There are two situations vacant currently in the federal parliament: member for Eden-Monaro, with Mike Kelly’s successor to be chosen at a by-election on a date to be determined, and Victorian Greens Senator, with Richard Di Natale’s vacancy to be filled by a party membership ballot following a timeline I’m not privy to. The latest developments on these fronts are as follows:
• With Andrew Constance now in the rear mirror, the Liberals are going through a preselection process that has brought them to the closure of nominations, with the candidates not yet formally announced. David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald reported three likely starters: the presumed front-runner, Fiona Kotvojs, who ran in 2019 and remains popular in local branches; Jerry Nockles, an international relations expert and former Navy seaman; and Pru Gordon, a manager at the National Farmers Federation. Canberra news magazine CityNews reported that names being tested in Liberal polling included Nichole Overall, a Queanbeyan freelance journalist. Please note that there’s a dedicated Eden-Monaro by-election thread below this one.
• The Victorian Greens have attracted nine nominees to fill Richard Di Natale’s Senate vacancy, and helpfully laid them out on their website. The highest profile is human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, who ran unsuccessfully for the party in the seat of Cooper at last year’s federal election. However, Noel Towell of The Age reported in March that Lidia Thorpe, who won Northcote in a by-election in November 2017 but failed to retain it at the general election a year later, is also rated highly. The report said the same of Huong Truong, who held an upper house seat in Western Metropolitan region in the nine months before the election, but she is not among the nominees.
“NE Qldsays:
Monday, May 11, 2020 at 9:18 pm
I was bored so decided to read bludger from 11/3/20.”
I hope that’s a level of boredom I never experience.
Agree Poroti and fess. My son lived in the US for a number of years. We stayed with him and met plenty of Americans who were genuinely nice folks.
https://twitter.com/KKeneally/status/1259799752838754304
Somewhere between
and
You lost me. But I havent been paying attention to the app discussions and media talk. I have been busy. So hang with me….
In the time it has taken for case one to be tested and the others notified they may have gone on to infect hundreds more. The beauty of a tracing app is that those ‘hundreds more’ could find out they were in contact with the secondary contacts at around the same time as the secondary contacts find out. So the app, whilst inhibited by a time gap between primary and secondary contacts, is ahead of the game with tertiary contacts. Is that right?
Or does a secondary contact have to test positive before the tertiary contacts get notified?
Is a secondary contact required to get tested? Or just isolate?
And… the app it only picks up people you were close to. It doesnt pick up if you touched a handrail 30seconds (or 10m) after the infected person does. Right?
I really wish that KK had won the seat of Bennelong. She would be among the best of the best performers on the floor of the House when it comes to holding this government to account. Scott Morrison obviously hates it.
So… pending answers…
The app is flawed if you think it will allow Australia to go back to normal and keep the spread of the virus to very low levels that we have experienced under current or recent restrictions.
The app is a great idea if used as one of many tools as you ease restrictions in some sectors of the economy.
Out of interest; as we ease restrictions… how many new infections per month is acceptable? What is the metric the easing will be assessed on? What level of unemployment/economic contraction is acceptable?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2LdHH0hmHY
SK – I struggle to believe that’s a serious question
“And… the app it only picks up people you were close to. It doesnt pick up if you touched a handrail 30seconds (or 10m) after the infected person does. Right?”
Of course not. But then, human contact tracing doesn’t either. All the app does is makes it easier to trace contacts. When people are in larger groups, like the public transport example, it’ll help.
It won’t replace manual contact tracing, but how it helps to supplement it is fairly obvious.
No, the app does not pick up if you contract COVID-19 when you are out and about and get it not from contact with a carrier but by another means. Only if you come into extended contact with someone who later tests positive. Or if you later test positive then the contacts can be notified.
SK – “Out of interest; as we ease restrictions… how many new infections per month is acceptable? ”
I think that’s the wrong question. It’s probably more important how many clusters there are. One identified cluster of 30 is less worrying than 5 of 5 people each.
