I reckon there's gonna be some turncoats and backflippers and we get a skinnier Dan back in paying $2.95What sort of markets are we seeing with the bookies where a Labor majority v minority is concerned ? Any arbitrage opportunities ?
I reckon there's gonna be some turncoats and backflippers and we get a skinnier Dan back in paying $2.95What sort of markets are we seeing with the bookies where a Labor majority v minority is concerned ? Any arbitrage opportunities ?
In a series of campaign ads attacking the Coalition, the Labor Party accused Opposition Leader Matthew Guy of cutting $1bn of funding from the state’s health sector.If there's any dribbling in this thread, that bulk of it is coming from yourself and Bengal.
But according to ABC Fact Check, these claims are completely false – health spending under the previous Coalition government actually increased and Mr Guy has never held the position of health Minister.
Just the ABC showing their right wing bias.
DS
Right wing ,l rarely watch the ABC ,but from what lve seen it's mainly left wing.Just the ABC showing their right wing bias.
DS
Right wing ,l rarely watch the ABC ,but from what lve seen it's mainly left wing.
Fair enough,l will be more interested in how big the back lash against Andrews will be.In terms of the ABC, I think pendulum has swung too far. I think it was a marginally left leaning, and now it is defintiely right. It constantly references conservative positions but doesn't critique those often. Whereas it labours (no pun intended) the point on left wing issues - particularly news and current affairs programs. Lifestyle shows outside of these tend to be more left in my opinion (eg You can't ask that type programming).
In full disclosure, I'll be voting left this weekend, and did in the last Federal election, but generally sit as close to the middle as I can. No party gets my vote in both upper and lower houses. I like the upper house being a house of review, and you can't get that without a government minority in that house.
Most people have different experience relating to lock downs ,my family is lucky we have quite a bit of land in the country,our only real problem was getting toilet paper ,but also being unable to go into metro Melbourne was a problem a few times,although Metro people didn't seem to have a problem shopping in Ballarat ,,so much for the ring of steel.For example, look at this "Fact check"
I read this and think, the facts state this is wrong. But they're being very guarded in actually saying it is. Very much erring on the side of cautious.
We fact checked Matthew Guy's claims about lockdowns in Melbourne. Here's what we found
The Victorian Opposition says Melbourne has "the dubious distinction" of being locked up longer than any other city during the pandemic, but such comparisons are far from straightforward.www.abc.net.au
The claim
As Victoria's first election since the pandemic rapidly approaches, state Opposition Leader Matthew Guy has for months fought to keep the 262 days Melbourne spent under strict stay-at-home orders fresh in voters' minds.
On March 14, he issued a media release that argued small business owners had been "smashed with [Premier Daniel Andrews's] world record 262 days of lockdown".
In an October 30 media statement and November 5 Facebook post, he similarly claimed that Victorian kids had been through "the world's longest lockdown".
The Liberal Party launched a campaign imploring voters not to let Mr Andrews "get away with it", making several bold claims on its putlaborlast.com website.
"While the whole of Victoria suffered, Melbourne had the dubious distinction of becoming the most locked-down city in the world," it said.
So, was Melbourne really the world's most locked-down city?
RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
The verdict
Mr Guy's claim is not clear cut.
Notwithstanding the difficulty in comparing lockdowns in different metropolitan areas around the world, Melbourne does not hold the record for the most days spent under strict stay-at-home pandemic restrictions.
Iquique, in Chile, spent more days locked down in aggregate, suffering through 287 days of restrictions compared with Melbourne's 262.
Melbourne's longest single lockdown lasted 111 days. In Buenos Aires, residents were forced to spend 234 consecutive days at home.(ABC News: John Graham/Reuters: Matias Baglietto)
Looking at the longest continuous efforts, Buenos Aires spent 234 consecutive days locked down compared to Melbourne's stretches of 111 and 77 days.
At various times, Mr Guy singled out the plight of Victoria's school students.
However, millions of children in Manila, in the Philippines, spent more than 450 days under stay-at-home restrictions during 2020 and 2021. Other groups were similarly locked down, including over-65s and anyone who lived with them.
