Monique Ryan feels entitled to lecture others about masks but doesn’t follow her own advice

The Teal brigade is suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome and for Monique Ryan, Covid catastrophising has become a bid for attention.

One wonders whether the privileged folk in the country’s richest electorates have buyer’s remorse after electing a bunch of Greens MPs masquerading as “independent” Teals. Simon Holmes a Court’s posse of pretenders is desperately looking for relevance, none more than the member for Kooyong, Monique Ryan.

The woman who unseated former treasurer Josh Frydenberg is not just a lowly backbencher in the lower house, but a superfluous one. Labor has a majority in the House of Representatives making the Teals utterly redundant.

Among the Teals’ more amusing attention-seeking antics has been Ryan’s efforts to be the parliament’s chief “Karen” and enforcer. In the same month that she made headlines for pointing her middle finger at Coalition MPs and yelling “put your masks on”, Ryan was dancing maskless in a crowded indoors setting in her electorate.

Monique Ryan yelling in parliament ‘put your masks on’. Picture: YouTube

In a video, taken on August 19, Ryan is seen dancing maskless in a packed room at a community trivia night at the Glenferrie Primary School.

When confronted with the footage during an interview on Sky News, Ryan struggled to explain the inconsistency. “I don’t eat, drink, sleep or wash in a mask, but I do wear a mask where I’m worried about keeping people I work with safe,” she said.

“I do wear a mask when I’m at work, I do wear a mask when I’m around other people and I feel like I can’t socially isolate.”

There wasn’t much social isolation happening in the video, far less than you see in parliament, but yet Ryan feels entitled to lecture others about masks while selectively following her own silly rules.

Monique Ryan has struggled to explain the inconsistency of her dancing maskless in a packed room. Picture: Getty

Earlier in the interview, she made bizarre allegations about Coalition MPs infecting three of her colleagues.

“We knew in parliament that several parliamentarians on the Liberal National side had had Covid in the week preceding us going back to the House (of representatives), those individuals chose not to wear masks in the House, by the end of the first two weeks of sitting three of the 13 members of the crossbench had contracted Covid even though we were all wearing masks,” she said.

Did she have any proof that the Coalition MPs were still infectious and guilty of infecting the crossbench? Did she perform genomic testing to trace back each infection to evil Coalition MPs? And if masks are so effective, then why were her meticulously masked colleagues infected? In trying to justify her hectoring on masks, Ryan only succeeded in making a monumental goose of herself.

But one cannot expect much consistency from the Teal brigade, who are suffering from a severe case of relevance deprivation syndrome.

Ryan is also crusading for more Covid-era measures.

“We all remember how awful last summer was; the summer of Omicron,” she tweeted. “That’s why I’ve called for a National Summit on Covid-19.”

Awful summer of Omicron? Really? It wasn’t long before the rookie MP was being mocked on Twitter.

One likened her to “the Japanese soldier on the island who thought World War II was still going”, while others pointed how “awesome” last summer was given adults were again allowed to make decisions about their own welfare.

“Awful? I got to see my parents interstate for the first time that year, leave my apartment without fear of being hassled by the police, go for walks after 9pm, see my friends, etc,” said one person.

“My loneliness, anxiety and depression melted away. Summer was great.”

Many others posted recent pictures of Ryan indoors, maskless and not socially distanced.

For Ryan, the continual Covid catastrophising is a way to stay relevant and feature in TV programs. It speaks to the hypochondriacs in her Twitter supporter base who treat Covid-19 like it’s the Black Death, but the rest of the country, and indeed the world, has long moved on.