“Tax grade” part II

Ever since my brother developed the concept of “tax grade” to explain Stephen F. Hayward’s rankings of the presidents from Wilson to Obama (and his presumptive high ranking of Trump), I have had a look at Hayward’s grades and found some interesting patterns in the grades over time, as can be seen from the following graph:

This graph – with two grades between each grey line – illustrates the “constitutional grade” (higher grade being shown higher on the graph) of United States presidents between 1913 and 2017 according to Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama.

 What I noticed on close examination is that:

1. of the theoretically possible “constitutional grades” from A+ to F, only seven are actually given by Hayward to any president between 1913 and 2017
2. the possible grades not given by Hayward to any president are:
1. A
2. B-
3. C
   
4. D, D+ or D-
5. E, E+ or E-
3. all grades higher than B minus (as I noted no president received a B- from Hayward) occur before 1930 or after 1980
4. all grades of C plus or C minus (there is no straight C as I noted) occur between 1930 and 1980
5. between 1930 and 1980, there is some overlap between Republican and Democratic presidents, although every failing grade is still given to Democrats Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter
6. contrariwise, before 1930 and after 1980, all Democratic presidents get failing grades, and all Republican presidents receive grades of B or higher

My brother believes that this difference occurs because before 1930 and after 1980 there was little acceptance by the US ruling class of the idea that taxing the super-rich was legitimate, and that the Politically Incorrect Guides are entirely about eliminating taxes on the super-rich. Whilst I appreciate my brother’s comments, I do see flaws.

‘The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom’

The Politically Incorrect Guides and allied groups have always been critical of an activist Supreme Court, preferring that the Constitution be viewed as a means of preserving the power of those groups whom pre-Communist Manifesto philosophy thought legitimate participants in politics. They frequently criticise the Supreme Court, especially during the final two-thirds of the twentieth century, for legislating from the bench rather than interpreting the law.

Robert A. Levy in 2008 produced a book titled The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. In strictly chronological order, the cases are:

1. Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934)
2. Helvering v. Davis (1937)
3. United States v. Carolene Products (1938)
4. United States v. Miller (1939)
5. Wickard v. Filburn (1942)
6. Korematsu v. United States (1944)
7. Penn Central Transport v. New York City (1978)
8. Bennis v. Michigan (1996)
9. Whitman v. American Trucking Association (2001)
10. McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003)
11. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)
12. Kelo v. City of New London (2005)

It’s interesting that this list is not the stereotypical list of the PIGs, although it is even narrower in its focus, with a 50—50 split between New Deal cases and very modern ones. The Warren Court, criticised by the Republican Party of today for its judicial activism, is entirely absent, although Berman v. Parker from the same year as and overshadowed by Brown v. Board of Education, paved the way for case #12 by ruling that private property could be taken for public purposes.

Dissecting and Understanding ‘Citizens United and Conservative Judicial Activism’ – step by step

Ever since I read Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama, the politics behind the United States Supreme Court has been of interest to me, because of that book’s focus on Court appointments.

My mother and brother have said that “originalist” judges praised by that name and word in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents are simply tools of the Catholic Church, the Republican Party, and super-rich businessmen and bankers. More scholarly writings I have read over the past four years suggest that this may be the case.

This morning, after waking up at 10:00, I read an article from the University of Illinois Law Review by Geoffrey R. Stone titled ‘Citizens United and Conservative Judicial Activism’ (in reference to the 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1999. Stone argues that the conservative majority in the Roberts and Rehnquist Courts is not motivated by originalism nor by judicial restraint, but by an ideology of unfettered capitalism identical or similar to that of the Politically Incorrect Guides.

Stone says that ever since the 1990 decision Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy always viewed corporations, including for-profit corporations as possessing the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Stone argues that this led them and Bush junior appointees Roberts and Alito to:

“eschew the narrow grounds of decision available to them, even those suggested by Citizens United itself, and actually order the parties to file briefs on the much broader and more controversial question of whether Austin and McConnell [v. Federal Election Commission] should be overruled”

The Politically Incorrect Guides argue that the First Amendment provides equal rights for freedom of speech, assembly, or the press and that this cannot exclude corporations. Socialists argue that the First Amendment and Bill of Rights constituted efforts to restrain protest against a highly undemocratic Constitution.

However, Stone argues that:

“on such questions as the constitutionality of affirmative action, regulations of commercial advertising, gun control laws, and campaign finance regulation, judicial restraint would lead to politically “liberal” results, and judicial activism would produce politically “conservative” results.”

The trouble with Stone’s argument here is that it is easy to observe that, at face value, the Second Amendment forbids restrictions upon gun ownership in any form. If “the right to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed” is taken literally, that means minimally that restrictions on gun ownership cannot be constitutional, although other laws, such as compulsory registration of guns, certainly do remain constitutional under a restrained view of the Second Amendment. As for commercial advertising or campaign finance regulation, there is nothing in the Constitution mentioning them, so it is natural that from the perspective of the Politically Incorrect Guides, they are completely protected and judges can never strike them down per se. Affirmative action is an even more obvious error: Stone cannot see that it strikes down freedom of association almost by definition. It is true that laws allowing racially restrictive covenants, which the little-known Corrigan v. Buckley case from 1926 legitimised when done by private citizens or organisations, do contradict equality of rights from a judicially restrained perspective. Between 1880 and 1940, judges certainly did narrow the Fourteenth Amendment beyond what it says at face value. This is likely because it – and even more the Fifteenth Amendment and 1960s civil rights legislation – were (and still are) viewed by the great majority of white Americans as elitist reforms by Northeastern lawmakers and their allies. This is the topic of Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

What Stone does not understand when he says

“The Framers of our Constitution wrestled with the problem of how to cabin the dangers of overbearing and intolerant majorities.”

is that – like all philosophers before The Communist Manifesto – the Founders viewed the urban population who have constituted a majority since the 1920 Census as ipso facto overbearing. The Founders viewed large cities as necessarily opposed to liberty because they would take wealth from smaller tighly-knit communities to fund their expensive services, as discussed by Jonathan A. Rodden in his 2011 ‘The Long Shadow of the Industrial Revolution: Political Geography and the Representation of the Left’.

A limited suffrage that excludes urban populations who own negligible land, women and for some theorists people of color, was universally accepted when the Constitution was written, although in the highly rural United States this allowed a broad male suffrage. It is natural that the Republican Party, who represents almost precisely that section of the population who were enfranchised when the Constitution was written, desires laws restricting voting rights, abortion, taxation, limits to campaign funds, public welfare, gun control and so on. Stone is right that such decisions do not sit well with the majority, but he does not understand that the urban majority of today’s American population is precisely that section against whom the Founders desired antimajoritarian decisions. That rigid sundown laws have excluded blacks, and lack of economic opportunity other nonwhites, from almost all of rural America outside the plantation South where blacks were disenfranchised until the late 1960s, is an extremely problematic issue by any account, but what the solution would be under “judicial restraint” is not perfectly clear.

What the conservative Justices want to do is to cement Republican power, and the Constitution as understood by the Framers and according to the political values that prevailed at that time allows them to do such, for the simple reason that suffrage laws of the eighteenth century match so perfectly with modern voter demographics.

‘30 fascinating early bands from future music legends’

As I was opening a Firefox window this afternoon, I discovered that Rolling Stone had put out a list of “30 fascinating early bands from future music legends”:

1. Bruce Springsteen’s Sixties Garage Band The Castiles
2. Elton John’s Sixties R & B Group Bluesology
3. Madonna’s Post-Punk Band Emmy
4. Eddie Vedder’s Eighties Alt-Rock Band Bad Radio
5. Billy Joel’s Wild Heavy-Metal Duo Attila
6. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s Psychedelic Rock Band Fritz
7. Simon and Garfunkel’s Teen Harmony Duo Tom and Jerry
8. Dave Grohl’s Adolescent Punk Band Dain Bramage
9. Robert Plant and John Bonham’s Psychedelic Sixties Outfit Band of Joy
10. Radiohead Members’ Sax-Driven Collective On a Friday
11. David Bowie’s Sixties Mod Group The Lower Third
12. Chester Bennington’s Nineties Alt-Rock Crew Grey Daze
13. Neil Young and Rick James’ Motown Pop Band The Mynah Birds
14. Steven Tyler’s Sixties Pop Group The Chain Reaction
15. Alice Cooper’s High-School Beatles Parody Act
16. Grace Slick’s Sly Stone–Produced Experimental Rock Band The Great Society
17. Michael Bolton’s Hard-Rocking Hair Band Black Jack
18. Iggy Pop’s High-School Garage Band The Iguanas
19. Duane and Gregg Allman’s Ill-Fated Psychedelic Soul Outfit The Hour Glass
20. Brian May and Roger Taylor’s Sixties Power Trio Smile
21. Future Doors Members’ Surf-Rock Band Rick and the Ravens
22. Debbie Harry’s Sixties Psych-Folk Group The Wind in the Willows
23. Ronnie James Dio’s Dreamy Fifties Pop Group The Vegas Kings
24. Dusty Springfield’s Early-Sixties “Family” Folk Trio The Springfields
25. Peter Frampton’s Teen-Idol Pop Group The Herd
26. Lemmy’s Costumed Sixties Band The Rocking Vickers
27. Bon Scott’s Australian Teen-Pop Band The Valentines
28. Carole King’s Progressive Folk Trio The City
29. Sammy Hagar’s Sunshine-Pop Duo Samson and Hagar
30. The Cars’ Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr’s Mellow Early-Seventies Trio Milkwood

I had heard of quite a few of these, though I have not listened to any. The ones completely new to me are:

• The Castiles (#1)
  
• Emmy (#3)
  
• Bad Radio (#4)
• Fritz (#6)
• Tom and Jerry (#7)
• Dain Bramage (#8)
• Band of Joy (#9)
• The Lower Third (#11)
• Grey Daze (#12, although I did not know the name and my main recollection of Linkin Park is hearing them called “stinking park” by a critic)
• The Mynah Birds (#13)
• The Chain Reactions (#14)
• The Hour Glass (#19)
• Smile (#20)
• The Vegas Kings (#23)
• The Springfield (#24)
• The Herd (#25)
• The Rocking Vickers (#26)
• The City (#28)
• Samson and Hagar (#29)

None of these seem of real interest to me, but that these musicians played in bands earlier than they did actually is.

