It's simplistic thinking, rather than educated thinking, to conflate many issues.
What Peter says about Paul tells us more about Peter than it does Paul......
Rob Peter to pay Paul?
A Victorian government official has taken aim at Daniel Andrews and health chief Brett Sutton in a scathing resignation letter.
Sanjeev Sabhlok, who moved to Melbourne from India in 2001, resigned last week after being asked to remove a number of inflammatory social media posts criticizing the state government.
“I did not come to Australia to be a slave of whimsical government.”
" The problem for politicians now is how to reverse course without losing their job. They've messed up on an unimaginable scale. I personally would like them locked up in jail. No mercy. There was so much good info and advice available but they picked the worst. "
“You have not implemented risk-based management, no evidence-based policy, no cost-benefit analysis. No justification. Just whimsy. You must reset Victoria’s policies right now. But if you won’t, then go!”
In an opinion piece for
The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday, the public service veteran said he had been approached by the head of human relations at Treasury and asked to remove his posts critical of the government.
“I considered deleting the few direct criticisms, but they wanted all indirect criticism removed too,” he wrote. “I resigned on the same day, the only honourable course for a free citizen of Australia.”
In the piece, Mr Sabhlok describes the pandemic policies being pursued in Australia and particularly in Victoria as “the most heavy-handed possible, a sledgehammer to kill a swarm of flies”.
“These policies are having hugely adverse economic, social and health effects, with the poorer sections of the community that don’t have the ability to work from home suffering the most,” he said.
“Australia is signalling to the world that it is closed for business and doesn’t care for human freedoms. This will dampen business investment but also impact future skilled migration, the education industry and tourism.”
“The need for good policy process does not disappear just because we face a public health crisis,” he said.
“In fact, it gets even more urgent ... Governments should have also realised at the outset that they are hostage to chronic groupthink and actively sought alternative advice.”
“The bureaucracy has clamped down on frank and fearless, impartial advice, in a misplaced determination to support whatever the government decides, (instead of performing its taxpayer-funded duty of providing forthright analysis of alternatives),” he said.
“So what happens now? Billions of dollars in income and wealth have been wiped out in the name of a virus that is no worse than the Asian flu.”
“That may be his version of what occurred, I’m not briefed on the accuracy or otherwise of that,” Mr Andrews said.
Mr Sabhlok claims he “repeatedly” tried to raise concerns but his “attempts were rebuffed”.
c2cjournal.ca