Opening Up Australia
NSW’s failure to contain COVID will now be the whole of Australia’s. It speak’s to both Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian’s lack of any humility, accountability or responsibility. Here failure is being recast as success and NSW’s runaway state of COVID cases as all part of the plan. The way out of all this is vaccination not containment - the British model - get 80% of people vaccinated and screw the remaining 20% as COVID rips through the population.
The shame of it all is that it was so unnecessary. As late as mid-June we still had COVID cases nationwide in the single digits. The current outbreak triggered (as most of them are) by insufficient quarantine procedures, something that should be utterly foolproof reveal that the Australian people, our livelihoods and our economy are being lead by a government that for all its bombast is incompetent. As with the bushfires, both the NSW state and Federal government answer crisis with spin and insipid half-hearted measures that fail to contain it. As a result people suffer, their livelihoods and sometimes lives go up in smoke.
Does anything seem more out of step than the Liberal government’s stated pro-business agenda? One wonders about the internals of the Liberal mind. Is the ability to operate untethered to any empathy, humanity or honesty viewed internally as intellectual dexterity. Is the small amount of power they wield - power so precariously held that it may be taken away by the voters, by their donors or most likely of all by their own party - is this small amount of power justification in itself for such a Faustian deal?
Perhaps this mode of governing was forged in an Australia with so many natural advantages that it simply didn’t require governing at all. The dice were loaded. There were always more opportunities to come in the place of those squandered. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Australia is no longer so huge that it can absorb limitless failure.
Our luck as the Lucky country may most likely lead to our eventual downfall. It is this very luck that has prevented a reckoning of poor leadership to the extent that we now have a political system now demands poor leadership. Before you strike this as empty rhetoric - consider - is it possible to have an honest politician? Honesty is important in leaders beyond any morality because it demands a acknowledgement of the reality as it is. Conversely dishonesty is a problem not because it is bad but because it was always fail to grapple with the emerging crisis.
It all comes down to honesty. Once you grease reality to allow yourself to slip past it you will never grip it again. I think many Australians so weary of the political process that never seems to improve our lives understand that honesty remains at the root of it all. It’s the reason why there is a bust of support for a new PM each time the old one has been chucked. “Maybe oh maybe we can trust this one.”