When We Needed Churchill – We Got ScoMo: The Best of 2020. As Editor. A Sense of Place Magazine, 30 December, 2021.
When We Needed Churchill – We Got ScoMo: The Best of 2020.
By Paul Collits
We are living through a national crisis. Things are out of control. Sitting atop the disaster is a man who shouldn’t be there.
There can be little doubt that Australia, now in a time of crisis and clearly out of control, is run by someone who has no business “being there”. Like the United Kingdom, we are governed by a chancer.
Scott Morrison chanced upon political power in 2018 in the most bizarre of circumstances – a Liberal Party internal civil war and an ideological implosion – and held on to power following a surreal election in 2019 which the Labor Opposition itself suffered its own ideological implosion, and committed political suicide, thus gifting an utterly mediocre and undeserving Liberal led coalition three more years in government.
And now, this chancer sits atop an even more bizarre political scenario, the dictatorship of a virus, and somehow continues to prosper electorally, judging by the polls and the sycophantic support of the corporate media.
This story is little short of incredible
The Government Morrison leads clearly has no idea what it is doing at a time of national crisis. He personally has no idea what he is doing. A nation is literally disintegrating before him. He botched policies relating to the only actual health threat posed by the Covid virus, care for the frail aged, a responsibility held by the Commonwealth.
Morrison has no answer to the border lockdowns enforced by premiers over whom he clearly wields no influence whatsoever. He oversees a regime that has shut down international travel, enforcing prohibitions matched only by North Korea and Cuba.
When we needed Churchill, we got ScoMo.
Morrison is the Chauncey Gardner of Australian politics. For those who have forgotten, or never saw, the 1979 film Being There, starring the incomparable Peter Sellers, here is a reminder.
Sellers played Chance the gardener, who through a series of bizarre events and no particular merit, came to be a central figure in power politics. As IMDB notes:
A simpleminded, sheltered gardener becomes an unlikely trusted advisor to a powerful businessman and an insider in Washington politics.
Some weeks ago our prime minister uttered the immortal words – “I support Daniel Andrews”.
This is a man who may well have committed industrial manslaughter for his insane quarantine madness. A man who has placed a whole state under house arrest.
A man who rules as a co-dictator with his chief of police and his chief health bureaucrat. A man who has abandoned any pretence of governing under the rule of law. A reckless criminal of a premier, whose actions have now been questioned as to their legality.
Morrison and Andrews need one another
While Andrews exists, Morrison escapes even the merest modicum of scrutiny. While Morrison exists, with his brand new 2020 toy, the “national cabinet”, Andrews gets protection.
Since Morrison’s pathetic defence of Andrews, things in Victoria have actually got worse. He has extended his astonishing emergency powers for another six months (at least) on the back of deals (no doubt) done with three Victorian sleazy Upper House MPs – to be precise, a former prostitute, an animal rights activist and a greenie.
Amazingly, the former prostitute claims to be a libertarian. Aren’t they meant to cherish freedom above all else?
And, far more shockingly, we have seen the arrest by the Vicstapo of a pregnant woman for the crime of posting a social media post about a planned protest in Ballarat against Victoria’s fascist lockdown laws.
The senior VicPol spokesman, one Luke Cornelius, actually said on television that Zoe was engaged in “serious criminal activity”. I kid you not. Serious criminal activity. Whatever attributes are needed to get a senior position in VicPol, clearly an IQ of over 30 isn’t one of them. Daniel Andrews claimed not to have seen the video of her arrest.
Ponder the nation we have become, and consider those to whom the power to govern us has been handed. Chief Health Officers. Police forces of the calibre of the corrupt cowboys of VicPol. Bureaucrats behind which scared, clueless politicians cower.
One has to ask – who is Daniel Lenin’s “useful idiot” in all this?
No one of even the most basic human intelligence and moral character can stand idly by and let this go through to the keeper. Australia is now run by, and populated with, midwits. We have a prime minister who famously opined – “how many jobs does freedom of speech create?” A prime minister who created Australia’s greatest economic crisis since the Depression. Scotty from marketing.
The other week we saw the following update on the so-called death virus:
… six Victorians died on Tuesday. Five were men in their 80s and one was a man in his 90s. All of the deaths are linked to outbreaks in aged care facilities.
This is what it is all about.
This truly pathetic faux crisis has delivered Australians rule by Chief Health Officer, corrupt VicPol cowboys who should actually be ashamed to show their faces in public arresting pregnant women who wish to organise peaceful demonstrations, parliamentary deals done with loopy greens and prostitutes to extend martial law in the state of Victoria, hundreds of fines every day, arbitrary arrest, police smashing the car windows of the innocent.
And sitting atop all of this, doing nothing at all, emerging from his lair every so often to mouth meaningless clichés – like “I support Daniel Andrews” – is the man from marketing. If only he had stayed there. Then we might have got someone with the spine and the wit and the morals to actually do something to arrest our slide as a nation into poverty, turpitude and decay. To actually govern.
The accidental prime minister. Chauncey Morrison. We deserve much, much better.
All Oppositions in the Anglosphere has simply given up earning their pay. They are truly pathetic, none more so than what’s-his-name in Victoria. They stand for nothing. The corporate media are simply not doing their jobs.
Until we get the chance to re-consign Scotty the gardener to his former occupation via the electoral process, what is to be done? The Queensland based Canadian legal academic James Allan has suggested an anti-lockdown party. I am not sure what this would achieve, but it would at least give people like me someone sensible to vote for. I would happily support such a party. I would even help to form it.
We know already that the Liberal party is beyond useless.
Neither liberal nor anything else, really. Motivated by nothing except careerism and wealth post the parliamentary career, it believes in nothing other than gaining and holding office.
For such an operation, Morrison is the perfect leader.
The answer in the short term needs to involve direct action. The situation is that serious.
