Comment

Scott Morrison could have picked up the phone to two members of his much-vaunted national cabinet this week, to sort out what was truly a bizarre situation. But he didn’t, and his decision not to says a lot about his approach to the pandemic. Morrison’s reluctance to get involved in the six-day border standoff between New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory betrays a style of governance that oscillates between the passive and the reactive, always with an eye to quarantining himself from culpability.

Community standards, particularly around gendered and sexual violence, have progressed to the point that, arguably, the older a law is, the less it is likely to represent the interests of the people it is supposed to protect. Yet this perspective runs counter to a profession built on hierarchical deference to precedent.

Andrew Bolt has made a career finding vulnerable people and devising new ways of punishing them. When you consider this, his views on the elderly are not surprising, just inhumane. Bolt doesn’t want the old to die, but he believes we overstate the tragedy of their deaths. “Note: 40 per cent of aged-care home residents die within nine months. The average stay is just under three years,” he writes. “So Victoria’s bans are doing huge damage to – essentially – save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier.” Quixotically, the column is titled “How to save Victoria from the coronavirus”.

It was quite something to tune in to the first episode of Bunter and Georgina Downer’s geopolitical podcast, where they discussed the recent AUSMIN meeting, the upcoming United States presidential election and the future of war. Father and daughter get along famously as they take us on a wide sweep through the trickiest global thickets, with memos about Condoleezza Rice’s determination to play golf, China’s dominance in the rare earth market, Joe Biden’s “flaky” interviews, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fishing quotas in British waters and Russia’s anti-satellite rocket program.

Scott Morrison keeps misreading the mood of a nation gripped by fear. Nowhere is this more obvious than his now-abandoned legal case against state border closures – or, to be more precise, against the lockouts in the Labor-governed states of Western Australia and Queensland. The Liberal-governed states of Tasmania and South Australia escaped his censure.

There are two striking aspects of Australia’s response to coronavirus: the first is that it’s being increasingly led as a police issue, and the second is that this is happening while the rest of the world works to reform and curtail police powers. As other democracies talk about abolition, we’re sending armed officers into housing blocks and calling it public health.

It is difficult to better Tom Calma’s original formulation. In 2005, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, he said this: “It is not credible to suggest that one of the wealthiest nations in the world cannot solve a health crisis affecting less than 3 per cent of its citizens.” Calma was pushing for targets to Close the Gap. Three years later, he would have them. Fifteen years later, none of the targets would be met. This is not credible. It cannot be.

Scott Morrison went into disaster management mode this week as the coronavirus pandemic came awfully close to home, both personally and politically. The ‘catastrophe’, as his political opponents described it, was the Covid-19 outbreak spreading through some private Victorian aged-care facilities – something that happens to be the direct responsibility of Canberra. No longer does the prime minister have the luxury of being a helpful but innocent bystander in the crisis.

Amid a once-in-a-century pandemic that has closed borders and deflated economies, two of Australia’s most senior cabinet ministers flew to Washington this week for talks with their American counterparts. The day they arrived, Washington, DC, recorded 11,858 Covid-19 infections and 582 deaths from the virus; both ministers will undergo two weeks of quarantine when they return to Australia. In an era when G20 meetings and leaders’ summits have taken place by video link, what is so compelling about these talks that justifies chewing up three weeks of two senior ministers’ time?

Some economists in Australia are trying to force a debate about whether we ‘should’ let Covid-19 kill tens of thousands of people or ruin the economy and force millions of Australians into unemployment and poverty. What would you do? As a year 12 debating topic it would make for an interesting spar, but as a contribution to public policymaking in a pandemic it is juvenile.