That didn’t last long did it? The right and everyone else throwing shade on Victoria; the now unified right-wing media of News Corp and Nine piling on hard.
Well the Andrews government deserved it for putting things in the hands of private contractors — part of the standard method of keeping everything off that actual government books.
Instead they were being slated for some sort of undefined socialistic-ish inefficiency, not officer material etc etc. The plan was obvious: make the Berejiklian government look good by comparison, and re-establish the old “party of government” dichotomy.
And theeeeeen … a planeload of Melburnians sailed through Sydney Airport and out into the city. Like we hadn’t been doing this for four months now. Like it was still late March.
And so we start the whole tired game again. The blame shifting. It’s Jetstar’s fault apparently. The health security of the state was put in the hands of an airline that flies (or used to) $40 seats Melbourne to Sydney. Because this busline-with-wings failed to do someone else’s job.
According to a NSW Health statement:
Airline staff, contrary to agreed protocols, allowed passengers to leave the gate area before the health staff had concluded screening a prior flight … As a result of this breach, flights will now not be allowed to land in NSW until NSW Health teams are in place to screen them.
Genius. State employees of the state Health Department screening arriving passengers for poor health. And all it took was the potentially catastrophic failure arising from the absence of such.
In the face of a New South Wales stuff-up federal Health Minister Greg Hunt is trying to spread the blame to Victoria, whose government apparently now has control over Sydney Airport. News Corp in particular is piling on Victoria in a way that may make it look very silly very soon.
‘Ham-fisted amateurishness and incompetence’
When is this going to stop? The basic pretence at thorough governance from every government — federal and state — when there is none. The ham-fisted amateurishness and incompetence which reappears again and again. The failure by governments to really, really accept that they have a challenge on their hands to the basic conduct of life and that they have to step up to it. The deep desire on the part of many to not have to lead, to clap their hands over their eyes and hope it will go away.
This is one mark of our era which separates it from a period of modernity which ended some time in the 1990s in the west. Say what you like about everyone from Bismark through to Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, LBJ to Whitlam and Thatcher, John Cain and gahhhhhh Jeff Kennett — but they wanted to have a go. They wanted to set an agenda. To shape a world.
Since the onset of full globalisation and the dominance of world markets, political leadership has been marked by an influx of people who are deeply diffident about actually governing with a steady application of power.
That doesn’t mean they don’t do terrible things. Quite the contrary. It’s often the stupid stuff — like the invasion of Iraq, or the ramrodding of Brexit — that is done as a substitute for the desire to steadily govern.
As government became the administration of a neoliberal order it began to attract people who thought they might enjoy slotting into a given system, either because they were genuine believers who nevertheless recognised their own mediocrity, or because they were hustlers out to game the system.
The categorical nature of the COVID crisis seems to have caught them like deer in a hunter’s lamp. The response to every stage of the crisis at the state level appears to have been to the proximate events only, with the deep wish that it was a dream whose unique events we were dealing with, with the promise of the alarm to wake us from it.
OK, that’s unfair. It has been a crisis of little recent precedent and the Andrews government was a lot more responsive than a lot of other places.
But for pity’s sake, having had a statewide lockdown? Why wasn’t there a plan in place for the contingency that local lockdowns might be necessary? Why wasn’t there a team model in place, where medical, care, social staff and community advocates would be at the lockdown area at the same time as the police? Why wasn’t there not merely a food, medical and general resources supply plan in place, but a warehouse full of ready-to-go kits set up?
People would jump at the chance to help
Thousands of restaurants closed or at half-speed, tens of thousands of chefs and hospo staff spinning their wheels, and you’re mailing in cheese sandwiches in a cardboard box? God. Set up kitchens at the base of the towers and make up thousands of high-quality meals. There’s umpteen qualified people who’d jump at the chance to do it, to do something.
Where’s the sense of audacity? Where’s the sense that crisis provides opportunity to make things better? It’s absent for the same reason as the lack of real leadership: a neoliberal reshaping of life has been so comprehensive that people find it impossible to imagine we could live any other way.
The COVID virus has exposed the desperate strategy of current capitalism: keep an economy going through discretionary spending funded by tax cuts, maintain permanent scarcity and social underdevelopment by consequent lack of reinvestment. The multiplier effect runs through dining out and drinking out and basically blowing all your money.
Now we can’t do that, the demultiplier is taking over. The fatal over-reliance the West has put on this absurd model of resource allocation is visible in the UK, where the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is using a mass subsidy to offer 10 pound-a-meal virtual vouchers at restaurants. That really is a return to the spirit of the Rooseveltian New Deal, ain’t it? Quite aside from the fact that it will help restart the virus (now down to “only” 500 new cases a day).
