Piers Akerman: Annastacia Palaszczuk and Daniel Andrews must be punished for incompetence
Labor premiers Annastacia Palaszczuk’s and Daniel Andrews’ wilful actions in response to the coronavirus over the past few days clearly demonstrate that they should not hold any office in Australia, writes Piers Akerman.
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The words cruel and heartless don’t adequately describe Labor premiers Annastacia Palaszczuk and Daniel Andrews.
Inhumane, brutish, uncaring, unloving, pitiless, callous and merciless — together — go some way to capturing their unfeeling actions.
Their profound ignorance and love of power is debatable, but their wilful actions in response to the coronavirus over the past few days clearly demonstrate that they should not hold any office in Australia.
The Queensland and Victorian health authorities are not elected to office (and nor would they be on their appalling records of utter incompetence) but their elected leaders repeatedly seek cover behind these two-bit public servants.
Neither Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young nor Victoria’s equivalent Brett Sutton have validated their appointments with displays of adequacy.
Premier Palaszczuk’s refusal to accept responsibility for her health department’s bar on a young woman from the ACT visiting her dying father and its subsequent ban on her meeting her mother and young sister at his funeral — she missed the chance of actually speaking with him before his death because her application to be at his deathbed took 20 days to approve — was utterly warped.
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Her accusation before state parliament that Prime Minister Scott Morrison had attempted to bully her into permitting the grieving daughter to attend the funeral with her family was just disgusting.
Mr Morrison may have some character flaws but he is no bully.
Not only did Ms Palaszczuk falsely brand him as such, she used the same tone and language used by former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard when she infamously accused former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott of misogyny in what must surely have been an attempt to appeal to the misguided harpies on the far left of the political spectrum.
Ms Gillard’s demonstrably untrue claims still resonate in the darker corners of the wimmin’s movement but have been deservedly mocked by those who remember that she uttered them in a vain attempt to distract attention from her defence of her chosen Speaker, Peter Slipper, who had made grotesque comparisons between women’s genitalia and shucked mussels.
A total indictment of the misguided and hateful the hard-left feminist coven and vindication for Mr Abbott.
In Victoria, Mr Andrews has now been left stranded by both his Chief Health Officer and his Police Commissioner Shane Patton over which department head was responsible for ordering the daily curfew — the most onerous in operation of all nations weathering the pandemic.
He also permitted local government to block delivery of mail from Senator Pauline Hanson to people stranded in their virus-ridden high rises until the post office threatened legal action.
Meanwhile, in a well-captured video, his police are seen savagely arresting a working journalist equipped with all the requisite permits at a protest against the state’s draconian lockdown. Further, the police visited the journalist at his home at night in what appears to be an attempt to intimidate.
Shamefully, several well-known members of the mainstream media witnessed his arrest and made no move to defend their colleague from the unwarranted, wrongful assault.
Victorians are furious, but cannot organise the protests which would normally erupt when governments collapse into such gross decrepitude.
Ms Palaszczuk and Mr Andrews are our own examples of Lord Acton’s 19th century observation: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It is not too much of a stretch to look at these two premiers in the light of those who defended their totalitarian actions in the name of Communism and Fascism within living memory.
The coronavirus is not the Black Death. It is not the Spanish flu. The modelling on which health authorities globally and locally have been operating has been shown to be profoundly wrong — and in the case of Victoria, counter-productive.
The state border restrictions across Australia are insanely economically destructive and it would be a kindness to call those administering them merely incompetent.
As Mr Morrison well knows, having lost his own father in January, the last moments for children to be with a dying parent are precious beyond measure.
The sheer ineptitude and unfeeling governance of these two rogue Labor premiers must be punished.