions.
Melbourne has now had the longest lockdown of any place on the planet earth- longer than New York, London, LA, or Tokyo; longer than Timbuktu or Nome, Alaska. Congratulations! One galling feature of the lockdown is that while the major chains of supermarkets can open freely, with hundreds of customers passing through every day freely and with no negative consequences, the proprietor of a tiny business in some arcade-if he opens, it is a grave threat to the health of everyone in Victoria, and he must go bankrupt.
That’s a great point, wdr. Many people have to travel farther to purchase food, bypassing the locked-down local corner store. That means people can spread the virus further and also give profit to corporations. For health, friends!
The Victorian Public Service is completely politicised. This description by Akehurst is accurate: ‘his lightest utterance translated into policy by the teeming horde of bureaucrats he has turned into an instrument of his personal will. As in all totalitarian regimes, the bureaucrats are closely watched, Andrews’s “personal staff” of junior enforcers recruited from the universities having been deputed to keep them under observation … for signs of disloyalty.
The idea that a government in Australia can control a seasonal respiratory virus by issuing orders to the public has been pure fantasy from the beginning. The connection between granny-bashing police and the spread of infectious disease is tenuous – though the method is typical of socialism.
What we are being subjected to is a version of the modern administrative state, or government by edict and regulation. Hence Monica Smit was arrested in Melbourne recently for allegedly inciting people to disobey the orders of the Chief Health Officer. A heinous crime indeed!
There are useful publications on the administrative state by Philip Hamburger, a graduate of Princeton and Yale, currently Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. A brilliant lecture he gave at Hillsdale College in 2014 – titled ‘Administrative Edicts or the Rule of Law: How Shall We Be Governed?’ – can be seen on YouTube. Australians need to ask themselves the same question – and the sooner the better.
WorkSafe Victoria have decided to charge the Victorian Dept. of Health and Human Services over the deaths resulting from mismanaged hotel quarantine in 2020, with the clear intention by a politically compromised government body not to charge any individuals. As the fix is in once again in Victoria, what is required is an alternative scheme to hold responsible those who decided that training in diversity was more relevant than training in quarantine procedures, up to and including Chairman Dan. Perhaps a class action by all those who lost family members against all those individuals involved in the mismanagement of hotel quarantine would fit the bill. It might also assist in ridding us of the previously unflushable Dan.
There’s no point in having an election when there is no opposition. Much of the problem is there because the Liberal Party are useless, they have nothing but bench warming second rate fools who are essentially fully on board with Labor. Without a strong principled opposition a government can do what it wants. The recent elevation of Matthew Guy to opposition leader (a second time) is evidence enough of the Libs inability and unwillingness to do what has to be done. The only real opposition is the LDP in the upper house and even then the two (very good) members seem to lack energy. I can’t see how Victoria can be set back on track.
The saying about electorates getting the government they deserve in a democracy surely also applies to Oppositions.
An interesting article from a state level analysis; now a very interesting documentary from the geopolitical level. Ivor Cummings has been a vocal opponent from the start. If you believe that this is some tin foil hat conspiracy then I ask you to do your due diligence and watch to the end.
Warm regards,
Michael
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/monopoly-a-fascinating-documentary-on:4?r=91WeCkSdnWzzZqAVhoiQSJAoLErK77r7
Four legs good, two legs bad. 1984 is where we’re headed but Animal Farm is how we’re being forced there. Maybe if our education system had been valued and prevented from being hijacked by the completely and utterly, insane lunatic-left, enough of us might have been equipped to see the signs early enough, sadly that moment has been long lost. Well one thing’s for certain, Melbourne ain’t the worlds’ most liveable city any more, not that it has been for some time anyway. How on earth was that ever so? Like so many I lived there for 38 years and in a distant memory once roamed the world freely, clearly some people’s idea of “liveable” is very different to others! A liveable city is more than the sum of its coffee shops.
So very glad, currently, that my family left Victoria when I was a child.
“the Liberal Party are useless, they have nothing but bench warming second rate fools”
‘
I think it is in good part because of the intense negativity politicians are subjected to nowadays, enabled by computing technology, with every thing they have said or done, going back to their teens, being pored over, so often by people on the public purse, for any hint, real, imagined or invented of a “wrong-doing”, especially racism or sexism, and disseminated across media, especially the insidious “social media” (which I never use).
.
If I were able to choose between being a politician receiving $250k pa (or even $500k like Dopey Dan) and $100k for doing what I do, I’d not think for even 10 seconds before taking $100k.
@lenton:
Having never been to Melbourne, could you elaborate for me why Melbourne was not liveable? Others are welcome too.
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@lbloveday:
I agree with your assessment. Politicians are paid too much for the good they do, and too little for what they have to put up with from the post-modern paparazzi (for whom truth is always relative but every sexual assault victim should be believed.)
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It would take a narcissist to be a politician now.
