Andrew Bolt: Anthony Albanese delay is a lethal game

Covid has exploded in China, infecting tens of millions each day and raising the risk of more lethal variants. So why didn’t the Albanese government act sooner?

HOW to explain the Albanese government’s delay in making travellers from China take Covid tests? Suicidal wokeness or dirty politics?

The Covid-19 virus has exploded in China, infecting tens of millions each day and raising the risk of more lethal variants.

In response, Italy, the US, Britain, Spain, France. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Malaysia and India have all demanded tests of people flying in from China.

But not Australia, until an abrupt about-face Sunday afternoon, when Health Minister Mark Butler finally reversed a decision defended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just three days earlier.

Why that dangerous delay? From fear of offending China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, whose state media warned Covid tests would be “discriminatory” and “sabotage”?

This crisis blew up because Xi last month finally dropped his savage zero-Covid strategy, which even had the sick welded into their apartments.

An international traveller in full PPE gear arrives at Melbourne Airport. Picture: AFP

But China has lurched from one extreme to the other, now letting the virus rip through a population of which a third of the most vulnerable – people over 80 – is still not vaccinated.

Worse, those vaccinated had to use China’s Sinovac vaccine, even though Western ones are a third better at preventing death.

We now see the appalling results. Videos on social media show crematoriums stacked with corpses. More than a million Chinese are expected to die over the next few months.

That’s a tragedy for China but also a threat to us.

Most obviously, planes from China risk being crammed with infected people. Tests of 120 passengers on a flight last month from Beijing to Milan found 62 had Covid.

To that, Albanese last week said he’d follow his health advice, which says Australians have built immunity to the Covid variant now running riot in China.

Seriously? For all our immunity, between 10 and 20 Australians a day still die from this virus.

What’s more, how could Albanese be sure there aren’t new and deadlier variants already in China?

As the World Health Organisation warns: “When a virus is widely circulating in a population and causing many infections, the likelihood of the virus mutating increases.”

Albanese seemed be banking on getting enough warning of a new variant to put up the shutters in time. But had he learned nothing from China’s handling of this virus?

It failed to warn us when the virus first emerged, and is still lying today, reporting just one new Covid death on Wednesday and one on Thursday.

But why would Albanese fall for this? Back to those two possibilities.

First, the woke factor.

Last week, Dr Roderick McRae, Victorian president of the Australian Medical Association, warned we should assume planes from China were “riddled with Covid” and quarantine the passengers.

Predictably, former Victorian AMA president Dr Stephen Parnis, a Labor member, called those comments “extremist”, and another doctor, Kate Gregorovich, asked the AMA to declare it did “not support labelling people from an ethnic group or country as a threat”.

How absurd. Were the initial ban on flights from China that saved so many Australian lives also racist?

Mind you, Albanese will be just as hypersensitive to such “racism”. We have 1.2 million Australians of Chinese heritage, and he’ll know the swing against the China-defying Morrison government in the 15 seats with the most Chinese Australians at the last election was nearly twice the average.

Plus there’s the grubby politics. Albanese is posing as the man who fixed the China crisis.

“Australia and China are talking again,” Albanese boasted last Thursday at the Woodford Folk Festival. “We are undoing so much of the damage done by the LNP government.”

In truth, China is playing Albanese with the old good cop bad cop con.

It smashed the former Turnbull and Morrison governments with a diplomatic freeze and trade bans in revenge for 16 complaints China listed in 2020 – including a ban on China building our next generation of telecommunications.

Then, without making any concessions, President Xi granted Albanese, our newbie Prime Minister, a meeting in November and praised his “mature manner”.

It’s worked. Albanese does not now want China to treat him like it treated Morrison.

So he waited and waited until enough other countries did the only thing that makes sense – impose Covid tests on travellers from China.

He waited until he could hide in a crowd, unlike Scott Morrison, who was one of the first to demand an independent inquiry into how the virus started in China.

You may think that’s smart. But how many Australian lives was Albanese putting at risk to keep sweet with China?