Andrew Gardiner contends that having a vapid, image-over-substance confidence trickster running the country is literally bad for our health.

America during COVID-19 was a nightmare last year. Governed by a Trump Administration philosophically opposed to government intervention, full of paranoid vaccine sceptics and beholden to corporate interests keen to keep the wheels of commerce turning, Trump pushed to open the economy well before it was safe to do so.

Perhaps worst of all, the Trump Administration – which enjoyed relative success with its Operation Warp Speed vaccine acquisition program – lacked a plan to distribute vaccines efficiently. Thousands of Americans lost their lives as a result of Trump’s reckless incompetence.

It’s a good thing Canberra has its act together, right? I jest, readers.

Australia during COVID-19 is turning into a nightmare this year. Governed by a Morrison Administration philosophically opposed to government intervention, with its fair share of vaccine sceptics and beholden to corporate interests keen to keep the wheels of commerce turning, PM Morrison pushed to open up the economy, in some cases before it was safe to do so.

In line with that philosophy, Morrison’s state colleague Gladys Berejiklian last month kept the NSW economy open when it was CLEARLY unsafe to do so. We’re now reaping the terrible harvest.

Perhaps worst of all, the Morrison Government – spared the worst ravages of COVID-19 last year, in part a lucky by-product of our isolation – lacked a proper plan, either to acquire and distribute vaccines efficiently or to adequately quarantine arrivals. So botched was the vaccine rollout that Morrison – seemingly without National Cabinet approval – went ahead and announced this week that people under 40 could go to their GP for AstraZeneca, a vaccine recent numbers show poses blood clot risks for anyone under 60.

So low are our stockpiles of safer vaccines, it seems, that many Australians are being encouraged to roll the pharmaceutical dice, in consultation with their GP of course. Gamble responsibly.


CARTOON: David Pope, Canberra Times

In fairness to our illustrious PM, he hasn’t ‘done a Trump’ by pushing quack cures like hydroxychloroquine or, more bizarrely, injections of a disinfectant more likely to kill the patient than COVID-19. That said, these fellow travellers share an awful lot of common ground.

One shared trait is their obsession with image over substance, with mastery over the 24-hour news cycle. Trump’s use of a catchy moniker like Operation Warp Speed last year may have betrayed a love of outdated sci-fi references, but it served its purpose, catching America’s attention and forcing news of his many and varied COVID-19 failures off the front page.

Not to be outdone, Morrison grabbed a headline on the issue of quarantining arrivals, announcing in May that the Howard Springs isolation facility near Darwin would be re-named “The Centre for National Resilience”. Mission accomplished: as laughable as Trump’s Star Trek reference, it nonetheless got Australians talking about it and not the fact he was a year late moving on from ad hoc hotel-based quarantine.

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Morrison wasn’t quite as memorable with his announcement that Australia’s vaccine rollout would put us “at the front of the queue for a safe and effective (cure)”. It did, however, betray another trait he and Trump share: their capacity to peddle falsehoods.

So prolific are this pair at fibbing – lying, actually – that dossiers on both can be found at Crikey.com.au (Morrison) and the Washington Post (Trump). Needless to say, Donald’s fib file is thicker; it’s hard to beat the King.

Of course, like all prolific peddlers of falsehood, both Trump and Morrison have strategies to stay on the front foot, even when they’re caught out. In Trump’s case, he often ‘doubles down’ on his lie, sometimes known as the Goebbels Doctrine: “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Morrison, on the other hand, prefers the “boiling frog” approach of slowly retreating from the initial falsehood, usually with a bunch of new ones. Thus, as it began to emerge that we were far from the “front of the vaccine queue”, Health Minister Greg Hunt insisted that March’s supply setback did “not affect the pace of the rollout” and “there is more than enough [vaccine] to see that bridge through to the arrival of the Australian-made CSL AstraZeneca doses.”

It turns out the supply setback not only “affected the pace of the rollout”, it put us pretty well at the “back of the vaccine queue”, well behind such economic powerhouses as Costa Rica. Hence the screaming, banner headlines you may have noticed over the past month.

There’s another term for what Morrison and Hunt did to Australians to stave off this reckoning: it’s called ‘gaslighting’.


CARTOON: Andrew Dyson, Sydney Morning Herald

Since Trump’s ignominious defeat at the polls last November, commentators have wondered aloud: “What if America produced a ‘better’, less abrasive, more rhetorically-nimble Trump? Not someone good with policy (heaven forbid!) but a front man (or woman) with enough rhetorical tricks and shiny objects up his or her sleeve to keep the masses distracted from rampant corruption and mismanagement longer than Trump’s solitary, four-year term in office?”

It turns out Australia may have beaten America to it: “Scotty from marketing” ticks all the abovementioned public relations boxes. He’s no good at managing disasters, but who needs that when you can stir up a culture war or two, ably assisted by shameless media enablers?

Having a vapid, image-over-substance confidence trickster running the country is quite literally bad for our health. Who knew?

In America’s case, it cost the lives of thousands. In ours, with a scarcity of vaccines or quarantine options to combat a Delta COVID-19 variant tearing through the country like one of those bushfires Morrison wouldn’t hold a hose against, the true carnage may be yet to come.

The Yanks got rid of their Gaslighter-in-Chief last November. Perhaps it’s time we did likewise.