Australian Senator Tim Ayres insults Australians and denies reality in excess deaths debate.
Australian Senator Tim Ayres insults Australians and denies reality in excess deaths debate.
Welcome article for new readers: battlefield philosophy and my articles summarised
Support ExcessDeathsAU with a small one-off donation (Ko-Fi)
ExcessDeathsAU has been banned from social media: I rely on you to share articles
Firstly, I want to congratulate Senator Babet for his tenacity in finally passing an enquiry into excess deaths in Australia. Supported on the day by Senator Rennick in the debate, well done.
Overseas readers, if you are unfamiliar with Senator Rennick, strap in for what was, in my opinion, the best speech in modern Australian history.
(Relatedly, Senator Rennick has quite a few admirers in the US):
Regarding the current excess deaths enquiry vote that just passed the Australian senate, you can read more details about it here and here. Who voted how (it was along party lines) and some background.
As others have stated, this was not the first iteration of this vote. Last year after the defeated votes I contacted many of the senate offices by phone, and one of my readers contacted all the Senators who voted ‘no’ to the enquiry via email.
It was an exercise in frustration, humiliation and futility, and was another nail in the coffin of my belief in political engagement. You can read about their responses here:
While many have been ‘celebrating’ the ‘win’ in the Senate, in my usual fashion I went to the Hansard1 to see what the debate was like on the day of the vote. I wanted to see what the government opinion was of those who say that excess deaths should be investigated.
What I saw were statements by Australian Labor Politician Senator Tim Ayres (representing the Albanese government - overseas readers, this is the current Prime Minister) that were so insulting to the people and so in denial of reality that I was actually embarrassed for him.
Before I copy his statement in full, please see prior articles. The ABS has fiddled around with the numbers and baselines since I published many of the articles but they were true at time of publication and are now part of the historical record. I have to do this because the government refuses to.
Of course, the government will never accept any information that does not come from Jane Halton or her husband at the ABS because anyone questioning this situation has ‘doctorates from Corn Flake packets’ and are fooled by ‘deepfakes from antidemocratic countries’ like ‘jackboot far-right extremists from the 1940s handing out leaflets from their lonely garage’ (see below transcript).
Oh by the way for all the new government minders reading, I published Australia’s Novavax vaccine contracts (I can print out leaflets if you want):
Just dropping this for Senator Rennick in case he is reading (get the ASIO guy back in the chair that is the correct energy):
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/chamber/hansards/27574/toc_pdf/Senate_2024_02_08.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf
p. 128 - start of Sen. Ayres’ statement. Copied in full. No omissions.
Senator AYRES (New South Wales—Assistant Minister for Trade and Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) (17:07): I just indicate that the government does not support this motion. In fact, much of what sits behind this motion is an assertion that there is data that is unavailable to the public—that there is data that, for all sorts of motivations that are impugned by the characters who share this sort of stuff on social media, has not been made available, for all sorts of nefarious purposes.
For the people who spend a lot of time in this place late in the evening on the socials posting thing that are true and things that are untrue, often with a disregard for evidence, science and the institutions that are there to analyse and disseminate the data—of course, I'm sure that there are some people who do that who honestly believe what it is that they say. There are probably a few of those. There are some who know it not to be true but say it anyway because it's a well-worn tactic of people who seek to propagate radical right-wing extremism.
There are some who've gone through a bit of a journey themselves who started doing it for those reasons—that is, they latched onto these things as a way of organising the maximum possible position for their political position even if they were things they knew to be untrue, and they have subsequently, in a process of self-radicalisation, begun to believe that they are true. I've seen some evidence of that in this place. It's the kind of process that we've seen in many parts of the world with this kind of conspiracy-theory thinking, bereft of the benefits of the last few centuries of scientific discovery since the Enlightenment and using those for a very narrow, very nasty set of organising propositions.
Where there is an event like a global pandemic, it is of course a frightening event. The Spanish flu caused untold misery, untold deaths around the world. There were 19 million deaths in Europe—more than the Great War. In the history of my family in this country, in the space of one week in the town of Uralla, a relative of mine, his daughter and his granddaughter all died of the Spanish flu in their home. It's not imaginable for us here in Australia, where we have the benefits of a health system and we have the state and Commonwealth governments working—not perfectly, but working—to deal with the challenge. People are able to attend hospitals. But remember the beginning of the COVID pandemic. There was no certainty that a vaccine would be developed in time, and people were frightened.
Some people in the political system, of course, where they see fear see opportunity. Where they see a capacity to divide people, to isolate them and to frighten them, that is an opportunity. We've seen that in other phases of our history. It will happen again. It certainly happened around the COVID-19 crisis. Some of the things that were being shared on social media in particular were the preserve of the funny characters you would find, when I was growing up in country New South Wales, in the League of Rights. They were the far-right organisation. They made efforts at organising. They made efforts at incursions into political parties. They did their best. They were the jackboot crowd in regional New South Wales and regional Queensland in particular. They'd be handing out the little leaflets outside the show or outside the markets.
