ScoMo and Andrews share the ‘big lie’ honours

There are two candidates for the Big Lie of 2020: Scott Morrison’s ‘we are all in this together’ and Daniel Andrews’ ‘this virus does not discriminate’.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison presided over a government whose neglect allowed the coronavirus into aged care homes. Picture:Getty Images

There are two candidates for the Big Lie of 2020: Scott Morrison’s “we are all in this together” and Daniel Andrews’ “this virus does not discriminate”.

It of course deliciously appropriate that the Prime Minister and the Victoria Premier are the two who are competing for this accolade: after all, the premier presided over the government whose criminal negligence let the virus out of those quarantine hotels, and the PM presided over the government whose criminal neglect then invited the virus into aged care.

And 505 deaths, and counting, later, who would say me nay, that they certainly deserve something, and probably jointly? More simply, does Harry Truman’s “buck” stop at any desks in the 21st century?

The arithmetic is indisputable. As of reporting yesterday, we — as in, the landmass formerly known as Australia — have had 737 deaths. Of those 650 were in the Stasi state formerly known as Victoria. And of those, 505 were in aged care.

Let me just spell that out. Of all the deaths in all the states and territories of Australia, fully 68 per cent have occurred in Victorian aged care. In the six months that the virus has raged across the landscape, there have been only 232 deaths outside Victorian aged care.

That 68 per cent figure will continue to rise as the Andrews-Morrison grim reaper continues its journey through those homes, and there continue to be near-zero deaths anywhere else in Australia and even anywhere else in virus-wracked Victoria.

While I am at it, let me throw some more figures at you. Of all the deaths in Australia, only 14 have been of people aged below 60. There have been no, nada, zero deaths below the age of 30. Only 26 have been of people in their 60s.

That makes a total of just 40 deaths — across Australia — of people aged below 70. Just under 700 deaths were of people aged over 70.

Now, unless Premier Andrews is hiding a massive countervailing toddler toll, those numbers tell me — now, true, I am not a health “expert” — that the one thing, the one thing, that we now know indisputably about this virus is that it precisely does discriminate.

We also now know that “we” are just as precisely not “all in it together”.

Two Australias

The policy action chosen by both the federal government and the eight state and territory governments was precisely directed at separating us into “two Australias”.

These are the Australia of those that are hurting and those who are actually having a “pretty good virus”, especially now that the fears of February that we would all be dropping in the streets, 1950s sci-fi movie or 2010s zombie series-style, have faded.

Broadly those “two Australias” are the Australia of the private sector and that of the public sector. The government ordered the destruction or devastation of businesses; the government ordered the destruction of jobs. But not in the assorted public sectors.

The official jobless figures from Roy Morgan Research on Friday detailed this toll. As of late August just under two million Australians were jobless. That was 13.8 per cent of the workforce (the official ABS data still says it was 7.5 per cent, as of the first two weeks of July).

In addition, according to Morgan, 1.3 million Australians were underemployed. So the total jobs toll of the deliberate policy action added to a staggering 22.8 per cent of the entire workforce.

Far from any public sector job losses, the reverse has indeed been the case as regular pay rises are rolled out instead. The entire jobless toll has been felt in the private sector.

Close to 30 per cent of the entire private sector workforce — nearly one in every three workers — is either jobless or underemployed; and that does not include those hanging on via the perilous and about-to-decline lifeline of JobKeeper.

No, PM, it seems to me to be a rather big terminological inexactitude to claim that we are all in this together. Some are more in it than others, Animal Farm style.

Now, of course this has been done entirely with the best of intentions: to save lives.

Further, the federal government did accept the responsibility — using taxpayer money — to compensate the devastation inflicted mandatorily on people if not really businesses.

But I have to say, I’m losing the desire to add that “good intentions” qualifier, as it becomes more and more clear-cut that the national lockdown and more recently the individual state Lockdowns 2.0 and border closures — of which the most outrageous and most punitive is of course Victoria’s ‘‘House Arrest’’ Lockdown 3.0 — were utterly and unnecessarily over the top.

The health damage they have caused alone far, far outweighs even the most overwrought predictions — from “experts”, of course — of the death and devastation that the virus might wreak.

Remember those forecasts of up to 150,000 deaths across Australia? Of 36,000 deaths in Victoria? Does anyone now seriously believe they were well-founded? That but for the lockdowns they would have happened?

Just look at the aged care numbers, bad and tragic enough as they are. Look at the very small number of deaths in Victoria out of the other 17,000-plus cases recorded outside the aged care sector, out of who knows how many actual cases, where infected people have had neither symptoms nor tests.

On the health cost-benefit trade-off alone, the costs have and will far outweigh the direct virus benefits.

Then add on the monumental economic and financial costs, and we are still living through the greatest public policy failure in this country’s entire history.

And the PM actually thinks it will be an “achievement” if we start emerging from our figurative holes in the ground in December.

Yet both PM and Premier are also totally, as in 100 per cent, invested in the economist’s “can-opener” vaccine. We assume it will be invented. What if it isn’t, PM and Premier? In this case, premiers plural?