PM’s hapless posturing offers no solutions

The vaccine rollout has had more mixed messages than the Collingwood board and Scotty from Marketing is failing to provide any certainty.

One of my lockdown pleasures has been trawling satirical newspaper websites for a laugh.

They depict Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a hollow man who pretends to like beer and sport. The caricatured Morrison is lazy of resolve and obsessed with the perception rather than the substance.

Yet my pursuit of light relief has been blurred in recent days.

Take this example from The Shovel website:

“Prime Minister Scott Morrison has confirmed that a new shipment of at least two million excuses – originally earmarked for October – will arrive in Australia as soon as next week. The new deliveries will replace stocks already exhausted in the troubled rollout.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has reached for excuses and provided no solutions. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Spot the problem? Life is parodying comedy. It’s as if Morrison has adopted a spoof news report as a real-life roadmap.

Morrison emerged on Wednesday like a bear roused from hibernation.

He laid blame. He reached for excuses. He provided no solution. Then he went away again, presumably to lie down in a man cave.

He said his “not a race” rhetoric had been taken out of context. “Yeah”, there had been rollout “problems”, he conceded, before claiming that he was “accountable for the vaccination program and everything that has happened in it”.

But he wasn’t accountable at all. Not his fault, he implied. Powers beyond his control and all that.

He had kept appealing to Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to change the health advice so that younger people could be vaccinated sooner.

But the independent body, vested with the vital task of assessing health risks, had quite rightly refused to bow to his political imperatives.

Morrison invoked flimsy numbers to spin the situation. Australia had for the first time registered a million vaccination doses in a week. But Morrison did not do the maths that showed that the nation’s unambitious (and unmet) targets pushed Australia’s hopes for avoiding lockdowns into next year.

He overlooked how Australia’s adult population was less vaccinated than any other OECD country. How the messaging was more mixed than that of the Collingwood board. And how Australia missed out on Pfizer orders last July – as other countries rushed the company for tens of millions of doses – seemingly by a lack of eagerness.

He wouldn’t apologise on Wednesday, mindful that a sorry would steal the headlines.

Then he did apologise on Thursday, mindful that the absence of an apology was stealing the headlines.

Morrison resorted to semantics.

“Right now, under no plan, was there any plan that said we’d be at 65-70 per cent vaccination in this country,” he said on Wednesday. “Under no plan. Australia was always going to be in the suppression phase this year.”

We can evoke history to offer perspective for Morrison’s hapless posturing.

Australians are entirely reliant on their federal government. We depend on its leadership more than at any other time since our forebears were gripped by the fear of a Japanese invasion.

Our way of life, our economic wellbeing, and indeed our pursuit of happiness stops at the front gate. Most of the country is stuck in the loungeroom.

We are forced to talk of a vaccinated society, and lighter restrictions, as an abstraction. In other nations, it is a reality.

Australia’s adult population is less vaccinated than any other OECD country. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

For vaccination rates, Australia trails an international field, ahead of Lebanon but behind El Salvador. Morrison has never explained how this was allowed to happen or how we would catch up.

Australia languishes as a have-not country. We do not have enough vaccinations and we do not have a crisis leader.

We have had strong leaders before. They had names like Hughes and Curtin. They had many failings, and their choices under pressure were often questioned.

Yet they rose to confront the threat, to lead a nation through uncertainty. They were in the business of hope.

Instead we have Scotty from Marketing. The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Yesterday, this story appeared online:

“The Prime Minister said his last press conference didn’t go so well so he’s going to tap out for a few days until there’s something positive for him to talk about …

“You guys always take things I say and use it against me,” said the PM.

“That’s a very dirty, Labor tactic. What I say, I shouldn’t be judged on because I said it then and things have changed and when things change, the context changes and when the context changes then the things I say before are out of context, which means using them against me is a dirty, Labor tactic and I just won’t stoop to their level.”

Morrison didn’t really say this.

The fictional account appeared in a spoof news story on the Betoota Advocate.

But Morrison could have said it. And that’s sad.