Lev Lafayette's journal

Today Melbourne city had a protest by anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protesters who represent a tiny percentage of the community but who are increasingly violent in their behaviour (compare, for example, the protests in Sydney and Perth). Many of the participants hold to bizarre fringe ideas, such as the coronavirus is a hoax, or a deliberate plan, or that the vaccination programme is a step towards a totalitarian government. Others, I suspect, were just there to get into a fight with the police or they wanted to riot. Well, hundreds of arrests later they had a gentle taste of power wielded by government. The problem with such people, as much as they cry "freedom", is that they don't have a very good sense of the difference between democratic public space and libertarian personal pace. We are in a public health conflict, of which war metaphors are quite appropriate, and these people are fifth columnists fighting on the side of the virus. I am rather more inclined to the AMA's position that a loosening of restrictions is premature. But such is the nature of politics; sometimes public will is against scientific opinion.

On the national scale, the decision this week by the Morrison government to renege on a deal with French designers to build 12 new attack-class submarines in Adelaide. Already Australia's largest military acquisition in history, it is an exercise in eye-watering opportunity costs. By early January it was already evident that what should have cost $50 billion was going to increase to $89 billion, and now the Federal government is cancelling the deal in favour of nuclear-powered submarines as part of a new defense pact with the United States and the United Kingdom (AUKUS), obviously aimed at curtailing Chinese influence. In doing so, the government has managed to aggravate our largest trading partner, shock and frustrate an important ally, throw away billions of dollars, and cost local jobs. It's a pretty ham-fisted set of actions, from a fumbling government that either announces and fails to deliver, or engages in shocking levels of nepotism and transfer of public money to their wealthy sponsors. Even on a technological level, smaller autonomous unmanned underwater and surface vehicles are the future - but they're more likely for defense, rather than attack.

I have a slight and ongoing annoyance at work, namely, my five-year-old laptop is giving up the ghost, mainly due to fan issues. It's a bit of a "first-world problem", but I've had a request in for a replacement for some months now and only recently has the IT procurement team decided that they can't replace it without a field assessment. They seem to have forgotten that we are in a lockdown and that all they need to do is check the date of purchase. Anyway bad became worse on Thursday when I had a need to do a firmware upgrade, and the system decided to freeze for the better part of 24 hours, which was unfortunate given that I had a workshop to conduct the following day. Fortunately, I managed to get all the necessary software, keys, etc together on my old Mac (a hand-me-down from Rick B) and I managed to conduct the class in that fashion. Still, it was an illustrative microcosm example of sometimes how bureaucracies don't think through their own edicts. Make of what you will whether this applies to national defense purchases.