I hate to dwell on Daniel Andrews but he represents a measure of incompetence and stupidity that will be hard for any future premier to exceed. However, I am drawn to all this again by Nick Cater’s article in The Oz today whose title sets the scene: The tyranny of ineptitude drives more to the streets.
I will stick to the highlights, but Andrews is a sad example of how fear and uncertainty can make absolutely anyone an apparent refuge, even when he has overseen the worst record anywhere in Australia, perhaps even across the world, shaded only by the devastating results achieved by Andrew Cuomo in New York (from whom Andrews may well have copied much of what he has done). All this is from Nick.
Lockdowns are a sadistic experiment with unintended consequences.
On Friday, 127 days, 87,000 cases, 9.2 million jabs and 460 deaths later, Andrews revoked the mask rule. There was no explanation or attempt to hide behind the fig leaf of health advice. If there was any advice, it would have contradicted the advice on which he claimed to be acting when he imposed mandatory mask wearing four months ago.
With more than 9000 active cases in the now unmasked community, Victorians are 530 times more likely to run into an infected person than they were in the middle of masked-up July.
Lockdowns did nothing to halt the spread of the virus; indeed, the number of people infected in the past four months of the pandemic in Victoria is four times larger than the number infected in the first 14 months.
Andrews’ brutal style of politics can allow for no admission of defeat or personal culpability. It demands a steady supply of scapegoats, the so-called idiots but for whom the virus would now be under control.
Andrews’ zero-Covid promise of July turned out to be utterly worthless and the pain he inflicted was degrading and ineffective.
Idiocy has assumed many forms in Andrews’ rhetoric in the past 20 months.
Today’s idiots are those who exercise their right not to consent to taking the vaccine. In doing so they are denying themselves the benefits the vaccine bestows but that hardly makes them idiots. They simply may be distrustful, and the more coercive public health measures become, the more sceptical they become….
Our intelligence has been insulted and our lives disrupted by these buffoons, safe behind their laptops, churning out executive orders, randomly enforced, that run to 83,000 words across 254 pages in Victoria, none of which has been endorsed by the elected parliament.
The social fabric is disintegrating as police are conscripted to enforce these garbled decrees that change on a whim. Police officers are calling in sick or resigning in disgust, uncomfortable with the declining public trust in the uniform they were once proud to wear. The permanent expansion of executive power Andrews seeks with the extension of emergency power legislation will further entrench the tyranny of ineptitude that is driving Victorians on to the streets.
I will finish with two comments from the paper.
How any intelligent reasonable Victorian, regardless of their political persuasion, can honestly believe Andrews and his government has performed well is frankly “unfathomable”. I just don’t get it.
But what does that say about Victorians, if Andrews goes on to win the election?
It’s the Melbourne Syndrome.
Leave a Reply