@mkctoohey. Thank you for posting the link from Ivor Cummins to the video about the New World Order. This is an important subject. The information in the video is available from many independent sources, and is reliable. As regards the more sinister aspects of the global political response to the pandemic, the video is on the right track in my view.
There is a dark side to the pandemic, as indicated by the inhuman, irrational, highly destructive countermeasures. Not to mention the ruthless suppression of dissent, and the banning of treatment for the disease. If one thinks of the Deep State, and the stance taken against it by Donald Trump, that is a useful start. It is vital that people of goodwill become active in promoting liberty, opposing socialism and dismantling the mechanisms of totalitarian control, including administrative state (see my post above).
There’s unfortunately no escaping it: it is the wilful stupidity of our people that is to blame.
Shifting Andrews ain’t going to change that, is it?
I could talk for hours, and have done, type millions of words, and have done. None of it means anything, none of it will change anything:
Because the problem is the wilful stupidity of our people.
Which is an incredible statement. Must be wrong, one thinks.
So what logic could the people be using that makes them right and me wrong?
What higher logic?
The only thing I could come up with was like ‘love’ or something: i.e. ‘we don’t know what’s right or wrong but if this bullcrap might save one old granny or one little kid then I’ll go along with it.’
And that is pretty powerful.
What beats that?
The fact that this bullcrap will not save one old granny or one little kid: that in fact it is harming and even killing old grannies and kids itself, right here in Aus.
And doing it in spades across the world: ‘collateral damage’ as outlined by Sunetra Gupta’s site.
But they don’t know that do they?
Obviously Dan and the other crazies are not telling them.
But neither are we.
You. With this article.
Me with my comments.
We are not saying it clearly, bluntly, loudly and often enough:
” This bullcrap is not saving anyone it’s actually harming.”
Journalists and egotistical twats like me, none of us should spare a minute for indulging ourselves before we’ve printed, announced, proclaimed that very line.
It should be a mantra.
And backed up by facts and figures.
But that’s not happening.
so I think that could well be it. Because I know they’re not dumber than me. So what is it?
They’re doing the thing with heart:
‘We don’t know who to believe, don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong but we do know keeping the peace is very essential to life and if all this can keep one old grannie alive, save one kid, then it’s all worth it….”
Nobody is telling them the truth.
Not the powers that be – they propagandise lies full on.
But not us, either. Witness this article and virtually every other you can find. In fact almost none of them are addressed to the people. they’re addressed to us: the converted.
Things are not going to get better until someone starts talking to the people and telling them the truth.
Thanks for this article. Even an election will not be democratic if free speech continues to be banned.
Adam J – I spent a mere 10 weeks in Melbourne, so cannot say a lot. But what I can say: I had to deal with more crime in that 10 weeks than in 50 years in Sydney, Canberra and the Gold Coast.
And I was in Elsternwick, a pleasant well established area.
There were police at every train station, but they were utterly useless: not even capable of giving directions. My landlord was an ex-cop and her hair raising stories of how utterly incompetent the once fine Victorian police had been become were truly depressing.
Adam J, never said Melbourne wasn’t liveable, the context was to its previous accolade as MOST liveable city in the world, a somewhat dubious and highly subjective notion. As I proffered, it very much depends upon what one considers “liveable” to mean. From my own 38 years of living there (proving it is indeed liveable) it certainly doesn’t come close to the MOST liveable city ever created, far from it. Most parochial maybe. And now in the Covid era, it has to be one of the least liveable places in which to cohabitate, unless of course you like living in perpetual lockdown, as many seem content to endure. Melbourne, (once) nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there.
Thanks whitelaughter and lenton.
Yes, I was referring to why it isn’t the most liveable. It is obviously liveable given that 5 million live people in it. 🙂 What city would you consider to be more liveable? As I have no hope of visiting, I’m fascinated by the differing opinions that people have about this city.
And it’s official – we have emoticons now. 😉
Prof. Yuri Maltsev says that the Russians have a saying: ‘The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history’. How true that is given the dumbing-down which has been going on in Australia since Whitlam. Ask the next ‘under 40’ you meet; who was Leon Trotsky? As Q on line readers know, (I hope!), Trotsky was Lenin’s sidekick in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. He was a murder and a torturer. Trotsky is also Dan Andrews’s political role model. As the Americans say; go figure.
I was working for the police when the uniform change from light blue to almost black was made. The reason given was that the light blue made the police look friendly and approachable and people aren’t scared of them. The almost black uniform would intimidate people and make them scared of the police. It makes them look like the black uniforms of the Gestapo.
I wondered about the wisdom of that. Shouldn’t you be able to trust your police? Shouldn’t you think of them as people who will look after you? Shouldn’t the relationship between the police and the people be friendly and cooperative? Was it was intended to make the police the enemy of the people?
It would appear that Dan’s popularity is not waning, so he’s likely to re-elected. I think the term cognitive dissonance sums it up; holding onto rusted on believes in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Doubting Thomas’ pithy summary nails it, the people of Victoria get what they deserve.