From the Sydney Morning Herald, February 28:
Was Australia about to put the cash flow of its universities ahead of the peoples' health in the middle of a pandemic? Was the Morrison government about to bungle the coronavirus response as badly as it did the bushfires?
As MPs and senators returned to Canberra this week for a parliamentary sitting, it was a topic of lively concern. Government members knew that the universities had been agitating behind the scenes for the China travel ban to be relaxed as soon as possible. Some 100,000 of their Chinese students are caught by the ban and the unis want them back in Australia. Paying fees.
The Chinese government had been complaining about the ban for weeks, too. Australia had been "discriminatory", according to the Chinese embassy in Canberra. In multiple meetings across the government, every week with the politicians who have let them in, China's officials have been pressing their case hard.
Was the government about to cave in to the pressure? Quite a few government MPs and senators were anxious. They knew there was rising fear among their communities. They'd just seen their government announce a partial relaxation already, with about 760 high school students allowed to return from China to Australia.[that would be a double ditto for the U.S.]
They'd heard the federal Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, tell the media last week that "it is incredibly important that we get some normality back into the international student market".
"At this stage," Tehan had said, "we are looking at year 11 and 12 students but the medical advice has said in a week we could look at what would happen with tertiary education students."
So the moment that the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister had finished their routine opening remarks to the Coalition party room on Tuesday morning, the smooth-faced Liberal senator from Victoria, James Paterson, took the floor to speak."With the ongoing China travel ban, I'm very sympathetic about the impact on tourism and farmers, but I'm much less so with the universities," he began. "Because they have been warned for years that they are over-reliant on the Chinese market, and for years they've reassured us that it was all fine, and that if anything happened they'd be able to withstand it. They rode the cycle up, now they can ride the cycle down."....
....MUCH MORE....From there, the medical advice goes to the policymakers in the National Security Committee of the federal cabinet, and this is where the politicians get involved. The NSC is chaired by the Prime Minister. This is where decisions are made and action taken. Or not.The medical officers' "pandemic" call was a big moment. For a start, they were way ahead of the UN body that is supposedly the lead global agency on international health emergencies, the Geneva-based World Health Organisation.
Why were the Australians ahead of the world? For a very simple reason. They don't trust the WHO. The information from multiple international sources is that the WHO is under intense pressure from the Chinese government, and succumbing to it.
The Australian Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, told the NSC that it was medically inexplicable that the WHO hadn't already declared a global pandemic. It's politics, in other words.
That's why Australia had earlier forged ahead of the WHO in declaring the China travel ban, on February 1. It was, again, on the unanimous advice of the AHPPC.The travel ban was decided immediately after the US made the same call. Beijing instantly lashed both the US and Australia on that occasion – the Chinese Communist Party's official mouthpiece, People's Daily, calling it "racist"....
One of these days someone should ask the W.H.O. why it took them until MARCH 11 to declare coronavirus a pandemic.