“Tax grade”?

When I first read Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama, I loved memorising the “constitutional grades” Hayward gave to each President. Although I could sniff out bias in them at a very early stage, I still was interested to see the rationale behind Hayward’s grade for each President.

Despite finding them interesting, I always saw anomalies even when the AABWCT (academia are biased, we’ll correct them) surface message was replaced by BACVR (be a Catholic, vote Republican) as the underlying morale of the Politically Incorrect Guides:

1. Why was Truman given a much higher grade than other Democrats except Kennedy?
2. Why was Coolidge given the highest grade if his Supreme Court appointment was so liberal?
3. Why was Ford given a relatively good ranking if his Supreme Court nomination was so liberal?

My brother said after a full digestion of the grades in conversation that the concern of Hayward is not with the Constitution at all. In my brother’s opinion, Hayward’s “constitutional grade” should be renamed “tax grade” – he believed and believes that the purpose of the PIGs is simply to encourage Americans to accept the complete elimination of income taxes on the super-rich – and that every grade offered by Hayward simply reflects partisanship and tax policy. The F grades given to every Democrat since Lyndon Johnson reflect the fact that the PIGs view civil rights as:

• illegitimate laws legislated by a liberal Northeastern elite with no popular white support
  
• contrary to natural law that differentiates between the races
• the source of social conflict between the races
  

President	Grade	Hayward’s interpretation	My brother’s interpretation
Woodrow Wilson	F	“The McReynolds appointment notwithstanding, between Wilson’s direct attack on the constitutional philosophy of the Framers and his appointment of Brandeis and Clarke, he deserves an F grade.”	“Wilson’s was a Democrat who used the Sixteenth Amendment to tax the very rich, and his rapid increase of this tax during World War I to over 70 percent, gives him a tax grade of F.”
Warren G. Harding	B+	“For the excellence of his Supreme Court nominations and the respect for the Constitution demonstrated by his conduct in office, Harding deserves a high grade as president. Countervailing factors – his lack of a deep constitutional philosophy, his proposal to amend the Constitution to create a six-year presidential term, the boost he gave Herbert Hoover’s career – knock his overall grade down to a B+.”	Harding lowered taxes for the rich from the high levels they had been at during World War I, so that the rich started to be able to get richer than possible under Wilson. He thus receives a B+ tax grade.
Calvin Coolidge	A+	“Despite this one disappointment [his only Supreme Court nomination, liberal Yankee Harlan Fiske Stone], Coolidge still deserves an A+ grade for his principled constitutionalism.”	“Coolidge consistently lowered taxes for the rich and kept them at the lowest level they have been at since the Sixteenth Amendment, so he receives an A+ tax grade”
Herbert Hoover	C-	“Between Hoover’s weak grasp of constitutional principles and his mixed record of Supreme Court appointments, his constitutional grade is a C-.”	“Hoover was an income tax-raising Republican [who raised taxes to attempt to combat the Depression], so his tax grade is C-”
Franklin D. Roosevelt	F	“Between FDR’s radical Progressive views about the principles of the American founding, his court packing scheme, and his left-leaning Supreme Court appointments, it is a shame that he can’t be awarded a constitutional grade lower than F. His counterproductive economic policies and hyper-partisanship are just extra credit.”	“FDR’s rapid increases in taxes on the very rich to fund public works and welfare for the lower classes, and his support of the Communist Russians against the Nazis who protected the wealth of the super-rich, means it is a pity that he cannot be granted a tax grade lower than F.”
Harry S. Truman	C+	“Truman’s Supreme Court appointments seemed to be driven mostly by old-fashioned considerations of political patronage. Neither his judicial appointments nor any of his writings or speeches give much evidence that Truman had any discernable constitutional philosophy. For these reasons he deserves as his constitutional grade a gentleman’s C+.”	“Although Truman was a Democrat, he lowered taxes on the very rich after World War II and was extremely vigorous in his opposition to Communism, so his tax grade is C+.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower	C+	“Eisenhower deserves high marks for general steady leadership in the uncertain postwar decade of the 1950s, for defending the nation ably (one of the most important constitutional responsibilities of the commander in chief), and for sensible modernizations of the office of the president. Above all, Eisenhower’s calm, steady leadership enabled America to settle in for the long haul of the Cold War. As the quiet and calm 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s and demoralizing 1970s, Eisenhower’s presidency started to look pretty good in retrospect. But for his Supreme Court appointments – especially considering the harm Earl Warren and William Brennan did to constitutional government in America – his constitutional grade must be cut down to a C+.”	“Eisenhower was a Republican and hence our ally, and he helped fight Communism under Cold War conditions, but he maintained very high marginal tax rates on the very rich. His tax grade is a C+.
John F. Kennedy	C-	“John F. Kennedy probably put little serious thought into the judicial philosophies of either Goldberg or White, but his accidental pick of White mitigates some of his abuses of executive power, earning him a bump in his constitutional grade to a C-.”	“Although Kennedy was a Democrat, he was a Catholic and he cut taxes on the rich to a small degree, so his tax grade can be raised to a C-”
Lyndon B. Johnson	F	“Between his dreadful Court appointments [Abe Fortas and Thurgood Marshall], his heedless expansion of government bureaucracy and the welfare state, and his duplicity in passing a civil rights law that warped constitutional principles of equality under the law, Johnson’s constitutional grade is an F.”	“Johnson was a Democrat who did the unspeakable sin of providing civil rights for black people who do not deserve such rights. He also greatly increased government spending via the Great Society, thus encouraging inflation and higher taxes, so his tax grade is an F”
Richard Nixon	C+	“Between Nixon’s acquiescence in or even sponsorship of so many constitutionally doubtful expansions of the regulatory statutes – the Endangered Species Act, the creation of OSHA and the EPA – and his botched appointments to the Supreme Court [rejection of Carswell and Haynsworth, liberal nominees Blackmun and Powell], Nixon’s constitutional grade has to be marked down to a C+. If it were not for his abortive attempts to rein in the government in his second term and his vetoes of bad legislation such as the War Powers Act (his veto was overridden), his grade would be even lower.”	“Nixon’s sponsorship of regulation like the Environment Protection Authority and Endangered Species Act that restrict business, and his inability to contain the tax that is inflation, mean that his tax grade is a C+. If he had not tried to rein in spending in his second term, his tax grade would be even lower”
Gerald Ford	C+	“While Ford’s use of the veto against a runaway Congress and his general demeanor in conducting himself in office in the aftermath of the Watergate disaster count strongly in his favor, his appointment of [John Paul] Stevens knocks his constitutional grade down to a C+.”	“Ford was a Republican who failed to lower the tax of inflation, so his tax grade is a C+”
Jimmy Carter	F	“Jimmy Carter is the only president of the twentieth century who did not appoint a single justice to the Supreme Court, so he doesn’t have a legacy in the third branch of government comparable to those of other presidents. He deserves an F grade for his respect and defense of the Constitution, nonetheless, for an unusual reason: his unprecedented and outrageous behavior as an ex-president. Carter does not seem to understand that the nation has only one president at a time. He has consistently undermined his successors in ways both direct and indirect.”	“Carter was a post-Civil Rights Democrat who was always our enemy, so he gets an automatic F.”
Ronald Reagan	A-	“Because of Reagan’s overall record of understanding, articulating, and implementing principled constitutionalism, the two disappointing Supreme Court appointments [Sandra Day O‘Connor, Anthony Kennedy] only lower his constitutional grade to an A-.”	“Reagan was a Republican who was the first to lower taxes on the rich since Calvin Coolidge. He did not lower them nearly enough to maximise wealth to the highest possible extent, but his radical tax cuts give him a tax grade of A-”
George Bush senior	B	“President Bush 41 (as he is often called to distinguish him from his son) deserves credit for a steady hand in conducting foreign policy—which satisfies the president’s most important constitutional duty: defending the nation. His appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is also a very large factor weighing in Bush’s favor. But his major blunder with Souter and his acquiescence in expanding government regulation knock Bush’s constitutional grade down to a straight B.”	“Bush 41 lowered taxes to some extent, but also raised them when he should not have done so, so as he is our ally his tax grade is a straight B”
Bill Clinton	F	“Clinton clearly knew what he was doing when he chose as his Supreme Court nominees justices who would defend and expand the liberal agenda. If there were a lower constitutional grade than F, Clinton would deserve it.”	“Clinton is a Democrat and our enemy whom we tried to defeat in Congress and the Supreme Court for many years. He supported or compromised with civil rights and maintaining taxes on the rich, so his tax grade is an F”
George Bush junior	B+	“For his vigorous defense of the president’s constitutional power to defend the nation against the threat of terrorism and for his two solid Supreme Court appointments [Alito and Roberts], Bush deserves a top grade for presidential performance. But his regrettable signing of the McCain-Feingold bill after saying he thought it was unconstitutional knocks him down half a grade to a B+.”	“Bush junior continued to lower taxes and he is our ally as a Republican. However, his acceptance of the McCain-Feingold bill and his increase on spending in the Middle East knock his tax grade down to a B+”
Barack Obama	F	“Because of his radical constitutional views and aggressive politicization of the judiciary, even Obama’s defense of executive prerogative cannot save him from a constitutional grade of F.”	“Obama is black and a Democrat, so he is our enemy. He stands for those Americans who reject the traditional American values, so regardless of what he does with the economy his tax grade can only be an F”
Donald Trump	≅A		“Because Trump is the ally of true America, and he has cut taxes on the richest individuals dramatically, his tax grade is an A”

Trump was not discussed in the original or the updated Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. My brother has constantly said that, although Trump does not understand the Constitution and never mentions it except rhetorically, he would receive a very high grade simply for cutting taxes on the very rich.