I guess the real answer would be what number indicates a reinfection rate > 1. Beyond me to calculate that.
I struggle to believe you are genuine in your posting. But I try to treat you with some respect.
Out of interest; as we ease restrictions… how many new infections per month is acceptable? What is the metric the easing will be assessed on? What level of unemployment/economic contraction is acceptable?
I saw the part of the interview Leigh Sales did with Brendan Murphy tonight where she asked that question (hey, it was the ad break on Lego Masters so I scrolled around to other stations 😀 ), and he said they’d be keeping an eye on where new clusters break out, analysing them, seeing if it was becoming more widespread again due to multiple breakouts, then bringing a discussion about what to do back to National Cabinet to decide.
Good on PvO for refusing to take a lie for an answer from the prime minister of the most corrupt government since Federation.
I have a feeling Lisa Wilkinson and Peter Fitzsimons have had Peter van Onselen around for dinner and gotten into his ear, since Wilkinson has been doing The Sunday Project with PvO. 🙂
“I struggle to believe you are genuine in your posting. But I try to treat you with some respect.”
Ok SK, humour me then. Did you genuinely think the app would be able to track that sort on incidental contact, works a handrail?
If you did, and I take you as being on the upper end of the intelligence curve, then I really have to reconsider what I would think most people would think the app does.
Dinner with Peter FitzSimons would
mean eating something from his sponsor Uber Eats, no booze and time spent admiring his Tesla.
Fair enough answer. I am guessing they are hoping it doesnt come to that. Back and forth restrictions, even confined to localities, would be messy if there were enough of them and in large areas.
Surely the big thing is maintaining some acceptable level of distancing and hygiene. And that worries me from what I am seeing in the community. Perhaps it isnt so much a change of rules that will need to happen if cases rise in certain areas… but that people will quickly take it seriously again and act accordingly.
shellbell @ #1216 Monday, May 11th, 2020 – 9:43 pm
A not atypical weekday evening, you mean?
shellbell @ #1218 Monday, May 11th, 2020 – 9:43 pm
You say that as if it’s a bad thing. Some of us can actually get by eating a meal without booze and enjoy ourselves to boot. Also, last time I looked, Uber Eats had deals with the restaurants that used to have dine in.
C@t:
PvO made a commitment either late last year or earlier this year to do his best to hold the PM to account and not allow him to simply wave away uncomfortable questions like he does.
Surely the big thing is maintaining some acceptable level of distancing and hygiene. And that worries me from what I am seeing in the community. Perhaps it isnt so much a change of rules that will need to happen if cases rise in certain areas… but that people will quickly take it seriously again and act accordingly.
Basically, he wanted to emphasise that we needed to keep observing the protocols that have served us well thus far.
“ Australia could have gone down the same road as Canada. Be broadly in coalition with the USA but stay out of the shit-shows. Canada has been a reputable ‘peace generator’. Australia has been the idiot ‘deputy sheriff’.”
This is perhaps the best thing you have written on bludger nath. Perhaps there is hope for you after all.
Someone (I can’t remember who) said that Canada was the NZ of North America: leaching off the good graces of the good ole’ US of A without putting in the effort required to justify their allied status. Or some such rubbish. I think they also asserted that Canada – like NZ – didn’t have the stragic interests that Australia does. This is also rubbish. Canada is a huge landmass – bigger than Australia – with an equivalence of mineral and natural resources. Like Australia its strategic interests straddle three oceans – and its neighbours on them other side of the waters’ include two that are major powers / super powers whose interests have the potential to be quite hostile to Canada’s.
Further, Canada has done its fair share of strategic heavy lifting in the past 120 years. Like Australia it was well committed and did a lot of bleeding in both world wars – before America showed up in either. It fought in Korea and again in Afghanistan and has been well represented in various global peacekeeping efforts.
