BadgeIsBack

most of us work 'hard'. Some of us get to use more leverage than others eg in the private sector, or in say Finance. You won't get much leverage out of working hard in a factory unless you get penalty rates.
When the leverage is corruption that's a different story yes. The thing is that there are "entitlements" and "benefits" to being a polly.

the troubadour

And some among the ranks find 'leverage' in other areas not satisfied with a successful professional income. Not uncommon here in Perth as I've discovered unfortunately. While few work in factories, pollies have always enjoyed their added benefits and advantages in the main. Other areas of those in authority not toeing the straight and narrow less forgivable.

the troubadour

And nor should it. Government are more than managers of an economy. It has the bigger picture to look at. The Corporate world has over recent decades far too much influence over government. Not healthy.

the troubadour

The economic damage would have been far more severe if followed the UK example and twiddled thumbs until too late. NZ has had perhaps the most successful management of the crisis in the world. Hard for you to admit a left leaning government got it right, I fully appreciate,

Beoz

You Rang? No left leaning gov has got the balance right. New Zealand is smashed and continues to be smashed by silly little nonsense lockdowns. Victoria has become the economic basket case of Australia brought on by political show boating. Queensland has its hand out for help .... oh how we sniggered at that. WA .... how many cases? 1 ..... have you stopped wearing masks in the office yet?

abner

And yet it didn't.

The problem with the latest lockdown was not that the lockdown itself was ill-conceived from a medical / epidemiological standpoint (it had to deal with a far more infective new variant, and the "circuit-breaker" model was effective to deal with that.) The problem was that it flowed from "Hotel Quarantine Failure II - The Sequel".

The greatest failure in investigative navel-gazing from "Hotel Quarantine Failure I" was not that it failed to identify fault in the conduct of Hotel Quarantine management, but that it failed to look much beyond it, to study how well the hotel quarantine model could really be expected to work at all, even if all the guards, the cleaning staff, the attending medical staff, and those being quarantined, always behaved as perfectly as they were expected to.

Hotel building HVAC systems are not designed for aerosol isolation. And aerosol transmission now appears to be the primary transmission mode for CoVID-19, and likely even more so for its recent, more contagious variants.

Until this issue is dealt with, through non-trivial retrofitting of quarantine hotel HVAC (or the politically unattractive alternative of ceasing repatriation of off-shore Australians), we're likely to have more "little fires everywhere" moments with CoVID-19.

Beoz

Only if you want to never see a case again in Australia while sacrificing all else. No thanks. The world has learned a lot since March 2020. Time for the one trick ponies to broaden their scope.

NJJ

So the govt now got their SOE powers extended to December, likely with more backroom deals done with the greens & reason party (more safe injecting rooms maybe?). The state give has had a year to come up with some alternate legislation that allows people to be quarantined, instead of the entire sweeping SOE powers allowing them to lockdown the entire state at the drop of a hat. Seems they have been more preoccupied with launching a Royal Commission into metal heath issues. One wonders why Andrews brings this up now, and not when he was health minister.