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Nominate a volunteer for award

volunteer

Mirani Southern Region  Volunteer Award

State Member for Mirani, Stephen Andrew, is calling for nominations for the Mirani Southern Region Volunteer Award. The prize is a Cruise Whitsundays Travel Voucher for the Whitehaven Beach Cruise (2 Adults + 2 Children) plus $500 towards accommodation at the Big 4 Adventure Whitsunday Resort. To nominate someone making a difference in the community, use the nomination form below.

Selection criteria

For the Mirani Volunteer Award: Local Hero award, the nominee must be an Australian citizen who volunteers in one of the towns or regional localities from the southern end of the Mirani Electorate between Ogmore South and Raglan Creek.

For the Volunteer Award, the person must:

 Be a volunteer

  Be based in the southern end of the Mirani electorate (as above)

  Benefit those who live, work and study in the southern end of the Mirani electorate

Volunteer Nomination

Nominate a volunteer for their achievements with a local community organisation. In your nomination, please include the:

  Benefit and impact of the nominee’s volunteering to the community, as well as their achievements

  Attributes, skills and experience of the nominee

  History and range of volunteering activities undertaken by the nominee

   Extent to which the nominee has balanced their volunteering activity in addition to family, work and other commitments

   Challenges and complexities associated with their volunteering activities

The winner will be chosen from the nominees and announced at the Mount Morgan Wattle Day Festival on Sunday 12 September 2021.

Nominations close COB Wednesday 8 September 2021

More information

For more information on the Volunteer Award, contact the Mirani Electorate Office at Mirani@parliament.qld.gov.au or call 07 4806 0700.

 

NOMINATION FORM


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Media diversity

media diversity

Stephen Andrew statement on Media Diversity

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Chair of the hilariously named “Media Diversity” Senate Committee, has issued Sky Australia with a ‘summons’ to appear before her next Friday and explain how recent outbreaks of free speech at the mainstream channel were allowed to go unchecked for so long. Senator Young, who describes herself on Twitter as a proud “World Economic Forum Young Global Leader”, said yesterday that Sky News Channel’s ‘speech crimes’ urgently needed to be stamped out as:
“Australians are rightly worried about the promotion and dissemination of Covid lies and conspiracy theories that put lives at risk and undermine public health.” Sky News Australia just served a 1 week suspension from YouTube, for “violating” the platform’s “policies on coronavirus”. What those policies are or how Sky ‘violated’ them, no-one knows, but I strongly suspect our friends in Canberra were closely involved in the Tech Giant’s decision.
Morrison’s National Cabinet, which replaced Parliamentary democracy in Australia nearly two years ago, has become very chummy lately with the Big Tech Triumvirate of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Nowadays, Big Tech has the Government’s back on pretty much everything, which just goes to show that ‘covert’ Public-Private Partnerships work just as well as overt ones!
Greens’ Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, also seems happy to run ‘defence’ for Morrison and his National Cabinet, as she champions the cause of State Censorship and the suppression of political dissent in Australia. Hanson-Young yesterday demanded answers from Sky News and the media regulator, who she accused of “sitting on its hands” for months. “If information is too dangerous for the internet, surely it’s too dangerous to be on our TV screens,” she huffed and puffed.
You have to wonder if the Greens Senator and her supporters ever stop to think, that doing the ‘dirty’ work of Australia’s powerful anti-free speech forces might one day come back to haunt the green movement and others on the country’s so-called ‘left’?
If they think this stops with conservatives, they’re delusional. The renegade News outlet, at least, still seems defiant, with Sky’s Digital Editor, Jack Houghton, calling the suspension and summons “an attack on the fundamental human right of freedom of speech”.
He cited UN Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Whether that will be enough to save the Sky News rebels, however, remains to be seen.

