THE moral blindness of even the supposedly conservative-friendly media has been on sad display for 24 hours in – or about – Queensland and its latest political scandal. Rendered more silly than usual by the Trudeau yips, Annastacia Palaszczuk officially opened her bizarre concentration camp in Toowoomba yesterday, hoping yet another War Leader press conference would re-endear her to a public fed up with a feigned emergency and medically worthless, capricious diktats. Accustomed to getting an easy run by the Brisbane media’s chookie-chasers, the Premier found herself being – eek! – asked a few difficult questions. Specifically, how much did the entirely obsolete “Wellcamp” cost to build, how much will it cost to run and how much did it cost to lease the land from the old money Wagner family? The government would only confirm a whopping $48.8 million was spent on capital costs for the site alone.
Safely assume, however, that Wellcamp is the biggest white elephant since Jumbo went into shock after being mortally wounded by an Ontario freight train in 1885. To bring on this much panic, the true bill must be heavenly. But put aside the criminality of a government refusing to tell taxpayers’ how it wasted their money – more or less, why parliaments exist – and even disregard Palaszczuk’s adolescent pledge that she’ll show us hers only if Scott Morrison shows us his.
Focus instead – as Sky News observers should – on Wellcamp’s inmates: the unvaccinated. Not the infected, mind you, but international travellers who have not received two (or is it three?) doses of a ‘vaccine’ whose recipients are no more likely to pass on the utterly endemic and largely harmless Omicron virus than the ‘fully vaccinated.’ One of Rita Panahi’s guests last night laughed that “only” 60 people have been accommodated at the 1000-bed facility. This demonstrated its lavishly idiotic uselessness, she argued. And she was right. But 60 is not a small number of people imprisoned by sociopaths pursuant to an epidemiological lie because they’re expendable persona non grata. That should not be a footnote to a scandal. That is the scandal.
They’ve got the same message the union movement received. Victorian health system in crisis, declares code brown, but it’s the NSW nurses that strike. Today, reports that the Victorian ambulance service in crisis with one example of a person waiting 40 minutes for a phone call back about her dying father and chronic understaffing for 10 years but again it’s the NSW paramedics that are planning to strike.
Let’s not pretend they actually represent the workers.
Most unvaccinated people would avoid coming to Australia. Just some desperate people who are reuniting with loved ones. Why would an unvaccinated tourist come here if they cannot eat in the restaurants?
Number one tourist destination in the world right now is Mexico – zero Covid restrictions or entry requirements, not even a “are you feeling crook” questionnaire.
Government spending (purportedly on behalf of us) should be made public for full scrutiny but those who for the bill. None of this ‘Commercial in Confidence’ stuff, even if it eliminates the possibilities of negotiated discounts from suppliers who don’t want a public benchmark their other customers can see. It would be cheaper for us in the line run, I’m sure.
Oh, stick it in the constitutions (state as well as federal) and then put those constitutions out of reach of MPs. The Victorian Constitution can be altered in Parliament. That bar is too low.
I wonder if they’ll come out “vaccinated”? Or having signed NDAs?
C.L., the Wagners already had plans for developing and expanding transient accommodation on their site, and have planned an Inland Rail intermodal terminal and all manner of other freight sites in that area.
Until the Feds released coof funding and guidelines for non-hotel quarantine, and Queensland.gov did the same in a panic, that facility was being held up by local and State planning processes and limitations. Quickly and cheekily whacking ‘Quarantine Facility’ onto their plans got them over the line. And as soon as this latest fit of the governmental vapours is lifted, they’ll pop the signs and temporary fencing, give the place a quick splash of disinfectant and set about renting it out to the various miners, builders, logistics companies and so forth working on various projects around the Toowoomba area.
The Wagners are neither fools nor collaborators.
Apart from that, I thoroughly agree with your last paragraph.
Hanson says she was told by Wagner that they intend to use the camp as holiday accommodation for the motor racing venue they’re planning next door
OK but I’m principally interested in the crime of incarcerating unvaccinated people for no reason just to give a ‘quarantine’ facility a nominal purpose. I haven’t criticised the Wagner family.
I suspect there’s an Alan Bond clause in the contract.
Viz: You only get one Palaszczuk in a lifetime and the Wagners have had theirs.
The Labor party allowing a wealthy family to build state infrastructure was seedy and revolting and two seconds of digging produces smoke:
Ah there we go, always with the China connection.
I think that was going to have to happen somewhere and somehow, anyway. Anna wanted one, and she’d damn well have it.
Horticulture mainly. The export market has expanded because of the airport. The wagners do sterling work, very entrepreneurial, and yes Palaszczuk is their Alan Bond.
It’s there any appetite in Queensland for bringing back an upper house? It seems an under-damped system (to use an engineering term), swinging wildly one way and then back. Good when one is in power, least when not. Are least a bicameral gives the punters some (not all as Victoria shows) power to rein in the excesses of members.