I would wish for more ability to discuss the issue more precisely, but my brother has never accepted the offer nor wished to do so, except to say that one reason why every post-Civil Rights Act Democrat gets an F is that the writers have memories of them as opponents, which they lack with Truman or even Kennedy.

In the case of Carter, who appointed no Justices to the Supreme Court, my brother was very critical of their argument. It is also strange that although the Politically Incorrect Guide notes Reagan’s record of conservative appointments to lower courts, it says not one word about Carter’s appointments thereto, although Carter made what was then a record number of appellate and district court appointments for a single term (this being due to many new seats being created). Many of Carter’s lower court appointees, notably the long-lived Ninth Circuit pair of Stephen Reinhardt and Harry Pregerson, were extremely liberal compared to lower court appointments of Clinton or Obama who had to deal with Republican Senates for substantial parts of their presidencies. Nor does the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents say anything about lower court appointments of preceding or following presidents, although if they were discussed even briefly it could alter grades if Hayward be true to his word.

If Andrews was really honest...

The revelation of 723 new cases of COVID-19 in Victoria – after two days of reduced cases but also reduced testing – led me into the most abhorrent temper outburst I have had since I was banned from RMIT for biting a security guard. The meltdown was so bad that I was hitting the cupboard doors of my bedroom, and my mother’s dog was jumping at me and trying to scratch me. My mother ultimately poured water on me to try and calm my temper whilst I was still in my pyjamas.

At the same time I admitted that I did not want to change my behaviour when it a meltdown. I also admitted that, ever since I first read Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly in the late 1990s, I had entwined abhorrent behaviour with the issues (global warming, now COVID-19) driving this behaviour so completely that I cannot express their opinions any other way. More than that, when I feel convinced by their arguments – and the current COVID-19 disaster in Victoria makes the World Socialist Web Site’s arguments appear irrefutable – I cannot ever contain myself expressing these views by screaming at the top of my voice, plus often hitting hard surfaces, and breaking even valuable things in the inability to contain rage. The aim of this rage is undoubtedly to alarm people enough to make them fight for the policies of socialist groups – complete confiscation of bosses’ profits to solve global warming and now COVID-19. However, it is logically obvious that the most extreme rage inside my home cannot attract the attention needed to mobilise the masses to achieve what the socialist groups desire.

During the previous two days of reduced testing and case numbers, when my temper was generally calm despite poor sleep and not getting to bed until 1:00 A.M., I planned to write on this blog what Premier Andrews would be saying if he were truly honest about the total failure of what, two days ago, Oscar Grenfell of the Socialist Equality Party conclusively demonstrated as a total sham “lockdown”. That Grenfell is 100 percent correct today’s figures give not the tiniest doubt. Unless the severest restrictions on business – proposed by not merely the WSWS but also epidemiologists like Julian Rait and journals like Australian Journal of Pharmacy – are implemented, case numbers will rise and rise indefinitely until improved medications are discovered. If we judge from HIV – admittedly an imperfect analogy – it could take up to six years before Victorians can be reasonably safe from COVID-19. Like COVID, attempts to discover a vaccine against HIV began at a very early stage in the virus’ history. Again analogously, there was early promise of an HIV vaccine that has never materialised even today when antiviral medications make HIV much less deadly. Like HIV, COVID-19 is a type of virus for which vaccine development is exceedingly difficult (though for different reasons than with HIV).

Here is, point by point, what Premier Andrews would say if he were radically honest about the total failure of his “targetted lockdown” policies:

1. “Today, sad to say, Victoria has observed 723 new cases of COVID-19, easily the highest on record since the pandemic began”
2. “This huge spike in cases is definitive proof that our lockdown policies have failed completely”
3. “It is clear that under the present lockdown case numbers are never going to fall”
4. “Victoria will be faced with four- and even five-digit case numbers for a very long time during August and into the spring if present policies are maintained”
5. “We have no doubt that a totally new policy is required if there is any hope for the state to ever recover from this disaster”
6. “Given that 659 of 723 new cases are community transmission, it is clear we must do something completely different to stop spread outside known sources”
7. “It is clear that we must severely rethink keeping workplaces open, given that 80 percent of cases are from workplaces”
8. “We must place the public’s safety above profits of big business owners, given that the escalation of cases proved beyond any doubt that the two are absolutely opposed and, verifiably, no compromise is possible”
9. “We must intensify our effort to hospitalise all inmates of infected aged care centres, and isolate  inmates for at least 14 days or until they test negative”
10. “We must develop policy that makes sure that working people in nonessential industries can gain an income until it becomes absolutely safe to reopen those industries”
11. “We must develop the strictest and most scientific criteria for what workplaces are absolutely essential to be kept open until the virus has been completely eliminated from Victoria”

If he really said something like this, Andrews would be being honest and truthful, and recognising he has presided over one of the most disastrous health failures in the world. As things stand, Andrews is simply playing by the rigidly limiting rules of protecting corporate profits above public health, when Oscar Grenfell demonstrates conclusively that protecting one is mutually exclusive of protecting the other.

The only alternative would be for Premier Andrews to honestly admit he is primarily concerned to protect corporate profits even when that stands verifiably incompatible with protecting public health. However, if he said that, one can admit the public reaction – a reaction the Premier would fear, but one his utter dishonesty makes by no means undeserved.

The world’s first failed lockdown, part III

Tonight, after I had been relatively calm over another record 484 cases in Victoria today compared to numerous nasty tantrums in the past few weeks, I had been playing the old Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego game from my childhood on My Abandonware, which I had discovered looking precisely for it on Google Images a couple of days ago.

Depressing news has become de riguer in Victoria this July, and my mother and brother have consistently said

“things will get worse before they get better”

So has Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton in his now-familiar daily addresses. However, with case numbers having risen threefold since the beginning of the lockdown, and Sutton forecasting that they will rise very soon to 500 or 600 per day, it is virtually certain that any reductions – let alone reductions below pre-lockdown totals – in case numbers in Victoria are a very long way away indeed. My mother and brother dismissed my prediction a couple of weeks ago that case numbers would never fall below 100 before the scheduled end of the present lockdown on 19 August, but the possibility they will fall that low so soon is becoming remoter by day.

In fact, Chief Medical Officer Sutton’s prediction of numbers of 500 to 600 in coming days constitute a tacit admission that the present lockdown is too weak to have the smallest long-term impact on exponential growth of COVID-19. This would mean quadruple-digit or higher totals are merely delayed by the lockdown and will be reached in August without any fall into the spring and beyond. Under this mapped-out future, saying “things will get worse before they get better” is a euphemism for a reality where things get worse and worse with improvement becoming a remoter and remoter possibility with each passing day. If quadruple-digit case numbers are already certain to be reached in August and beyond, then the impact on Victoria’s medical system would be incomprehensibly horrific, especially as nursing homes constitute a major source of infection spread.

In ‘Maximizing the probability that the 6-week lock-down in Victoria delivers a COVID-19-free Australia’ – published a week ago by the Medical Journal of Australia and authored by Tony Blakely, Jason Thompson, Natalie Carvalho, Laxman Bablani, Nick Wilson, and Mark Stevenson – it is argued that far stricter rules were necessary. The authors argued that:

“Under the ‘Standard’ [actual Andrews Government] policy approach, there is no chance that all infected people will have cleared their SARS-CoV-2 infection by 19 August (six-weeks after lock-down started).”

The rapid and continuing escalation of COVID-19 in Victoria since the article was written suggests that the authors, like Premier Andrews and Chief Health Officer Sutton, is exceedingly, even unrealistically, optimistic about the long-term effects of the present lockdown. It is abundantly clear to me that any reduction in case numbers, even in the long term, requires that all but the most essential workplaces – the source of 80 percent of current infections – be closed until at least six weeks with no new cases has passed. The World Socialist Web Site convincingly argue that enough money – by completely eliminating government bailouts to corporations – exists to pay workers’ wages in full until such a date passes.

The Medical Journal of Australia also argues that Australia’s economy will be adversely effected by

“public health measures necessary to prevent and control recurrent outbreaks arising from resurgent community transmission”

if the virus is not eliminated as it has been in the Territories, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Professor Blakely had previously argued in the June 17 Lancet article ‘Integrated quantification of the health and economic impacts of differing strategies to control the COVID-19 pandemic’ that Morrison’s preferred “suppression” strategy is never optimal, with “mitigation” optimal at low levels of willingness to pay and elimination at high levels.

For Australia’s ruling class, willingness to pay is undoubtedly very small relative to numbers of “life years” gained, since the ruling class can afford expensive private health cover and protective living environments that effectively immunise them against the dangers of the virus. Logically, then, mitigation would be the ruling class’ preferred option. Mitigation has been officially rejected by politicians due to the high inherent morbidity and mortality – if 60 percent of Victoria’s population were infected the number of deaths could exceed 25,000. However, both Andrews’ premature easing of restrictions and his refusal to close down non-essential workplaces suggest that Australia’s major parties do privately prefer a mitigation strategy, despite knowing that extreme numbers of deaths would necessarily result. An exception to preference for mitigation would occur where elimination proves achievable via minimal lockdowns, as happened in most of Australia.

Assuming Australia’s ruling classes prefer a mitigation strategy whenever weak lockdowns fail to eliminate COVID-19 accounts for the behaviour of the Andrews Government amidst the recurrence of the past five weeks. Refusing to close department and hardware stores when numbers began rising, and refusal to close schools, amounts, as the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated in numerous articles this month, to demonstrating that the Andrews Government is not willing to do what it takes to reduce case numbers. It is only willing to do what it takes to marginally slow growth whilst keeping as many private businesses as possible open.