It’s just that it also avoided participating in American ‘peak stupid’ military adventures like Vietnam and Dubya’s Iraqi adventure.
So yes. We should be like canada.
On a related note I think that Stephen FitzGerald’s Whitlam Oration is a good starting point on how Australia should tackle the vexed issue of our relationship with China and our relationship with America. If I can parse his point in shorthand it is ‘friends with both America and China’, ‘a friend and ally with one’ but always maintaining a healthy skepticism of both Countries. Follow the link to read or watch the oration here:
https://www.whitlam.org/publications/2017/10/4/managing-ourselves-in-a-chinese-world-australian-foreign-policy-in-an-age-of-disruption
Confessions @ #1222 Monday, May 11th, 2020 – 9:47 pm
Has he succeeded in actually getting SfM to provide straightforward answers to them though? Not that I’ve seen. Until SfM does, PvO is just whistling in the wind.
Blobbit, I started with,
For all I knew, the app could easily use GPS positioning or bluetooth chain positioning with other app users to see if you had walked past a position the infected person had been 30 seconds before. Perhaps in places of known high contact shared surfaces (like a train station) this feature could ‘turn on’.
Goodo. SA have been doing this too. I hope it gets through. I will know more come first netball training of the year to see how many handshakes and kisses on the cheek I get.
I have been impressed with construction sites. It is obvious they didnt want to get shut down and took it all very seriously.
Where do you start with the exploitative practices of UberEats?
Of course, Cremorne’s leading moral crusader, FitzSimons, adroitly pushed that all to one side when they came bearing coin for his endorsement.
SK, the idea is that the original carrier, app installed, who might have been infected for some days, but is symptomless, has contact registered by the app with other travellers on his train. The more travellers on the train, and the more days travelled, the more the coverage gets closer to the average install rate, and the further it moves from merely the square of the average install rate.
The original carrier finally exhibits symptoms, after say 10 days since his infection.
Other passengers with the app, who travel in the carriages he uses, may have been infected by him over the week of travel, but are further back in the symptom timeline than the carrier, say by five days.
When the carrier presents to a hospital and tests positive the other passengers are informed (presumably) promptly by Health Department contact tracers.
That’s five days advance notice they might not have had without the app.
As for those the co-travellers may have infected, the second generation infectees, it’s the equivalent of TEN days notice as traditional tracing is combined with the first generation bluetooth based tip-offs from the app.
As I understand it, this kind of scenario is the purpose of the app: a tool to shorten tracing and notification timelines in some cases (more as time goes by).
It won’t help in all scenarios – particularly if paranoid people who believe we already live in a totalitarian police state that, in league with Google apparently, is fascinated by trips we make to the supermarket, or who view prolonging battery life as a fundamental and inalienable human right, like access to clean water, won’t install it.
But it will help in some cases, and more over time, as increasing numbers give up the undergraduate fantasy that the Government is out to get them (has been for 40 years since they were smoking dope and dodging the draft at uni), and install the app as a public responsibility, rather than not install it as an expression of MAGA-style individual liberty.
“Break out the balaclavas! We will overcome! Where are the baked beans?”
The fewer people who refuse to join in the app, the more the virus chortles in its joy.
Andrew_Earlwood says:
Monday, May 11, 2020 at 9:48 pm
This is perhaps the best thing you have written on bludger nath. Perhaps there is hope for you after all.
______________
While I appreciate this backhanded compliment I still maintain that my Shorten/Napoleon material was quite special and probably a highlight of PB long term.
shellbell @ #1228 Monday, May 11th, 2020 – 9:56 pm
So, let’s all form a Peter Fitzsimons firing squad as we clutch our pearls, huh? Or, we could tackle the whole problem of exploitative practices as they relate to the Gig Economy, head on. I know which would be more productive.
Though I must say, I’ve spent more than enough time for one lifetime around the Mosman, Cremorne etc area to know that a certain cohort of the residents there love nothing more than a good old ‘tut tut’ about certain other residents who don’t conform to their ‘standards’. It’s pathetic, quite frankly.
