Mike O’Connor: I’ve had my jab, how about you Premier?

As implausible excuses go, the Premier’s one for not yet having the COVID-19 jab is a firm favourite to take out the Fairytale Of The Month Award, writes Mike O’Connor.

The thousands of people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 should pause and offer a silent prayer of thanks to the Chief Health Officer, the Health Minister and the Premier.

Were it not for the selflessness of this trinity in declining to get at the front of the vaccination queue, three among those thousands might have missed out.

As the Premier has explained, she and her two colleagues did not have their shots because they didn’t want to use up vaccines meant for true blue Queenslanders.

I had my shot some days back and you can imagine how I would have felt if I’d lined up to be told “Sorry, mate. The Premier was in the queue ahead of you so I’m afraid there’s no jab for you. She took the shot we would have given you.”

Really? As implausible excuses go, it’s one of the better ones and firm favourite to take out the Fairytale Of The Month Award.

You’d reckon the Chief Health Officer, whose Delphic pronouncements have been used to justify snap border closures, would quite justifiably have been at the front of the queue.

It would, after all, not be a good look for the CHO to be unable to provide the secret medical advice which the Premier has used as justification for the closures and as a political shield because she was in an intensive care unit with Covid. Physician heal thyself and all that.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk gets her flu vaccine ahead of her COVID-19 vaccine. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

As for Ms Palaszczuk and Health Minister D’Ath, they might care to take note of an observation made by American general Colin Powell: “The most important thing I learned is that soldiers watch what their leaders do. You can give them classes and lecture them forever, but it is your personal example they will follow.”

I was in luck then, that when I lined up at the Nundah Respiratory Clinic there was no sign of the Reluctant Trio just waiting to swipe my jab and I was in and out in a matter of minutes.

Side effects? A slight dizziness of the sort you might feel when you try to figure out why the government says 40,000 people at a football match is fine but imposes crippling number caps on entertainment venues. The light-headedness lasted for about as long as an election promise – which is to say no time at all – and as quick as you could say “commercial in confidence” I was on my way.

Commercial in confidence? That’s the reason for keeping the Queensland government’s proposal to the federal government for a quarantine centre at Wellcamp outside Toowoomba a secret.

It seems that it looked like it had been prepared by a five year old trying out a new set of crayons but served the political purpose of being rejected by the federal government as it was always destined to be, allowing the Premier to indulge in the usual Canberra bashing.

“I just don’t understand what he (the PM) has got against Queensland,” she complained. Yawn!

What is worrying is the significant percentage of the state’s population that has stated a reticence to be vaccinated. Perhaps they are taking their cue from their elected leader.

If they think that she’ll be right, mate and that our closed borders will protect them then I fear they are in for an unpleasant surprise.

Politicians, both federal and state, have conditioned the electorate into believing that they are keeping us safe by locking us in our own country. But if you take the time to make a cup of tea and sit down and think about it, you see how fallacious this is because it can’t go on forever.

All the Coalition is doing is kicking the can down the road until after the federal election – and you don’t have to be too bright to conclude that the country’s economy can’t sustain what amounts to a national lockdown indefinitely, a lockdown being perpetuated for political purposes.

Make yourself a second cup of tea, or perhaps pour something a little stronger, and indulge in more reflection and you’d have to concede that the virus isn’t going to magically vanish in the foreseeable future.

The big, bad world is out there and we have to join it or become a hermit state. The border closures have made us frightened, a fear that has been played upon by politicians at all levels to their considerable advantage.

We have to put that fear behind us, get vaccinated and while exercising all due care, get ready to rejoin international society. What is needed is leadership possessed of the political courage necessary to resist the cries of the fearmongers and opinion pollsters and act in the best interests of the state and nation. The hour cometh, but from whence will cometh the man or woman?