How our leaders are feeding us lies in virus panic
Queensland’s Premier blamed her Chief Medical Officer for deciding to ban a woman from travelling to the state for her father’s funeral and Premier Daniel Andrews blamed data and doctors for imposing the world’s harshest bans. When will our leaders stop lying, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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The biggest lie our leaders tell in this virus panic is that they’re just following the “experts” and the “science” as they smash us with bans.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, said it was her Chief Medical Officer, Jennette Young, who decided to ban a woman from the ACT from going to her father’s funeral.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said it was the “the science and data and doctors” who made him impose the world’s harshest bans, including a curfew.
It’s all nonsense, of course.
Dr Young is no expert in infectious diseases, and better-qualified epidemiologists say such bans are too tough.
Professor Peter Collignon said the effectiveness of border closures was “fairly small”.
No, Dr Young is just the expert who suits the Premier, who knows that polls show terrified Queenslanders support her.
So she ignores the many other experts – business leaders and economists – who say her bans cause more harm than good.
Meanwhile, Young makes other decisions based on an economics expertise she clearly does not have. She let in 400 AFL players and officials to play the finals in Queensland saying: “We need every single dollar.”
Again, this was just the “expert” opinion that suited Palaszczuk: the grand final will be just one week before her state election, and the government is planning an AFL trophy tour before then through marginal seats.
The biggest unravelling of the “listen to the experts” lie is in Victoria.
Last week we learned Melbourne’s curfew was not asked for by any expert – not the police, nor Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton.
Andrews now says it doesn’t matter.
Nor does it seem to matter that real experts such as the ANU’s Professor Elizabeth Gardiner warn that shutdown is too harsh: “I don’t think the numbers justify it.”
On Wednesday, more unravelling. Sutton told an inquiry into Victoria’s botched quarantine hotels – the source of the second wave of infections –he was not consulted on the disastrous decision to get private security guards to enforce that quarantine, the most critical part of Victoria’s virus defences.
Nor had he agreed with being removed as State Controller of the virus emergency.
So who made these decisions to run a system so ramshackle that the virus escaped and killed more than 700 people?
No one can tell. Where are those experts when politicians need a scapegoat for their own excesses?