With Australia’s largest city locked down, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is missing in action. He has not made a single statement or spoken to the media since a brief press conference after national cabinet last Friday. We haven’t seen his face since a Facebook and Instagram selfie taken with the family dog at the weekend.
His social media posts have all been infographics about the vaccine rollout. He hasn’t even given the customary interviews with favourable media like 2GB or Sunrise. The photo-ops, a hallmark of Morrison’s media management game, have disappeared.
Aside from last Christmas and an official week of leave taken in January, this is the longest we’ve gone without hearing directly from Morrison via press conference, statement or media interview since his ill-fated Hawaii holiday at the height of the December 2019 bushfires. Between December 13 and 20 of that year, he did not make a single media appearance. His office spent days trying to shut down the rumours that he was on holiday with his family. He was forced to call the trip short and return home, expressing regret at any offence caused to people affected by the bushfires.
Morrison is not on holiday right now, but he’s certainly been far less visible. At the weekend, he returned to Sydney to be with his family, putting him into lockdown. He’d spent considerable time away from them, travelling to the G7 during the final sitting weeks last month, before spending a fortnight quarantined at the Lodge in Canberra.
He’s finally scheduled a press conference for this afternoon, and has been working and in meetings over the past week. But this unexplained silence after a period overseas and in quarantine has put him further out of the media’s reach.
We’ve heard substantially less from him over the past month. At a time when Australia’s pandemic response is at one of its most challenging points in the past 18 months, journalists have lacked opportunities to ask him questions.
Meanwhile, Australia is in a crisis partly of the federal government’s doing: as countries battered by the virus are opening up, an outbreak in Sydney has led to its first city-wide lockdown in a year, a situation worsened by the sluggish pace of the vaccine rollout. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Health Minister Brad Hazzard have expressed frustration at the inadequate supplies of vaccines.
It’s another clear sign of how much heavy lifting the states are doing during the pandemic. Premiers have fronted the media nearly every day over the past few weeks, in stark contrast to Morrison. They also seem to be exerting influence over management of the pandemic — last week’s widely criticised decision to cap hotel quarantine arrivals despite falling numbers of cases from overseas followed a push from Queensland and Victoria.
Without an opportunity to be scrutinised or to reinforce his own messaging, Morrison’s recent appearances have deepened confusion. His announcement at a press conference 11 days ago that GPs could administer the AstraZeneca vaccine to under 40s — made without clear agreement from chief health officers — led to days of chaotic messaging. There’s now considerable inconsistency between GP clinics.
With Sydney’s lockdown extended and frustration growing about the vaccine rollout, it’s little wonder confusion and fear are spreading through the community. The prime minister could help ease that for some by showing his face.
“”Prime Minister Scott Morrison is missing in action.”
No he is not. To be MIA he would first have to go into action. Someone who is really missing in action might have been killed, disabled or simply cut off from the rest of the army while still fighting on, you cannot tell because they are no longer in communication, but you do know they went into action. If we are going to use a military metaphor, one that applies might be Absent With Out Leave. Morrison’s gone AWOL. The only other possibility is he should be on active service but he has deserted his post. Desertion is much more serious, it’s the sort of offence for which soldiers could be shot. But whatever it is, it’s not a case of MIA.
The cartoon is excellent in Bernard Kean’s piece on the Liar from the Shire. Surely the ADF can refuse to be used as mouthpieces and scapegoats.
Kevin Rudd met Pfizer chairman to request millions of doses be brought forwardA letter has revealed how former prime minister Kevin Rudd held an intervention meeting with Pfizer to try to bring forward millions of COVID doses as Australia’s rollout lagged.
Mr Rudd spoke to Pfizer chairman and chief executive Albert Bourla on June 30 to ask if the drug company could “advance the dispatch of significant quantities of the Pfizer vaccine to Australia as early as possible in the third quarter of this year”.
Days later, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Pfizer doses would rise to 1 million doses a week after states complained bitterly about dwindling supplies.
The details of Mr Rudd’s online meeting are contained in a letter he sent to Scott Morrison informing the PM he had spoken to Dr Bourla in his personal capacity as a concerned citizen.
