Albo claimed hydrogen could make “Australia a renewable energy superpower”.

Gawd!

Yet another proclamation that Australia will become, under government direction, a sort of economic ‘powerhouse’.

That’s right the Israeli Christian founder of an Aramaic NGO was referring to Hebrew not Aramaic as the language of Christ.

What is this in reference to?

The Dept. of Health has confirmed it has disposed of 35% of the Commonwealth’s covid vaccine supply, with another 15% due to be binned soon due as use by dates expire.

It is estimated only 26.2%of all vaccine doses purchased were administered.

During the covid panic Morrison’s government boasted that it spent $18bn on vaccines and treatment.

Less than 10% of Australians are presently “boostered”, many only so they can keep their jobs in healthcare and related sectors.

This is really impressively brazen even by Congressional standards. They inserted a special provision into the FISA reauthorization bill to protect THEMSELVES from government surveillance! Members of Congress — as opposed to the average citizen! Unbelievable

Remember when Jacinda Ardern told Kiwis to only get their news from the state?

NZ’s only privately owned FTA news service, Newshub, will close its doors at the end of June, leaving NZers who can’t afford a sub to Sky reliant on the state broadcaster…or the interwebs.

Thank you for that information, Roger.

Thanks to citizen journalist Rebekah Barnett!

Link provided just upthread.

The young chap takes off his prosthetic legs and goes into beast mode.

@2:09

Good stuff.

Knuckle Sandwich Compilation
https://rumble.com/v4objj6-knuckle-sandwich-compilation.html

Too many good insights into the shitminds of lefties to select one:

FrontPage Magazine | Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out

Australia bins 35% of multi-billion dollar Covid vaccine supplyOnly 26% of the total 267 million purchased doses have made it into Aussie armsREBEKAH BARNETT
APR 13

As part of its pandemic response, the Australian government purchased 267.3 million doses of Covid vaccines, enough to vaccinate Australia’s population of approximately 26 million people ten times over. 
But figures released to Dystopian Down Under by the Department of Health (DOH) this week confirm that, three years into the vaccine program, only 70 million doses, or 26% of the 267.3 million doses purchased, have been administered, while 35% of vaccines doses have been wasted since the start of the vaccine rollout.
Last week, the Australian reported that more than 35% of Covid vaccines were being tossed out as of January due to oversupply. The revelation came from the DOH’s public submission to the federal Covid inquiry. 
The wording made it unclear if this was a cumulative figure or applicable only to the month of January, so I contacted the DOH to confirm the total wastage to date, along with some further questions on the value of doses purchased, delivered, and wasted, and exactly how many had been administered.

A DOH spokesperson responded,

“As of 31 March 2024 the total COVID-19 vaccine program wastage rate was at 35.69%. Australia’s wastage rate is within the World Health Organization (WHO) acceptable wastage parameters for multidose vials of 15% and 40%.

“Approximately 80% of COVID-19 vaccine wastage is attributed to expiry of doses across warehouses and vaccine administration sites.”

This appears to mean that 80% of the wasted doses simply expired on the shelf. 

The remaining 20% of wasted doses would likely be due to administration sites not managing to use the entire contents of multi-dose vials once opened. While unopened vials have a shelf-life of anywhere between 9-18 months, opened vials must be used within 6-48 hours.

The DOH refused to confirm the value of doses purchased or wasted, or how many of the purchased doses have actually been delivered, “for contractural and security reasons.” The Australian government has repeatedly refused to release details of its tax-payer-funded Covid vaccine purchase agreements.

However, we know that total government spending on Covid vaccines and treatment supply amounts to over $18 billion, of which it appears that the lion’s share was allocated to purchasing vaccine doses.¹
Source: Department of Health and Aged Care

Most of these remain unused. DOH figures provided to me this week show that as at 3 April, only a quarter (70 million) of the 267.3 million purchased doses had been used, at a total usage rate of 26.2%
Of the remaining 197.3 million unadministered doses, the DOH advised that approximately 53 million doses have been donated as foreign aid.²
That leaves approximately 144 million doses, more than half of the total stockpile, either already expired, or likely to expire within the next several years, as booster rates hover below 10%. ³

As Australia’s vaccine purchases extend into 2023 and 2024, it is probable that a portion of these doses still be viable up to 2025. 
But even if vaccine doses never expired, it would take Australians 29 years to work their way through the glut, based on the five million boosters administered in the past 12 months.

