No wonder Victorian premier Dan Andrews was so keen to sign up to Xi Xinping’s notorious BRI: he is clearly bent on reinventing the state as a cheap knock-off of the Chinese communist state. Complete with feral media bootlickers, ever-ready to denounce counter-revolutionaries.
Mental health campaigner Patrick McGorry has withdrawn from speaking at a function for a new community group that has highlighted the “shadow pandemic” of poor mental health among children after he became aware of its ties to the Liberal Party.
It’s not a matter of scare quotes, of course: the shadow pandemic in Victoria is very real, and very, very shocking. So shocking, in fact, that the Andrews government is going to great lengths to keep its own reports on the matter a state secret.
So what are these “ties”?
One of the key organisers of Shadow Pandemic Victoria, Jacquie Blackwell, is the unpaid vice-chair of the party’s Higgins branch, which takes in the affluent suburbs of Armadale, Prahran and Toorak.
Her husband is Richard Murray, who chairs one of the Liberal Party’s chief fundraising arms, the Higgins 200 club, and is a former JB Hi-Fi chief executive and the new chief executive of Premier Investments.
One of the organisers. Who is married to a bloke who fundraises for the Victorian opposition. See the chain of guilt-by-association the media are stretching to breaking-point here, in an obvious hatchet-job in retaliation for daring to question the Dear Leader?
Ms Blackwell’s group, which describes itself as “a group of mums speaking out for the shadow pandemic crippling our children”, emerged in mid-August amid widespread media coverage of the burden of the lockdown and home-schooling on children. Its genesis was a conversation between concerned inner-eastern suburbs school mothers on their daily walk who created a WhatsApp group which quickly amassed hundreds of members.
It has since gained almost 18,000 followers on its Instagram page, more than 20,000 people have signed its petition calling for a plan for schools to urgently reopen.
Sounds like a mainstream lobby group, to me. In fact the article itself acknowledges that the group has rejected open collaboration offers from opposition and cross-bench MPs, “in order to avoid a perception that it is aligned to a party”.
But watch for the next attempt to poison the well:
a position that aligns with the state Liberal Party
To which Victorians are entitled to ask: well, so bloody what?
But the media hatchet-job has had its desired effect.
Ms Blackwell said the group was not motivated by advancing the interests of any political party, but its loose Liberal Party links prompted Professor McGorry, a psychiatrist and former Australian of the Year, to withdraw from speaking at an upcoming event hosted by Shadow Pandemic Victoria. The event, which was set to feature an independent school principal and other academics, was cancelled on Wednesday afternoon.
Professor McGorry said while many of the group’s concerns were legitimate he did not want to be “drawn into any controversy about which side of politics is holier than the other”.
Except that no one is politicising it except the media.
The simple fact is that the situation is so dire that it shouldn’t matter who draws attention to it. Victoria’s children are suffering. The government is trying to keep it under wraps. “Dictator Dan” has suspended parliament to exempt himself from opposition scrutiny.
“Kid are losing their spark. They have missed so much school; that’s socialising, sport, education … We don’t have answers for them anymore when they ask what date they’re going back[…]
Education and child mental health experts have warned that repeated periods of remote learning are inflicting cumulative harm on children. Calls to Kids Helpline rose 30 per cent in Victoria in the first six months of 2021 compared with the first six months of 2020, while figures recently published in The Australian show an average of 156 teenagers a week were rushed to hospital after self-harming and suffering suicidal ideation, up 88 per cent from last year.
The Age
In such circumstances, it should be the duty of any group who can, to bring the matter to public attention and hold a dictatorial government to account.
What the media are doing here, is running as the government’s propaganda wing: trying to smear by association anyone who might expose the shameful plight of Victoria’s children. As one organiser said, “kids don’t have unions – they have mums”.
These mums are doing their natural duty and what the authoritarian Victorian government and its lickspittle media will not: speaking up for their kids.
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