Stephen Andrew statement on supply chains
The world’s supply chains are imploding and the global elites couldn’t be happier. The global shipping industry is in chaos, beset on all sides by government restrictions and regulations, surging fuel costs, ongoing labour change issues, and costly port delays. The result has been a stratospheric rise in freight rates.
The cost of shipping a container on popular trading routes like the one between China and Europe has soared 840%, with the cost of containers from China to the US jumping from $US1,500 to $US25,000.
In Australia, shipping companies are charging $8,000 per container for shipping to Australia, against $1,370 a year ago.
As one industry forum said “shippers are facing a “meltdown” with rates in the stratosphere, slots up for auction and service performance in the trash”.
“What none of the industry metrics show are the huge numbers of shipments not being moved – boxes left on the quay, stacked in the terminal or stockpiled in export warehouses awaiting a slot”.
Last month, the carrier ONE announced a string of port omissions for Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, citing the need for schedule recovery, and costly port delays. Australian meat exporters are reporting 10 day delays to secure containers for their shipments. Australian grain farmers are even worse off, with many failing to meet contractual obligations, due to schedules being regularly cancelled by shipping lines.
According to the F&TA, “three of our members collectively paid in excess of $US117,000 in contract breaches in the past three months alone … because low-paying cargo, such as grain, is getting bumped-off vessels at transhipment ports for higher-paying priority cargo”.
There is no incentive for the shipping carriers to move grain which could lead to bottlenecks next harvest, with farmers potentially having no way to unload grain. The flow-on effect means Australian retailers are waiting months for stock to arrive.
Key stock is down more than 40%, and what they can get, is costing them an absolute fortune in shipping rates. All these extra costs are being passed down the line with the price of food, clothing, shoes, toys and computers all rising steadily. Things are much worse across Europe and the US, with widespread reports of rampant inflation, empty store shelves and crippling fuel and food shortages.
Many ‘experts’, however, seem almost gleeful at this wholesale destruction of the world’s supply chain. Instead of reassuring the public they will fix it, they are saying empty shop shelves and shortages are now “permanent” – all part of the ‘New Normal’.
The Food and Drink Federation boss told a UK industry event last week, that the days of people being able to “find any product they want on the shelves” are gone. “That’s over. And I don’t think it’s coming back”. From now on, he said, people must simply learn to ‘prioritise’ – ‘rationing’?
Our broken supply chains are starting to sound more and more like a ‘managed demolition’ by our self-appointed ‘chosen ones’, as they frogmarch humanity down the ‘Great Reset’ Road to a greener, more sustainable future.
Stephen Andrew statement on unions and mandated jabs
Police unions across America are fighting mandates, describing them as “an affront” to people’s civil liberties. In LA, a group of LAPD employees are suing the city over its jab mandates, claiming they violate their constitutional rights. More than half of the LAPD department’s 12,000 employees remain unvaccinated. Vaccination rates are similarly low in the New York City Police Department, with only 51% having received at least one jab.
The low uptake among New York’s officers has led Mayor Bill de Blasio to say he will withhold paychecks for any NYPD employees who refuse to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing—a directive all four of the city’s police unions have reportedly said they will challenge in court.
The President of the city’s largest police union told the New York Post last month: “If the City attempts to impose a vaccine mandate on PBA members, we will take legal action to defend our members’ right to make such personal medical decisions”.
In Oregon, the Governor is being sued by a group of state troopers and firefighters over last month’s mandate.
Meanwhile, Chicago, the city’s largest police union vowed to take legal action if the city’s Mayor mandates the jab for all city employees. “It cannot be mandated. It’s that simple” the union’s president said. He later went so far as to liken vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. “We’re in America, g*ddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi f***ing Germany.’ What the f***?” he said.
Other police union leaders, including those in San Jose and Cincinnati, have warned authorities that mandates would cause staffing problems for departments that are already having trouble recruiting and keeping officers. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national union representing over 350,000 officers, also opposes the mandates.
A statement from the union said it would “take every step and use every available approach to protect our members and their rights”.
In Portland, Oregon, the Mayor decided not to impose a mandate on the city’s police force, after the police union warned that requiring vaccines for officers would lead to mass resignations and massive staff shortages. The Portland Police Association told the Mayor police officers are “so deeply” opposed to mandatory vaccination that “some will leave the profession before accepting a mandate.”
