It has been confirmed that the federal government was contacted by Pfizer in June 2020 to provide Australia with 40 million doses – which wasn’t taken up by the government – after months of denying the story and suggesting that everyone else was wrong. There’s two issues here: the constant denials – which continue to be provided by Scott Morrison and the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt – and a deal which could have delivered the Pfizer vaccines to Australia in early 2021, offered protection to th...
Sep 10, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast he politics of the COVID pandemic are still being played as hard as possible – at a time when the public craves unity and expecting governments to manage the crisis in the best way possible. It would seem that the Queensland and Western Australian Governments are doing well – case numbers are zero – but they are the governments the media are attacking (as is the federal Liberal Party), while ignoring the problems in NSW, where 1431 cases were recorded yesterday. It doesn’t make sense, until you ...
Sep 03, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, now wants Australia to “live with the virus” and “get out of the cave”. But why the big rush? Essentially, it’s to cover over the mistakes of the NSW Government during this wave of the Delta outbreak, and remove himself of political problems in the lead up to the next federal election. And “live with the virus” is a mantra also picked up by the mainstream media, keen to let everyone know that now is the time to open up, because the vaccine is here to protect e...
Aug 27, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Delta version of coronavirus has taken hold in Sydney and if the NSW Government doesn’t take action to reverse the tide, the daily case numbers are going to reach 2,000 and it’s an number that is unlikely to be palatable to the electorate. And if it continues to spiral out of control, it’s likely to take hold of the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who is now facing pressure to resign. Every historian for perhaps the past two hundred years would recommend that Afghanistan is a difficult coun...
Aug 20, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is one of the worst public health and economic disasters ever in Sydney but what is even worse, is the entire crisis could have been avoided. Why would the NSW Government avoid implementing the plans that were so successful in every other state and territory across Australia – hard, fast and early lockdowns – when it was obvious that this is what was needed to avert the Delta outbreak? Does the NSW Government have health officers and epidemiologists who have trained at unusually different u...
Aug 13, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The federal government and its best friend – the NSW Government – are sinking in the polls because of one key issue: the mismanagement of the pandemic. Qualitative and quantitative research is showing a rapid decline in the support of both of these governments and their efforts to spin, manipulate and gaslight the public are falling on deaf ears. Both Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian have lost the trust of the electorate and the rhetoric behind the gold standard management of the pandemic h...
Aug 06, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are too many vested interests in Sydney and it makes it difficult for the NSW Government to act in the public interest and, because of this, the city is now in a nine-week lockdown, with no end in sight. Gladys Berejiklian says “but there is no guidebook for a pandemic”. Actually, there is, and we provide a five-point plan, which would be obvious to anyone looking at what’s been happening all around the world, including Australia. But, evidently, it’s not obvious to the NSW Government, or ...
Jul 30, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Political games are never far away when it comes to COVID-19 management in Australia and, of course, it’s across the political divide: the Liberal Party of NSW and the federal government on one side, and Labor Premiers on the other. If only the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian had shown some sympathy to Victoria when they went through their lockdowns, perhaps that could have been repaid and requests to access more Pfizer vaccines would have been more receptive. Far from being a victim of success,...
Jul 23, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Australia has become lockdown central, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, going into two different types of lockdowns – Sydney has a modified version where shops are still open and people seem to be able to freely move about (except for those migrant-working-class-Labor-voting-sub-classes in Fairfield), and Melbourne – a city which takes this process far more seriously – instigating a short sharp five-day lockdown. Professional. Not that it's a competition, but we suggest Melbour...
Jul 16, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Sydney lockdown continues into its third week and the Gladys Berejiklian show moves into the full public relations mode and spin cycle to get itself out of political trouble. It’s almost as though if the NSW Government put as much effort into managing the effects of COVID-19 as they put into media manipulation, there would be no lockdown to speak of. But where is the challenge in doing the right thing in the first place? The facade of “The Woman Who Saved Australia” so prominently promoted i...
