Incidentally, the Tasmanian education minister spent the last month on holiday in France.
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I don’t know a lot of people, apart from people I know through work. Through the pandemic I haven’t known well anyone who died, though there are a several people my partner knows who have died. He’s more involved in the community, than I am.
But, this weekend, it finally happened. The departed was a friend of my partner, and a (mostly) good person I’ve known for 20 years. He went full MAGA, but he was there for us when things went wrong, and he did a lot of good in the community as a volunteer firefighter and first responder. I guess you’d say we’re family friends (as in our family and his family are friends).
He had a series of heart attacks, as a product of COVID, according to the doctors. I’m sad, but I’m also kinda pissed because he went to an anti-mask rally a couple weeks ago, and that’s probably where he got infected. It just didn’t have to be like this.
We’re fully vaxxed, so we’ll go to the viewing, but skip the (indoor, full of anti-mask, ant-vaxxers, 2 hour) funeral. We will go, to show support for his son, a genuinely good human being who lived with and supported his parents, and who got vaccinated to protect them even though he knew they would be pissed. He performed CPR on his dad for 20 minutes until the ambulance showed up. That had to have been excruciating, even though he is a trained first responder, and physically very strong. But, when you live that far into the boonies, help isn’t there very quickly.
In the end, it didn’t matter, he had two more heart attacks after the EMTs arrived. But, it just didn’t have to be like this.
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I’m so sorry for your loss. May he rest in peace.
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Unsurprisingly, that Education Minister has been copping quite a lot of heat online over this. So, today:
The usual bullshit about “no, nothing to do with the scandal, I’m just stepping down to spend more time with my family”.
Once again, cyberbullying shitty politicians is a worthwhile thing to do. It doesn’t really change the system, but at least you can occasionally make one of the bastards suffer some consequences for their actions.
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Because of the tiny Tasmanian Parliament (only twenty five seats, about half of which are usually occupied by opposition parties), she was also Minister for Skills, Training and Workplace Growth; Disability Services; Children and Youth; Tourism, Hospitality and Events. The Tasmanian government has many more departments than it has ministers to run them.
The Tas Parliament used to be substantially larger (which greatly reduced this problem), but the major party duopoly collaborated to shrink it back in 1998 as part of a mostly-unsuccessful attempt to nobble the Greens.
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I just love how for two years, we can look around the world and see what not to do…and then just go ahead and do it anyway.
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As with the recent NSW Teacher’s strike, the courts ruled it illegal but the strike proceeded anyway.
No really effective industrial action has ever been legal. If the bosses give permission, it’s because they know it isn’t a threat.
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I wonder if he’s ever ingested alcohol or caffeine…?
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Tasmania had two years to observe, plan and prepare for Covid. And the government deliberately invited it in, on their own timetable; if they needed more time to prepare, they could’ve easily delayed events for however long was required.
Plenty of time to build/train/hire whatever or whoever is required.
So there is absolutely no excuse for any sort of last-minute emergency scrambling, yes? Especially involving situations that were easily forseeable from miles away?
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