Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

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Herainestold
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Herainestold » Sat May 08, 2021 3:06 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 2:13 am
Herainestold wrote:
Fri May 07, 2021 12:13 am
AZ is supposedly not making profits off the vaccine. In light of recent news have any of the other manufacturers volunteered to forego patent protection for the duration? It makes me very angry to think of Pfizer profiting billions from this dire situation. Their profits should be confiscated and given to Covax
So do you support the NHS 1% pay rise, or do you think it's too much? Presumably you don't want the NHS staff profiting from this dire situation either.
Take the Pfizer profits and distribute them to rank and file NHS workers. Or to covax. Both are worthy.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by shpalman » Mon May 10, 2021 5:23 pm

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Millennie Al » Tue May 11, 2021 12:34 am

Herainestold wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 3:06 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Sat May 08, 2021 2:13 am
So do you support the NHS 1% pay rise, or do you think it's too much? Presumably you don't want the NHS staff profiting from this dire situation either.
Take the Pfizer profits and distribute them to rank and file NHS workers. Or to covax. Both are worthy.
Why is it that the NHS worker who saves a life is worthy, but a vaccine manufacturer saving a life is not worthy?

Any quite apart from that, how do you expect to get your hands on the profits of a foreign company where the profits are made abroad based on a product licenced from a foreign producer?

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by shpalman » Sun Jun 06, 2021 7:42 am

PM of UK, which has so far only imported vaccines and not exported any, tells a bunch of countries who have been exporting vaccines, to export vaccines
Downing Street said the UK has "led efforts to ensure the world's poorest and most vulnerable people have access to vaccines", referring to its funding of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by shpalman » Tue Jun 08, 2021 2:02 pm

The Guardian says that the BBC (can't find it) says that
Many thousands of vaccine doses have been destroyed in African countries after exceeding their expiry dates amid a reluctance to be inoculated and a lack of medical infrastructure, the BBC reports.

Malawi has destroyed almost 20,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, while South Sudan said it would safely dispose of 59,000 doses and hand back another 72,000 to the global Covax scheme for poorer countries.

The Democratic Republic of Congo said it could not use most of the 1.7 million AstraZeneca doses it received through Covax, so they were sent to Ghana, Madagascar and elsewhere. Nigeria was also unable to use some doses.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by bolo » Wed Jun 09, 2021 8:12 pm

The Biden administration is buying 500 million doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine to donate to the world, as the United States dramatically increases its efforts to help vaccinate the global population, according to three people familiar with the plans.

The first 200 doses will be distributed this year, with the subsequent 300 million shared in the first half of next year. The doses will be distributed by Covax, the World Health Organization-backed initiative to share doses around the globe, and they will be targeted at low- and middle-income countries. Pfizer is selling the doses to the U.S. at a “not-for-profit” price, according to the people familiar with the deal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

There is a "million" missing in the second sentence, but what's a factor of 106 between friends?

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jun 24, 2021 3:57 pm

African Union special envoy Strive Masiyiwa has accused the world’s richest nations of deliberately failing to provide enough Covid-19 vaccines to the continent.

Masiyiwa, the union’s special envoy to the African vaccine acquisition task team, said the Covax scheme had failed to keep its promise to secure production of 700 million doses of vaccines in time for delivery by December 2021.

“It’s not a question of if this was a moral failure, it was deliberate. Those with the resources pushed their way to the front of the queue and took control of their production assets,” Masiyiwa told a panel discussion hosted by CNBC on Wednesday.

