In no way should any of this be this difficult. This whole thing, top to bottom, is a complete mess. Most of the country is in lockdown. We’re vaccinating people against a global pandemic at glacial pace. The Prime Minister is apparently just making shit up as he goes. No one’s talking to anyone – or worse: they are, and they’re ignoring them – and the states are about ready to drop gloves and declare war with the Commonwealth. What – and I cannot stress this enough – is going on.
We have Scott Morrison casually opening up AstraZeneca vaccinations to all Australians under 40 through what could well have been a verbal botch, because cases of the Delta variant have inevitably seeped out of city-based hotels that were never built to accomodate medical-grade quarantine. And rather than admit he misspoke a bit, he’s simply gone back to ground and is waiting for things to blow over. The Federal Coalition is so allergic to fault or blame that it would rather funnel an entire nation’s worth of young people – literally millions – through an unprepared GP system rather than admit Scott Morrison spoke two words wrong.
That says absolutely nothing of how truly badly Morrison has botched the vaccine rollout in the first place; a cock-up of such monumental proportions that it should, by all rights, be a career killer. Only Morrison’s career thus far has been so defined by self-aggrandising malice and buffoonish incompetence that he now exists in a cocoon of his own sun-hardened shit through which no new cock up can penetrate and no egregious scandal can stick to.
And then on the other hand, we have the Queensland Government, and more specifically its Chief Health Officer, wasting time saying some truly unhelpful and dangerous shit like “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who – if they got COVID – probably wouldn’t die” rather than delivering vital health information in plain terms.
We’re nigh on 18 months into a pandemic and we’re still snapping state borders shut at the barest hint of trouble, and that’s our only real weapon against COVID-19 because some fucking idiot at the top of the pile decided to take virtually the entirety of Australia’s pandemic response program and do the vaccination equivalent of betting it all on black.
We’re having press conferences in response to press conferences. We’ve got the Prime Minister contradicting national cabinet literal minutes after meeting with them. We’ve got federal MPs shooting their mouths off willy nilly without reprimand. Everyone wants to say the thing that dunks on their political foes the hardest and no one wants to actually do shit other than shut our doors forever until COVID just kinda magically goes away.
Who’s really in charge? Couldn’t tell you.
Who’s leading the way? Don’t know.
What’s the plan from here? Don’t have even the slightest goddamned clue.
But here’s an idea: Maybe shut the fuck up until you get it all sorted out.
It’s a novel idea, particularly in a world where politics just means saying all the words in your brain out loud. The order of which is not a priority. But the benefits of shutting the fuck up are vast: More time to spend coming up with an actual plan, less time wasted on scrambling to cover over the last time you said something dumb. It’s a virtuous idea, and it’s not that hard.
Perhaps someone in a high political office – the Prime Minister, for example – could simply take the reins and provide coherent, clear leadership that doesn’t bow to self-interest and has the backbone to occasionally concede fault. You wouldn’t think it possible in the current climate, but in theory it is.
This whole scenario is beyond absurd. We’re tearing ourselves apart because our leaders – on every level – can’t get on the same page about anything. Your average fast food joint has more coherent management structure than this.
You all have, quite literally, one job. Figure it out. And until you do? Strongly consider shutting the fuck up. Thank you.