If numbers continue to rise into four figures and even higher in August and beyond, and Premier Andrews fails to introduce tighter restrictions on what businesses can operate, it would be clear that he is in effect pursuing a mitigation strategy rather than a suppression strategy. What Andrews will do when the medical system is overwhelmed by four-figure case numbers is even now hard to imagine, but all choices are truly frightening.

How Andrews is not following medical experts

Despite persistent hopes from Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton, and new laws mandating face masks – very uncomfortable for me – in public places from this Thursday, there is still not the slightest sign that Victoria’s COVID-19 disaster will abate in the future. Most lockdowns have ultimately succeeded in getting case numbers down, but, two weeks in, this lockdown is the first to fail to achieve this.

In their daily morning speeches, Premier Andrews and Chief Medical Officer Sutton may well believe that compulsory masks in public will finally produce a decline in case numbers two weeks after the lockdown began and with outbreaks developing in “open” areas of Geelong and its surrounding rural shires. Two weeks later is when the decline really set in last time round, so one might not be too pessimistic at first sight.

However, the problem is that, ever since the crisis emerged, it has become clearer and clearer that Andrews has not been adequately following the best medical advice ever since the Cedar Meats outbreak at the beginning of May. At the end of May 2020, medical experts advised Andrews to wait until the end of June before easing restrictions by such moves as gradually opening cafés, libraries and swimming pools. However, pressure from business and peer pressure from other states where the virus was properly eradicated overwhelmed Andrews and caused him to ease restrictions when COVID-19 was still active in the Victorian community. Nevertheless, the first two weeks of eased restrictions looked promising for Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “suppression” strategy, as numbers fell below even what they were in the last part of the first lockdown.

Then, of course, disaster struck, as botched hotel quarantine allowed the virus to escape and spread far more rapidly than it did the first time. When Premier Andrews initially announced lockdown measures in March, SARS-CoV-2 cases in Victoria were almost all from foreign sources. However, Andrews continued trying merely suppress the virus in “hotbeds”, whilst movement of and contact between employed people spread COVID amongst Melburninans at an exceedingly rapid rate. Even when Metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire returned to Stage 3 lockdown two weeks ago, as the World Socialist Web Site demonstrated, so many businesses were kept open that the virus spread within the community exactly as beforehand – with extreme rapidity.

Apart from the WSWS – which my mother and brother view as a completely unreliable source – there have been others who have called for closure of many more businesses. Professor Tony Blakely – upon whose research the WSWS article is based – was the first to argue that Andrews should not follow the “suppression” strategy of Scott Morrison, and should aim for elimination by:

1. Strong and decisive leadership with strategic clarity. 
2. Convening an advisory group of experts in the elimination strategy and COVID-19 public health response.
3. Closing all schools until the daily rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection without a known source falls. 
4. Tightening the definition of essential shops to remain open.
5. Requiring mask-wearing in indoor environments where 1.5m physical distancing cannot be ensured.
6. Tightening the definition of essential workers and work. 
7. Requiring mask-wearing by essential workers whenever they are in close contact with people other than those in their immediate “household bubble”.
8. Ensuring financial and other support to businesses, community and other groups most affected by more stringent stay-at-home and lockdown requirements. 
9. Further strengthening contact tracing to ensure the majority of notifications (and their close contacts) are interviewed within 24 hours and placed in isolation if necessary.
10. Extending suspension of international arrivals into Victorian quarantine

Apart from requiring mask-wearing, Andrews refuses to do this, because businesses would lose profits vis-à-vis the current situation where they effectively operate as if there was no lockdown, and workers would feel very insecure if they did not know when they might return to having an income.

The present lockdown is the first in the world to completely fail to reduce numbers, and the economic and mental costs to lower class Melburnians will be severe if this failure continues indefinitely, which is virtually certain, despite the fact that many workers accept having to work in an unsafe environment to get food on their tables. The WSWS policy of expropriating bosses – or a more moderate policy requiring workers to be paid full wages until whenever is four to six weeks after the last new case – is in many ways just, but unspeakable to mainstream parties largely funded by big business. Any other policy based around closing all businesses except medicine or food stores risks workers losing jobs and sustenance permanently, although it has worked in countries with larger welfare systems than Australia possesses. The present policy, with continual extreme community transmission and no return to normal until antiviral treatments be developed, risks severe political reaction, although no election is due until late 2022.

The world’s first failed lockdown, part II

The catastrophic news of 428 (four hundred and twenty-eight) new COVID-19 cases in Victoria is both painful and extremely revealing.

Even Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton, speaking on ABC television, is now implicitly admitting that this current lockdown might prove the first in the world to entirely fail to reduce numbers. Sutton said he expected COVID-19 numbers to begin to fall on or before nine days into the lockdown. However, COVID case numbers appear to be on an upward trend more rapid than ever before, especially when one factors in that only ⅔ as many tests were conducted today as had been conducted during the first few days of the lockdown.

What this suggests is stark. The possibilities are to say the least alarming.

• It is first of all clear that far too many services are permitted to open when there exists anything other than absolute safety against the spread of the virus as per the World Socialist Web Site, let alone the present risk
• It may be that COVID-19 is spreading so rapidly within Melbourne that even operation of essential services cannot be done without extreme risk of continual spread
• for instance aged care workers often have to travel from the western suburbs to the Sandringham and Frankston corridors
• there exists extreme risk of spread from surfaces touched (even unintentionally) by these aged care workers, especially if they do not have time to clean them
• It could be that Melbourne’s populace is so frustrated there exists a non-negligible proportion that is unable to adequately comply with even present relatively lenient rules

The possible futures are equally stark:

1. Continuation of present Stage 3 lockdown with more and more rapid rises in case numbers
2. Shift to Stage 4 lockdown with all services except food and medical shops closed – with public works postponed or cancelled wherever not technically impossible, and tradespeople allowed to work only on demonstrably urgent maintenance
3. Shift to hard lockdown with people excluding law enforcement and medical workers not allowed outside home even for shopping – and nonresidents allowed inside residence only for COVID testing or demonstrably urgent maintenance

Plans 2) and 3) have long-term hope of reducing case numbers as the present lockdown clearly never will. Nevertheless, even if either 2) or 3) can finally reduce Melbourne’s COVID-19 case numbers, being judged successful – “successful” meaning the reopening of non-essential services with absolutely no recurrence of COVID-19 (whether to exclude externally acquired cases constitutes another issue) – is another matter.

It is certain that 2) or 3) will need to be adopted in Melbourne as case numbers skyrocket and skyrocket under the existing Stage 3 lockdown, despite Premier Andrews and Chief Medical Officer Sutton defensively saying that case numbers might be much larger without the Stage 3 lockdown. I have the most extreme scepticism, however, that even if case numbers under the adoption of scenario 2) or 3) do finally start falling, that it will produce a successful second reopening. For one thing, the World Socialist Web Site has demonstrated that demands of big business were a major cause of the premature reopening that has left Melbourne in its present state of explosive COVID-19 spread. For another – and I am in no way immune to this myself – Melburnians would be even more frustrated with a more rigid lockdown than they were with the Stage 3 autumn and current lockdowns.

As the World Socialist Web Site and many leading epidemiologists have demonstrated, for a truly successful reopening COVID-19 must be completely eliminated, or at least reduced far below the level of 8 cases per day in Victoria during the week before the first failed easing of restrictions.

In the present situation, sad to say, even if a hard lockdown were imposed now, it would take minimally eight weeks (until 12 September) before that hard lockdown could be ended with COVID-19 eliminated from Melbourne. A Stage 4 lockdown imposed today would take minimally ten weeks (until 26 September) for an analogous result. I have extreme doubts Melburnians would accept such stringent restrictions for so long, and doubt they would accept them even should they fail so badly as the present Stage 3 lockdown has. Moreover, unless COVID-19 is completely eliminated, there is the danger it would come back even more quickly after a severer and/or longer lockdown than observed in the autumn. The Melbourne public embraced its new freedoms with eagerness when restrictions were eased at the end of May, and they would undoubtedly do so more eagerly if they were eased from a more rigid level this spring or summer. Thus, whilst a long-term plan to end the present skyrocketing COVID-19 growth, get cases down to a sustained zero, and reopen Victoria is needed, presenting it to the public and carrying it out successfully appears quite impossible even in the long term.

The world’s first failed lockdown

After mild hopes that case numbers in Victoria would start to reflect the effects of the lockdown now a week old, today’s case numbers – 317 new cases – demonstrate some stark realities:

1. that present lockdown restrictions, whilst effective in the first outbreak and stronger than what was required anywhere else in Australia, are utterly unable to reduce infections in Melbourne under current conditions of spread and abundance
2. that this will become the first occasion anywhere in the world where a lockdown of non-essential services will fail entirely to reduce the rate of COVID-19 spread, let alone reduce actual case numbers
3. that unless a much more rigid “hard lockdown” is imposed, which will mean no one leaving their home at all even for shopping, numbers will rise and rise and rise and rise with no limit whatsoever except whatever is imposed by Melbourne’s population numbers
4. that the World Socialist Web Site are absolutely correct that the elimination of profit in quarantine is absolutely urgent – though they do not understand the actual importance of having quarantine
5. that the present inquiry into botches of quarantine is certainly to prove severely inadequate to bring the perpetrators to justice. This logically would require both severe financial penalties and substantial prison terms given the effects their spread of the virus is having upon employment opportunities for workers and the general public’s health
6. that the World Socialist Web Site are absolutely correct that there should be no reopening unless it be absolutely safe, meaning zero risk of new infections. Epidemiologists have ever since April said that absolute safety would mean easing restrictions only after minimally six weeks with no new cases
7. that when reopening does come – which even with a much harder lockdown would not be until several months into next year – testing of the population must be absolutely continuous to prevent one single undetected case from spreading

When the lockdown was imposed on 7 July, it was hoped that at this time case numbers would start to fall or plateau, as was admitted in today’s new by Chief Health Official Brett Sutton. The 317 new cases today puts paid to any prospect that the present lockdown is remotely adequate to even plateau new case numbers, let alone cause them to fall.