Stephen Andrew statement on Australia’s critical infrastructure assets
As I mentioned in an earlier Post, the Federal Parliament has launched an inquiry into the “extent of common ownership of Australia’s publicly listed companies” amongst a small group of institutional investors, headed by BlackRock and Vanguard. The new Inquiry will be looking into a small group of investors who control and effectively own nearly all of Australia’s biggest companies.
In the process of doing so, I hope the Committee will also look into the ownership of Australia’s unlisted infrastructure assets, many of which are tightly held by a handful of hugely powerful and wealthy foreign consortiums and private equity trusts. They are making billions out of our assets, all whilst paying no tax and enjoying highly beneficial terms from agreements with government, all of which are ‘commercial in confidence’ and therefore hidden from the public.
The potential for anti-competitive pricing and collusion around such a tiny number of global investment and super trusts owning huge stakes in our state and national assets, is almost never mentioned by our leaders and mainstream media, let alone investigated. I am talking about infrastructure like our airports, ports, electricity grids, toll roads, bridges, rail networks and tunnels.
Earlier this year, the head of ASIO delivered an address on potential threats to Australian national security, with the majority of time taken up talking about the threat of ‘domestic’ right wing groups’ and ‘online’ extremism. Not once, did Australia’s top security chief mention the potential danger of having a significant amount of the country’s critical infrastructure assets under the control and management of a tiny group of privately owned, shadowy global ‘consortiums’.
This massive concentration of Australia’s key national assets and infrastructure in just a few, largely foreign, hands, seems a bigger security concern right now, than ‘online extremism’ – especially with all this talk by the World Economic Forum of a coming Cyber Attack.
The government tells us it wants Australians to submit identification before being allowed to use social media – Well, how about it show some consistency for a change and set up a 10 point identification system requiring these private consortiums who own all our key national assets and infrastructure, to disclose exactly who their majority shareholders and ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ are?
Stephen Andrew statement on democracy descending into despotism
We are witnessing shocking scenes in Melbourne as the “Lucky Country” descends further into despotism. Australians are now watching in horror as their once stable Western democracy disintegrates further into utter chaos and despotism on the streets of Melbourne. Victoria’s heavily militarised and Orwellian-named “Public Order Response Team”, today moved in tight military formation against crowds of protestors, as they fled to the sanctuary of their city’s ancestral Shrine of Remembrance, only to again be chased down by police dogs, shot with rubber bullets and gassed. Crowds that included many elderly Australians and young children.
Across the airwaves, media talking heads, government spokespeople and a host of so-called ‘labor leaders’ swung into gear, working feverishly to ‘quarantine’ and ‘emotionally distance’ the protesting construction workers from the rest of Australia, smearing them as nothing more than “far right extremists” and ‘domestic terrorists’. Clips of the protestors were all carefully edited, framed and editorialised on, in such a way as to create, reinforce and then ram home this narrative in the public mind. The fear being that other Australians, sitting at home, might actually start to feel sympathy, or even worse, make ‘common cause’ with these men, their families and supporters.
How different everything was last year when BLM protestors were rampaging through our streets, defacing public memorials, yelling obscenities and burning Australian flags. Then, our elites were all falling over themselves in the rush to pay fealty and respect to the protestors’ ‘woke’ agenda.
Will anyone ever forget the sight of Victorian police officers kneeling before the screaming, mostly white, hordes, bowing their heads in abject shame and deference. It was like some ritualised act of self-loathing, and a clear sign of our ruling elites’ complete repudiation and contempt for this nation’s history, culture and people. It’s the same ‘repudiation’ and ‘contempt’ we see on their faces today as they all march in lockstep against a group of people they regard as ‘relics’ from the ‘old Australia’ – the Australia they long ago consigned to the dustbin of history.
For all the conservatives out there who have also attacked the protestors, Professor James Allan, summed it up best when he wrote in yesterday’s Spectator:
“..there is nothing in being a conservative that precludes one from thinking that a situation is so bad – because the lawful authorities have gone so far off the rails – that protest and disobedience of the law is fully warranted.”