“Imagine we are in a village and there is drought and there will not be enough bread and the richest guys grabs the baker and they take control of the production of bread and we all have to go to those [rich] guys to ask for a loaf of bread,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... says-envoy

Sounds like Strive Masiyiwa has discovered capitalism.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by shpalman » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:46 pm

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:56 pm

You'd think the potential development of a vaccine-defeating strain would be enough reason to sort this out for purely pragmatic reasons. It's a catastrophic public health failure as well as a moral one.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:56 pm

Still, at least it's creating more value for shareholders.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by jdc » Thu Jul 29, 2021 2:01 pm

WHO's special envoys must be desperate, they've taken to writing CiF articles: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ines-covax
Almost 3bn doses of vaccine have been distributed globally, but only 90m of those have gone through Covax. There are at least 60 countries that rely on Covax for vaccines and those countries have vaccination rates that average less than 3%.
Countries with the greatest stocks of vaccines should not hoard them and push to cover their entire populations while other countries do without. It is not even in their best interests, since the intense circulation of the virus in countries with no vaccines increases the possibility of more transmissible and dangerous variants, threatening to make current vaccines less effective.

At the same time, the world must not lose sight of the second track which requires that everyone refresh their commitment to protecting themselves and others by recognising the importance of mask-wearing, physical distancing, ventilation and other actions that have been proven to curtail the spread of the virus.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by jdc » Thu Jul 29, 2021 3:54 pm

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58003893
Countries across the globe say they've been let down by broken promises and stalled deliveries of Russia's Sputnik V Covid vaccine.

Scores of countries enlisted Russia's help through deals to buy millions of doses of Sputnik V, unveiled last year as the world's first Covid jab.
Guatemala was one of the first countries to complain that deliveries were not being fulfilled.

The government there reserved millions of Sputnik V doses from Russia in April, paying an advance of over $79m (£57m) for eight million doses. But by the end of June, local media reported that only 150,000 had arrived.

Authorities in Honduras say they were working on a contingency plan following delays, with one minister saying "the supplier failed us".

Bolivian media say the country had only received 745,000 doses of a promised 5.2 million by the end of May, with local press speculating Russia might have promised more vaccines that it could deliver.
In May, Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo said the country expected to receive 1.3 million doses of Sputnik V. By 16 June, the west African country had yet to receive its first batch of 300,000 doses after being told the supplier had "run out of stock".

In Angola, the health minister said at the end of June that more doses of the Sputnik vaccine would arrive "soon". In May, the country received 40,000 doses of the Sputnik vaccine, out of a request of 12 million.
One of the countries hit hardest by late deliveries is Iran. Tehran ordered 60 million doses, only a fraction of which have arrived.

In February, it was announced that Iran would receive five million doses in a "first phase" of the agreement with Russia.

But by the end of June, the total number of Sputnik doses delivered to Iran was just 920,000. The figure now stands at around two million.
Despite ambitious plans to roll out Sputnik V across the world, Russia is finding it difficult to produce enough for its own citizens.

This is despite only 15% of Russians - wary of new drugs and government programmes - having one shot of the vaccine by the end of June.

According to Reuters, there's been an increase in domestic demand after some regions made the vaccine compulsory for public-facing professions. Moscow says this, coupled with storage problems, has led to shortages.

As far as foreign customers go, the Kremlin pledged this week that it would resolve difficulties with its overseas customers, but its immediate priority was to satisfy domestic demand.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm

It's honestly heartbreaking to see that countries can't pull together to tackle global challenges that affect everyone. Greed and sharp elbows will only work short-term, and (as we're seeing now with Delta) are risking much greater problems in the medium- and long-terms.

Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.

But alas. I can't help but think that, without a radical overhaul of global governance, we are fairly f.cked.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Fishnut » Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:33 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm
It's honestly heartbreaking to see that countries can't pull together to tackle global challenges that affect everyone. Greed and sharp elbows will only work short-term, and (as we're seeing now with Delta) are risking much greater problems in the medium- and long-terms.

Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.

But alas. I can't help but think that, without a radical overhaul of global governance, we are fairly f.cked.
I've had the same thoughts. When the pandemic started I thought that maybe this would be a turning point and we'd see countries really work together for once because they'd recognise that this wouldn't be over until it was over everywhere. I was so naive. And I've realised that if we can't work together over something as obvious and straightforward as controlling a virus we have absolutely no chance over climate change. The future really looks bleak.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Millennie Al » Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:28 am