As it stands, usage rates by brand are as below:

• Of 131 million Pfizer doses purchased, 48.5 million have been administered, a usage rate of 37%. 82.5 million doses remain.
• Of 29 million Moderna doses purchased, 7.5 million have been administered, a usage rate of 25.7%. 21.5 million doses remain.
• Of 56.3 million AstraZeneca doses purchased, 13.8 million have been administered, a usage rate of 24.5%. As the AstraZeneca stockpile expired on 20 March 2023, the remaining 42.5 million doses have been binned, unless they were donated as aid prior to this date.
• Stunningly, of 51 million Novavax doses purchased, only 273,700 have been administered, a usage rate of 0.5%. 50.7 million doses, 99.5% of the stockpile, remain. This is because by the time Novavax was approved for use, in December 2021, over 90% of Australians aged 16 and over had already been double vaccinated.

In a July 2022 article investigating Australia’s already apparent vast vaccine wastage, the ABC asked if perhaps the government had bought too many vaccines?
Deborah Gleeson, Associate Professor of Public Health at La Trobe University, criticised the government’s run on the global vaccine supply, suggesting that Australia had hoarded more than its share.
Prof Gleeson told the ABC,

“Australia really participated in a bigger trend that we’ve seen worldwide of wealthy countries buying up far more doses of COVID-19 vaccines than they needed early on in the pandemic. And this is a practice that unfortunately has continued.”

It’s enough to make advocates for global vaccine equity lose sleep at night.
The news of the Australian government’s wastage of billions of dollars worth of Covid vaccines comes as Australians are grappling with the soaring cost of living and the worst housing crisis on record, with over a quarter of a million Australians accessing homelessness services in 2022-2023.

The government webpage also details investment in aid program COVAX, and research and supply chain developments, including some funding for the development of a potential Covid vaccine (since abandoned). The page mentions a 10-year partnership with Moderna and the Victorian Government that will see Moderna build an mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility at Monash University Victoria. However, it is unclear if funding for the Moderna partnership comes from this $18 billion investment, or from other funding.

From a DOH spokesperson, 

“Australia has donated more than 52 million doses to countries in the Indo Pacific and Southeast Asia.

·      23.6 million as part of our commitment to share 40 million doses through the Department’s procured supply; and

·      28.5 million as part of the commitment to share 20 million doses through DFAT’s agreement with UNICEF.

“Australia has offered a further 16.8 million doses to the COVAX Facility for distribution to participating developed and developing countries. Of the 755,200 doses that were accepted by the COVAX Facility, 14,400 have been donated.”

Note that because the DOH would not confirm how many of the 267.3 million purchased doses have been delivered, the precise number of doses sitting in the national stockpile cannot be determined. However, the vaccine agreement webpage does specify delivery dates of some purchases, and from this, it can be ascertained that the great majority of doses purchased have already been delivered. 

Abbott gets interviewed by the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend interview. He gave a speech in Phoenix Az.

Tony Abbott, a Fighter in the Cold War With China
The former Australian prime minister is worried by the U.S. tilt toward isolationism—though he has faith America will come through in the end.

Phoenix

Americans dispirited by the 2024 presidential campaign might find it bracing to listen to Tony Abbott. “The Western world has never been more materially rich,” Mr. Abbott recently told a symposium on classical education here. “But it’s rarely been more spiritually bereft.” Since winning the Cold War, he says, the West has become “economically, militarily and culturally flabby, like a retired sportsman.” His warning is dire: If we don’t shape up, China will leave us in the dust.

Mr. Abbott, 66, is a politician, but not an American one. He served as prime minister of Australia from 2013 through 2015, arguably the most conservative and pro-American leader his notably pro-American country has had. He swears by Plato, Shakespeare, the New Testament and “narrative history starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans.” Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill are his political role models.

But he’s a fighter as well as a thinker—every inch the pugilist he was when he won his boxing colors, called a “blue,” as a 21-year-old heavyweight at Oxford University. (He is also a director of Fox Corp., whose ownership overlaps with the Journal’s parent company, News Corp.) We meet in a corner of the Phoenix Convention Center on the morning after his speech. He’s just been to the gym at his modest downtown hotel and can’t resist boasting that he hasn’t outgrown his Oxford blue’s blazer. “I found it in the cupboard and as an experiment I tried to see if I could still fit it,” he says. “I can.”

You might call Xi Jinping his personal trainer, for it’s China, he says, that “exercises” him the most. He wishes he could talk about “the China opportunity”—and a decade ago he did. “As prime minister, I concluded a free-trade deal between my country and China—the only free-trade deal at the time . . . that China has done with a G-20 economy.” He regrets it now: For China, “There is no such thing as a free market, no such thing as an independent business. The Chinese turn trade on and off like a tap to suit their strategic purposes.”