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State coercion and lockdown

lockdown

Stephen Andrew statement on State Coercion and Lockdown

Those in power know that if you make people desperate enough, you can get them to do almost anything. With vaccination rates stubbornly low – 15.7% as of yesterday – snap lockdowns and harsh restrictions are being used coercively by governments to enforce their will on an unexpectedly recalcitrant Australian people. As the political adage goes, if you want people to be willing to accept a solution, first you have to make them realise that they have a problem.
With each passing day, more and more extreme restrictions are being imposed, and the country’s leadership are stridently adamant that the lockdowns and strict measures won’t end till most of Australia is fully vaccinated. The PM, Scott Morrison, told Australians last month that phase B, the ‘transition phase’, only begins when the adult population has reached 80 per cent of people fully vaccinated, and any State wanting to move to the next stage will also have to have reached that target. The NSW Premier told the people of her State that the ‘harshest lockdown ever’ would be lifted at the end of August. Yesterday, she walked that back, saying only much higher vaccination rates would see restrictions loosened.
In Queensland, we have had three snap lockdowns already this year, with the most recent one extended another week by the Deputy Premier, Steven Miles. Miles told media that this could be the last lockdown, provided Queenslanders did the right thing by wearing masks, checking in at venues, getting tested for the virus and, yes, getting vaccinated. So eighteen months after ‘flattening the curve’, people are still being told that they aren’t allowed to seek and find basic social interaction, enjoy physical contact with friends and family or derive confidence and self-esteem from their work.
The impact of these coercive, cruel lockdowns, combined with the frightening dismantling of our rights and civil liberties, has been enormously destructive of public confidence and trust.
The damage done to social cohesion and people’s sense of happiness and well-being has also been profound. Many will take years to recover, if they ever do.
Whether they will ever forgive their Governments and those who led them down this road, is another question altogether.
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Social isolation and loneliness inquiry

social isolation

Stephen Andrew statement on social isolation and loneliness inquiry

From the beginning, it was clear that lockdowns and harsh social restrictions were going to have enormous collateral damages when it came to people’s feelings of well-being and mental health – things that are often hard to see but are nevertheless very real. At the outset, however, much was unknown about the virus and I, like many others, accepted our political leaders’ argument, that the benefits of their policies, though historically unprecedented and draconian, still outweighed the consequences. I am no longer prepared to accept this.
The impacts we are seeing on those living alone or with no family in Queensland, on those who are old, young, migrant, poor or with limited social networks has been devastating to say the least, and largely unrecorded by the daily media. Many studies have linked forced isolation and social restrictions to significant cognitive decline, loss of self-esteem, and feelings of extreme loneliness, social disconnection and despair. Human beings are social creatures. They crave to be around others face to face through daily interactions at work and socially. It is also essential that those interactions occur in a relaxed, natural way, unconstrained by division or fear. Confining people to their homes, depriving them of human contact at work, the pub or local church, telling them not to hug or kiss their friends, talk to their neighbours or visit aged family members, has done untold psychological damage and harm and simply has to stop.
The Community Support and Services Committee are conducting an Inquiry into and reporting on social isolation and loneliness in Queensland. While passing reference is made to the “interplay of Covid-19”, the entire focus of the Inquiry’s brief is on LONG-STANDING ‘drivers and factors’ and ‘identity’ groups. What is glaringly missing is the urgent need to look at and assess the long-term consequences to people’s mental health after suffering through eighteen months of snap lockdowns, forced social confinement, mask mandates, missed/ruined life milestones (graduations, funerals, baptisms, weddings, honeymoons), business shutdowns, job losses, worsening government surveillance, propaganda and censorship, inconsistent border closures, and the ongoing dismantling of civil society.
One GP said in a letter to the Victorian Premier last year: “I have never in my 15 years of general practice, seen such devastation with people’s mental health”. Parents, children and young adults, she wrote, are “in anguish, despair and have no hope”. Instead of addressing the seriousness of what is happening, the Government’s TOR recites all the usual SDG rubbish about ‘identifying risk factors’, ‘leveraging mitigation strategies’ and addressing ‘drivers and impacts of social isolation and loneliness across Queensland’.
As I said in my own Submission:
“Government and experts are ready to admit that the current signs of mental suffering and distress within the Queensland population is a serious problem, but few seem willing to discuss the most obvious cause of it or the most obvious solution, which is to call an end to all the cruel and coercive government lockdowns, harsh measures and general fear-mongering that are destroying the mental health of ALL Queenslanders.”
CLOSING DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS – 5:00pm, Wednesday 18 August 2021.
Email submissions to: CSSC@parliament.qld.gov.au
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Vaccine profits rolling in

