For a man so single-bloody-minded about optics, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sure as hell loves – like a labrador puppy braining itself on a squeaky clean glass door – to walk straight into bad ones.
Covering a weekend that seems to have yet again topped its predecessors for biggest one so far this year, Morrison should have a lot on his plate right now. Instead, he has samosas.
Over the past ten days alone, Morrison has presided over a Federal Government that over-estimated its own JobKeeper numbers by a truly staggering $60 billion, in the kind of calculator error you only expect to see after kicking one down a flight of stairs.
A mere handful of days after that little whoopsie, Morrison and his Government conceded that the much-maligned Centrelink Robodebt scheme was maybe, sorta, a little bit extremely fucked. Part of that process will, ultimately, involve issuing refunds to the tune of $721 million, and a further 470,000 “debts” – or, more specifically, erroneously issued notices based on a system of income averaging that wasn’t correct on day one of the scheme and certainly didn’t get any less wrong throughout its lifespan – would be wiped completely. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the emotional cost of the scheme, which data suggests cost 2,000 people their lives, many of them vulnerable or in high-risk brackets. Lawyers, it’s said, will almost certainly be chasing damages.
In the face of growing race-related unrest in the US, which has seen scores of cities swamped by rioting and a staggeringly violent paramilitary response from police forces frequently in the face of non-violent and peaceful protesters, and with attention here rapidly turning to Australia’s own pisspoor record of Indigenous deaths in police custody, Scott Morrison responded today by stated he “saw good a meme.”
“I saw a good meme on the weekend,” Morrison stated on 2GB this morning, “Martin Luther King didn’t change anything by burning anything down or by looting any shops,” in reference to the US civil rights icon who was reviled by the rusted-on conservative establishment for speaking out against systemic racial injustice and police brutality; whose cold blooded murder at the hands of a white supremacist sparked widespread public unrest that culminated in the US President mobilising the military against his own citizens. Which only sounds just a little bit familiar.
“A good meme,” the Prime Minister claims to have seen, deflecting the growing disquiet here in Australia which has risen on the back of the action in the US, highlighting the 400 Indigenous people who have died in police custody since 1991, which have resulted in zero police officers or official being held legally accountable. “A good meme,” he has seen.
That’s not to mention the on-going Sports Rorts disaster, which doesn’t require a PolSci degree to deduce that $102.5 million in public money was used liberally (guffaw) by the Morrison Government to blatantly porkbarrel marginal seats in the lead-up to a crucial Federal Election; a scheme that frequently and without subtlety allocated money to well-to-do sporting clubs over those that were in genuine need.
That’s not to mention the Bushfires Royal Commission, which will lay bare a Federal Government response that involved the Prime Minister escaping to Hawaii on holiday, in secret, in the middle of one of the largest national disasters in recent living memory.
That’s not to mention the Prime Minister being so risk-averse that, at the onset of a global pandemic, he allowed State leaders to fracture what should have been a clear, concise national response, only to throw his hands up as the nation slowly pulls itself out of it – individual state by individual state – and wonder why they won’t fall in line now.
That’s not to mention anything about the Ruby Princess debacle, which single-handedly ratcheted up the impact of coronavirus in Australia by a hefty percentage, and is now subject to a potential tuberculosis issue.
In the face of all that, the Prime Minister is giving us samosas.
Samosas, proudly shown off on his social media channels, that he claims to have hand-made in what appears to be a sub-commercial kitchen, and gleefully posted online to promote the Daggy Dad image his marketing director brain tells him to keep pushing despite, as stated above, all of that.
So honestly, to speak nothing but the truth, if I may be serious for a moment, those samosas look like shit.
They look like absolute drizzling dog shit, dude.
They look dry as hell and floury; dreadful to look at, smell, and eat.
They look fucking awful, Mr. Prime Minister. Like big stinky turds.
Fuck off with them, man. What are you doing.
