Calls for Victoria’s DCHO Annaliese van Diemen to resign over Captain Cook tweet hypocritical
Yes the Deputy Chief Health Officer in Victoria shouldn’t have tweeted what she did about Captain Cook. The fact the First Fleet (18 years after Cook’s visit) brought with it small pox – ravaging its way through indigenous communities – isn’t the point.
Her tweet was dumb and badly timed. It also saw her stray out of her area of expertise.
Dr Annaliese van Diemen (yes, that’s actually her name, how ironic) really should have known better. She wittingly or unwittingly entered into the history wars, the culture wars, you name it. She gave political opponents of Daniel Andrews the chance to play their childish games and use her actions to condemn him.
Doing so – as one of the nation’s senior medical administratorsduring this pandemic – was an unnecessary distraction.
But calls for her to resign because of the tweet are the height of hypocrisy. Especially when you consider who are loudly doing so. The shadow health minister in Victoria, Georgie Crozier, started the call out for a resignation letter, today the home affairs minister Peter Dutton echoed the sentiment with his larger microphone.
The only thing this mob is lacking is pitch forks.
Politicians demanding resignations is always funny to watch. They do so when disagreeing with the actions of perceived opponents, but lose their high moral ground when one of their own gets into trouble. When that happen it is amazing how quickly they lose their voice.
There really have been some cracker examples of Victorian Liberals doing dumb things over recent years, yet I don’t recall the shadow health minister being at the vanguard of calls for resignations. In fact like most partisan hacks, she lined up behind embattled colleagues, time and time again, defending their actions.
Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID19 or Cook 1770?
— Dr Annaliese van Diemen (@annaliesevd) April 29, 2020
The same goes for Dutton, including defending himself through some fairly hairy moments. And let’s not forget in this time of pandemic what happened with the Ruby Princess cruise ship – docking in Sydney and acting as the primary agent spreading the coronavirus. No one has lost their job and been held to account for that. Not the Home Affairs Minister, not the NSW Health Minister. Everyone is blaming everyone else, and no one as of yet has taken accountability.
Or lets not forget about the scenes at airports where social distancing seemed like an unrecognisable practice. Or Australia’s slow response to shut our borders to the United States, now the epicentre of the virus globally. These were at the very least failures which involved the department of home affairs. I for one haven’t been calling for Dutton to resign, because I recognise that this situation is a difficult one, and a resignation call is a big call to make. Demanding the minister resign for system failures isn’t remotely as unfair as demanding the Victorian DCHO resigns for a tweet. What she did, rightly or wrongly, isn’t even related to her employment.
Which raises the issue of free speech. How ironic is it that some of the nation’s most vocal advocates of free speech are trying to get this doctor sacked for her freely held views? It just goes to show that for many free speech advocates what they really support is the rights of their own to exercise such commentary, but it becomes a less innate right when people they disagree with do so. And don’t even get me started on the inconsistency – as just one example – when this situation is compared to Israel Folau’s.
This morning Alan Jones – one of Folau’s biggest free speech defenders – laid into van Diemen, egging the Prime Minister on to do the same. Jones showed out and out hypocrisy compared to how he’s acted towards Folau. To Scott Morrison’s credit he didn’t bite – noting that the tweet showed poor judgment but not joining the lynch mob seeking her resignation.
Rights are only worth defending if you defend the rights of those you disagree with, not just those you agree with.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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