The reality is that only by a complete lockdown of the entire Melbourne public that does not allow them out of their homes for any purpose could there possibly be a reduction even in the long term. Such a measure would be exceedingly unpopular with a public already strained by three months of present-level restrictions.

The Andrews Government refuses to admit that its policies ever since the present outbreak began on 17 June have been a complete failure, and wishes to have the public believe there exists a minimal probability that present lockdown restrictions will some day lead to a reduction in numbers. However, this may not be the case if the public does not abide by the rules or if the operation of essential services leads to constant rapid transmission in public workplaces, food shops, or aged and medical care centres. These are centres of uncountable large outbreaks at present, and there exists the possibility that basic sustenance of life in aged care centres means workers will continuously transmit cases. Many aged care centre workers live far from where they work, and even with a rigid lockdown it may be impossible to stop continual spread unless the workers can either be given medical grade personal protective equipment or be accommodated in their workplaces. Under this scenario, unless those be absolutely required and paid for by the government, reduction in case numbers may be impossible in any time span.

The utter failure of Victoria’s government – and the consequences for everyone

The news that Victoria had 127 new cases – easily the most on record – this morning, after I half-joked that the figures would be much, much higher, was of itself no alarm given that I had been told that cases would rise due to outbreaks in a number of housing blocks in Flemington and North Melbourne. The alarming thing is that a mere sixteen of the new cases are due to testing in those above-mentioned housing blocks, leaving 111 – fifty percent more than yesterday – cases from community transmission.

What this shows is that government moves to merely lockdown affected or “hotspot” suburbs are an utter failure. At present rates of community transmission, Victoria will be receiving over 1,000 new cases by next week (13 July), assuming testing rates remain unchanged.

Premier Andrews, if he were serious about containing COVID-19, would accept that would have to implement a strict Stage 4 – stricter than the past autumn lockdown – with a law forbidding any revision until minimally four weeks (28 days) after the last new case. The rate of community transmission is so high at present that even under such a strict lockdown it is certain to take several weeks longer than other Australian states have taken to eliminate community transmission. If we base our calculation upon New South Wales, who took two months to largely eliminate community transmission, it would take minimally four months before Victoria would have passed four weeks with zero new cases every single day.

Four months from now would be early November, and after the frustration of the autumn lockdown, a much severer lockdown for twice as long or longer would be intolerable for most Victorians including myself. Nevertheless, if coronavirus is ever to be contained in Victoria there is clearly from recent figures absolutely no alternative except locking down until four weeks – or longer – after the last new case. Rigid rules that require any incoming traveller to test negative before being released into the community are also absolutely essential. This would have to be backed up by the severest punishments both personal and financial for those who breach these rules or who allow anyone positive to COVID into the community. As it stands, Stamford and Rydges must pay the entire economic cost to those placed out of work and financial support – their negligence is what has placed Victoria in its current predicament, and they must pay to get it out. New South Wales has conclusively demonstrated it is possible to open up without risk of a second, worse wave of infections. If Victoria eliminates COVID-19 adequately – which it had quite simply failed to do when it began to open up in June – it can if its quarantine is good enough reopen very quickly a second time with absolutely zero risk of recurrence.

As things are, one can only conclude that Victoria’s people and politicians are too frustrated to do what is needed to contain COVID-19 beyond an epidemic that could easily be much worse than any in Europe or North America. The radical left have shown all along that there is the money to defeat COVID-19 if the super-rich were made to pay for it. The present epidemic in Victoria is entirely or almost entirely the fault of wealthy hotel owners’ profit seeking leading them to cut costs in quarantining returning travellers, so the Trotskyist solution of seizing their profits and locking up their bosses without trial can appear absolutely just. Even if we do not fully accept the radical views of Socialist Alternative or the World Socialist Web Site, there can be no justice for economically displaced Victorians until these hotel companies pay in full for the damage they have caused. If they did pay the full costs of their negligence, it would be easier for Victorians already displaced from work for several months to tolerate twice as long a period out of work – but with the knowledge that when they were back at work they would be at zero risk of this happening for a third time.

The present government path of targetted lockdown is proving an utter failure. Either the government will have to rescind its current policy and adopt a Stage 4 lockdown until four weeks (possibly more) after the last new case to permit a rapid, zero-risk reopening, or it will continue its present failed policy of locking down more suburbs and seeing the virus spread for month after month with continuously increasing cases. Whilst the former policy is already unnecessarily painful – with unbotched quarantine Victoria would be already at the stage of a rapid and complete reopening with zero risk of recurrence – it will cost everybody less in the long term except for the super-rich businessmen who can make profits out of their negligence, and will mean Melbourne ending its COVID-enforced isolation from the rest of Australia much sooner.

Why a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation should be Australia’s goal

Tonight, when I was having dinner with my brother and mother, my brother made a stern criticism of my talk about Australia’s sorry greenhouse gas emissions record, revealed by this table from the Climate Change Performance Index. Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkmenistan are major omissions owing to their very high per capita emissions, but the table is still useful even with them omitted and many countries with low total and per capita emissions included.

The position of Australia at the absolute bottom of this list must constitute utter shame for every Australian. Writers like Tim Flannery, Thomas Aquinas McMahon, and Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski have shown that Australia’s ecology is:

1. shaped by soils that – at least amongst Quaternary landmasses – are uniquely ancient, weathered, nutrient-poor and vulnerable to erosion
1. the unique vulnerability to erosion is caused by extreme texture contrasts
2. these in turn are caused by clay accumulation in deep subsoil after 300 million or more years of topsoil leaching
3. most of this leaching occurred in much wetter and hotter climates than found in the Quaternary
2. demanding of extremely low energy consumption by native fauna, and extremely low nutrient requirements for native flora
3. demanding of extremely large territories for native fauna due to the extremely low density of nutritious food and the absence of nutrients that allow effective digestion of cellulose
4. in the case of aquatic organisms, shaped by uniquely high variability in runoff due to extremely low runoff coefficients and absence of baseflow where it is found in similar climates elsewhere
1. this is due to much greater absorption of water by native vegetation compared to similar climates elsewhere on the globe
2. in turn this high water absorption and low runoff component of moisture budgets is due to the need for deep, dense roots to absorb nutrients from ancient soils

These features, especially (2) demand that Australia have by far the world’s lowest per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, not excluding the poorest tropical African nations. They also demand logically that Australia be ranked as incomparably the world’s best country in terms of climate change performance. Both of these stand exactly opposed to Australia’s uniquely bad and worsening performance over the past three decades. An acceptable performance – even factoring in that many of the highest-performing countries could reasonably have been omitted – would have required Australia completely decarbonise so early as 2005.

Following on from groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation, and the Democratic Socialist Party, I have long assumed that by expropriating the wealth and profits of Australia’s major corporate greenhouse emitters, rapid and total decarbonisation of Australia would prove easy to plan and execute, chiefly by transferring from cars and coal to renewable energy and electric mass transit, complete cessation of land clearing, and large-scale revegetation of degraded farmland with native flora.

However, this evening, my brother said I had severely neglected the impact of the meat industry, and said I did so because I enjoy eating meat despite its major impacts via greenhouse gas emissions and using Australia’s uniquely scarce water resources. Consider that the volume of water carried by all mainland Australian rivers south of the Tropic of Capricorn – draining around four and a half million square kilometres – is only four-fifths that carried by the Kaladan, a river draining an area half the size of Tasmania.

I have long held that the environmental impacts of food grown abroad are negligible vis-à-vis analogous food grown in Australia because:

1. water resources overseas average around fifteen times as intense per unit area as the water resources of Australia south of the Tropic of Capricorn
2. required storage sizes for the same total draft in the same climate in Australia are (approximately) 7.3 times as large as for Europe, East Asia, the Americas or New Zealand
1. in fact, because of Australia’s high evaporation rates during dry spells due to advection of dry air from the interior, the figure of 7.3 times larger is most definitely an understatement
3. soils in the Enriched World (extratropical northern and western hemispheres) and the younger parts of the Tropical World are almost all under 10,000 years old and are rapidly replaced when eroded or damaged by new soil
4. in contrast, the topsoil of Australia was mostly formed over 300,000,000 years ago during the Carboniferous and is not replaced if eroded or damaged: instead, the landscape is permanently denuded, gullied and/or salinised
5. Australia’s oceans have – according to on old atlas that I was given by one of my father’s sisters – less than one-tenth the animal plankton density of seas in the same latitudes of Europe, East Asia, or the Americas
6. the requirements of Australian soils for the nutrient elements in which they are severely deficient compared to all other present-day landmasses can produce ecologically dangerous eutrophication during large floods, and also make land unsuitable for native flora and fauna
7. Australia’s native trees are extremely efficient at storing carbon in the absence of large-scale bushfires, vis-à-vis shorter-lived and more easily browsed Enriched and Tropical World trees
8. climate change has already substantially aridified Australia’s major agricultural areas, and as it further does so, larger areas of sub-marginal land of high conservation value might be cleared
1. ironically, this last point is most likely to be an issue if global warming makes present conservations reserves unsuitable for the species they were proclaimed to protect

These differences are much more severe for animal foods (including fish) than for annual plant foods, and much more for annual plant foods than for perennial plant foods. Contrary to the implicit attitude of many vegetarians, non-meat animal foods are equally or more unsustainable in the Australian environment as meat itself. Milk production uses more water and nutrients than meat, and fish is so unsustainable in Australia’s warm, oligotrophic oceans that many Aboriginal groups developed absolute taboos against fish eating, but not against meat. Australia is indeed so nutrient-poor that any population density above 0.1 people per square kilometre cannot be ecologically sustained by local nutrient resources unless the diet be de jure and de facto vegan. This means no animal foods would be eaten whatsoever and that law and/or custom also mandate no animal foods be eaten. The pre-industrial human history of Australia (see here), however, reflects that a vegan diet based on local resources would be impossibly poor nutritionally.

