By the time Australia reaches the magic 80 per cent vaccine level, circumstances will have changed and new variants will be upon us. What is most unlikely to change is the monumental uncertainty surrounding this ever-mutating virus, doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines and, the most static element of them all, the failed template of endless lockdowns and restrictions

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Misinformation abounds, premiers do as they wish, half the country is locked up and the China Virus keeps returning. Surely a man sufficiently smart to have charted a life's course that brought him to The Lodge can grasp that banishing COVID is and always will be a no better than a temporary victory. Yet still we wait for the obvious to be acknowledged

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It’s vital to understand that a virus doesn't shift its genetic makeup to avoid our immune system, knowingly target specific suburbs or particular ethnicities. It’s all evolution, you see, with natural selection to the fore. But hang on: if the fully vaccinated are coming down with COVID, what does that say about the level of resistance this virus has achieved?

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The news that COVID has claimed a life in Sydney is big news at the moment, and thus does the madness escalate. The fact that the unfortunate lady was in her 90s gets scant mention amid the bedlam of urgings and demands that the public roll up its collective sleeve. Me? My shirt cuffs are staying buttoned

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Inconvenient facts are hidden, exaggerations abound, emphasis is given to 'cases', many of whom are so un-sick they need a test to know they are infected. As panic prevails and liberties are curtailed what isn't mentioned are hospitalisations, of which there are few, and certainly not the one single, solitary death so far this year. Meanwhile, China chortles at the panicdemic it has sown

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How long before inflation rears its ravenous head to hollow out the remains of an economy in which the Reserve Bank cashes its own cheques? Meanwhile, COVID and its ruinous lockdowns continue, Dark Emu is taught in schools and green rentseekers make out like bandits. If not yet officially stuffed we soon will be

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I'm feeling as Neanderthals must have felt as they saw their species overtaken by humans, for when I look around I see a new species whose brains have become narrow tunnels to avoid exposure to non-ABC-type views. They are terribly fearful of climate change and COVID. Terribly fearful full stop

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There is a species of conservative that makes my blood boil. I'm talking about those so accustomed to serving as the token renegade on the ABC's stacked panels that they accept with good cheer every latest defeat in the culture war. Then along comes Trump, who has some fight in him, and they recoil in horror at his 'style'

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Ollie Robinson -- that modern rarity, an Englishman who can actually play cricket -- has been banished from the sport amid howls of outrage over tweets he sent years earlier, when still a callow teen. Once again, the scolds have risen to brandish their virtue and, once again, they are proving far more offensive than the target of their condemnation

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Viking helmets are fetching and widely available, plastic ones as well as metal. Were I to buy one, and still more wear one, it would cement my new identity. Who could doubt me? I have blue eyes, surely a clincher, and I sometimes use one of the rowing machines at my gym. By current standards, what better credentials could I need to file AHRC complaints about anti-Norse racism?

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