Meanwhile, many of the nation's schools suspended in-person classes for more than two years.
Importantly, a lack of internationally comparable data at the city level or lower makes it impossible to say definitively which city or population weathered the strictest conditions for the most time.
A numbers problem?
While Mr Guy claimed that Melbourne had been through the world's longest lockdown, such comparisons are far from straightforward.
For one thing, there is no universal definition of what constitutes a "lockdown".
So-called "stay-at-home orders" can offer a useful proxy, though rules vary between countries and are just one element of pandemic restrictions.
Countries also adopt very different strategies for targeting their lockdowns.
Some may impose them on small (including densely populated) parts of a city, for example, while others may apply different rules to different populations within the community.
There are also subjective questions to consider, such as whether (and to what extent) the duration of restrictions matters more than their severity, or whether consecutive stretches matter more than cumulative days.
And then there are the data limitations.
The executive director of Oxford University's COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, Toby Philips, previously told Fact Check that his team maintained "the most comprehensive data source in the world on COVID-19 pandemic policy".
But he said it was "literally impossible" to prove from this which city had been through the world's longest lockdown, in part due to the tracker's focus on national rather than local restrictions.
What about China?
China provides a useful case study for illustrating these complexities.
It has imposed numerous whole-city lockdowns — most notably in Wuhan and, more recently, Shanghai — while also adopting a more localised approach of "closed management" for neighbourhoods and apartment buildings.
As academics writing for The Conversation explained in 2020, there were two types of closed management: a strict form that prevented residents from leaving home, and a looser version that allowed movement but with 24/7 entry checkpoints on buildings.
More recently, BBC reporters have noted the difficulty in tracking China's localised restrictions over time, in part due to evolving official terminology.
They said the current phase in 2022, known as "scientific and precise dynamic zero", is about avoiding city-wide lockdowns and instead "responding more dynamically depending on what the situation requires".
"But on the ground, it just looks and feels like a series of endless lockdowns."
The article adds: "Several lockdowns announced by local officials were, in fact, missing from Beijing's daily announcements in March and April [2022] — including one in Shenzhen which confined 17 million to their homes for a week."
According to a separate BBC report, residents in the city of Chongqing were told to stay home despite there being no official announcement.
How long was Melbourne 'locked down'?
Melbourne does not hold the record for the most days spent under strict stay-at-home pandemic restrictions.(ABC News: Scott Jewell)
Fact Check last broached this topic in October 2021, finding that Melbourne had spent a total of 262 days under strict stay-at-home restrictions.
This tally covers six separate stretches between March 31, 2020, and October 21, 2021, and excludes 19 days of "soft" lockdown, when the rules allowed groups of five people to "visit friends, family and loved ones" in their homes.
Victoria as a whole was also locked down at various times, though to a lesser extent than the capital.
Since restrictions in Melbourne were eased on October 21, 2021, they have not returned.
Was it really the world record?
While Melbourne had 262 days of lockdowns, the Chilean port city of Iquique suffered through 287.(Lucianoan / Flickr CC BY 2.0)
When it came to consecutive days under strict stay-at-home rules, Fact Check found that Melbourne was outdone by the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires.
Melbourne's longest single lockdown lasted 111 days. Ten months after it ended, in October 2020, it suffered through another 77 days.
In Buenos Aires, however, residents were forced to spend 234 consecutive days at home between March and November 2020 (and 245 days in total).
That included periods during which outdoor exercise was banned entirely and children were not allowed outside for several weeks.
Nor did Melbourne clinch the record for cumulative days, with the Chilean city of Iquique clocking up more time under stay-at-home orders.
Compared to Melbourne's 262 days, Iquique's residents endured 287 days of lockdown, comprising 241 days of "quarantine" and 46 days of "transition".
Quarantine meant only leaving home for essential reasons, with shopping trips limited to twice per week and permits required for dog walks. Transition kept the same rules in place, but only on weekends.
