Our ‘conservative’ Prime Minister has declared war on choice:
If I hear our Prime Minister telling us about one more thing that will not be made mandatory but will be completely voluntary I might get ill. His latest chimera about choice has to do with electric cars. Our new green PM has just said that $250 million of taxpayers’ money will be spent on a subsidised electric car industry. He wants to spend this money on 50,000 charging stations within people’s homes and the like.
But he was insistent that it will not be mandatory for citizens to get electric cars – it will be up to us and our free choices. Yeah right, like our free choices about Covid vaccines ScoMo? Let me speak further to both. As to his push for electric cars, he has really been turning a bright shade of green in recent months, including his bizarre embrace of net zero. I wrote about that here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/10/19/net-zero-cop26-and-scomo/
All this stands in marked contrast to his position of just a few years ago. His 2019 election campaign comments are still fully true. He said back then that Labor’s push for new electric vehicle (EV) technology was a declaration of war against the weekend: “I tell ya what, its not gonna tow your trailer. It’s not gonna tow your boat. It’s not gonna get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family. Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles.”
But now he has become a green zealot, trying to outdo Labor. And he insists that his new push for electric vehicles will all be a matter of choice: “We are not going to tell them what to buy or what to drive or where they can’t drive, we aren’t going to tell them how to live their lives and interfere in their way of life, we’re not going to put their petrol prices up to make them buy electric vehicles, do anything like that.”
Um, after saying the same thing about the vaxx, I am not at all reassured. Indeed, as ScoMo gets more and more green, you can be sure that what is a choice today will become compulsory tomorrow. This is exactly where all this is heading. What is going on with the guy?
As Andrew Bolt has asked, what happened to Scott Morrison? He seems to have gone walkabout. There used to be a politician by that name who was more or less conservative. But now we have some guy using his name who seems to be someone who was smuggled in from the Greens. This is not the ‘miracle man’ that voters elected in 2019.
The Libs had won several federal elections by simply showing how loopy Labor and the Greens were with their policies on climate change and the like. Voters wanted sensible and workable policies that did not kill jobs and the economy. Yet now ScoMo seems to have gone full circle, and is competing with Labor for his green credentials.
And the truth is, electric cars today are far too expensive for most Australians to afford. EVs are around four per cent of the world car market right now (one per cent in Australia). So it will take a lot of incentives to get folks to make the switch. But these incentives will increasingly penalise those who are hesitant – just like our vaccination incentives (more on that in a moment).
And will this radical change even be feasible? Imagine all these households plugging in every night to an already overloaded electricity grid. It is all a big ask, and like his net zero campaign, he is wanting us to put our money into something that is speculative at best as to whether it will even work. And 70% of our electricity is coal based anyway!
But sure, some will benefit financially – big time. It will be a jackpot for carmakers who will be happy for us to junk millions and millions of cars running on petrol and diesel and be forced to buy these new EVs. They will be laughing all the way to the bank.
As to vaxx choice – what choice? Jab or job is what we now have in most states. Either get the jab no matter how hesitant you might be about it, or be prepared to lose your job, your livelihood, your ability to feed your family, and your ability to exercise basic human rights.
Vaccine apartheid (the word means ‘separate development’) is now alive and well in Australia. And ScoMo promised us that it would be totally voluntary – no coercion at all. Yet he is allowing folks like Dan Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk to make it very much mandatory.
We already know Dictator Dan is insisting on a two-tiered society, with the new Jews or the new lepers being the unvaxxed. He wants this diabolical discrimination to continue indefinitely. He is quite happy to strip tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of citizens of their most basic human rights and freedoms.
And the Queensland government has just announced similar sorts of things:
Unvaccinated Queenslanders will no longer be able to dine in a restaurant, socialise at the pub or attend a match of footy from December 17 or when the Sunshine State reaches 80 per cent double-dose vaccination coverage, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has announced. Ms Palaszczuk on Tuesday morning told a press conference that residents who have rolled up their sleeves for two coronavirus jabs will be “rewarded” as the state prepares to open up to COVID-hit parts of the country just in time for Christmas. https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/coronavirus/unvaccinated-queenslanders-will-be-unable-to-attend-restaurants-pubs-stadiums-from-december-17-or-80-per-cent-doubledose/news-story/a39a361cc308efd0ca3ed051f893f901
Rewards for some mean punishments for others. Yet I hear brainless politicians and media reporters speaking about how voluntary all this is, as they speak of ‘encouragements’ to get the jab. Um no, this is not encouragement or choice, this is bullying, intimidation, coercion and manipulation.
And that, according to the Federal Government Department of Health’s own Australian Immunisation Handbook is strictly forbidden. This is what it says about vaccinations and informed consent: “It must be given voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation” (emphasis mine).
Preventing people from various forms of employment, travel, education and consumer activity sure as heck is not about choice: it is using undue pressure, coercion or manipulation. And you can be sure that in Queen Palaszczuk‘s Queensland it is not just a matter of no longer being able to go to the pub. Such discrimination will likely expand much further in the days ahead.
James Macpherson said this about her announcement today:
Is freedom an inalienable right or is it a “reward” given by governments to compliant people? Listening to Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk today, one could be forgiven for thinking human rights were hers to give, and hers to take away….
It is astonishing to me that Australian politicians can speak in this authoritarian tone and receive, as if their due, nothing but approving nods from the press gallery. Brisbane? Beijing? What’s the difference these days? Not much evidently.
If vaccinated people “deserve” basic freedoms then, by implication, the 20% of Queenslanders who are not vaccinated, are undeserving. Think about that. If a perfectly healthy person has decided — for whatever reason – that they don’t want to be vaccinated, they are now deemed undeserving of basic rights we all took for granted less than two years ago. https://spectator.com.au/2021/11/isnt-freedom-an-inalienable-right-rather-than-a-reward/
States all over the country are demanding that fewer and fewer jobs are open to these lepers, and plenty of businesses are happily going along with this. And if they are not happy, it is because they too are being coerced: they must either sack all the recalcitrants and/or deny the lepers access to their goods and services, or face massive fines and other punishments.
So much for freedom of choice. So much for no coercion, no compulsion, no enforcement and no mandates. Where is ScoMo in all this? Complete silence. He is missing in action.
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