Contrariwise, in the Enriched World production of animal foods has exceedingly small comparative impact, so veganism becomes of itself a form of consumerism that helps divert food production into more fragile lands.

The only real argument against a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation of Australia is transport energy costs. Whilst these must not be dismissed, I have generally thought that with major improvements to fuel efficiency of ocean and rail transport, and even of intercontinental air transport, these problems could certainly be overcome to a substantial degree, and that even if they were not entirely overcome the gains in terms of conservation of Australia’s land and elimination of emissions from land clearing would make it justifiable.

The complete protection of Australia’s ancient soils and uniquely structured ecosystems would give a completely new and much truer image of Australia to outsides – an image of a continent whose ecological and even climatic structure is much closer to (if not perfectly representative of) the Earth during its predominant geological history as an ice-free oligotrophic planet. This history is not known to most of the world’s population, and is not well-understood even by ecologists, but that it needs to be known there is no doubt.

Blind spots in the Trotskyist worldview

Ever since the painful and frustrating COVID-19 pandemic began affecting Victoria in March, I have read the Trotskyist websites World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and Red Flag (the descendant of Socialist Alternative whose archives can be found here) as a response to frustration and hoping for a radical solution to the COVID-19 crisis that:

1. would avoid any risk of the recurrence that is occurring in Melbourne as I write this and
2. would not be too slow

I have extreme fear that lockdowns – on and off – will persist in Victoria well into 2021 and possibly into 2022 or 2023, whilst the rest of Australia has fully opened up and contained COVID-19 by the end of this year or earlier.

Revelation today that major quarantine breaches have been the major contributing factor to the explosive growth of COVID-19 in Victoria since 17 June has made me imagine that a “genuine socialist” society – as defined by Socialist Alternative and the WSWS – would avoid the mistakes that my mother has said are inevitable. By eliminating the profit motive more care would be taken to ensure no COVID-19 escapes from quarantine, rather than sacrificing care to reduce costs. Moreover, I have emphasised a major factor in why COVID-19, but not Ebola or swine flu, caused a major pandemic is that there is zero quarantine for travellers exiting tropical and East Asia, but strict quarantine for those exiting Latin America. This despite tropical and East Asia being more nutrient-rich and favourable for microbial development than Africa or eastern South America (although Mesoamerica and Andean South America are more nutrient-rich than tropical Asia).

The remarkable thing is that Trotskyist groups never think of quarantine as a good thing at all. They view it as merely a product of capitalism, which they define as exploitation of workers for profit. Much more importantly, Trotskyists view quarantine as a product of nation-states, which they believe are a weapon of capitalist class rule to divide the workers by nation, thus preventing a rapid international revolution to overthrow global capitalism. The fact is that, even if the majority of political divisions are artificial, there does exist extremely distinct ecological regions of the world, as I have outlined in many older posts on this blog.

Trotskyists’ COVID-19 policy consists of a rigid cessation of all nonessential industries with zero loss of pay until a vaccine is found. The World Socialist Web Site have claimed that a vaccine would be found in one month if every single cent of the wealth and profits of the richest 1 percent – or even of the richest 0.01 percent – was expropriated and diverted to urgent medical research. Trotskyists also believe that if land clearing in the tropics were eliminated, large-scale pandemics would be too, although they lack understanding of why it is only the Tropical World where land-clearing has such disastrous effects.

No actual scientist believes that a vaccine could possibly be found in one month even with the total expropriation advocated by the Trotskyists.The human body does not function in such a manner that testing of vaccines can be done perfectly within such a short time. Side-effects of vaccines and of drugs can take several months to develop. The Trotskyists undoubtedly believe that:

1. new electronic medical technology would permit extremely rapid developments of perfectly safe and effective drugs and vaccines
2. such would be possible if every last cent of the profits and wealth of the richest 1 percent or 0.01 percent were expropriated and placed in the hands of the majority

However, their claims – as I recall them – seem to be what my brother calls marginally misleadingly (because Trotskyists are insistent that human work and constant struggle against the capitalists is the key to achieving the immense benefits of workers’ rather than bosses’ control) “magic solutions”. By “magic solutions” is meant an idea or action that would solve every single problem in the world in a completely failsafe manner. In the case of COVID-19, the Trotskyist worldview goes ridiculously far, and has definite blind spots in their extreme internationalism failing to recognise natural ecological boundaries, and their belief that workers’ control can eliminate all social and economic problems immediately.

Five months (or years?) more of frustration

Today, with the news that Victoria’s new COVID-19 cases have increased by 75 compared to yesterday, the looming future for the state becomes mapped out so clearly.

Around five weeks ago, Victoria’s leaders were criticised for not opening up sooner, despite there still being an average of eight new cases in the state during the preceding week. Today, such criticism seems patently absurd with as many new COVID cases as at the March peak, and certain in ensuing days to be far more than the previous record of 111. Contrariwise, if Victoria had waited until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 case to remove restrictions in place in April and May, Melburnians would have seen life back to normal by this coming spring with zero risk of a new wave of infections. As it is, with only a portion of these restrictions removed, COVID-19 cases are again growing exponentially, and, as targeted lockdowns in major centres of COVID-19 growth have failed, Victoria stands faced with three unpleasant choices:

• a strict lockdown with all non-essential services closed until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 infection
• this will absolutely ensure that no COVID-19 whatsoever remains in the Victorian community
• to ensure the complete elimination of the virus this move would need to be accompanied by sustained high levels of testing until eight weeks (56 days) after the last new COVID-19 infection
• only this policy, although unpleasant in the short term, can ensure absolutely zero risk of another wave of infections and permit rapid, complete reopening once zero risk is attained
• short-term lockdowns and reopenings when cases have fallen merely to “manageable” levels
• this is the actual policy of the Andrews Government, but will result in severe long-term hardship for the majority of Victorians
• the certain result is a chaotic pattern – lasting many years – of lockdown after lockdown, partial reopening after partial reopening, with the virus entirely uncontrolled
• continuing reopening in face of exponential growth of COVID-19 that is certain to overwhelm the state’s medical services

Given observed rates of decay in new COVID-19 cases before the partial reopening at the end of May, it is probable that, had there been no partial reopening, it would have been around the end of August before the state reached four weeks after the last new COVID-19 case, although possible timeframes could have ranged from late July at the earliest up to late September or even later. Eight weeks after the last new COVID-19 case would have been the middle of October 2020, although a range from late August until the end of November would have been plausible.

Melbourne’s populace was frustrated with lockdowns before reopening began at the end of May, and would have found it difficult to tolerate a continued strict lockdown into August, September or even October 2020 (into whenever is four weeks after the last new infection). However, such a long lockdown, alongside constant testing and rigid quarantine, would have ensured a rapid return to normal conditions without any risk of reoccurring infections. This would have been a definite lesser evil and allowed rapid although seriously delayed return to normal life with zero risk of local COVID-19 infection. As it stands, Melbourne’s populace will almost certainly become more frustrated again with repeated lockdowns and reopenings into 2021, 2022 and further on, alongside continual spread of COVID-19.

What is already striking, and certain to be more so in the future, is that Victoria will beyond doubt remain locked down whilst all Australia’s other states and territories have eliminated COVID-19 spread, and almost certainly after basic social distancing requirements are eliminated there. Even if movement into border communities on the Victorian side of the Murray River is permitted, there will likely be no permission for movement into or out of Victoria beyond those limits once COVID-19 is eradicated from the remainder of Australia. Rather, we will simply see travelling links that exclude Melbourne and its surrounds established and maintained for many years. Long-term trends towards Melbourne’s relative growth will likely be reversed and growth transferred to other parts of Australia, although which other parts will benefit be is impossible to yet tell.

A looming disaster and a quarantine botch

Twenty days ago, there was a family celebration to celebrate Victoria’s first day with zero COVID-19 cases.

Unfortunately, the hope provided by two days early this month with no new COVID-19 case in Victoria has been crushed by rapid community spread of the virus at a time when the rest of Australia has not seen locally sourced transmission for a long time. Despite the rapid spread – which is practically certain to exceed Victoria’s peak of 111 reported cases per day late in March – the Andrews Government is preceding with the opening of major libraries and museums for the school holidays. These school holidays, which finish on Sunday 12 July, are critical for the finances of economically crippled cultural institutions such as the State Library and the Melbourne Museum. It is also true that some precautions are being taken to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 inside these claustrophobic building environments.

If COVID-19 cases in Victoria grow at the rate they have over the past fortnight – from a daily average of three coronavirus cases in Victoria a fortnight ago to 23 today – they would rise to 176 cases per day over the coming fortnight to end on 10 July, and to 1,351 cases per day over the first fortnight of the scheduled school term, which ends on 24 July. Given that testing is steady at around 20,000 tests per day over the past three days, and tends to peak on Thursdays and Fridays when people are most often at facilities in major shopping centres, 1,351 cases per day would mean that 6.75 percent of Melburnians have COVID-19.

Such a situation would mean that Melbourne – though likely not rural Victoria where there is no community transmission – would return to the strict lockdown from between 17 March and the late May. Most likely the state government would be eager to maintain a much longer lockdown than the ten weeks seen last autumn, in order to ensure that COVID-19 really does get eliminated from the state. Security would require that the severest restrictions remain until four weeks after the last new COVID-19 infection, to ensure that the virus has completely gone. Such would mean that restrictions would be returned to the highest level – or higher than last autumn – and last until well after the ordinary September holidays, and most likely not being removed or even relaxed until November or even December. Whilst such a long lockdown might remove COVID-19 from Melbourne to a reasonable degree, it would be certainly horribly frustrating for a population already not wishing to see restrictions upon movement re-imposed.