Senator Dean Smith interjecting—
Senator AYRES: Where there were bookshops, occasionally they would be found, Senator Smith; that's right. It would be all of the conspiracy theory stuff of the age—much of it with an antisemitic overtone, I have to say. Very regrettably, they were Australians who did not understand the moral weight of what it is they were doing. We laughed at those characters because they were isolated and all they could do was hand out something that they had run off on the Gestetner in some lonely garage somewhere and post it around through Australia Post. They would be there at those events.
I have to tell you as an aside, colleagues, that the Glen Innes Show is on this weekend. It's where I grew up. It's a fantastic agricultural show. I urge Senator Scarr and Senator Rennick and others making their way back to Queensland to do it by road, go through Glen Innes and see the Glen Innes Show and Mayor Banham.
Senator Scarr: Are you in the woodchopping competition?
Senator AYRES: I am not going to be in the woodchopping competition. I'm not going to be in the bull riding.
Senator Dean Smith interjecting—
Senator AYRES: I won't be in the smash-up derby either. I will be in none of these things, partly because I—
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Sterle): Sorry, Minister; just resume your seat. Senator Rennick?
Senator Rennick: I have a point of order on relevance. I think we've got someone filibustering for time here. Can we stay on topic, please?
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Rennick, there is absolutely no point of order. If I could impose that penalty, I'd be looking a lot younger after the years I've been in here and what I've listened to. Minister, you have the call.
Senator AYRES: And we would have all gone home quite some time ago if Senator Sterle were really in charge of the timing of these things. But it's a fantastic show.
Just to make my friend Senator Rennick happy, my point, of course, is that times have changed. It's no longer the preserve of people handing out little roneoed notes distributed from some garage somewhere in the League of Rights headquarters or wherever. Anything can be said on social media. We see deepfake material being sent out. We see assertions being made which sound true but are in fact not true. Things are generated overseas in countries that don't have the best interests of Australians or Australia at heart, in antidemocratic countries, in countries with which we don't share values—adversaries, in fact. Meme factories are generating what I understand are called bots, which share the material on and share the material on—material that is completely untrue. But, if you follow the line from that material back to the antisemitic, nasty conspiracy theory stuff that was being shared by the League of Rights crowd and others, it's a pretty straight line.
And what is it that it's our responsibility in this place to do? It is to tell the truth, to support the science, to make sure that governments and this place act with transparency, to do it with confidence and to not be distracted by the efforts of some—not just on the crossbench but within the opposition parties here—who seek to take the utterly rational questions, apprehensions and fears that ordinary Australians of course have when there is an event like a global pandemic. There's a pretty close relationship between pandemic denialism, assertions about vaccines, assertions about the availability of information, and climate denialism, quite frankly. It is all in the same continuum of political activity. I know that on the other side many good people—I wouldn't vote for them in a pink fit, but there are many good people—are doing their best to stand up against this kind of conduct. I'm just saying that now is the time to be firm and resolute. Don't be worried about your preselections. Don't be worried about the hard Right. Don't be worried about the thuggery. Assert what is in the public interest and what is in the national interest.
The truth here is that the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects all of this data, mortality statistics and all the related data in Australia, and there are regular publications of that data. Provisional mortality reports are published monthly and every second month, as a way of updating the data in the most transparent way possible. Deaths in Australia are updated annually, and excess mortality reports are published twice-yearly.
Now, any person, any researcher, has access to that data. The trick, of course, with data is you've got to have the skills, you've got to have the academic background, you've got to have the research capacity to be able to interpret it intelligently, to analyse it properly and to report on it in a way that is true and ends up being truthful. And that is one of the problems here. You can take any bit of data and produce the kind of material that is being generated by some of those on the other side of this argument.
It's published online. It is available to every Australian. It's used by researchers, government departments and agencies like the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and it's reported in reputable publications, by actual academic journals that have standards—where people require doctorates not out of Corn Flakes packets but from reputable universities—and they provide analysis that should guide public policy making. Where there are problems, they should be transparent. But that's what should guide public policy making.
In their analysis, the ABS have compared the number of deaths which have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic to the number of deaths expected based on historical trends and adjusted population changes. It includes deaths from all causes, not only those related to COVID-19. While death rates and causes of death are key indicators of the health status of a population, it's important to remember, of course, that behind every death sits a personal tragedy. Behind that sits, very often, misery for a family, and they should not be the subject of political manipulation and grandstanding and nasty—
(End transcript).
My fellow Australians, I regret to inform you that this is what the government thinks of you and anyone who questions the narrative. Right now, we are being murdered while the Prime Minister parties at TayTay and Katie Perry.
February 24, 2024. Archive article.
Evidence of Australia’s Prime Minister being a Swiftie has been revealed in a video of Anthony Albanese ‘shaking it off’ alongside his Perth-based fiancée at a Taylor Swift concert in Sydney.
In the video shared to TikTok on Saturday, Albanese is seen showing off his dance moves to one of Swift’s hit songs on Friday night.
Anthony Albanese was among an array of political elites invited to an Australian billionaire's VIP party that included a private performance by Katy Perry.
Epilogue
Overseas readers - this is the name of our Parlimentary transcript system
It is disheartening in the extreme to see governments getting away with sweeping under the rug all the glaring evidence of murderous corruption. Where does hope live, at this point, I wonder every day.
I'm guessing none of the new government minders are paid subscribers, another great summary as always 🙏