The Full Morrison The prime minister’s virtual press conference Monday night treated us to 100-proof Scott Morrison. The goalpost shifting, the demonstrable falsehoods, the cranky dodging of responsibility — it was a potent Long Island Iced Tea of Morrisonisms.
Behold:
Now, the [Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation] advice talks about a preference for AstraZeneca to be available and made available to those as preferred for those over 60. But the advice does not preclude persons under 60 from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. And so if you wish to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, then we would encourage you to a, go and have that discussion with your GP …
This gives us roughly our fifth official position on who can access the AstraZeneca vaccine. When asked about the public frustration of ducking in and out of lockdowns for the foreseeable future, Morrison said:
… Now, at no stage of that plan, under any scenarios that were considered last year, late November when we agreed [to] the national vaccination plan, was there a situation contemplated this time of the year that the vaccination would have reached anywhere near the level of herd immunity that you would expect to enable the sorts of things that you’re talking about. So, we were always going to be having to deal with what we’re dealing with now at this time of the year.
At the most generous interpretation, this is completely disingenuous. Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt both said that they planned to have the adult population of Australia vaccinated by the end of October. The government then missed every single target it set — including a plan to have aged care workers vaccinated by the end of March — and abandoned all targets by April.
It’s the pandemic, that’s the reason why these things are happening, and happening not just in Australia but in all places around the world.
There it is! His catchphrase! None of this is his fault! Ever!
Do the Hockey Pockey “Joe Hockey? Good old Wobbles, whatever job he’s employed in, he’s not up to it,” wrote Guy Rundle in these pages back in 2018. Fast-forward three years and Hockey — fresh from spoiling an otherwise solid stint as US ambassador by feeding into Donald Trump’s bogus election fraud claims — is doing nothing to dissuade us from that view after accidentally (?) tweeting embarrassing stats about the government he used to serve.
Hockey shared (then swiftly deleted) a table showing Australia languishing at the very bottom of the pile of vaccination rates, with the comment “says it all”. Well, indeed.
CEDA house rules Crikey has long kept an eye on annual neoliberal “competitiveness indexes” — surveys of corporate executives which masquerade as evidence of Australia’s lack of global competitiveness. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia made the mistake of sending one of these surveys to Crikey‘s own Bernard Keane, who promptly shared the link with his followers:
The questions concern topics like labour regulation, the agility of companies and access to migrant labour. While we can’t be certain, Bernard’s faithful followers may have actually skewed the results and pushed Australia out of the top 20 in the final “competitiveness ranking” list — dropping us from 18 to 22:
CNN weighs in on Morrison It’s nice to see what kind of coverage our leadership gets overseas. CNN highlighted how some Australians are feeling:
‘Dear Customers, We will be closed for the foreseeable future because Scott Morrison is a useless dickhead who only ordered enough vaccine to vaccinate 4% of the population 18 months into a pandemic,’ reads [a] sign, shared on Twitter, in reference to the Australian prime minister.
The first time CNN has featured a world leader being called a “useless dickhead”? We suspect so.
The Land of RNod Here’s the latest in RN Breakfast exhaustion watch. This time, it was Matt Bevan’s wacky news round-up. How good a segment was this? Not only did it have Bevan calling Dirk Hartog Island “Dirk Harcock Island”, it had this:
BEVAN: And in Kuwait a man has been arrested and sentenced to death for posting a protest about climate change.
FRAN KELLY: Sentenced to death? For what?
BEVAN: (slight pause) Oh I don’t know, I’d have to look that up …
So are Morrison press conferences now some sort of performance art theatre of the deranged?
No, no no. Think of it as … kabuki (with it’s roots going back to the Ego period) and him painted up in his kumadori make-up …..
In reference to the ‘virtual press conference’ Rundle mentioned in the previous article that Barnaby Joyce (‘is that the Chattanooga choo-choo?’) was talking about working from home via the net, and how he shouldn’t really have to go to Canberra at all. Why stop there? We all know what to expect from the Coalition. Surely there’s an algorithm that can be created with all their predictable responses, deny that, rort this, promise the other. We have years of footage, terabytes of information. We can predict to the smallest degree what their reactions will be, what decisions they will make, even what words they’ll use, even Barnaby, whose grammar and syntax are challenging at best. At the end of the day, what is the difference between Scotty, Barnaby, their crew, and Max Headroom? (Look it up, Millennials).
And now that I write this, I’m having a horrible feeling of delayed prescience… Has anybody actually seen Scotty or Barnaby in the flesh recently?
“At the most generous interpretation, this is completely disingenuous.”
That statement by Morrison was not only disingenuous but complete gobbledygook. I had to read it three times to figure out what he was trying to say. Maybe that was deliberate.
Deliberate. He is an advertising man. All hype, no responsibility. Not a hope in hell of anything resembling the truth from this dick head of a PM.
What did they say of Gerald Ford? That he couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time.
Well Morrison had two things to do: get effective quarantining in place and roll out a vaccination plan.
He’s making Gerald Ford look like a genius.
My heroes, Fran and Matt, be kinder to them, they make the morning news palatable.