jdc wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 2:01 pm
WHO's special envoys must be desperate, they've taken to writing CiF articles: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ines-covax
Countries with the greatest stocks of vaccines should not hoard them and push to cover their entire populations while other countries do without. It is not even in their best interests, since the intense circulation of the virus in countries with no vaccines increases the possibility of more transmissible and dangerous variants, threatening to make current vaccines less effective.
It's not at all clear if it is in a countries best interest to cover their population first, but it's certainly very plausible. It's even quite plausible that it's in everybody's interest to do so. If vaccination can achieve herd immunity to the point that it prevents transmission, then it's better to do one area until it reaches that point before moving on to do another. This is because herd immunity gives you a free boost to the number of people covered. To take a simplified example, if 80% coverage stops transmission, then vaccinating uniformly to 40% leaves 60% vulnerable, while covering half the area at 80% and the other at 0% leaves only 50% vulnerable. Of course the real world is much more complicated, but the same principles apply.

There's also the fact that if a country gets enough people vaccinated it can avoid economically damaging lockdowns. This may be an area where one country benefits at the expense of another, but it's definitely not a case of it being in everyone's interests to spread the vaccines as evenly as possible.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Millennie Al » Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:38 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm
Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.
Are you familiar with the history of the 20th century? Apart from two world wars, check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll If the 21st century is characterised by people standing by and letting others die, it will be a huge advance on the 20th century where people eagerly leaped forward to kill. And that's without counting things like the Great Leap Forward and other anti-capitalist interventions which also killed millions, some of which was inadvertent.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:56 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:38 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm
Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.
Are you familiar with the history of the 20th century? Apart from two world wars, check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll If the 21st century is characterised by people standing by and letting others die, it will be a huge advance on the 20th century where people eagerly leaped forward to kill. And that's without counting things like the Great Leap Forward and other anti-capitalist interventions which also killed millions, some of which was inadvertent.
Sure, there are fewer huge wars. In the aftermath of WW2 countries banded together and agreed "never again", and it sort of worked apart from things like Vietnam, European overseas colonies, Uighur genocide, etc. (Which is to say, it worked well for rich countries, even while they were sponsoring proxy wars overseas just as they had done throughout the colonial period. The twentieth century was really an aberration only because rich countries were exterminating each other, rather than focusing on poorer people overseas.)

But things are simply different now. There wasn't a well-documented global crisis requiring immediate cooperation to solve. There is now.

And just wait till the water wars start. China controls the Tibetan plateau, where all those sacred rivers in the Indian subcontinent start, providing the water for a billion+ people. China is already having huge droughts, and those glaciers are melting fast. The twentieth century's squabbles over oil will look like peanuts in comparison.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:51 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:56 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:38 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm
Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.
Are you familiar with the history of the 20th century? Apart from two world wars, check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll If the 21st century is characterised by people standing by and letting others die, it will be a huge advance on the 20th century where people eagerly leaped forward to kill. And that's without counting things like the Great Leap Forward and other anti-capitalist interventions which also killed millions, some of which was inadvertent.
Sure, there are fewer huge wars. In the aftermath of WW2 countries banded together and agreed "never again", and it sort of worked apart from things like Vietnam, European overseas colonies, Uighur genocide, etc. (Which is to say, it worked well for rich countries, even while they were sponsoring proxy wars overseas just as they had done throughout the colonial period. The twentieth century was really an aberration only because rich countries were exterminating each other, rather than focusing on poorer people overseas.)
The rich countries also slaughtered each other in the 19th, 18th, 17th centuries, and all the earlier ones.

But yes, we do have much better global institutions and a much better understanding of the world in which we live.

That said, if climate change is to be mitigated I suspect that and successes will be due to self interest rather than altruism.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by JQH » Fri Jul 30, 2021 4:12 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:51 am

That said, if climate change is to be mitigated I suspect that and successes will be due to self interest rather than altruism.
Which is something that has always puzzled me about the people funding the climate denialists; how much enjoyment do they think they'll get out of their money if the Earth is uninhabitable?
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by monkey » Fri Jul 30, 2021 6:30 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:15 pm
It's honestly heartbreaking to see that countries can't pull together to tackle global challenges that affect everyone. Greed and sharp elbows will only work short-term, and (as we're seeing now with Delta) are risking much greater problems in the medium- and long-terms.

