Alan Jones: Scott Morrison needs to call out unnecessary Victoria lockdown

Prime Minister Scott Morrison needs to hold Victoria accountable for unnecessary lockdowns, writes Alan Jones.

With the political ­emphasis in recent days on the fallout from the Upper Hunter by-election in NSW and the chaos in the NSW Labor Party, still without a leader, political pundits have focused on the fate of the Labor Party and what the federal implications might be.

However, it would be foolish for the federal Coalition to ignore some realities which should make them stay away from a federal election as long as they can.

Since Upper Hunter, we are now seeing the political and administrative fiasco in Victoria.

How people will judge where the blame lies is anybody’s guess. But it is undeniable that there has been a massive failure in quarantine and vaccination.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Both issues have the potential to drag the Morrison Government into a political cauldron which could easily overtake any brownie  points it earnt in the past 15 months.

Genuine Liberal and conservative voters have had a veritable gutful of the failures in Victoria.

Yet Scott Morrison has barely raised a syllable in criticism.

It is surely time that someone in the Morrison Government called out Victoria, and any other State, for these ­unnecessary lockdowns.

The Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, Professor Sunetra Gupta, has urged Australia to “abandon its selfish and self-congratulatory lockdown tactics”.

Michael Levitt, the Nobel prize ­winning professor at Stanford Uni­versity, has argued in relation to lockdowns: “The level of stupidity going on here is amazing;” lockdowns are “a huge mistake”.

The Canadian Professor, Doug Allen, who has undertaken the world’s first lockdown cost/benefit analysis, has ­argued that lockdowns “may be one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history” and that “heavy ­lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas they are implemented”.

Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University. Picture: Supplied

Why then is this lockdown strategy tolerated by the Morrison Government? Do you think if Gladys Berejik­lian were the Prime Minister of Australia she would be silent in the face of these incompetent Victorian health and economic vandals?

Coalition supporters are shaking their heads. The Prime Minister was asked last week in question time by the deputy leader of the Opposition: “The current Melbourne outbreak is linked to a man who caught the virus in hotel quarantine in South Australia. Wouldn’t Australians be safer if the Prime  Minister built a better quarantine system?”

Among a lot of verbiage in reply, the Prime Minister said: “Unlike those ­opposite, I am not going to attack the States, I am going to thank the States.”

Does the Prime Minister’s silence mean he is thanking Victoria for the ­fiasco the nation now faces? Is he prepared to squander his Covid-inspired electoral dividend by ignoring rank ­administrative mismanagement? Why are we secretive about the number of Australians who are vaccinated?

To tell us there have been 4.3 million doses is meaningless. How many have had a single jab? How many have had a double jab? Why aren’t we told?

And, as I wrote last week, if every corporate man and his dog, to say nothing of the big pharmaceutical companies, have been roped in to implement the vaccine program, how much have they been paid for this seeming failure.

How naïve is the federal Gov­ernment to imagine that when things get  tough,  Labor  premiers   and  federal Labor wouldn’t go after the ­Government?

If the Government in Canberra has a front foot, it might be time to get on it.

All this derives from a single infection and a contact tracing system which couldn’t stop it. The Berejiklian Government would have made mince meat of such a simple circumstance.

But Victoria doesn’t have the computer systems; nor does it have the QR code system that has worked so well in other States. But the federal Government remains silent about these failures and provides ammunition to its critics.

All Australia knew that those in aged care homes were vulnerable.

Cartoon: Terry Pontikos

It is therefore inexplicable that the Federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt, was forced to admit on Monday that out of 598 residential aged care facilities in Victoria, only 361 were considered ‘fully vaccinated’ as of last Wednesday; and 29 facilities hadn’t received a single dose. Aged care is a federal Government responsibility.

And, via national Cabinet, the Government has outsourced its vaccination program to the States.

Now it is getting belted around the head because of State failures.

In the interests of political survival, we need some tough talk from Can­berra on quarantine and vaccination, which brings me back to my opening point, what does 31 per cent for the ­Coalition in the Upper Hunter mean?

Apart from the current coronavirus crisis and the Morrison Government’s failure to utter a syllable in opposition to lockdowns, the federal Government at its recent federal council meeting had nothing to say about declining educational standards across the country.

Parents actually vote and they’re not happy about indoctrination replacing education. The federal Government has barely uttered a syllable in opposition to Blacks Lives Matter or impotent protests by schoolchildren about climate change, predicated on fallacy and alarmism.

Why wouldn’t there be a tragically high incidence of youth suicide when world leaders give a forum at that ­absurd UN Climate Action Summit in New York in 2019 to 16-year-old Greta Thunberg.

Her “message” went around the world, unchallenged: “You have stolen my dreams … people are suffering. ­People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction …”

The big time political and business leaders in the audience, including ours, allowed that stuff to go unchallenged.

And now, young people feel their lives aren’t worth living. We face a crisis in Western political leadership.

In all the rhetoric at the weekend at the Liberal Party’s federal Council, one word wasn’t mentioned – coal; yet I ­believe if you went to a referendum today as to whether the electorate wanted nuclear energy and coal fired power, the vote would be overwhelmingly in the affirmative.

Instead, senior figures within the Coalition preach the Green’s mantra, net-zero carbon dioxide emissions, not only an impossibility, but in seeking to achieve it, an economic suicide note.

Bjorn Lomborg is regarded as a world authority on climate change.

Can someone in Canberra read his book titled ‘False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet’.

Lomborg argues Biden’s climate alarmism is “almost entirely wrong”.

But the Australian Government, earlier this year, lauded Biden’s decision to re-enter the Paris Climate Agreement – our Prime Minister argued there was no longer any question about the need to meet a net-zero emissions ­future. I think it’s time for a Liberal Government to be genuinely Liberal.

On lockdowns, quarantine, vaccination, Black Lives Matter, climate change protests and the wretched Paris Agreement, I believe the quiet Australians are saying ‘find a voice’.