Hurray! Australia is saved! Our prime minister recently announced a "new deal" which will enable us to deal with COVID, put it behind us and get on with our lives. Apparently it involves vaccinations and dangling carrots like permitting people who have been vaccinated (roll on September) to indulge in the heady fruits of freedom that may be denied to the infectious herd. Oh, and the number of people allowed into the country is going to be restricted. I'm not saying this is unwelcome but it does rather raise the question of what the hell was the "old deal" and why did we stick with it for so long. I'm also a little confused about the "allowed into the country" thing. I didn't realise anybody was still traveling. Except for our prime minister of course who went overseas for the G7 summit and has spent the last two weeks personal quarantine himself as a result. Given what happened in that time being plausibly absent from the centre of responsibility probably isn't a heart breaker for him.
And, apparently people are still traveling. For starters there are, apparently, still Australians stuck overseas trying to get home. How much of our population was overseas for goodness sake? This pandemic has been going on for over a year now, even with entry restricted to the numbers we can quarantine at any one time how can there possibly still be anyone left overseas?
Celebration of the country's new golden path away from lockdown hell was muted due to the fact that a large proportion of the country is currently in lockdown. NSW Health (in light of the circumstances they may wish to change that name) has put out a list of locations that require testing and/or self isolation. It will soon be easier simply to name the venues that haven't had an exposure.
In an interview over the weekend a government minister announced that he is confident that plenty of doses of Pfizer vaccine are on their way. Or to put it another way he announced that plenty of Pfizer doses aren't actually in the country. This is not entirely surprising. One of the disadvantages with living on an island a long way from the parts of the world that actually make things is that there tends to be a bit of a delay before said things turn up.
There have been dark mutterings about the media's role in spreading disinformation and alarm about the vaccines which in my mind is somewhat unfair. What the media does is report stories that they think will receive attention in order to generate revenues for their owners. The way to deal with that is to get in front of such stories and present a coherent narrative that will hold steady despite the occasional blip. And I can literally feel every politician in the country staring at me in complete incomprehension. Politicians tend to undertake actions based on reports in the media. The concept of generating reports in the media as a result of their actions isn't something that comes naturally to them (except in a negative sense when they get caught in a public toilet with a fistful of party drugs and a wallaby in a negligee).
Just on that topic, over in North Korea a number of senior ranking party officials have been sacked for what was referred to as "neglecting their duties in fighting the global health crisis". Its a little disturbing that apparently North Korea can teach us lessons on ministerial responsibility.
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