If you have the app and another person has the app and they are both running and the conditions for the apps capturing the required data are met then the probability is much higher than 5% – they are not independent events.
All those opposed to downloading the App are in the same basket as the idiots protesting yesterday.
Simon
The way the app works is your phone records contacts.
That information doesn’t get uploaded to a server until you’re tested positive.
At that point they only have access to your own contacts.
They don’t have immediate access to the secondary contacts.
The question remains as to whether they wait for your primary contacts to get tested positive first before getting their app info or whether they give up their info immediately regardless of whether they have yet been tested.
I suspect it will be the latter. But its still a human deciding how deep to search in that web.
C@t
“and he said they’d be keeping an eye on where new clusters break out, analysing them, seeing if it was becoming more widespread again due to multiple breakouts, then bringing a discussion about what to do back to National Cabinet to decide.”
Oh, lets wait a couple of more weeks, just to see…
Morrison bans cruise ships from docking in Australian ports on the 15th March.
Ruby Princess docks in Sydney on the 19th of March.
Morrison stuffed up.
Lest anyone suspects I see the app as a panacea, I won’t be changing my own social behaviour patterns anytime soon.
But I’ll make sure I have my phone with me at all times.
Thanks BB. I am a paranoid anarchist but I support the app. I am concerned its sell may lull peeps into a false sense of security.
Now that I have been pinged for being unschooled on the matter and asking dumb questions I have now read the government blurb on the app. This wont stop me asking more dumb questions.
It would seem you will only get notified if you had been in close proximity to someone who has tested positive. So tertiary contacts wont automatically get notified. And the blurb doesnt say if the secondary contact must immediately get tested.
For me this is a shame. Say your man on the train has had the virus for 10 days before he got tested. He was a tough stubborn old coot who doesnt like to bother doctors. That is a lot of secondary contacts with time to pass it on to tertiary ones. The ability to stop it at the tertiary stage would require quick turnaround from secondary contact getting notified, getting testing positive and then notifying tertiary contacts.
(has been for 40 years since they were smoking dope and dodging the draft at uni),
There was no draft to dodge in 1980.
Simon
My understanding is that the app can notify you but only if a human contact tracer instructs the server to do that. You may just get called up. From what I can see the app never actually downloads any info from the server – only uploads.
Re Apple Head and Incitatus on Australia’s ability to deploy combat brigades overseas at America’s beck and call:
_____
“ alfred venison says:
Monday, May 11, 2020 at 3:19 pm
“We could invade literally any country in the world tomorrow and the Aussies would be good for two brigades.”
Wrong. We could possibly provide one Brigade and that is a very loose definition of what a Brigade really should be. Single Battalion/Regiment groups on rotation – not a problem. A full Brigade is a stretch as East Timor demonstrated – the laccy band just about broke on that one. Now that we are using the Armoured Cavalry Regiment model for our brigades we don’t have nearly enough logistics support in terms of spare parts and replacement equipment to deploy a full brigade for any significant period of time. Somalia was an armoured vehicle maintenance disaster and that was just one battalion and an APC Squadron – nothing like deploying the current Brigades with multiple types of different vehicles. And that’s without running into the political wall of the artificial numbers caps which completely ignore the requirement to deploy capabilities which require differing numbers of personnel.”
______
As Incitatus knows, or should know, under ‘Plan Bathsheba’ the army’s current force structure envisages three combat brigades of the First Davison’s full time regulars, each having an equivalent structure and equipment with the others and each operating in a 3 year, 3 phase cycle- ‘Readying’, ‘Ready’ and ‘Reset’.
By extending the time when a brigade is ‘Readying’ and also keeping in some sort of active reserve the brigade who is coming of the ‘Ready’ phase and into ‘reset’ – each by 6 months it is theoretically possible to have two whole full time brigades capable of being deployed.