Jul 09, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The NSW Government’s ‘gold standard’ in COVID management has soured into a more tarnished puce colour, with Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s reluctance to shut down Sydney a week earlier, resulting in a more protracted lockdown than would otherwise have been required. Aside from the extra billions of dollars it will cost the NSW economy, it took a full 24 hours before Berejiklian could even mention the word that shall not be mentioned: LOCKDOWN – a dastardly word that fellow Liberals were ridiculing...
Jul 02, 2021•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Australia could have been close to reaching herd immunity but a poor Australian government decision to turn its back on an excellent Pfizer deal means the national level of vaccination is at 3%, one of the lowest rates in the world. The anger in the medical community is palpable, but will the electorate blame the government for this error? And, for a government that was so keen to open up the economy as soon as possible, this foolishness is difficult to understand. The mainstream media wanted to...
Jun 23, 2021•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Victoria will complete a two-week lockdown soon but if the Morrison government had done its job properly on quarantine management and the vaccination rollout, the lockdown – which will cost around $2 billion in lost revenues and other expenses – may have been avoided. And it’s nobody’s fault, except for the fault of the Morrison government. And their performance has been so bad that it’s a performance that seems to have been directed by the Big Q. It’s frustratingly puzzling as to why they are r...
Jun 09, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s Budget time and we've spent the last week analysing the third Budget announcement from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Our verdict? Don’t believe the hype: it's not a ‘big-spending’ Budget; and it’s not a Budget the Labor Party would have introduced. We think it's yet another lost opportunity for the Australian economy and the community – just like Peter Costello squandering the mining boom in the early 2000s, this could be another chance to make positive long-term changes to government spending...
May 19, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The world is slowly moving towards climate change solutions and, once again, Australia is the laggard on the world stage but trying to tell everyone how well it's performing, even though no other world leader believes it. And this is the modus operandi of the Morrison government: lie, mispresent the data, gaslight, or divert the attention somewhere else. The US President, Joe Biden, might be an old man but he’s not a fool and knows a fool when he sees one. It’s obvious Morrison wants to lead a g...
Apr 27, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast The vaccination program is now officially in fiasco territory, with error after error and now another announcement of 20 million Pfizer doses "secured" after problems with the AstraZeneca vaccines. Which, of course, is not the same as actually having the doses in doctors’ surgeries all around Australia. We feel that it’s almost like the program has been designed to fail, because surely no government could handle such an important event so badly. If only Scott Morrison could stop overpromising an...
Apr 10, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The many women of Australia have said “enough is enough”, and said it loudly through the March 4 Justice campaign. But the Prime Minister is hard of hearing and wants it all to be on his terms, refusing to meet the organisers of the rally in public, wanting to meet behind closed doors and in private. Which is exactly what a rapist would do. And, of course, Attorney–General Christian Porter decided to launch his defamation case on the same day of the March 4 Justice rallies. Tone deaf! Vaccinatio...
Mar 19, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christian Porter’s political career is over. There won't be any legal proceedings arising from an allegation of rape in 1988 but the political repercussions will be far-reaching. And as long as the Prime Minister keeps resisting a call for a public inquiry into these events, this issue will keep burning in the background: for sure, there is a presumption of innocence within Australia’s legal system, but there also has to be a presumption of justice. Justice not only needs to be done, but it has ...
Mar 05, 2021•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast It seems like there was a grand cover-up of a serious sexual assault of a female staffer in March 2019 at Parliament House, but who’s got time for that sort of wimmen’s business when there's an election to be won. If the allegations of rape had been revealed at that time, Scott Morrison would have lost that election, there's no question about this. A political decision was made to keep quiet about the incident but even then, the Liberal Party didn’t even have the decency to offer support to Brit...
Feb 19, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Australia Day has been hijacked by the conservative side of politics. Which means that it's a day of vainglorious nationalism, jingoism, white imperialism and forgetting about the events of 1788, when an entire continent was stolen from Indigenous people, setting off 233 years of racism, oppression and subjugation: all at the stroke of a pen. Should the date be changed? Absolutely. There is a new US President and while there was a massive amount of grandstanding from Donald Trump about vote-rigg...