For politicians who are awfully vacillating rather than acting decisively, a re-imposed lockdown is feared as costing votes, unlike in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfallen, where a lockdown has been re-imposed without opposition two days ago upon 400,000 people after an infection in a meatpacking facility. This is what Victoria needed to do in the Cities of Brimbank and Maribyrnong as soon as the Cedar Meats cluster was detected.

It is popularly thought that the reason why Victoria alone amongst Australian states is suffering community transmission of COVID-19 is luck. This is patently wrong. The reality is that there is no accident behind why Victoria is the only state with community COVID transmission:

1. The source of most of Victoria’s current community COVID-19 transmission is almost certainly from security guards in quarantine hotels, most critically the Rydges and the Stamford Plaza
2. Most people in quarantine are recent migrants who travelled abroad to visit near relatives on urgent family matters
3. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and the Territories are home to a very small proportion of recent migrants, and essentially none live in rural areas
4. Most critically, in New South Wales army personnel and medical staff were used to strictly enforce quarantine. Contrariwise, in Victoria security guards with no medical knowledge were used to enforce quarantine

The result is that COVID spread from those in quarantine to immigrant communities chiefly in Melbourne’s western suburbs, but has remained inside quarantine in New South Wales and has essentially disappeared from rural areas and from other states. There is a severe lesson exactly analogous to the one I noted about the absence of quarantine for travellers from tropical Asia at the start of the pandemic here: that strict and properly-enforced quarantine is the best way to stop disease spreading. Both the Victorian Government and the World Health Organisation appear yet to learn this lesson.

Are these “History's Nine Most Insane Rulers”?

As a result of highly reasonable criticism of the PIGs’ views on race and on American politics – and their tendency to follow what the Republican Party does – I have not been so interested in them. During the COVID-19 crisis, I have turned quite a bit to their political opposite, the Trotskyists whom I read intensely during April, at times falling prey to the anger that is of course the aim of websites like the World Socialist Web Site.

As I searched my huge backlog of emails, I found that Regnery – the publisher of the PIGs whose founder Henry Regnery was a Nazi sympathiser – had published a book that responds to criticism of Donald Trump by arguing that there were many rulers much more insane than Trump has ever been. Titled History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers (with a number in the title rather than spelled out) it looks at the following historical figures (lifespan in brackets):

1. Emperor Caligula of Rome (A.D. 12 to A.D. 41)
2. Charles VI of France (1368 to 1422)
3. Ivan IV Vasilyevich of Russia (1530 to 1584)
4. Sultan Ibrahim I of Ottoman (1615 to 1648)
5. George III of England (1738 to 1820)
6. Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845 to 1886)
7. Idi Amin (1925 to 2003)
8. Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Ataýewiç Nyýazow; 1940 to 2006)
9. Kim Jong-il (1942 to 2011)

The first thing a reader will not about these leaders is the absence of the most infamous tyrants of history like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot – not to mention others. There are no nonhereditary theocratic monarchs in the list, and most are hereditary monarchs from earlier civilisations. Of these, a couple are quite familiar (Ivan IV “The Terrible” and Ludwig II) but most are not. The details of two of the three post-monarchical leaders – Sapamurat Niyazov or “Türkmenbaşy” and Idi Amin – are well-known but in the limited audio I watched tonight on YouTube they stood out in a manner that more infamous dictators did not for their eccentric behaviour.

The video itself was of some interest for revealing surprising side-effects of these rulers’ insanity and mad behaviour.

“The Incompetent Security Game”

As a child, I read three of the eight Famous Five Adventure Games (see a discussion of another aspect here) – The Sinister Lake Game, The Whispering Island Game and The Secret Airfield Game. I was probably attracted by the numbers of the paragraphs in the games working out the games’ structure, which is quite logical but not explained anywhere on the web as far as I know.

Even back in my childhood, my brother always said the games were contrived – something I will admit without a grudge and which still gives me a bit of humour even in my forties. Since my unsuccessful librarianship course, I have collected the five remaining titles, although I have not been able to get the full cards for The Wreckers’ Tower Game or The Shuddering Mountain Game.

I always could recognise Blyton’s xenophobia in most of these books. Most although not all the villians are Italian (The Whispering Island Game) or Russian. No doubt this xenophobia reflects Blyton’s upper-middle-class hostility to the internationalism of Europe’s socialist working classes, and of course Russian international power and the spread of Stalinism was an especially salient issue in the 1950s.

Often, and still today, I have imagined whilst knowing it wrong that the Famous Five is fact rather than children’s fiction written by a middle-class woman undoubtedly hostile to the urban lower classes. However, despite having known the problems of the stories for a long time, today my brother offered a new twist on many jokes we tell about them. He argued that the story of Jeff being abducted by two men was entirely unrealistic because a secret military airfield would be much better guarded than the story in The Secret Airfield Game (and the related story in Five Go to Billycock Hill) implies. He also said that theft of a top secret military jet would have been investigated by military police much more quickly than implied in the stories, where there is no evidence of any investigation other than by the airfield’s ordinary guards. My brother made a really funny joke of calling the game “The Incompetent Security Game”, arguing that a secret military airfield would never be left unguarded even in the dark of night. Even with the limited technology of the 1950s, I agreed and agree enough to see that I had overlooked entirely unlikely elements in the plots of the Famous Five Adventure Games.

The name “The Incompetent Security Game” is really, really funny, unlike my brother’s “Child Labor Game” which implies that the Famous Five did not enjoy what they were doing. Its only problem is that it would imply that the mystery is to be solved in government negligence, which Blyton would not have wanted to convey. In fact, she likely wanted to convey the idea that ordinary people should take responsibility for crises as deep and as specialised as theft of critical military equipment or of minerals or old treasures.

40 years of unnecessary wastage must end at a stroke

As I have noted, there is little public confidence about using Victoria’s ecologically critical public transport network.

Today, my mother confirmed that a mere thirteen percent of the state’s residents are confident about using public transport due to the risk of COVID spread. My mother says that when COVID ebbs this will improve, but I am neither:

1. certain of this
1. COVID-19 is so much more severe than previous pandemics that people will not forget it even when and if improved treatments are developed.
2. More likely the public will come to fear public transport as an incubator for viruses on a permanent basis
3. Victorians in the future will be thus even more willing to accept road traffic congestion and its ecologically deadly consequences
2. accepting of the situation, give Australia’s execrable environmental performance outlined for may years by the New Climate Institute in its annual Climate Change Performance Index
3. accepting that there is no better alternative to a car-based transport system and drastic cuts to already inadequate services

Both the Public Transport Users’ Association and the Democratic Socialist Party conclusively demonstrated in the 1990s that a public transport system providing equal mobility to Melbourne’s current car- and freeway-based transport system would cost about ⅒ as much as freeway projects planned and built since 1990.

Earth’s ecology has been demanding from Australia a rigid zero roads budget policy throughout forty years of uncalled-for wastage on freeways that benefit only the car companies, the oil companies, and businesses supplying them with raw materials and components.

If all money earmarked for unbuilt proposed roads were transferred to the critical issue of making ecologically essential public transport perfectly safe through all pandemics, there would no doubt – although I have not made calculations – exist ample money to sanitise every public transport vehicle and to ensure all passengers are given hand sanitiser, masks and gloves. Such a transfer of funding would have the following advantages:

1. prevention of huge losses for Victoria’s public transport system
2. prevention of drastic cuts to services after the COVID-19 pandemic ends
3. prevention of massive increases in traffic congestion – which more roads exacerbates – as more cars are on the road
4. reduction Australia’s lamentable level of greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the impacts on the global climate
5. preparing for a complete transfer of all public and private transport funding to rail and buses – forty or more years overdue as I write this
6. following from (5), major public savings from not subsidising the car and fossil fuel industries who benefit from public and private wasting of money on ecologically damaging transport systems

25-scoring-shot quarter aggregates

Ten years ago, I did a post on cases of 100 points being scored in a quarter in VFL/AFL football. A few weeks ago, I listed all 37 cases in a tabulated manner.

Having long been interested in the length of [Australian rules] football games and quarters, I have recently considered whether aggregate scoring shots rather than aggregate points scored would provide a better indication of how long a quarter or match is likely to last.

For this reason, I have looked for quarters in VFL/AFL football with at least 25 aggregate scoring shots. As a first note, I have tabulated such quarters in pink below:

