TRUE OPINION: Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been delaying Australia’s access to much-needed Covid vaccines so he can win votes at the next federal election, writes comedian Kieran Butler.
Xenophobia is a cornerstone of the Australian psyche. We are terrified of everything we don’t understand and are easily manipulated as a result. We scare easily, and when paired with a racist dog whistle, a fear campaign, followed by a somber assurance that “only we can protect” you, is a guarantee of electoral success in the world’s most apathetic polity.
The list of things to be terrified of can be played on a loop and the LNP have turned it into an art form. Be it refugees, Muslims, terrorists, Islamic terrorists, Africans, gangs, African gangs, China, pedophiles, Chinese pedophiles … Do I have to go on?
This is why, to paraphrase Sideshow Bob: “Your bleeding heart may beg you to vote progressive, but deep down you long for a cold hearted Tory to torture refugees, ignore climate change and rule you like John Howard”.
However, none of the things Tories spend their time telling you to be terrified of have ever posed any real threat whatsoever. Therefore, protecting you from it is not hard, and yet another reason why it is so electorally popular.
Not long ago, a few days after his government got busted for putting a 3-year-old refugee in hospital; Scott Morrison was smirking his way through an interview at the G7 in the UK, declaring he would rather be in Australia than Britain.
Morrison had just got a predictable boost in the polls after leaving Indian Australians to die in India from the Delta strain of Covid-19. Like refugee torture, it’s racism you can indulge in under the guise of caring about people whilst stoking fear. Morrison is a master practitioner of this sleight of hand.
However, as anyone who watches The Voice will tell you, nobody puts Delta in the corner. All you need is a limo driver with a slack attitude, a bunch of smug Australians and a Gladys.
Keating had the recession we had to have. This is the Delta outbreak Australia probably deserves. Greg Hunt recently explained that the reason Australia has avoided the death rates that Covid 19 has meted out around the world is because Australia listens to science.
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This would have been news to anyone who had the misfortune to spend five minutes with Morrison and his climate change policies at the G7. Even Boris Johnson decided to it was better to ignore reality and tell Morrison what his policies were!
Morrison was smirking like the c*nt who got the cream in Cornwall because he had it all worked out. He had just met with his UK based electoral strategists and, despite the odd rapist in a minister’s office, he had mapped out the path to victory at the next election.
It has been reported that, in June 2020, Morrison knocked back an offer from Pfizer just because Astra Zeneca was cheaper. That’s bullshit. Morrison is now a trillion dollars in debt. Government money is for spending on #sportrorts, car parks, your former attorney general’s defamation case and getting LNP governments re-elected. Curiously, high levels of public debt used to be a subject of Tory fear campaigns in the not so distant past.
Morrison knocked back Pfizer because the election was still at least 18 months away and vaccines have an expiry date. The timing didn’t suit him. By November 2020 he ordered 10 million doses. The bloke from Pfizer said this was “unconscionable”.
Unconscionable is a great word. If you use it in a sentence like this: ‘I drank 56 beers and passed out on the couch. I was unconscionable’, your private school education was wasted. It means you deliberately took advantage of a situation to benefit yourself at the expense of others.
Morrison was setting up for an October 2021 election. His vaccination roll out was timed to peak in September. It was all going perfectly until Brittany released her hit single “I joined the LNP and all I got was a hangover, the morning after pill and an invite to go debating with Christian Porter”. That put a spanner in the works. The chicks got super pissed about that for some reason.
Still, fear is the best political aphrodisiac. A Delta outbreak in the UK is one thing, but when it happens in India, that’s a gift; and threatening Indian Australians with jail time is more popular than a self-immolating refugee.
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By the time Morrison got to Cornwall, all he had to do was smirk, delay the vaccine roll out by just a few more months and set up for an election in early 2022. Pictures of eagles are all well and good but Morrison surely has a post-it note stuck to a laptop somewhere that says: “If I vaccinate, they’ll forget about the rape”.
Fast forward just a few weeks and Delta is the unexpected sleeper hit of the winter. NSW and Victoria are currently locked down. There are government ads featuring actors gasping for air. Rumour has it Porter and Lehrmann were on set when the ad was shot and placed either side of her. That is why she looks from side to side in abject terror. You can’t knock the Strasberg method. It gets results.
People fear death. This global pandemic has killed millions of people. Delta is about to run riot and Australia is stone motherless last on the table of OECD vaccinated countries. For an unprotected populace, Delta is something to fear.
However, when there is a genuine threat, the people who promise protection will only attempt to do so on condition you keep their grubby snouts in the trough.
Furthermore, when their Machiavellian plans come undone, they will only offer pointless platitudes like “this is a tough time for Australia, but we’ll get through it together, like we always do” and idiotic comments like “Delta writes it’s own rules”.
It’s a fucking virus. It can’t even hold a pen.
Loved it! It is so refreshing to read this kind of political critique. I found it informed, detailed, global, local and funny! Humour is contagious and perhaps critically useful. None of the overwrought (and yet supercilious) bowing to that pernicious species of termite that has infected SMH, ABC, BBC (etc,ect, ect) aka journalistic ‘balance’. More of it. It may be the only way to take back ground.