It is also theoretically possible to deploy an additional two reserve brigades for each active First Division combat brigade, as each of the First Davison’s combat brigades has been teamed with two of the Second Division’s brigades.
Each First Division combat brigade comprises four seperate force elements: two light infantry battalions of the Royal Australia Regiment, a ‘Cavalry-Armoured Regiment – [CAR]’ (containing an armoured squadron of Abrams tanks, a squadron of infantry fighting vehicles, a squadron of armed reconnaissance vehicles and a logistics squadron), and an artillery regiment. Also brigaded permanently with each combat brigade is an engineering regiment, a signals regiment and a combat service support regiment.
When actually deployed each combat brigade can be further reinforced by other force elements as needed. These can include medical support teams, military intelligence units, special forces (one can expect at least two units – an SAS Squadron and a commando company – to accompany any deployed brigade, navy clearance divers, bomb disposal personnel, 2nd battalion (amphibious warfare), army aviation regiments (Tiapans, Chooks and Tigers) etc etc.
Of course, the potential of this is pretty theoretical. The RAR battalions are in pretty good shape to be deployed, as are the artillery, sappers and signallers. The CARs are a best described as a work in progress. At the moment only the tank battalions are good to go. Our aging ASLAVs (in the combat reconnaissance role) have taken a battering – having been used as the backbone armoured vehicle in two decade long deployments nd are in the process of being replaced by the Boxer ACRs. That will take years. The infrantry fighting vehicle role is being undertaking by the Vietnam war era aluminium coffin M113, which won’t be replaced by an new IFV until 2025 at the earliest (probably won’t be operational by our CARs before 2030).
So, in reality, if deploy a single combat brigade we will still need some backup in covering firepower And protection for our CARs for another decade. On top of that, our attack – reconnaissance Helicopter capability is lacking. Two years ago it looked like our Tigers would have to be scrapped asap. Now, belatedly the bugs appear to be ironed out in that program but we only have 22 attack helicopters and we probably need double that to maintain operational tempo with our combat brigades.
The ability of our reserve brigades to deploy is a joke. There are no CARs in the reserves. Reserve artillery extends only to mortar batteries. Personnel strength across the board is pathetic.
You’re showing your youth c@t. Just a baby, really, aren’t you?
There was a draft to dodge when I was at uni.
Then Gough got elected in my second year.
My position on the app is that its mostly harmless except for the fact that Scomo portrayed it as “you’ll be safe if”. It has the potential to be useful in a few cases if things ever get that bad.
BUT I get tired of saying this and no one commenting. We are missing things that will be far more useful than the app itself. Those include resourcing the contact tracers to the eyeballs. So that they can actually go through CCTV footage and map out your every movement.
They need to know your every physical movement because they need to put out alerts saying which bus you were on, what cafe you ate at, which store you went to. They cannot afford to do as they have done previously and just test a few “close” contacts. They to swarm over the map, mass testing everyone who went near anything you went near to. If they can’t do this, the virus cannot be controlled.
That requires real resources and so far I’ve no hint or clue that the relevant health departments are ready and able to do this – or have even contemplated this. Its happened overseas, but nowhere has this sort of action been mentioned here. And that really worries me. As always, I’m happy to be corrected or reassured.
And just a for instance.
Even in the situation where the app reveals a contact. It doesn’t log location. You have to interview both parties and do make some hunches and much of the time you’ll get to the point of knowing the two people came into contact either on a train or at a station. No more. Not which carriage. End result is you need the resources to mass test everyone on the train or at that station at the time.
One thing about Qanda, all the premiers are very good communicators. Perhaps the show should eschew federal MPs and have the state MPs on instead!
SK – ok. It never even occurred to me that someone would be wanting that type of tracing.
It’s a very elderly youth, but thank you, BB. 🙂
The only thing I had to dodge while I was at Uni was Tony Abbott!