Round	Home Team	¼ time	½ time	¾ time		Away Team	¼ time	½ time	¾ time
Round 1, 1934	Essendon	8.2 (50)	12.5 (77)	15.9 (99)	19.11 (125)	Footscray	8.7 (55)	10.13 (73)	13.15 (93)	16.18 (114)
Round 6, 1935	Carlton	2.4 (16)	12.11 (83)	15.13 (103)	20.16 (136)	North Melbourne	2.5 (17)	6.9 (45)	8.12 (60)	9.14 (68)
Round 2, 1939	South Melbourne	3.4 (22)	8.11 (59)	10.14 (74)	15.17 (107)	Collingwood	8.12 (60)	11.13 (79)	17.18 (120)	21.20 (146)
Round 3, 1940	Collingwood	5.4 (34)	6.8 (44)	13.18 (96)	18.19 (127)	Carlton	2.4 (16)	5.6 (36)	7.13 (55)	12.18 (90)
Round 19, 1945	Carlton	5.3 (33)	12.9 (81)	14.13 (97)	23.23 (161)	Geelong	1.2 (8)	2.6 (18)	7.8 (50)	9.13 (67)
Round 15, 1969	Collingwood	3.3 (21)	6.5 (41)	12.13 (85)	15.16 (106)	Carlton	4.2 (26)	7.6 (48)	14.10 (94)	17.14 (116)
Round 19, 1975	South Melbourne	4.4 (28)	7.13 (55)	10.17 (77)	13.20 (98)	Fitzroy	6.1 (37)	10.10 (70)	12.14 (86)	16.19 (115)
Round 1, 1977	Fitzroy	8.5 (53)	13.11 (89)	16.13 (109)	21.17 (143)	Richmond	5.3 (33)	13.10 (88)	16.17 (113)	18.21 (129)
Round 6, 1977	Hawthorn	5.11 (41)	10.24 (84)	15.32 (122)	25.41 (191)	St. Kilda	2.0 (12)	10.3 (63)	11.5 (71)	16.7 (103)
Round 2, 1978	Melbourne	4.7 (31)	14.15 (99)	20.20 (140)	24.23 (167)	Fitzroy	5.3 (33)	8.7 (55)	16.13 (109)	23.19 (157)
Round 6, 1978	Melbourne	6.2 (38)	8.5 (53)	15.8 (98)	21.15 (141)	St. Kilda	8.7 (55)	19.12 (126)	23.13 (151)	31.18 (204)
Round 13, 1978	Essendon	1.6 (12)	2.12 (24)	7.16 (58)	12.26 (98)	Collingwood	3.2 (20)	9.8 (62)	11.14 (80)	14.21 (105)
Round 14, 1978	Richmond	3.5 (23)	11.15 (81)	16.15 (111)	17.20 (122)	Geelong	5.3 (33)	11.4 (70)	15.8 (98)	18.9 (117)
Round 7, 1979	Footscray	4.3 (27)	10.7 (67)	13.10 (88)	22.17 (149)	South Melbourne	4.4 (28)	9.6 (60)	10.12 (72)	14.17 (101)
Round 15, 1979	Melbourne	5.3 (33)	9.11 (65)	17.17 (119)	24.23 (167)	South Melbourne	4.5 (29)	10.5 (65)	18.8 (116)	24.10 (154)
Round 5, 1980	Richmond	6.1 (37)	13.8 (86)	18.19 (127)	29.25 (199)	Fitzroy	4.3 (27)	4.8 (32)	9.13 (67)	11.15 (81)
Round 9, 1980	Collingwood	2.8 (20)	10.18 (78)	13.23 (101)	18.28 (136)	Geelong	0.7 (7)	6.10 (46)	10.13 (73)	15.15 (105)
Round 22, 1980	Carlton	5.5 (35)	9.11 (65)	19.17 (131)	21.20 (146)	Fitzroy	3.5 (23)	5.11 (41)	11.14 (80)	20.22 (142)
Round 3, 1982	Richmond	4.7 (31)	12.14 (86)	15.18 (108)	25.22 (172)	Essendon	6.3 (39)	12.9 (81)	14.13 (97)	16.14 (110)
Round 17, 1983	Fitzroy	2.4 (16)	14.10 (94)	16.12 (108)	20.18 (138)	St. Kilda	7.6 (48)	14.7 (91)	19.14 (128)	22.17 (149)
Round 5, 1985	Hawthorn	4.8 (32)	9.16 (70)	14.18 (102)	21.23 (149)	Richmond	5.5 (35)	13.10 (88)	23.11 (149)	29.14 (188)
Round 14, 1985	Geelong	7.9 (51)	10.13 (73)	14.19 (103)	17.22 (124)	Footscray	7.3 (45)	12.6 (78)	17.8 (110)	23.8 (146)
Round 21, 1985	Sydney	8.10 (58)	14.15 (99)	20.17 (137)	24.21 (165)	Melbourne	2.5 (17)	5.10 (40)	10.11 (71)	14.13 (97)
Round 5, 1988	North Melbourne	3.2 (20)	7.8 (50)	12.11 (83)	19.14 (128)	Hawthorn	7.3 (45)	14.7 (91)	25.14 (164)	31.19 (205)
Round 1, 1989	Carlton	1.2 (8)	2.6 (18)	8.10 (58)	10.13 (73)	Footscray	5.3 (33)	9.6 (60)	17.13 (115)	19.18 (132)
Round 1, 1989	North Melbourne	2.5 (17)	11.9 (75)	14.14 (98)	18.17 (125)	Geelong	6.3 (39)	9.12 (66)	14.17 (101)	17.21 (123)
Round 5, 1989	North Melbourne	3.1 (19)	8.9 (57)	10.12 (72)	20.14 (134)	Richmond	7.3 (45)	9.5 (59)	18.10 (118)	26.15 (171)
Round 6, 1989	Hawthorn	5.3 (33)	9.5 (59)	16.9 (105)	26.15 (171)	Geelong	8.4 (52)	17.6 (108)	19.10 (124)	25.13 (163)
Round 8, 1989	West Coast	3.4 (22)	7.13 (55)	9.20 (74)	12.21 (93)	Melbourne	1.3 (9)	7.10 (52)	8.12 (60)	13.17 (95)
First Semi-Final, 1989	Geelong	3.3 (21)	8.8 (56)	12.11 (83)	22.21 (153)	Melbourne	1.5 (11)	3.11 (29)	8.16 (64)	12.18 (90)
Round 4, 1991	Richmond	5.8 (38)	9.10 (64)	14.12 (96)	19.13 (127)	Sydney	9.4 (58)	13.8 (86)	16.14 (110)	24.20 (164)
Round 4, 1991	Brisbane	2.1 (13)	8.8 (56)	10.11 (71)	12.16 (88)	Geelong	4.9 (33)	11.16 (82)	21.21 (147)	27.28 (190)
Round 6, 1991	North Melbourne	5.7 (37)	13.12 (90)	19.18 (132)	27.26 (188)	Sydney	9.3 (57)	19.6 (120)	21.8 (134)	21.8 (134)
Round 21, 1991	Hawthorn	7.6 (48)	11.15 (81)	22.25 (157)	28.27 (195)	Fitzroy	2.2 (14)	4.5 (29)	7.6 (48)	10.9 (69)
Round 22, 1991	Fitzroy	7.5 (47)	14.9 (93)	17.14 (116)	22.16 (148)	North Melbourne	4.2 (26)	14.6 (90)	16.12 (108)	21.21 (147)
Round 13, 1992	North Melbourne	4.2 (26)	5.6 (36)	14.8 (92)	17.13 (115)	Geelong	7.5 (47)	16.8 (104)	23.16 (154)	29.18 (192)
Round 23, 1992	Adelaide	5.6 (36)	14.17 (101)	17.21 (123)	24.25 (169)	Geelong	1.9 (9)	4.5 (29)	8.9 (57)	11.12 (78)
Round 7, 1994	Geelong	7.3 (45)	13.9 (87)	15.12 (102)	18.16 (124)	Collingwood	0.1 (1)	4.10 (34)	12.14 (86)	13.18 (96)
Round 22, 1995	North Melbourne	7.11 (53)	16.13 (109)	25.21 (171)	30.24 (204)	Fitzroy	6.1 (37)	8.2 (50)	12.6 (78)	15.11 (101)
Round 5, 2001	Brisbane	3.4 (22)	9.9 (63)	12.15 (87)	25.21 (171)	Fremantle	6.2 (38)	8.4 (52)	15.6 (96)	19.8 (122)

Some notable facts about 25-scoring-shot quarters:

1. the total number of 43 is six more than the 37 century-aggregate quarters
2. the most in one season is six in 1989
3. the second-most is five in 1978 and five in 1991
4. other seasons with multiple cases are 1977 (three), 1979, 1980 (three), 1985 (three), 1992 and 1995 (two in one match)
5. the most 25-scoring-shot quarters played by any club is 11 by Fitzroy and Geelong
6. Port Adelaide, Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney have played no 25-scoring-shot quarters; Adelaide, Fremantle and West Coast just one
7. Essendon have the fewest by any pre-1987 club with just three
8. unlike century-aggregate quarters, three matches have seen two 25-scoring-shot-aggregate quarters:
1. Hawthorn v St. Kilda, Round 6, 1977 (second and final)
2. Melbourne v Fitzroy, Round 2, 1978 (second and third)
3. North Melbourne v Fitzroy, Round 22, 1995 (first and third)
9. unlike century-aggregate quarters, there has been one case in a finals match of 25 scoring shots in a quarter, between Geelong and Melbourne in the last quarter of the 1989 First Semi-Final
• although not reching the century aggregate, this last quarter is the highest-scoring quarter ever recorded in a finals match – remarkably it was quite a rainy day
10. of the 43 25-scoring-shot-aggregate quarters, a total of twelve were also century-aggregate quarters
1. these twelve quarters constitute 32.43 percent of all century-aggregate quarters and 27.91 percent of all 25-scoring-shot-aggregate quarters
11. there have been six of the consistent 22 rounds since 1970 without a 25-scoring-shot-aggregate quarter:
1. Round 10
2. Round 11
3. Round 12
4. Round 16
5. Round 18
6. Round 20
12. Contrariwise, there have been six cases on Round 6, five cases on Round 5, and four cases on Round 1 and Round 22
13. This pattern is broadly similar to those of century-aggregate quarters, though with a larger drop occurring at the height of the season in the coolest and darkest winter weather
14. unlike century-aggregate quarters, there have been two rounds – Round 1, 1989 and Round 4, 1991 – with two games featuring a 25-scoring-shot aggregate quarter
15. the lowest aggregate for a 25- or more-scoring-shot-quarter is 7.18 (60) between South Melbourne and Fitzroy in Round 19, 1975
16. the lowest match aggregate with a 25-scoring-shot quarter is 25.38 (188) between West Coast and Melbourne in Round 8, 1989
17. of the 43 quarters with 25 scoring shots, 23 have had exactly 25 scoring shots, 15 had 26 aggregate scoring shots, four had 27 aggregate scoring shots, none had 28 aggregate scoring shots, and one (the second quarter between Hawthorn and St. Kilda in Round 6, 1977) had 29 aggregate scoring shots
18. of the 20 quarters with 26 or more scoring shots, there were three (two in one match) in 1977 and 1991. Two occurred in 1980, 1985, and 1989
19. all of the five quarters with 27 or more aggregate scoring shots were first or second quarters – four being second quarters alone
20. the previous point does suggest that accuracy improving as players are exhausted may be a factor in causing century-aggregate quarters to concentrate in the final quarter when players are most weary