Aged Care Disasters, Border Wars, Belting China Again

What does a government Minister have to do to lose their job? Losing control of aged care homes and allowing coronavirus to cause the death of over 400 people isn't enough these days. How we long for those good ol’ days when a Minister could be stood down for possessing a oversized teddy bear or filling out the wrong form. But that was so 1980s, and it's now the year of the pandemic: 2020. Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck still remains in his job, but we're really not sure why.

The tedious and totally predictable border war continues, and while it's not quite like the Battle of Stalingrad, the federal government (Liberal, by the way) is taking aim at the governments of Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria (Labor, by the way) over border closures. But, apparently, “we're all in this together”, so (cynicism warning) it couldn't be anything to do with the Liberal Government playing base politics.

And whenever this federal government is in trouble, it has two cards it can play: race and hate. This time around, it's all about China. The Belt and Road Initiative is a China investment program that Scott Morrison spoke glowingly about in June 2019 but has decided that he never said anything good about the program, never supported the Victoria–China deal in 2018 (yes, he did), and will now veto these projects. This all came out of the blue, and is all about ramping up pressure on Daniel Andrews and the Victoria Labor Government. Who’s got time for the national interest or eliminating coronavirus when there are political points to be scored by using the Royal Flush of race and hate cards?

In shades of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Liberal Party foreign investment: good; Labor Party foreign investment: bad. It really is as simple and basic as this, a philosophy implemented by a government filled with simpletons. It’s like a Ship of Fools.