Andrew Bolt: Attacks on ScoMo just politics of personal destruction

Vilifying the Prime Minister for rushing vaccines to where they were needed most is misguided anger, stirred up by the master of hate and fear.

This week’s attacks on Scott Morrison showed how savage and selfish we’ve been made by these crazy lockdowns of 8 million Australians.

Maddened like trapped rats, politicians and journalists now vilify the Prime Minister for spending Father’s Day with his family and rushing vaccines to where they were needed most.

Is this really Australia today?

First up, shame on Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, a master of the dark politics of hate and fear.

Andrews is under pressure. People are getting angry with his brutal lockdowns, which on September 23 will set a sick record for the longest in the world.

So on Tuesday he tried to shift that anger onto Morrison instead, by claiming the Prime Minister had made a “secret’ deal to rob Victoria of extra vaccines scrounged from overseas and send them to NSW instead.

Daniel Andrews is trying to shift anger towards Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Martin Ollman

“I signed up to a national plan to vaccinate our nation, not a national plan to vaccinate Sydney,” Andrews raged.

“There is something like 340,000 doses that have not come to Victoria that ought to have”, causing “a sense of anger”.

But if there’s anger, aim it at the deceit and selfishness of Andrews himself.

Has he forgotten that Australia is still one country? That we’re supposedly “in this together”?

Vaccines should go first to the Australians most likely to be killed. Right now, those Australians are mostly in Sydney, which recorded another 1480 new infections on Wednesday and nine deaths. Victoria had 221 and no deaths.

It would be obscene if Morrison instead rushed his extra vaccines to other states that don’t have people dying, just to placate a vindictive Premier.

What’s more, Andrews is a hypocrite.

When Victoria earlier this year had the country’s biggest outbreak it got the same priority treatment. Extra doses were rushed there, too.

It has 26 per cent of Australia’s population but in June got more than 30 per cent of its vaccines.

And as the Prime Minister has said, and Andrews must know, the allocation of vaccines will be evened up in the next months. In fact, there will be no shortage this month of vaccines. Millions of doses of AstraZeneca are sitting in cupboards.

The other attack on Morrison this week was just as unfair, launched by opportunists exploiting the rage, envy and ignorance of the worst of us.

Premier Daniel Andrews must know the allocation of vaccines will be evened up in the next months. Picture: David Crosling

Morrison flew last Friday from Canberra to his home in Sydney, where he spent Father’s Day with his children, who won’t have seen much of him this year.

Scandal! Horror!

“Appalling!” snapped former Labor leader Bill Shorten.

Check Morrison’s “double standards”. Hadn’t he last week criticised the Queensland government for letting in the wives and girlfriends of NRL players who’d gone there to play?

Channel 9’s Chris O’Keefe staged a tantrum at this “outrage”.

“How is this fair” that Morrison could “fly from locked-down Canberra to locked-down Sydney” when other dads couldn’t get into locked-off Queensland?

On it went, this greedy joy at finding someone to scapegoat.

Junkee declared Morrison had “again proven there is one set of rules for Australians and another for himself”.

Former MP Julia Banks, the Liberal turncoat, claimed Morrison “got a special exemption to go to Sydney by VIP jet to see his kids for Father’s Day when thousands of Australians couldn’t”.

The news bulletins were full of the same spite. And same poisonous falsehoods.

In fact, there were no “double standards”. There is no ban on anyone flying from Canberra to Sydney. You don’t need “a special exemption”.

It’s flying back into Canberra when you run into quarantine rules.

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten described Morrison’s Father’s Day trip as appalling. Picture: Gary Ramage

But those rules do not apply to an essential worker, provided they get regular tests, and the Prime Minister has been deemed an essential worker by the ACT government.

If a prime minister isn’t an essential worker, who is? Morrison flew to work in Canberra on Monday to attend a meeting of the national security committee that had to be done face-to-face.

You don’t think that work should be done for us? Give me a break.

True, other states – mad states like Queensland – have stopped dads from flying home to their families. Attack them, not Morrison, who does not like the heartlessness and hypocritical policing of such bans, either.

I’m not close to Morrison. I’ve spoken to him just once in three years, and often criticised him for not standing for much.

But this abuse now hurled at him? It’s pathetic.

This is the politics of personal destruction that leaves us all damaged and so dirty.