It's worth noting that the Chilean government introduced a "mobility pass" from May 23, 2021, which granted more freedoms to fully vaccinated residents.
This would have affected some residents of Iquique during the final 12 days of the city's lockdowns, but it does not change the outcome relative to Melbourne.
Data from Oxford University's tracker indicates that, like Australia, Chile and Argentina have since left lockdowns behind as a way to tackle the pandemic.
How much do cities matter?
As Fact Check has also previously highlighted, in some places certain populations were locked down for longer than cities as a whole.
In the Philippines, many adults aged over 65 years, children under 15 and people with "health risks" — plus anyone who lived with them — were under stay-at-home orders for more than 450 days during 2020 and 2021.
This applied to residents of Manila. According to the 2020 national census, the national capital region was home to 4.3 million children and seniors.
Notably, Mr Guy singled out the hardship faced by Victorian students, who he said experienced "up to 171 days of lost learning during Daniel Andrews' record breaking lockdowns".
Fact check: Most locked-down cities
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg says Melbourne is the world's most locked-down city. Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
Read more
Putting aside the fact that Melbourne's schools continued to offer remote learning during lockdowns, that figure would represent roughly 34 weeks of class learning out of a typical 40-week school year.
By contrast, schools across the Philippines were closed for more than two years.
Schools shut their doors in March 2020 and, according to the World Bank's director of Education Global Practice, just one per cent of them had reopened by November 2021.
Physical classes did not resume for most schools until August 2022, and even then roughly half were still conducting a mix of in-person and online learning.
The claim
Victorian Labor has warned voters to brace for budget cuts if the Coalition wins the November 24 state election, with accusations the former government slashed health spending during its term.
Claiming cuts were "in the Liberals' DNA", Health Minister Jill Hennessy released a statement on October 12, 2018 which said that "the Victorian Liberals cut a billion dollars from health when they were last in office".
The following week she repeated the charge:
The verdict
Ms Hennessy is wrong.
Under the Coalition, health spending grew from $7.4 billion in 2009-10 to $8.7 billion in 2014-15.
The average annual increase over the five years was $264 million, while the cumulative extra spending over the period was $4.1 billion.
Did the Victorian Coalition cut a billion dollars from health when it was last in government?(ABC Radio Perth: Emma Wynne)
These figures factor in the effects of inflation in the health sector and refer to spending on both recurrent health services and one-off capital expenditure in the health portfolio.
They also show health spending grew faster than population growth.
Ms Hennessy's office provided Fact Check with figures summarising the projected effects of savings measures announced by the Coalition.
But these numbers, drawn from the state budget papers, do not show what was actually spent.
And while Labor's figures illustrate Coalition efforts to reduce expenditure in some areas of the health portfolio, they do not acknowledge new spending measures announced at the same time.
Tony Abbott cut a lot of funding during his time ,but the Victorian libs did spend 264million extra a year during their time,and did have a lot more planned to be spent pre election ,l don't see the cuts ,lm sure the health spending would of been even bigger had that Abbott *smile* not made so many health cuts.This is the thing with stats, they can be used for whatever point you want to make.
"Technically", the claim is false in broad terms, but the claim could also be basing this on a per capita spend.
For example, we can try and work out what spending "should" be on things like healthcare right. The ABS have all the stats.
So starting point is the start of the 2009-10 year (so June 2009 data).
The population of VIC was 5,371,934 and according to your article (I haven't checked these numbers), the amount spent on healthcare was $7.4bn, so thats essentially a per capita spend of $1,377.53 per capita.
By the end of 2014-15 (again data supplied above), it says that has been raised to $8.7bn refuting the claim that healthcare spending has reduced. The population at that time was 6,022,322, again as per ABS data. This changes the per capita spending to $1,444.63 per capita. That increase from 2009-10 on a per capita spend was $67.10 or 4.9% across a 6 year time span, which works out at a CAGR of around 0.8% per year which on the face of it appears low for inflation.