Relations between Canberra and Beijing started to sour after Malcolm Turnbull succeeded Mr. Abbott as prime minister. In 2018 Australia banned Huawei from its 5G rollout over national-security concerns. “We were the first country to do that, even before the United States,” Mr. Abbott says. (The U.S. did it in 2019.)

Tensions heightened in May 2020, when the Australian government called for a full, independent international investigation into the origins of “the Wuhan virus,” as Mr. Abbott calls it. “That really set the Chinese off. There was a furious reaction from Beijing, including statements from the Global Times”—a state propaganda organ—“that Australia was the ‘chewing gum’ on China’s boot.” China slapped what Mr. Abbott calls “capricious and arbitrary bans on some $20 billion worth of Australian trade,” including lobster, wine, barley and coal.

In 2021 the Chinese Embassy in Canberra issued a list of 14 demands, including “essentially, that we end the American alliance, permit all Chinese investment, and cease all criticism of the Chinese government. No independent, sovereign country could accept that.” Australia didn’t.

“It’s crystal clear under Xi Jinping that the role of the party-state is being massively reinforced,” Mr. Abbot says. “There’s been the rise of the ‘social credit’ system, and the increasingly genocidal tendencies in Xinjiang province. Having crushed the freedom of Hong Kong, they’re now dead set on taking Taiwan as part of their oft-declared aim to be the global hegemon by midcentury.” That means we’re “deep into a new cold war,” one that could be “every bit as difficult, as taxing, as costly, as stressful as the last one.”

If not more. China is “rapidly becoming a first-rate military, but it is also undoubtedly a first-rate economy,” Mr. Abbott says. By contrast, the Soviet Union was “never more than a third-rate economy, and Russia and the other Comecon nations were more or less hermetically sealed from the economies of the wider world.” (Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, consisted of the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and the communist states of Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam.)

The West, “inevitably led by the United States,” needs “to accept the reality of this new cold war and do our best to ensure that it ends as well as the last one did, with a victory for freedom and liberalism.” How? “By doing everything we can to reduce our economic vulnerability, to increase our deterrent capability, and to regain the cultural self-confidence that was an important part of winning the Cold War.”

On the economic front, Mr. Abbott believes that “decoupling” from China, “at least in vital supply chains,” is necessary, “however lengthy and costly, particularly for a country like the United States, if it is to remain what it always has been—a great arsenal of democracy.” The West needs to “rebuild its manufacturing base as quickly as possible by not having free trade with China, by not sharing significant [industrial] secrets, by not giving them access to our manufacturing processes.”

It also needs to halt “the widespread economic self-harm that we are inflicting upon ourselves.” By this he means “the climate cult. This notion that there is a climate emergency is, I think, completely without foundation.”

“Even if the global-warming hypothesis is correct,” he says with relish, “a couple of degrees of warming over several decades wouldn’t justify the extreme steps that we’re taking—the economic revolution that we’re undertaking.” He says that “a country which thinks that the greatest economic, political and moral challenge of our times is climate change is, at the very least, going to be extremely distracted if it comes to fighting a war, or even running a cold war.” Never mind a hot one: “The Ukrainians aren’t worrying too much about climate change right now,” he says. “I don’t think the Israelis are obsessing about emissions at the moment.”

Mr. Abbott says he won’t comment on the policies of an American president, then does so anyway, describing President Biden’s “so-called Inflation Reduction Act” as “basically a climate-change policy masquerading as anti-inflation policy.” That may not augur well for Mr. Biden in November. Every election in Australia where climate change has been an issue, Mr. Abbott says, has produced a thumping win for the party “which is most skeptical of the whole thing. But this is one of those transitions where the public is rarely asked. It’s an elite project which has been foisted on the public.”

As for military deterrence, Mr. Abbott points to two “projects” that could discourage Beijing from using force in Taiwan and elsewhere. The first is the Quad, the four-nation “democratic partnership” between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., set up in 2007 to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. Australia withdrew the following year when the center-left Kevin Rudd became prime minister, then rejoined in 2010 after Mr. Rudd’s party lost power. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe then “made massive efforts to reinvigorate it.”

Mr. Abbott sets great store by the Quad: “It’s the first time that independent India has moved away from strategic detachment. It’s a definite tilt by India towards the West.” But the Quad will work only “if America appreciates Indian pride and self-respect and potential.” India wouldn’t have joined the grouping “if the Quad initiative had come from the Americans. The fact that it came from Abe made it acceptable to the Indians.” Mr. Abbott praises Abe, who left office in 2020 and who was assassinated in 2022, as “a great global statesman.”