Hopefully, hopefully, federal and state public servants and Libs outside Victoria aren’t just sitting back and having a larf at our plight but will use it as a learning experience for what will come next and how it might be possible to get out the front of it if someone will just lead rather than merely react.
But don’t bet on it. Here in Victoria we’re the testing ground. Andrews is talking about a lockdown past six weeks. He’ll be lucky if we get to that.
There isn’t an infinite social capacity to observe such rules. Eventually the low-risk young will simply start breaking it en masse and there will be not merely a public health crisis but one of state legitimacy and power.
Nothing these days is lasting long, except the virus, and everyone’s got a strategy till they’re punched in the face. Andrews and everyone else had better have a plan B in their pocket. Hell, a fully worked out plan A wouldn’t go amiss.
“deer in the headlights”?
Found that in your American article-generator?
Cat? Roo? Pig? Cow? Horse?
. . . . or do you mean a “bunch” of them? So . . . .
Jaysus Bob, it’s a pretty standard expression in Australia, has been all my 58 years, and our national parks are chock full of deer. Nothing American about it.
From first acquiring language in the early 50s to late 80s in this country, I always only ever heard “rabbit”.
Certainly not deer, up until the homogenization of the worst of language.
https://www.fullforcehunting.com.au/blog/full-force-australian-hunting-blog/a-guide-to-deer-breeds-in-australia/
Yeah, you can probably hunt aadvarks somewhere in Australia, but it’s pretty unusual.
You reflexively used an Americanism because you’re more imbued with American popular culture than Australian reality – “own it” as your American friends would say.
FFS BTB. Pedantic much?!
No.
Oh sweet irony!
I have had an actual deer in my actual headlights, right here in Gippsland. More than once.
What a ridiculously petty argument. A quick google, reveals that “like a deer in the headlights” is indeed American in origin.
I’ve lived in Australia all my long life, and I’d never heard that expression until after the advent of the internet.
Sure you can argue there are pockets of deer here and there, but encountering one at night isn’t a common occurence for most Aussies, in the way it is (often fatally) for Americans.
BTW, the above was meant as a reply to the whole thread, not just Simon.
Pockets of deer? Shirley Kangas are the ones with pockets. 🙂
North Eastern Victoria and adjoining southern New South Wales over the last 5 or 6 years. Numbers have increased dramatically, and at times you will see them dead next to the Hume Highway between Wodonga and Euroa. There have been some serious crashes with deer on country roads, and I believe there was a fatality from hitting a deer within a few kilometres of Albury about 3 years ago.
Irrespective, it is as well that I do not have a managerial position at Crikey otherwise subscribers would be obliged to undertake a graded (progressively more complex) test in comprehension. On the other hand the articles would be much more analytic.
The nature of the idiom has little (if any) relationship with the topic.
Re feeding the 3000 people in the Melbourne high rise public housing. ADF is involved in Covid19 activities regularly now. Why didn’t someone suggest bringing in a few Army field kitchens and plonk them on the grassed areas around the high rise blocks? The famous saying, “an army marches on its stomach” is true. I’ve seen these field kitchens operating and they could provide cooked food, meeting cultural requirements where needed, 24/7 and in an efficient way.
I nominate Sando88 for Home Affairs.
I’ll nominate absolutely anyone for Home Affairs . . if they replace existing office bearers.
No need for cooked food. The flats all have kitchens, where people usually cook what they like for themselves. Only ingredients would be necessary, much easier.
Yes and they do have plenty of time on their hands to whip up something nice
“flights will now not be allowed to land in NSW until NSW Health teams are in place to screen them”
That will do wonders for air safety, productivity, pollution and passenger health.
Aircraft stacked waiting for bureaucrats with clipboards, pamphlets and guns.
Rorts on steroids, now bureaucracy on steroids.
“political leadership has been marked by an influx of people who are deeply diffident…” Thanks Guy. That’s our problem. We have attracted “the political class” to government. The endorsed candidates of major parties used to have an understood duty to represent the people of their electorate. Now, they have sold their souls to the party machines and they are cynical puppets dedicated to voting where the party whip points.
And how are major party policies determined? By systemic corruption through donations and influence.
We have no leaders because we elect diffident cynics.
succinct and accurate.
What a rant, worse than mine. (hah) But, here is a crisis offering the controllers and exploiters new opprtunities, initiatives, plans, cunning stunts.., the exploiters who dominate stock exchange crime, or activity, have fleeced the general public with their hedging and cover betting. Cheap labour is being harnessed in confusing ways (to them, the desperates) in new low levels of behaviour. Andrews in Vic. has done well in a problem which is beyond district, block, town city, state, nation. The headlines in two weeks may see NSW, Queensland, anywhere, in new agonies. Exploitation is a shocking undercontolled, misunderstood criminality and security firms are just one of the neoliberal thieving anuses to do well out of suffering. If Commercial media were “wiped out” or Silenced soon, it would be a relief as one contemplates some honesty and reality in information. Meanwhile, one can take solace in viewing the dogpark grass, for little replica Trumps and Morrisons, brownish.