Obviously I'm used to it, from following the news on global environmental problems for a couple of decades. But I had always had "hope" (if that's the right term) that once things reached a point that there were headlines announcing thousands of deaths, day in day out, that might help focus minds.

But alas. I can't help but think that, without a radical overhaul of global governance, we are fairly f.cked.
A countries leader's interests (staying in power) are served by keeping their own people happy (or at least happy enough not to overwhelm your security forces), not by helping the people of other countries. I think you could fix that by having Governments be elected by the people of a different country - e.g. I'm pretty sure that the UK would look out for the interests of Gabon better if the Gabonese were electing our PM. The UK population are also in the best position to overthrow the UK government, so they need to be kept happy too. Therefore, by electing the leaders in another country, you get good stuff happening in two places, rather than one. We just need to work out a way to pair them all off.

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Jul 30, 2021 11:05 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:51 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:56 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:38 am


Are you familiar with the history of the 20th century? Apart from two world wars, check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... death_toll If the 21st century is characterised by people standing by and letting others die, it will be a huge advance on the 20th century where people eagerly leaped forward to kill. And that's without counting things like the Great Leap Forward and other anti-capitalist interventions which also killed millions, some of which was inadvertent.
Sure, there are fewer huge wars. In the aftermath of WW2 countries banded together and agreed "never again", and it sort of worked apart from things like Vietnam, European overseas colonies, Uighur genocide, etc. (Which is to say, it worked well for rich countries, even while they were sponsoring proxy wars overseas just as they had done throughout the colonial period. The twentieth century was really an aberration only because rich countries were exterminating each other, rather than focusing on poorer people overseas.)
The rich countries also slaughtered each other in the 19th, 18th, 17th centuries, and all the earlier ones.
Totes, but not (unless I've missed something) much in the way of systematic extermination of the kind seen in the Americas, Australasia and arguably the transatlantic slave trade.

If Hitler had been targeting indigenous people on another continent I don't think anyone would have batted much of an eyelid.
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:51 am
But yes, we do have much better global institutions and a much better understanding of the world in which we live.

That said, if climate change is to be mitigated I suspect that and successes will be due to self interest rather than altruism.
The thing is, by the time something is affecting the entire planet there's not much difference between self-interest and altruism. I don't think many people would actually want to live in a bunker or jet off to space (though the wealthy are investing heavily in both of those things). Continent scale droughts and heatwaves, 1-2 m of sea level rise, superstorms, wildfires, hundreds of millions of displaced people etc etc would probably mess up even the most callous billionaire's weekend, if only because it would be quite bad for the economy.

But I suspect if anything does happen it will be as a last-ditch reaction to ongoing catastrophes that stubbornly refuse to solve themselves. With a huge amount of collateral damage.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Trinucleus » Sat Jul 31, 2021 12:55 pm

monkey wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 6:30 pm
Therefore, by electing the leaders in another country, you get good stuff happening in two places, rather than one. We just need to work out a way to pair them all off.
In an Arthur C Clarke book from many years ago, he had the US president picked at random from the electoral roll. They would do a decent job without being distracted by wanting to win an election

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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:16 pm

I can't help but think that if two countries' governments just swapped electorates you'd still get all kinds of horse-trading. The powerful elites of each state would just lobby the other electorate, who'd be less informed and less motivated to resist. "Let us open this mine and we'll build some new schools," kind of thing.

Supra-governmental organisations with democratic mandates are a little less vulnerable to that kind of thing, at least for setting minimum standards.
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Re: Vaccine rollout on Planet Earth: A "catastrophic moral failure"

Post by monkey » Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:39 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sat Jul 31, 2021 1:16 pm
I can't help but think that if two countries' governments just swapped electorates you'd still get all kinds of horse-trading. The powerful elites of each state would just lobby the other electorate, who'd be less informed and less motivated to resist. "Let us open this mine and we'll build some new schools," kind of thing.
At the moment, they just open the mine.

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