“Think about this from the point of view of elected politicians who have become way too big for their elected boots, and started to exhibit some of the traits of the despotic, heavy-handed petty tyrant. A citizenry full of those who refuse to practice civil disobedience (or make out that a citizenry of conservatives who think their primary allegiance must always and everywhere be solely to the law and to whatever those with the lawful authority to make legal rules say) is a society that takes the same path … as ‘sheep to the slaughterhouse’.”
Stephen Andrew statement on jabs for kids
I have received numerous calls and messages from parents over the past few weeks, concerned by the Queensland Government’s evident rush to get ‘jabs’ into the arms of their vulnerable children before all proper safety trials on the new technology have been completed.
The Queensland Premier and Health Minister have said recently they want every child from year 6 and above fully or partially vaccinated against Covid before they will consider re-opening the State. The speed with which they are moving ahead with these plans is alarming, especially given so many infectious disease experts, here and overseas, are recommending caution on the roll-out of these injections to children. Many are advising we wait, at least until Phase III trials of the vaccine are all completed and more research has been done on any long-term effects this new mRNA technology could have on children’s still developing bodies.
Professor Robert Booy, who is the Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Sydney and also head of Clinical Research at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, says that governments shouldn’t be rushing to vaccinate healthy children. “We shouldn’t be rushing something that for children is not a severe illness” he told the Herald Sun earlier this month. Martin Makary, a Professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July that the evidence behind the vaccination push for children was ‘flimsy’ at best. His team analysed about 48,000 cases of children under 18 diagnosed with Covid-19. “Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukaemia”. The findings, he said, had “significant implications for healthy kids and whether they need two vaccine doses”.
Earlier this month the UK’s vaccine advisory body, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation told the UK government there was still “insufficient evidence” on the long-term effect of these mRNA technologies on young, still developing bodies. The Committee said that given children were at such a low risk from the virus, any roll-out of ‘jabs’ would provide only “marginal gain”. The Committee’s advice was that it did NOT recommend vaccinating “healthy children” in the UK.
The Committee has previously complained about “the habit of government health officials sitting in on their meetings” and interfering in the decision-making process. So far the Committee has stood firm, with the Chairman saying recently that governments should be “taking a precautionary approach”: “The margin of benefit” he said, “is considered too small to support universal Covid-19 vaccination in this age group at this time.”
Clearly, there is sufficient doubt amongst experts as to the long-term effects of these vaccines, to justify excluding children from any government vaccination roll-out targets. If ever a situation called for adopting a ‘precautionary principle’ policy, surely this is it!
MUMS & DADS. Thoughts please?
Stephen Andrew statement on the future of the union movement
John Wilson, the former Queensland State Secretary and ex-President of the Trades Hall Council is incandescent with rage at what he calls the ‘sell out’ of the working class by Australia’s Union Leadership over the past 18 months.
“They’ve SAID NOTHING and they’ve DONE NOTHING” he thundered. “They are FULLY on board with this agenda”.
“They are PART OF this SELLOUT – they’re part of it and there is going to be a reckoning.”
“They will not survive this”. “They are finished”.
Wilson’s words came as Victoria’s construction workers and tradies unleashed their own fury at unions, specifically the CFMMEU, for their failure to initiate any stop-work actions over the mandatory vaccination orders their members are now subject to. Construction workers in Victoria have been told by the Dan Andrews government that they must have at least one jab by this Thursday, or face the loss of their jobs and livelihoods. Many have mortgages to pay and kids to support and the orders have been a devastating blow to the hard-working members of the industry. They are absolutely furious that their union reps are basically sitting on their hands and letting it happen.
Not a single union – not the Building unions, the Nurses Unions, Firefighters Union, or Police Union – have stood up for their workers over these draconian mandates in clear violation of the Nuremburg Code. Go to any union websites and like every other institution in the country, they are completely silent on the issue.
After being slammed by their rank and file in recent days, a couple have mouthed a few weak platitudes on people’s right to choose, but not a single one has seriously stood up and challenged the government or fought for their members’ rights.
Wilson, whose father was a life member of the Maritime Union, boasts a long family history of ties to the Australia’s union movement, says now he is done with the lot of them.
“There is going to be a reckoning in this country” he said. “When the tide turns, as it is now, there will be a reckoning and it will be ‘Goodbye’ to the trade union movement in this country AND the Labor Party – and good bloody riddance to the lot of them”.
“They are ‘scabs’ to the working class of the trade union movement. They’ll go to their graves as ‘scabs’ to the working class.”