Sloppy thinking about vaccine mandates

John Quiggin43 Comments

Michelle Grattan has an uncharacteristically sloppy piece in The Conversation about vaccine mandates. It reads as if she’s chatted to some people in the government,then phoned in an article reflecting their confused position. Among the most notable failings

First after mentioning the decision by canning company SPC to require vaccination for its employees, she says, of other firms that might follow suit:

But the legal position is unclear. In the absence of a public health order, they would be relying on directions to employees being judged lawful and reasonable. Inevitably there would be court challenges

Grattan ignores the point raised by SPC, that if an employee caught the virus at worked and died, the directors would be open to criminal prosecution for manslaughter. On the face of it, that’s a bigger problem than an unfair dismissal action, and a fairly conclusive defence for any company imposing a mandate (other than on remote workers). Maybe there’s a counterpoint, but Grattan (in common with a fair bit of commentary that seems to be based on info from the same sources)ignores it.

Then she says

It is not as simple as “no jab no pay” for the vaccination of children, which only denies government benefits. In the COVID case we’re talking, in the extreme, about people’s access to jobs and livelihoods.

She appears not to have kept up with the shift to “no jab no play” laws which excludes unvaccinated children from kindergarten

Grattan concludes that “Incentives may be helpful, although they shouldn’t be as expensive or extensive as Anthony Albanese’s $300 for everyone vaccinated.” No basis is given for this judgement. If we accept estimates that the Sydney lockdown is costing $1 billion a week, Albanese’s policy would only need to save six weeks of lockdown in one big state to be justified. Again, there may be an argument but “that’s what people in the government are saying” isn’t one.

As I said at the start, Grattan is usually better than this. Let’s hope for quick return to form.

Recipe for a one-term government

John Quiggin2 Comments

Labor’s capitulation on tax policy may help them regain government, but what then?

That’s the headline and standfirst for my latest piece in Inside Story. Key paras

What can be said with more certainty is that, even if Labor wins the 2022 election, its capitulation on tax policy will make holding office for more than one term very difficult. The concession on negative gearing, while regrettable, was mainly symbolic. The lost revenue could be made up in other ways, or else with tolerance of a modestly higher budget deficit.

But the tax cuts are big. They will cost the budget around $15 billion in their first year of operation and the cost will rise steadily after that. That’s more than the entire annual value of the spending commitments Labor took to the 2019 election, which would have reached $11 billion in 2022–23, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office.

In other words, to offset this concession, Labor would need to abandon its entire program, and then find even more savings.

Government reliance on army for lockdowns a weak move

John Quiggin4 Comments

That’s the headline from an article I published in Independent Australia last week. Apparently, rather than offer a serious response to the unfolding disaster, Berejklian and Morrison intend to send in more troops.

Opening para

The incapacity of NSW Premier Gladys Berejklian’s “gold standard” Government to contain the latest outbreak of COVID-19 has become a political liability for Prime Minister Scott Morrison. So, as has become standard in such situations, Morrison called in the army, offering 300 troops for what was described as a “crackdown” on compliance with COVID-19 regulations.

The practical impact of this deployment is virtually zero. The NSW Police Force has over 18,000 officers along with thousands of other employees who could assist with many of the routine tasks involved in compliance checking.

Lonesome George

John Quiggin17 Comments

With the closure of Catallaxy, this blog is now pretty much the last remnant of what was once called Ozplogistan – the Australian political blogosphere, which was, for a while, a serious alternative to the political journalism of the mainstream media.

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Obituary for Catallaxy

John Quiggin36 Comments

On a chance visit to Catallaxyfiles.com the other day, I found an announcement that the site was closing. It’s now apparently inaccessible, but there’s an archive at the National Library.

As the era of blogging draws to end, this departure is worth noting

Catallaxyfiles was started by Jason Soon in the earliest days of Australian blogging. Jason was soon joined by Andrew Norton, who still has a blog of his own It was one of the first sites I linked to i I started this blog in 2002. Jason and Andrew were and thoughtful people, inclined to the classical liberal version of libertarianism, but not dogmatic about it. We had lots of interesting discussions – here are the results of a search “https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=johnquiggin.com+jason+soon

Catallaxy declined rapidly after Jason and Andrew left, but until about 2012 I still engaged with them. But after one such exchange got out of control, we agreed to leave each other alone.  Occasional subsequent visits have confirmed me in the view that this was the right thing to do.

Catallaxy was an early example of the decline of libertarianism into what we can now call Trumpism.  By the end, the comments threads and quite a few of the posts were a toxic mix of racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories comparable to Sky After Dark or even Alex Jones

Catallaxy outlived its usefulness by quite a few years. But it was once a valuable contributor to Australia’s intellectual life, as was the early flowering of blogs in general. One day, perhaps, that will return.

Repubs retreating from anti-vaxerism

John Quiggin9 Comments

A funny thing happened in the culture wars the other day. After taking steadily more extreme anti-vaccination positions over many months, leading rightwing commentators and Republican politicanss suddenly jumped ship, announcing that everyone should be vaccinated as soon as possible.

It would be encouraging to imagine that this shift was the result of a recognition of the surge in cases and deaths among the (predominantly Republican) unvaccinated population, and of the dangers posed by the Delta variant. But that explanation seems implausible, given that the same politicians and commentators watched half a million Americans die and opposed every conceivable measure that might reduce the death toll.

It seems even more unlikely that this shift is a response to the efforts of the Biden Administration to pressure organizations like Fox News into a more sensible position. The whole raison d’etre of the rightwing media is to ‘own the libs’. Rejecting such pressure and boasting about it would be par for the course.

A more plausible explanation is that Republicans have realised that, at least at the national level, this is a culture war that they can’t win, or even play out long enough to mobilise voters for an election win. The critical problem is that the vaccination debate no longer fits the standard culture war playbook in which an easily demonised outgroup is imposing their way of life on ordinary (that is, white, heterosexual and Christian) decent Americans.

Campaigns of this kind can naturally be presented in terms of the preservation of liberty not liberty in any abstract or universal sense, but the specific liberties of the dominant group to do things as they have always done them, whatever the effects on others.


As the proportion of American adults who have received at least one shot creeps towards 70 per cent, the proportion likely to join a fight against vaccine mandates declines.In particular, the old, who are normally the most reliable recruits for the culture war, are also the most vulnerable to Covid-19, with the result that their vaccination rates are close to 100 per cent

A final, but essential, factor is that Donald Trump has stayed on the sidelines. The development of vaccines was one of the few genuine success stories of his Administration, and he has shown himself unwilling to undermine it. As a result, Republicans who break ranks with the dominant anti-vax position are unlikely to suffer the consequences that would result from appearing on Trump’s list of enemies.

Sandpit

John Quiggin19 Comments

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

To be clear, the sandpit is for regular commenters to pursue points that distract from regular discussion, including conspiracy-theoretic takes on the issues at hand. It’s not meant as a forum for visiting conspiracy theorists, or trolls posing as such.