SK, the presumption is that once the primary infectee gets tested positive, his app contacts are tested, and if they test positive, their (tertiary) contacts are also tested.
And so on.
For those who believe it’s all just a Google trick, or a ScoMo Trojan Horse to track our movements, I’d normally say “Good luck to you! Stay well!”
But of course your coronavirus infection could be my eventual coronavirus infection, so just get the bloody app and quit being a drama queen!
Bushfire Bill:
Actually I said 25% take-up probably results in about 10-12% contacts detected (rather than 1/16), to account for the fact that certain demographics (such as train commuters) are more likely than average to be running the App, so to that extent I agree with you.
Turning to your example, suppose there are four carriages, each has (like your example):
– 100 people
– hence 25 people running the app
– one infected person per carriage (same rate as the rate I have assumed from your example, return to this at end), with a 25% chance of running the app
So there are:
– 400 people total
– four infected people (return to this at end)
– on average one infected person running the app (could be zero, could be two, unlikely to be three or all four)
Now on your definition of contact (anyone in the same carriage as an infected person is a contact) all 400 should be contacts. However, with only one of the four infectees also running the app, only one of the four carriages has any contacts detected at all. There are 25 people running the App ion that carriage, so 25 contacts detected out of 400 in reality.
That is near worse case (unless we get unlucky and none of the four infectees is running the App), because it assumes that the four infectees are evenly distributed, one per carriage. More likely it is one carriage has two infectees, two carriages have one infectee and one has none. This immediately improves the detection rate since:
– the carriage without an infectee has no contacts in reality, so we divide by 300 instead of 400
– the carriage with two infectees has greater than 25% chance that at least one of them is running the app
The most favourable case in the one in which all four infectees happen to be in the same carriage, in that case there is about a 68% chance that at least one is running the App.
Need to look at all the cases (marginalise, as it is said). Maybe someone could write some Python to do it…
It gets more complicated of course, in that I have assumed infection rate is 1 in 100 (you didn’t state it). Now we really need to compute it along the infection rate curve. I’d be interested to see what that would do. Someone really ought to check my working too! (spot the flaw! ha ha)
CC – that type of monitoring of CCTV simply ain’t going to happen.
I suspect your response is that it should and the resources should be provided. I just came imagine a world where the resources to do what you’re proposing exists.
“ Greensborough Growler
says:
Our SAS is regarded as the best fighting group in the world and are held in awe everywhere around the world.
___________________________
masturbation material for nationalists. Oh the mighty SAS!”
The SAS is not what it was in Graeme Kennedy’s day.
GladysB and Dan Andrews showed their command of their States on qanda tonight, along with articulate defence of the debacles of recent times (GladysB having more of these to bat away) . But AnactaciaP took the prize for talking to the Queenslander, boosting them up, singing the praises of the cane toads- she will romp in when the election rolls around later this year.
The other thing which makes those 3 so impressive, is that they are all hated by the grubby Murdoch tabloids who infest the recycling bins of their jurisdictions. And the garbage written about them does not mean a thing electorally.
That’s an irrelevant objection, surely?
Fuck ScoMo! Fuck Google! And fuck battery life! If the app means the chances of prompter, more accurately targeted testing are greater, then get it.
The virus loves to hear us mere humans, its subjects, its feeding bowl, squabble over mind-fucks like who trusts who and who used the wrong marketing ploy as an excuse not to install.
That’s why it’s wiping out tens of thousands in America: they want liberty or death… they got death. Italy: they wanted to see their mamas… they saw them alright, in coffins. The UK… it was better than those EuroWogs… now its citizens are dying by the trainload every day. The Iranians wanted to kiss the statue… and they died for their religion. Allah didn’t save them after all!
Mere distrust of the salesman is, in my opinion, insufficient excuse to avoid buying the product.
Andrew – while some of us completely understand your excellent explanation most civilians really don’t so I tried to explain the reality in terms that most would understand somewhat.