Trapped in an elevator with a grinning colostomy bag.
I try not to delude myself that outside the confines of my Twitter feed, or this delightfully exclusive subscription periodical, that anybody shares my spectacularly low opinion of the thirtieth Prime Minister of Australia. But I do wonder if somebody somewhere, other than you and I, might be waiting for the election to roll on so that they might finally beat this lying, happy-clapping dodgewanker to actual pieces with whatever blunt instrument might be to hand.
Martin Amis cautions that the number of people you know and can trust is vastly outnumbered by those you don’t. Thus, it is not a good idea to generalise from any particular loathing your carefully curated friend’s list has for this lying bag of shit, to a wider sense that we as a nation have finally had it and might be ready to drop him down the elevator shaft — after three years trapped in the elevator with a grinning colostomy bag leaking silent farts and smirking at us as though the anal whispers were all our fault.
But omifuckinggod pleeeeeeease tell me we’re getting there.
This is a fucking slow motion clown car crash of apocalyptic incompetence - an entirely foreseeable cluster of fucks arising from the massively increased transmissibility of Omicron, the failure to prepare for the inevitable collapse of Covid testing as daily cases soared from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands, and the consequent implosion not just of supply and distribution chains but the economy as a whole.
Turns out the economy is more than just a bunch of numbers in the budget. It’s made up of twenty-five million or so living, breathing human beings and if they all catch the same virus at the same time and find themselves having trouble with that whole living and breathing deal, they stop working, they stop consuming and some of them even stop living and breathing.
Who’d a thunk it?
But here’s a thing. Not only was it entirely foreseeable, it was entirely foretold. By his own fucking people. The Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox, as fierce a champion for raptor capitalism as you will ever meet, called out the lack of rapid antigen tests in August last year. By that stage tens of millions of RATS were being used in the US and UK every day to keep schools and businesses open, and many of them were being manufactured by Australian companies who couldn’t get the federal health bureaucracy here to even take a fucking phone call.
So they went offshore.
As David Crowe wrote yesterday:
This was not a complaint to Morrison from critics trying to find fault. It was a practical question, not an ideological one. Tony Shepherd, the company director who led the government’s 2014 commission of audit, was urging federal ministers to move fast. Liberal backbenchers, such as paediatrician Katie Allen in the Melbourne seat of Higgins, went public about the need to deploy the rapid tests. Allen had been arguing for more RAT kits since at least June.
Omicron hadn’t rolled into the party at that time, of course, but Delta was in the da muthafuckin house and Scotty was still pushing hard to open everything up by the end of the year, undoubtedly hoping that a short term sugar hit from a hot vax summer and all that pent up spending might be enough to win him another three years of doing sweet fuck all - except for squeezing out those sweet silent ninja farts and blaming everyone but himself, of course.
And so here we are. In the two weeks I took off work, Ms Rona is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Thousands of businesses which survived the pandemic now face annihilation. There could be millions of people infected, but we don’t know because you can’t get tested. (We ordered some RATs for home use a couple of weeks ago, but they appear to have been seized by the feds. Or maybe Jen, who can say?)
The hospital system is teetering on the edge of collapse. And the fresh food sections of Coles-N-Woolies look like an East Berlin Workers Larder the day after rumours of a door buster special on horse meat and pickled turnips.
Still, what Martin Amis said.
I'm with you and Martin: I have no idea what everyone else is thinking. I've been told that tradies love him, so who knows. There are certainly plenty of shiny new high-rise utes tooling around everywhere, if that's any indication.
Don't lose sight of the use of shock doctrine in the background though. They're still going to open more fracking fields, build pointless gas turbines (while also blocking new major solar power plants for being "against policy"), allow schools to discriminate against (kick out) both teachers and students (with a review of the latter in twelve months, perhaps), wind down Universities in general and arts departments in particular, stack the AAT with mates, and turn Perth over to be a US nuclear submarine base. I could go on, but it's too depressing, because there's not a peep about any of that from the opposition.
I must conclude, therefore, that my countrymen by and large agree with it all. I don't know what to do about it.
"...lying, happy-clapping dodgewanker...". Thank you, JB.