Spot on. Over the last few days, a small army of furious Crikey commenters have been sputtering in rage because fellow columnist BK dared to question the Andrews government competence (“cancel my subscription!”). What will they think about Rundle getting stuck in too? Demand a refund?”
The first lockdown we endured was supposed to be so that State governments could prepare and develop a strategy. Remember when were being told that? But they didn’t and the deficiencies of their responses, and their first big first humunguous failure, came in the most progressive and supposedly proactive state in the nation, Victoria. Clearly, there is no plan, 4-5 month down the track, no one has a clue what to do., not Andrews, not Morrison not Berejiklian, nor the leaders of Old, WA and NZ who’s only bright idea is cower in fear behind closed borders with a susceptible incredibly vulnerable population until a vaccine comes along (when was that again?), or their economies turn to mush – whichever comes first. So all that sacrifice and pain was just so the we had to be locked down again? Pathetic…
The only consolation: Not one of these governments will survive their first election test. Not one.
You’re right in implying Andrews shouldn’t be above criticism, but I’m sure you’ll be heartily consoled when fascist whinger Michael whatshisname is premier.
Again BTRI seeming to oppose any lockdown while suggesting no viable alternative (the viable bit means NOT the Sweden model).
Not sure what leadership looks like for you. If the WA Premier isn’t re-elected with a stinking majority I’ll be flabbergasted. They love what he has done, is doing. The whatever party NT Govt has been rightly praised and they are reaping the benefits politically. The SA lib govt has been clear, responsive, taken the best advice and run with it, and pleasingly he is not the ideological dolt that the libs only ever seem to put up. That’s 3 very likely re-elected. Gladys will probably pop through because the Ruby Princess and Jetstar flights were all somebody else’s fault, and the MSM seem to be happy to run that leaderless obfuscation.
Palaszczuk may lose the next election but that will have little to do with how she has closed the state, the vast majority agree with it, she has looked after QLDers, in spite of blohard Palmer and Hanson getting airplay. Her biggest problem is that it’s a one paper ideological state, all Murdoch.
Good analysis. Look forward to seeing how things pan out.
I have never suggested Sweden’s model was “viable”. Stop putting words in my mouth. That’s the second time you have tried, DB
I was not being partisan, Liberal, Labor, whatever – they will all fall no matter how high their popularity is now. No government can survive a recession (Keating’s the one exception, but for only for one dismal term), especially one they have deliberately engineered. We are heading for the worst depression since the 30s and it doesn’t matter one iota that the ruinous rolling shutdowns that we’re now enduring are for the best of (health) intentions – all people will know in a few years is that they can’t hold down a job, the small business sector is in ruins, their high streets and malls are boarded up, that their kids can’t get work, and that governments, having given away billions to people whose jobs no longer exist, haven’t got a dime to spend on anything else, including (tragically) a First World health care system.
Aust and NZ have bet everything on the vaccine. But there’s there’s no guarantee one will ever turn up or be in time to rescue us from economic collapse. Ironically, countries that have had less “success” than us in suppressing the virus (no one has “eliminated” it, not even NZ claims that) will have come to terms with it and got on with life long before our two countries’ vulnerable populations can be “made safe”. If our only response to the inevitable spikes is lockdowns – there won’t be much left of civil society in five years time.
And we’ll have long run out of politicians like Andrews (or Morrison) to blame.
” will have come to terms with it and got on with life”
There seem to me to be at least as many questionable if and buts in that prediction as there are in hoping current government interventions can adapt, improve, and ultimately work.
Oh, and you forgot Tassie, like everyone else: 59 days with Zero cases….
Well BTRI, it is only a week or two ago when the QLD LNP blew publicly apart, with news their party president and his executive clique had commissioned and publicised a survey that found voter unhappiness with LNP leader, Frecklington.
Massive scars from many years infighting bled openly, with reports defining that the President and some LNP HQ officials were on Cliver Palmer’s payroll.
When Dutton suggested the LNP President resign, he did……..from receiving payment from Clive Palmer only!!
Total disarray, an absolute farce, but can Conservative voters keep a political memory for 5 months??
Meanwhile, Palaszczuk has performed positively and has gained in popularity.
It is likely the QLD ALP can win the next election on this basis, barring any Covid19 mismanagement.