Andrew Bolt: Voters pressured to blindly trust blundering governments
Victorians can barely keep up with all the rules we’re being told to follow, but how can we trust our leaders when they continually make costly mistakes, asks Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
Don't miss out on the headlines from Andrew Bolt. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Our politicians! If you could see through this mask I’m forced to wear, you’d see my shocked face.
Here’s the Prime Minister now threatening to punish me if I don’t let him stick some new vaccine in my arm.
Here’s the lethally incompetent Victorian Premier now paying leftist stars to tell me to “follow the rules” he and they are breaking.
There is a big picture here, and it’s ugly. It’s of terrified voters being trained to obey blundering and arrogant governments.
Take Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
He claimed last week to have signed a deal (actually just a letter of intent) to distribute a new vaccine (actually not proven) to every Australian to protect them from this virus.
Then he took out his big stick. He would force us to take this vaccine — make it “as mandatory as you can possibly make that” — as soon as it passed its trials.
True, by Wednesday afternoon, Morrison realised he sounded awful, and supposedly “back-pedalled” on forcing us: “I mean, we can’t hold someone down and make them take it.”
But by the next day, Health Minister Greg Hunt was suggesting many other ways Morrison could indeed force you to take it. By holding back welfare payments, for instance. Stopping your kids from going to school.
Hunt wouldn’t even rule out stopping you from going on planes or to restaurants if you refused your jab.
Sounds like this alleged vaccine will be “mandatory”, after all, especially if you are poor and live on welfare.
But Morrison’s government insists that of course it wouldn’t back this vaccine unless it were safe.
But can I really trust Morrison to safely inject me, when his government couldn’t even do the basics to stop the virus getting into nursing homes?
Can I really trust Morrison when even the Australian Medical Association’s president warns we “have to acknowledge it is a rushed approval process and even if the phase three trials on this Oxford vaccine go really well, it’s still not absolutely proven that it is safe, not as proven as is normally the case”.
Can I really trust Morrison’s vaccine, when even the manufacturer he’s lined up to produce it, AstraZeneca, says it wants a guarantee it won’t be sued if it goes horribly wrong: “This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in … four years the vaccine is showing side-effects.”
Look, ask me nicely and show me the evidence, and I probably would take this vaccine. But what is Morrison’s mindset that he can even think his government-knows-best bullying is acceptable? Or is this all spin?
Still, he’s not the only politician who lacks a mirror.
We have this second wave of infections only because Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews couldn’t run quarantine hotels, and let the virus get out.
Nor could he set up efficient testing, tracing and isolation, or proper protection for the very old.
He didn’t follow the most basic rules, resorting instead to brutal mass bans that destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and caused more suicides.
Yet this same Premier is now paying fellow leftists from showbiz, such as Waleed Aly, Nazeem Hussain and Magda Szubanski, to make ads telling the rest of us to “follow the rules”. Dan’s rules.
But, bizarrely, the first ad shows Szubanski playing netball in one of the indoor sports centres Andrews has ordered closed to the rest of us. Penalty for noncompliance: $9913.
Will Dan’s stadium now be fined? Or don’t the rules apply to our rulers?
You got it. After all, this same government last month threatened bosses with 20 years in jail and $16m fines if they didn’t save workers from dying of the virus.
But more than 300 deaths after they themselves let the virus escape, does a single politician of this Andrews government face jail or fines?
Of course not! Because government always knows best.
Just let them inject you with their vaccine, and try to forget these politicians are meanwhile so blind they even refuse to examine cheap drugs which some experts claim could save lives right now — hydroxychloroquine with zinc, or ivermectin with zinc, or almost any other safe ionophore that can get zinc through the lipid surface of the virus.
No, governments know best! Hear their paid-for fellow travellers in those TV ads: “Follow the rules!”
Do not question. And do not struggle as Dr Morrison lurches at you with his needle.