Hypocrisy is defined by a national government rushing to accept the global accolades for most effective management of COVID-19 while ignoring its clear responsibilities for quarantine and aged care, and bagging and only minimally supporting a key state in carrying the load.

John Hewson

How can you witness billionaires accumulate $10,000,000,000,000 in wealth during an economically catastrophic pandemic and not conclude that the system needs to fundamentally change?

Robert Reich

What we’re witnessing is a global phenomenon, something big has changed. The oligarchs have discovered the formula for persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich and that formula includes massive lying and cheating on an unprecedented scale. Mobilising social media particularly to generate mendacious, manipulative adverts and memes and conspiracy theories in order to swing people round or to turn them off from voting all together. Pushing forward killer clowns like Johnson, like Trump, like Modi, like Bolsonaro, who will do whatever the oligarchs want but present a sort of almost amusing face to the public and so we laugh along with them and then they learn from each other, they teach each other. In fact very often the same political operatives will hop from one campaign to another, constantly refining the model, refining the formula.

George Monbiot

[in response to a facebook post by the departure of veteran journalist Philippa McDonald from the ABC after $84 million budget cut] What a legend. Watch this. It is what us mere journalistic mortals aspire to have covered in our careers.. and we grieve the loss of so many of our fine colleagues to government ideological bastardry. Hope you are feeling smug Scott Morrison.

Laura Tingle

Imagine being such an imbecile that you protest a lockdown which is about to end, because it was wildly successful.

Catherine Williams

Covid has shown us that we can lift every single Australian out of poverty today – bang. Just like that. They could and they chose not to. We must never forget that.

First Dog on the Moon

The only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination. I'm tired of it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

COVID-19 has magnified the shortcomings of our failed paradigm of economy with all its imbalances, inequities and injustices. The pandemic has demonstrated a renewed demand from the citizenries of the OECD, indeed the citizens of the globe, for a new economic order. This is evident through the response to COVID-19, the burden of which fell to the State, and proved, if proof were ever required, that the State has the ability to play a leading, transformative role in crisis management and response; that the public sector has the capacity and expertise to deliver quality universal services to its citizens and do so effectively and fairly; that government can act decisively when the will is there. Yet the crisis has also shown us how so many of our citizens and their families are only ever one wage payment away from hardship; how the self-employed or workers in the so-called ‘gig’ economy lack security and are often impeded from access to basic employment rights; how private tenants in under-regulated housing markets are at the mercy of their landlords, how many designated ‘key workers’, those providing essential services, are shamefully undervalued and underpaid.

Michael D. Higgins

The nice part about accepting [climate] science is that you don't have to lie, shout, insult, cheat and/or be dishonest to make your point.

Gerald Kutney

He [Trump] allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realise people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives. The hatred – what is that about? It’s a fear of your own weakness.

Fran Lebowitz