The second project is Aukus, the trilateral security pact set up in 2021 between “the great Anglosphere countries,” Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Mr. Abbott describes it as “a whole new level of defense and security cooperation.” The three nations are now “essentially treated as one for military procurement and strategic cooperation purposes.” Australia will acquire Virginia-class nuclear submarines—the newest class available—from the U.S. and a new-generation British sub will be built in Australia.

The original Cold War was as much a duel of ideologies as it was a shadow (and often proxy) military confrontation. The West seems to have depleted the self-confidence that sustained it through the Cold War. “How and why it’s gone is a fascinating question,” Mr. Abbott says, “but gone it has, at least among vast swaths of Western elites.” Behind the loss of swagger is an enervation rooted in a sense of historical guilt.

Americans agonize incessantly over slavery, Britons over imperialism, Australians over the treatment of indigenous people. Mr. Abbott wants us to acknowledge that “Project America, Project Britain and Project Australia are marvels”: “The main Anglosphere countries are as free, as fair, as prosperous as anything on earth.” People all over the world are “desperate” to come to them, testimony “that our societies are welcoming, magnanimous, decent places. And yet we don’t seem to see in ourselves what everyone else does.”

As Mr. Abbott tells it, a palpable loss of domestic confidence in the U.S. is corroding America’s external projection and potency. The same is true of Australia, though in a minor key since the country’s heft is much smaller. The U.S. move toward isolationism is evident in its wavering over Ukraine. “I just think, frankly, that America is badly letting down a democracy in desperate need.”

He gives President Biden “all credit for what he has done,” but wishes it had been more. “The congressional game-playing over the Ukrainian aid package is wrong. Given that everyone says they wanted to provide the aid, I just wish they would not let their disagreements on other issues jeopardize the provision of aid that Ukraine desperately needs.”

Vladimir Putin and Mr. Xi regard the West as “degenerate, utterly effete. And I don’t think that’s a good image to show to the wider world, particularly to people who don’t see our self-doubt as a sign of maturity, but as a sign of weakness.”

For all that, Mr. Abbott—who entered a Roman Catholic seminary at 26 but decided the priesthood wasn’t for him—professes a seemingly unshakable faith in the U.S.: “America unleashed is an amazing, creative country, with an enormous capacity if roused,” he says. “One of my little missions is to express, on behalf of myself and many of my compatriots, gratitude to the United States for everything it’s done over the last seven decades.” The modern world is a product of “American strength, American benevolence, American blood, American treasure.” It is “more free, more fair, more safe, more rich for more people than at any time in history, thanks to the Pax Americana.”

This Pax America has been challenged, he says, “as never before, and yet America remains the indispensable nation, not because it should be expected to do everything, but because without America the efforts of others will be much less successful, even quite futile.”

The prospect of a Pax Sinica—a Chinese world order—makes Mr. Abbott shudder. “A world under American leadership becomes more like America, and a world under Chinese leadership would inevitably become more like China. I think it would be a very oppressive pax indeed.”

2024. Russia held scheduled presidential elections, Ukraine did not.

I think Abbott’s point is that the strongest nation makes the rules – If it is the US then we will benefit but if China runs things then the rules will be tilted strongly against our interests in favour of China.

At present China is flouting the rules we are accustomed to and acting in accordance with, for their own gain.

There has always some skirmishing on the edges – the EU wants to make the rules (they used to) but they have less clout than the US.

My memory of the 70’s was that of an America in decline, militarily, economically, and in confidence. Then, in the 80’s, under The Gipper, there was a resurgence. America may be poised to do so again – depending on the election.

He also had a point regarding the way that, under America, other countries begin to become like America. Obviously there has been a pop-culture transmission, but I think in more profound concepts as well. Concepts like that of free speech and egalitarianism are far more energetically asserted (and threatened by bad people – which is a sort of acknowledgement also) in other countries now than I think would be otherwise. People in Australia and Europe assume they have an absolute right to free speech. It is a point being constantly tested by the self-serving elites, just as it is in the US.

Europe and Australia are suffering the same malaise as the US. We caught it from them.

Australia became a very different country when we shifted our upward gaze from Britain to America.

Last point I will make is that I am glad Abbott did not overstate Australia’s importance – we don’t have the heft, as I think he put it. But he emphasised new alliances such as with India and Japan. That can’t be called looking back.

Four people are dead and many more injured after a mass stabbing inside a packed Westfield at Sydney’s Bondi Junction.

Oh no…I hope it is not inspired by what I am thinking…….

A certain incident in a Yekaterinburg basement c.106 years ago showed rather clearly that commies do not play by the rules. Those who are today still bewildered when commies do not play by the rules are, shall we say, off the pace.