Feb 03, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just when we thought this federal government couldn't get any more evil, it goes out and tries to legislate the Indue card into permanance, enlists three debt recovery companies to chase down welfare recipients and creates workplace conditions that will be even worse than the WorkChoices policies that were too extreme for John Howard to introduce way back in 2005. But when your policies are guided by the ghosts of Margaret Thatcher, what more could we expect? Except for the end of society becaus...
Dec 11, 2020•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mr Morrison went to Tokyo and returned empty-handed. But the 24-hour trip was never about Japan, it was all about continuing to avoid scrutiny and land the Prime Minister into a two-week quarantine at the Lodge – just enough to avoid the final Question Time of the year. Very convenient. And, of course, two weeks with the official photographer, ready to snap every pair of board shorts, thongs, exercise bikes and COVID test. It's outright propaganda. Meanwhile, Mathias Cormann is using a taxpayer ...
Nov 26, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast The 2020 US Election has brought in a new President (we think) and the key question will be how an incoming Democrats administration will affect political behaviour in Australia and whether the Morrison government feels the need to do anything at all on climate change. Or change its economic philosophy. Or even feel the need to be more truthful with the Australian public, but we feel this is most unlikely. And will the media turn down the volume on Scott Morrison, as they did with Donald Trump? ...
Nov 13, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast There's far too much corruption in politics but what can be done about it? There's a compliant media that is always at hand to cover over any corruption performed by conservative governments, and they were at their best when it came to the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian. A high stinking pile of corruption is slowing being uncovered at the hearings held at the NSW ICAC but the media decided to ignore all of that, and go for the ‘girl-in-lurve-dudded-by-the-bad-man’ angle, so the allegations of c...
Oct 28, 2020•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's that time of the year when we look at the federal Budget (seasonally adjusted), and the Treasurer has announced a $213 billion deficit. We have no complaints: Governments need to spend money according to the circumstances and with a national government debt reaching $944 billion, the main benefit the Australian electorate will receive is an end to the maniacal debates about “debts and deficits” and “how ya gonna pay for it”. Don't believe the neoliberalist tripe: governments can always pay ...
Oct 13, 2020•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The mainstream media and the federal government are still making their push to open borders, even though the continuing threat to public health is still there. Border closures are quite popular in the states and territories – 91 per cent support in Western Australia – and it's difficult to understand why vested interests are making this push, when the public support to open up borders is not there. But as we all know, anything is possible when vested interests hold hands with the Liberal governm...
Sep 25, 2020•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast What does a government Minister have to do to lose their job? Losing control of aged care homes and allowing coronavirus to cause the death of over 400 people isn't enough these days. How we long for those good ol’ days when a Minister could be stood down for possessing a oversized teddy bear or filling out the wrong form. But that was so 1980s, and it's now the year of the pandemic: 2020. Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck still remains in his job, but we're really not sure why. The tedious and...
Sep 01, 2020•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast The public’s patience with Scott Morrison’s constant obfuscation, deflection and outright lies is starting to wear thin. As Abraham Lincoln said “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. And we think Morrison may have reached the point of no return: once the public image of serial lying is set in stone, there's no turning back. It might not be so evident right now, but this sentiment is starti...
Aug 17, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan instigated a brand of neoliberal economics and politics that affected the world for almost four decades. They left the political scene over 30 years ago, and whatever people think about their economic practices and policies – we think they were an absolute disaster for the world – they were major political figures of history steeped in the politics of the Cold War. But they were people of the 1980s and 1990s, and their policies are not the right policies to ev...
Aug 01, 2020•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's a by-election the Liberal Party should have won, but didn't. Eden-Monaro. Despite all the resources put into the campaign, the Government nudged the margin by just 0.45% – not much and certainly not the massive swing and "brutal lesson to Labor" the New Corporation reported with glowing headlines in their local versions of Pravda and The North Korea Times. For all the glowing support provided to Scott Morrison by the mainstream media, there's an underbelly of electoral negativity that will ...
Jul 18, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