Let him stay silent. It would be better for everyone if we heard from someone who actually gave a damn.
But they’ll forget what he’s like
Agreed. Let him not reappear until he calls an election – after all he has proved again and again that he is worse than useless.
Morrison initially announced on Thursday that there would be an additional 300,000 doses of vaccines – including 150,000 from Pfizer – made available to New South Wales. Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper that evening saying the federal government had secured a deal with Pfizer to lift supply to approximately 1 million doses a week, three times the weekly average of 300,000 to 350,000 a week in May and June.
Mr Morrison conducted an early morning media blitz the following morning, telling the Nine Network’s Today show on Friday:
“We have been working with Pfizer now for quite some period of time to bring forward our supplies … I commend Minister [Greg] Hunt and Professor [Brendan] Murphy and Lieutenant General [John] Frewen for the great job getting those supplies brought forward.”
It was all bullshit and pfizer called out the lie: Pfizer subsequently released a statement confirming the bring forward but emphasising it did not involve an overall increase in the contracted 40 million doses agreed with Australia.
there should be more MIA – Missing Inaction
Last month in late June, senior Australian business figures based in the United States discussed making contact with the vaccine manufacturer Pfizer to see whether it was possible for Australia to get earlier access to larger supplies of the Pfizer vaccine as the COVID-19 Delta variant emerged in Australia.
This was due to Morrison bungling its negotiations with the company in talks going back to June and July 2020, last year where Morrison’s negotiator displayed a “rude, dismissive and penny pinching” approach demanding all pfizer’s intellectual property details on the drug.
Morrisin very belatedly and eventually signed a deal for just 10 million Pfizer doses in November 2020, four months behind other countries.
Hunt and Morrison Department officials flatly denied many of these reports, but the businessmen in the US who had connections with Pfizer, were hearing even more graphic accounts of how badly offended the company had been by the response to its early approaches to Australia last year when it offered unlimited access to pfizer. (But Morrisin had already unofficially told the ex Liberal Party Howard staffer now working as a lobbyist for AZ company, that the Coalition would sign to AZ only).
As a result, one very senior Australian businessman — whose identity is known to the ABC but who wishes to remain anonymous — held two meetings with senior Pfizer executives in late June, only to be rebuffed.
Senior Pfizer executives told the businessman that if Australia was to make a more serious effort, after its treatment at the hands of relatively junior bureaucrats, it would have to come from much higher up, expressing their astonishment that Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not directly spoken to the Pfizer chairman and chief executive Albert Bourla, as former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had done on multiple occasions.
The executives suggested that, in the absence of Mr Morrison, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd — who was known to them because of his work in the United States as head of the New York-based Asia Society — may have some influence.
Morrison stayed very silent, not contacting pfizer himself in an attempt to get more pfizer vaccine. It was Kevin Rudd who did the job and got pfizer supplies to come in earlier
Mr Rudd spoke to Pfizer chairman and chief executive Albert Bourla on June 30 to ask if the drug company could “advance the dispatch of significant quantities of the Pfizer vaccine to Australia as early as possible in the third quarter of this year”.
Morri$ins Murdoch doing all he can to rewrite history again
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2021/07/12/pfizer-vaccine-kevin-rudd-nsw-lockdown/
… it’s little wonder confusion and fear are spreading through the community. The prime minister could help ease that for some by showing his face.
Um, no. I cannot think of a single circumstance where the PM’s face would ease the situation. Except perhaps on a dart board.
He makes announcements in wordsalad; he turns on his heel and walks away from pressers if he gets a question he does not like; his government has failed to prepare proper quarantine facilities; the vaccine rollout is a catastrophe; the treatment of people who are in aged care and those with disabilities is surely a gross breach of humans rights conventions to which Australia is a signatory; he refuses to accept climate change is a present reality and to take timely action; the list is endless.
Top comment MJM
His face causes unease for me.
Surely Scummo showing his face is not going to help anything?
His absence speaks volumes, but he is not a leaders bootlace, so it will make SFA difference should he turn up and pretend to do the job forwhich he is paid.
Can’t we just enjoy living in a smirk free zone for a while ?
Also some of us have appreciated not having the smirko’s face all over the place!!!