Our stupid politicians have let us down by not doing enough to prepare for the Omicron wave. Not just Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but all the Premiers and Chief Ministers too.
There are nearly too many policy failures to list: PCR testing is overrun, rapid antigen tests are expensive and impossible to find, hospitals are swamped, and more than half of us are expected to get COVID by the end of next month.
Basically, shit’s fucked. And no, it’s not due to a lack of “personal responsibility”. It’s because politicians have done next to nothing to prepare, either due to a lack of political will or because of their stupid ideologies.
Let’s start with Scooter, AKA our PM and the dopiest cunt in the country. He’s run from responsibility at every opportunity. When this pandemic started two years ago, he immediately shoved the responsibility to manage quarantine onto the states. Despite the constitution saying it’s up to the Federal Government. Good start.
hospitals telling people not to attend the ED, private testing sites closed for the week, public ones turning people away… ngl these vibes are off
— Joshua Badge (@joshuabadge) January 4, 2022
Then of course more recently there’s the RAT situation. National governments around the world are giving them out for free, but Scott “fuckwit” Morrison refuses to do so because he doesn’t want to “undercut” commercial sellers. Which is such a maliciously stupid thing to do when you need to know if you have the virus to help prevent yourself from spreading it to others.
Politicians (both state and federal) were warned that RATs would be needed in September and did nothing to procure them until they started flying off the shelves. They were illegal around the country until October and still are in Western Australia. And that’s without even touching the businesses which are price gouging with now scarce tests, limiting access to poor and vulnerable people. And again, the states have been left to pick up the slack as the Federal Government insists it’s not their problem.
Which brings me to my next point: it is utterly insane that nothing has been done to bolster PCR testing. It is an extreme sport to get one at the moment. Sick people have to battle massive lines, centres shutting minutes after they open and massive delays to get a result. And this was a problem which began well before Omicron, as pathology staff reported they were knocked around by previous waves.
But again, not enough was done to make sure these services would be able to cope with this latest wave. Some blame should fall on the private companies which do the testing too.
Then there’s the hospitals. They’ve been chronically underfunded since before the pandemic was a twinkle in some cruel god’s eye, and now we’re two years into a worldwide health crisis. Since then it hasn’t been much better. Health care workers say staffing levels have taken a hit due to successive waves during the pandemic, so what has been done to prepare? At this point it’s important to note that hospitals and the PCR testing done at them are managed by the state governments, and so the Premiers deserve some blame there too.
In my opinion, nothing helpful has been done over the pandemic. Premiers gave themselves more powers, tightened the borders and empowered police to crack down on us more, but didn’t add more money to the budget to hire nurses and doctors.
It’s an expression of neoliberalism, the dominant ideology in Australia. In summary it amounts to: let go of government responsibility to allow “the market” and private companies provide needed services for a profit. It’s shit, it’s always been shit, and despite being warned by experts that governments needed to act, they just didn’t. Except to find new ways to punish citizens and redefine terms like “close contact” so less people can access help. Love that for us.
So to sum it up: Politicians could have acted but didn’t, they left it to private companies whose primary concern is profit and not our wellbeing and now we’re scrambling to keep up with a plague which spreads faster than we can contain.
Stop saying affordable you gutless fence sitter. Grow a spine if you want to lead or just quit. Your lack of actual opposition is embarrassing https://t.co/Ud7QPvZ3GX
— Goori for a doori (@BundjalungBud) January 4, 2022
Federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese won’t even commit to the slam dunk of making RATs free, the coward.
RT from a locked account.
Wonder if this is why Albo can’t say RATS should be free? pic.twitter.com/i6rg6JuUWK
— DaltySog (@DaltySog) January 4, 2022
If only we had a political party that was prepared to act in our best interests, and not in the interests of their rich donors.
