I missed this episode where Albo lies, and lies again. How anyone could vote for him confounds me.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yJCqxHFQaQ

David Penberthy in the Hun:

The insult “cooker” is one of those pejorative terms which has taken on a life of its own among the politically obsessed and is used as a barb on forums such as Twitter.

“Cooker” is the derogatory term for the conspiracy theorists who sprung up during Covid and labelled it a sinister plot by governments, big pharma and allegedly shady free-trade organisations such as the World Economic Forum to enslave us all. The Cookers brought us the nutty term “plandemic” saying the whole Covid outbreak was a manufactured hoax. They’re the people who baselessly questioned the efficacy and safety of vaccines, believing at their most extreme that they were a form of mind control, an attempt to render the female population infertile, or any old bit of batty BS they picked up in the more demented recesses of the internet.

As is always the case with these politically-loaded terms, “cooker” also become an indiscriminate sledge for anyone who dared question the wisdom and extent of lockdown practices and the encroachment of state power into so many areas of our private lives. You might have seen the sledge during this election campaign, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trying to besmirch Peter Dutton’s team by saying the Coalition party room is “full of cookers”. I don’t think the attack worked for, as I said above, this is an insult that is more the preserve of the political class than the mainstream, so it didn’t resonate with disengaged voters.

At the risk of sounding like a cooker, or at the very least cooker-adjacent, I’d argue the most remarkable political story to emerge over the past couple of weeks went to the revelations surrounding former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and his government’s implementation of a mandated curfew during that state’s marathon lockdown.

As far as I can tell, the term cooker in an Australian setting had its genesis and spread in the hard lockdown state of Victoria, and was used by Dan’s army of acolytes to disparage anyone who dared question that state’s exertion of power at levels not seen anywhere else in Australia and in no other country on earth, with the exception of China.

Remember, it was Victoria which brought in the 5km ban on walking and the absurd “bonk ban” and “bubble system” whereby couples were initially barred from sleeping at each other’s houses, then only allowed to do so on the condition they were actually having sex. Victoria also had the so-called “Ring of Steel”, where Melburnians could not visit regional areas, and vice-versa, meaning the city’s more cashed-up residents simply relocated to Torquay and Sorrento to get away from it all. And then there was the decision to ban children from using playgrounds or from playing basketball, with no Health Department directive to justify the logic of a ban which five years on appears to have contributed, along with own schooling, to a rise in anxiety among Victoria’s young.

Craziest of all was the decision to implement a curfew where for two months in 2020 Victorians risked fines and even arrest if they left their homes between 8pm and 5am.

It’s the sort of stuff you’d expect in Caracas or Mogadishu, but here we were with Australia’s sporting capital and the home of laneway-cafe culture resembling some Third World capital.

This is how the Herald Sun broke the story last weekend: “The draconian decision to take away the freedom of Melburnians and make millions live under a Covid curfew was not based on medical advice … an explosive document released this week after a 4½-year legal row shows former Premier Daniel Andrews and his government’s unprecedented decision to lock Victorians in their homes between 8pm and 5am for two months in 2020, was ‘not occurring on public health advice but is a decision taken by Cabinet’.”

“An email exchange between former chief health officer Brett Sutton and then public health commander Finn Romanes prove that the extreme lockdown measure had not been proposed by health experts, although they ultimately supported the move as a way to limit transmission of the virus. The letter is expected to put pressure on Premier Jacinta Allan, who at the time was part of the seven-member crisis cabinet that signed off on the curfew.”

To that last point, so it bloody well should.

What an outrage that any government in this country should lock up its populace without due explanation, regarding all questions as to why as the work of cookers and conspiracists, flimsily hiding behind an unsubstantiated claim that it was the idea of health professionals.

This is the problem with politics, and it’s also a problem with the way Covid was managed under our federal system. For our citizenry, negotiating Covid became the luck of the draw.

I was blessed to live in the state of South Australia where we veritably coasted through Covid in no small part thanks to a Police Commissioner who wanted to maximise freedoms to keep the public onside. Over the border, for reasons I still can’t understand, the reverse was the case, where kids in far-flung border towns such as Murrayville and Ouyen were prevented from playing sport, like they were in an episode of The Last Of Us. It seems to have stemmed from an ideological conviction that the best type of government is big government, led in hangdog style by leaders who bleated unconvincingly that we were all in this together. The truth is, we weren’t.

And the Vics had it worst of all, governed as they were by a bunch of latter-day Nurse Ratcheds who were giddy with authority and, we now know, making it up as they went along.

And the arsehole wonders why golf clubs don’t want a bar of him.
Never forget.

I noticed in passing that the front page of today’s (Brisbane) Sunday Mail is a puff piece on Potato Head.

Peter Dutton Exclusive:

I HAVE A SOFTER SIDE.

I’ve made mistakes but we can still win.

Sounds like a focus group has told him his deserved reputation as a thug is holding swing voters back from embracing the LNP arm of the uniparty.
Clearly some final week reputation repair was needed.

And in more news about fairies living at the bottom of my garden, I received a pamphlet from my Deakin Greens candidate today. Bless her darling heart, Amy Mills is her name, she’s a dietitian, a disability support worker, and a renter living with a disability. She’s passionate about everything and wants lots of free stuff and publicly owned renewable energy and no more coal or gas. No mention of how anything will be financed. (Probably from the sustainable money tree!) How do people like this ever get to think they have the intellectual power or experience to become an MP?