So again I went to the ABS data, I couldn't find the VIC specific data on health but across Australia as a whole the index moved from a score of 89.3 to 118.3 across the same timespan, or around 32.5%, around about a CAGR of 5.4% for health based inflation per year, a heck of a lot higher than the rate that we just measured spending to have increased by.
Using the ABS data of 32.5%, if spending had continued on a per capita basis at the specific health specific inflation rate, then that would have increased spending to $1,825.23 per capita, far higher than the $1,444.63 / capita we calculated above based on the spend of $8.7bn. In fact if you factor the per capita spending that inflation suggests it should be, that would mean that spending should have increased to a smidge under $11bn, compared to the $8.7bn quoted in your article, an underspend of around $2.3bn / year.
I'm not claiming he was, and I don't vote anyway (I've been very slack with doing my citizenship - I should get on and do it this year, its not like I've been here for a 3rd of my life haha).Tony Abbott cut a lot of funding during his time ,but the Victorian libs did spend 264million extra a year during their time,and did have a lot more planned to be spent pre election ,l don't see the cuts ,lm sure the health spending would of been even bigger had that Abbott *smile* not made so many health cuts.
BTW Guy was not health minister ,although Labors ad's try and make out he was.
No that wasn't aimed at you,,the thing is l don't see Labor disputing the RMIT ABC claims,and health spending did increase 264 million each year.I'm not claiming he was, and I don't vote anyway (I've been very slack with doing my citizenship - I should get on and do it this year, its not like I've been here for a 3rd of my life haha).
They definitely got that wrong, but the ABC did what I (as a person that works directly in corporate analytics), a pretty *smile* poor attempt at "fact checking"
I think there's no doubt there'll be some backlash against lockdowns. That's s trend we've seen, even in locations where the lockdowns/restrictions have been negligible. Most governments have felt this.Fair enough,l will be more interested in how big the back lash against Andrews will be.
Most people have different experience relating to lock downs ,my family is lucky we have quite a bit of land in the country,our only real problem was getting toilet paper ,but also being unable to go into metro Melbourne was a problem a few times,although Metro people didn't seem to have a problem shopping in Ballarat ,,so much for the ring of steel.
I think were he will get a lot of back lash from the lock downs will be the Metro area ,l know of a few families who live in units and small houses ,and they said it was the hardest thing they had ever done,it was really hard mentally .
I think the country areas will still vote against him because of the lock downs but they will vote against him because of his lack of spending ,Metro will be the one how much back lash does Andrews get ,l expect a lot.
Seriously ,you are blaming the Libs for disharmony during covid in Victoria WOW,it had nothing to do with all the restrictions,and some of them were ridiculous ,and it had nothing to do with the way the restriction laws where implemented by the police,and the snap lock downs that didn't cause disharmony .I think there's no doubt there'll be some backlash against lockdowns. That's s trend we've seen, even in locations where the lockdowns/restrictions have been negligible. Most governments have felt this.
My issue was the mainstream media's portrayal of ALP state government v conservative governments. The backlash is no doubt higher in those states because of mainstream media.
I'm voting against the Libs because of their politicisation of the covid controls. I'll never forgive the seeds of disharmony that were sown in the cheap chase for votes. There were much more constructive ways to have objected and challenged Andrews. They chose not to.
The entire Lib leadership needs to go in this state, as they have no talent and that's bad for us all. Without a viable opposition, we're very likely to get an out of control government. I don't think Andrews is that bad in comparison. He gets *smile* done. He's borrowed to do infrastructure at a time interest rates are low, like most of the world has. He's also had to do this, because of inadequate distribution of taxes to Victoria. Morrison knew part of his appeal was his big build. Hamstringing the big build with specific grants and underfunding our state was deliberate.
Andrews has not been squeaky clean with how he's gone about it opening up the criticism of impropriety, but the investigations have come up empty. I believe they're largely politically driven as a result.
No doubt he's not everyone's cup of tea. But it's also just what happens to long-term governments.I've said from the start, Labor will get back in on but will lose seats. Regardless of being right or wrong I think the smugness of Andrews has rubbed people the wrong way.