vaccine profits

Stephen Andrew statement on vaccine profits

Vaccine profits are starting to mount as the COVID-19 vaccine is on track to become to the most profitable drug in world history. Giant pharmaceutical corporations, like Pfizer, Moderna, China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd and Sinopharm Group Co, are making obscene levels of profit from the monopoly they hold on the Covid-19 vaccine market.
According to People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group of non-profit, non-governmental organisations including Oxfam and UNAIDS, more than a dozen executives and investors became billionaires overnight last year, thanks to their ownership of Covid-19 patents. The new billionaires include many CEOs of firms like Moderna, the CanSino Biologics and German firm BioNTech, which helped develop the technology behind the Pfizer vaccine.
BioNTech increased its production capacity to 3 billion doses in 2021 and is working with 15 partners, including Merck, Novartis Sanofi and Baxter to form licensing and manufacturing agreements and establish a global vaccine manufacturing network worth trillions.
US Drug company, Pfizer, told investors last week that thanks to Covid-19 vaccine sales, the company had nearly doubled its second-quarter revenue and boosted profits by a staggering 60%. The pharmaceutical giant’s CEO, Albert Bourla, celebrated by announcing an increase in price of the Pfizer vaccine, raising it from $USD19.50 to $USD24 per dose.
Bourla is also now pushing for people to get a third “booster” shot of the vaccine, saying boosters will be needed within 6 to 12 months of people getting the second shot. During a February earnings call, Bourla told analysts the company could make significant profits by charging higher prices and implementing routine booster doses for new variants of the virus, assuring investors the company didn’t see this as a one-time event, but “as something that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future”.
Australian biotechnology giant CSL notched up its fastest profit and revenue growth in years, after its flu vaccine was bought by the tonne by the federal government. Net profit surged a massive 45 per cent to $US1.8 billion ($2.32 billion) in the six months to December 31, while revenue leapt 16.9 per cent to $US5.7 billion.
All told, governments and non-profits around the world invested billions in developing these vaccines. Add to this the cost of advance purchase deals, and public investment in Covid vaccines climbs even higher. Big Pharma has been the big winner without a doubt, and it has all been handed to them 100% risk free, with blanket immunity for any injuries or deaths caused by their fast-tracked product. The only industry in the world to be handed such a gold-plated pass. It begs the question, though – if a company is not prepared to stand behind the product it sells, then why should the Public trust either them or their product?
No liability. No trust.
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COVID death numbers queried

COVID death

Stephen Andrew question regarding COVID deaths

We need a proper, grown-up discussion on the reliability of COVID-19 death numbers. Yesterday, Queensland Health released the Minister’s responses to MPs’ ‘Questions on Notice’ for this week’s Health Estimates Hearings.
My question was on Covid deaths in Queensland. I asked:
1. Would the Minister advise:
(a) How many people who died in Queensland during 2020/21 and had Covid-19 listed on their Death Certificate had prior co-morbidities;
(b) Whether any of the Covid-19 cases detected or ‘deaths’ in Queensland since 1 January 2021, had received a vaccination against the virus; and
(c) What payments have been made to residential care facilities and hospitals involved in managing the care of patients who dies with Covid-19 listed on their death certificate.

COVID death answer

Here’s the answer I got back:
The response confirms that ALL Queensland’s Covid-19 deaths involved the existence “of co-morbidities” – whether cancer, brain tumours, Alzheimers, heart disease etc.
In 2020, for the first time in history, new guidelines were issued by the WHO and CDC, for the recording of Covid-19 deaths on death certificates. Until 2020, if someone died of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, while also testing positive to one of the various viral respiratory diseases, those respiratory disease were never listed as the primary cause of death. They were always put on a separate line underneath, and noted as a ‘contributory’ factor, NOT the primary cause of death.
Since Covid, however, anyone suspected (not even confirmed) of having had COVID-19 when they died, are counted as ‘Covid-19 deaths’.
It is vital that people understand this, or they will have a completely distorted view of the real ‘relative risk rate’ posed by the Sars2 virus.
According to the CDC, just 6% of the deaths that have been attributed to COVID over the past 18 months were deaths where COVID-19 was the primary cause of death. If those guidelines had NOT been changed – those death rates would all be 94% less than the numbers we are being given.
Compounding all this muddying of the waters, was the decision early on by world authorities, not to carry out post-mortem testing on those ‘suspected’ of having died with Covid-19, to see if they really did or not. This raised even more doubts around the scientific accuracy of fatality counts for Covid-19.

What has happened to science in Australia?

Why does anyone who questions Public Health diktats get censored and vitriolic levels of abuse thrown at them? Is public health our new religion now? Because whenever someone talks about “science being settled” then, trust me, we are dealing with uncritical dogma, NOT science.
“Test Everything”!
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