fed-up

It is hard for an old cartoonist like Gus to keep track of ScoMo's crap and make fun out of it... One could say that satire is exhausting under the present circumstances and Gus' pencils can't match the brilliance of Shakespeare (I mean the cartoonist). This is why I borrow the cartoon above. It illustrates the story which comes with it: ScoMo is the master of marketing stationary bullshit while promising that it is on the move...

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Thursday was the day Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk finally had had enough of Scott Morrison. She announced she was not waiting any longer for the Prime Minister to work with Queensland. In January, Palaszczuk decided that Queensland needed to dump the failed system of hotel quarantine and build its own cabin-style facility. But when she pitched this to Morrison, he was unsupportive.

Now her government had decided to go ahead and build the cabin-based quarantine facility in Queensland without any Commonwealth co-operation.

It had been an exasperating seven months for her. So much for a pandemic emergency: “I’ve been calling for this since January, it could have been built now,” she told a press conference. She’d been trying to work with Morrison because quarantine is, after all, a Commonwealth responsibility under Section 51 (ix) of the constitution.

Hotel quarantine has proved to be the leakiest part of Australia’s defence against COVID. The system has been responsible for 27 outbreaks of the disease, on Labor’s count, including the current one gripping NSW.

Several premiers and the federal opposition for months called on Morrison to fix the system. But for some reason, he couldn’t see a need. The Prime Minister decided that what was good enough for the first phase of the emergency was good enough for the duration.

Palaszczuk was sick of him. “This is a race,” the Queensland Premier said, a direct rejection of Morrison’s notorious excuse for his government’s vaccine sclerosis. “This is what the Commonwealth should have been building right across the country.”

But, asked a reporter, had she at least notified the Prime Minister of her decision? Did he know? “I’m quite sure he does now.” She hadn’t done him the courtesy of advance notice.

So much for Morrison’s cheerful claim to the House on Wednesday that “we work together as a team of premiers, chief ministers and myself, to make sure we respond to each other’s needs”.

The Prime Minister did set up the national cabinet. It was a genuine effort at national co-ordination. But as time passes, the states and territories have grown increasingly unhappy with Canberra. Of course, the compelling need of the premiers and chief ministers this year has been for vaccine supplies, solely a Commonwealth responsibility.

Every one of them is frustrated with the slowness and clumsiness of the federal government’s vaccine “strollout”. But they have other resentments, too, including hotel quarantine. Beneath the surface, relations with most of the premiers have become very unhappy.

But what about the NSW Premier and fellow Liberal, Gladys Berejiklian? Morrison has made an effort to appear supportive. In the view of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, Morrison is too supportive. “His job is not to be the Prime Minister of NSW,” a Victorian government spokesperson said last month.

The Victorian complaint was that Morrison was giving NSW more generous financial support, a “double standard”. The PM rejected this – “Victoria received the same support for its two-week ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown as NSW has for its first two weeks of lockdown” – but the perception of favouritism stuck.

Yet even between the two Sydneysiders, relations are strained. Berejiklian is a Liberal team player who keeps her grievances about Morrison private. But, in private, she is scathing. The NSW Premier has told Liberal colleagues she’d have preferred that Peter Dutton had won the last federal leadership ballot – she’d rather be dealing with Dutton because Morrison is so unpleasant, she’s said. She’s described the PM as a “bully”.

Berejiklian went so far as to tell a colleague that Morrison’s behaviour was “evil”. She and many of her colleagues are still angry at the fact that Morrison’s press office phoned political reporters in a background effort to discredit her, so-called “briefing against her”, over the vaccine rollout a few weeks ago. They accuse Morrison’s staff of doing the same during the bushfires of two years ago: “Usually he briefs against her for doing her job with some measure of competence,” said one of the Premier’s loyalists. “He doesn’t like the contrast – he makes himself look big by trying to make others look small.”

Among Berejiklian’s inner circle, it’s considered a joke to call Morrison “the Prime Minister for NSW”. They consider Morrison to be the Prime Minister for Morrison and no one else.

Ironically, the source of Victoria’s gripe of favouritism, federal funding of NSW during its current lockdown, was actually the subject of a major argument between Canberra and Sydney.

NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet wanted JobKeeper back. The Morrison government refused. Canberra was prepared to make disaster payments, as it had to Victoria. But it wouldn’t contemplate a return to JobKeeper.

Perrottet considered JobKeeper so much better that he wrote an opinion column in The Daily Telegraph last month explaining three reasons why. The main one was that “Disaster Payment and JobSaver don’t appear to be maintaining the relationship between workers and employers as firmly as JobKeeper did”.

JobKeeper was paid from the federal government to employers, who then paid their workers, so it maintained the connection between businesses and their staff.

Perrottet was so determined that he decided NSW would pay the full cost of JobKeeper Mark II – all he needed from Canberra was the enabling data that only the Australian Tax Office possessed. The NSW Treasury was in discussions with its federal counterpart to set this up. But when Perrottet went on TV and announced that NSW was prepared to create its own wage subsidy, Morrison reacted furiously. Testy phone calls followed; Morrison refused to supply the essential information even though the program would not cost Canberra a cent.

The politics seemed pretty plain – Morrison didn’t want to be seen to be abandoning the states. The two governments reverted to a fall-back plan, sharing the cost of increased supplementary payments instead. This confirmed the suspicion in the Berejiklian government that Morrison was more interested in the politics of appearance than the substance of outcomes.

Some of the premiers gave up on the hotel quarantine system months ago. To state the obvious, hotels were built for tourists, not for containing plagues.

One type of quarantine accommodation that has proved virus-proof is the cabin-style camp at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, formerly a mining camp. With no connecting hallways or air-conditioning ducts, the virus has been unable to waft from room to room.

Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/even-berejiklian-is-fed-up-with-the-pm-who-she-privately-regards-as-an-evil-bully-20210827-p58mde.html

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