Category: Public policy

An email I sent out yesterday:

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Dear all

A few weeks ago I’d shared the Exec Summary of the final GigiFoster CBA, which shows that the harms from lockdowns and border closures in Australia have been at least in the order of 68 times the benefits.

Now the full CBA is ready to be ordered – it has been converted into a book published by Connor Court. It is the kind of document that the government would normally produce. But due to the Great Hysteria, all principles of good policy were thrown out of the window in 2020 and we never got a CBA from the government.

While I’m biased towards this particular CBA,  I can confirm that in my entire career as a government economist, I’ve never seen a more comprehensive and thorough CBA. Having said that, there’s obviously a huge opportunity to further refine and improve it, should someone wish to do so.  The governments of Australia have destroyed half a trillion dollars (apart from other harms to life and health). Had they invested in a CBA, they would have achieved a great outcome for Australia at a fraction of that cost. Making policy without a CBA is equivalent to flying a plane without a flight panel.

A few related things

1. My 2020 book, The Great Hysteria and The Broken State.
2. Gigi Foster’s 2021 book (along with Paul Fritjers and Michael Baker), The Great Covid Panic.
3. My 2022 study along with Jason Gavriliswhich conclusively proves that lockdowns increased even covid deaths globally.
4. My detailed complaint of November 2020 to the International Criminal Court which showed even then how the policies adopted in Australia constitute a crime against humanity. The data on the mass massacres caused by Australia’s policies is out in the open. Further, across the world millions of additional deaths have occurred due to lockdowns. Surely someday this will be recognised as a crime against humanity.  This chart from ABS shows how severe the additional deaths are in Australia itself. Almost all the 10,000 odd people whose lives were saved in 2020 and 2021 by intense border closures, have died in 2022 from covid. Plus vast numbers of additional non-COVID deaths (the CBA contains a deeper analysis of ABS data to show how the excess deaths of Australia are an under-count).
5. Dan Andrews and his Liberal understudy Matthew Guy have failed to respond to my challenge to prove their blatantly false claims about covid being in the league of Spanish flu. I offered them 11k. Sky Newsasked these pollies to go ahead and prove it. None have done so. They can’t! They have lied at every step over the past 2.5 years. I’ve taken this message (of the lying politicians) to the people of Bulleen through flyers, walking myself over 500 km in 100 days and spending around $40,000 from my pocket to raise awareness of these lies. My candidate page contains the DL flyers that I’ve been distributing (and paying Australia Post to distribute). I was working only 0.6 FTE when I resigned in September 2020 to fight public health tyranny. My opportunity cost will be well over $200 by end-2022 from lost wages. If we add my expenses to educate the people, I’d have spent around $250k by end-2022 to fight public health tyranny. So if you have any capacity to do so, please chip in to support my work to wake up the people.
6. Finally, I’d love to support a CBA of lockdowns in India where even more devastation has been caused by Narendra Modi than by Australia’s politicians. Unfortunately, in India not a single economist/policy maker has ever heard about a CBA. I keep raising this issue repeatedly, but they’ve never heard of it – the purest form of a banana republic. I’m sharing this email with some Indians so they might finally wake up one day and undertake a CBA.

Regards

Sanjeev Sabhlok