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Flat White

The Ruby Princess fiasco: our leaders’ latest great failure not only over coronavirus, but China as a whole

2 April 2020

11:01 AM

2 April 2020

11:01 AM

Our political leaders have significantly failed to protect Australians from the Wuhan virus.

On the principle enunciated by President Truman as to where the buck stops, our politicians should accept responsibility for most of the increase in the number of infected in the community.

Sitting in what is the Premiers’ Conference (the name changed yet again to suggest innovation) the politicians completely ignored widespread public concern at the absence of proper controls on the wharves and at the airports.

Had our leaders acted with elementary common sense as they did in Taiwan and Singapore, there would have been very few cases of returning travellers innocently going home and finding out that later they in fact had the virus, having unintentionally infected many others and spread the disease. There would have been no need to then so seriously damage the private sector and the many workers there.

I flew home on 26 February from a cruise to the most lax reception conceivable, as did The Australian’s Troy Bramston only recently. Meanwhile, certain universities blatantly evaded travel restrictions for their fee-paying international students

The Ruby Princess cruise liner debacle is but the best known; there have been many similar arrivals involving thousands of travellers.

This loophole continued until the politicians belatedly announced tighter entry controls on 26 March, But, according to one source in the Daily Telegraph on the very day of the announcement a United Airlines from New York flew into Sydney ‘with zero testing in place’, while on the following evening 33 doctors were left to self-quarantine.

Before this, the politicians had deviously decided to condemn the young for being Australian and going to the beach on a warm day in Sydney’s typical Indian Summer.

If the Wuhan virus had not been around, the weather would have been used as proof of global warming.

Instead, the pandemic was cynically misused to justify the massive shut-down of private-sector Australia, leaving the vast taxpayer-funded public sector unscathed


The politicians seriously blundered.

Those young Australians were innocent of the alleged mass breach of the social distancing protocols.

The politicians blundered by relying on press photographs taken at ground level that pick up and compress standing and moving crowds so that they appear to be closer together than they actually are.

Had the ‘concerned’ politicians arranged an aerial shot, this would have shown that the distance between sole surfers, couples and small — often family — groups was usually more than the prescribed 1.5m.

This is not the French Riviera. Australians just do not cram together especially on a large beach like Bondi.

That didn’t stop the political class, including Amanda Vanstone, from rushing to declare these young Australians to be morons.

So on the basis of a concocted breach worthy of a Beijing show trial, the politician dictators closed most of the private sector down, destroying businesses, sacking workers and bringing on at least a recession.

They completely mismanaged access to Centrelink. Meanwhile, there are those on the Left who would impose even greater destruction on the private sector with increased authoritarianism. Already, a woman runner alone on Bondi Beach on a cold windy day and later, a few boys on surfboards were pointlessly chased away by agents of a Premier inexplicably spending a fortune to move the Powerhouse Museum from its valuable CBD location to a flood-prone site at Parramatta.

A foreign dictatorship gave us the virus; our politicians are using this to take exorbitant control over our lives without the decency of admitting that most of the problem comes from their gross negligence. Some are even talking about this going on for six months.

So what will be left? At least the Prime Minister has relented and has finally agreed to provide those sacked a ‘job-keeper’ allowance of $750 per week for up to six months. This and other provisions with the Reserve Bank printing money will cost well over $300 billion.

While too many of our politicians still enjoy their gold-plated special superannuation and even communist- sourced consultancies, the debt will be inherited by our children. Since we’re all in this together, shouldn’t public sector incomes be topped at $3000 per week?

And be warned, this will not be last virus to escape from the Peoples Republic.

There are four groups of people. There are the vulnerable because of age and/or health who should be protected, those arrivals and contacts who should be in quarantine, the inexplicably specially protected in the public sector and the rest who should be allowed to get on with their lives.

As Donald Trump hopes, what makes Australia tick, the private sector, should soon be back in business

There is no need for a blanket approach; locking down parts of the country where there is no apparent problem. But the so-called National Cabinet tends to require uniformity in a federation created to respect differences.

Our political class have for long been too beholden to the kleptomaniac thugs, liars and killers who control China, some influenced by the prospect of the fortunes they could make from this — and not only in outrageously early retirement.

Obsessed with a utopian version of free trade, they too readily handed over not only manufacturing to Communist China but also premium and strategic assets, including our farms. These must be recovered to recoup the damages caused by the creation and mishandling of this Wuhan virus. In the meantime, paddock-to-plate and supermarket-to-Australia Post should be banned and no more assets handed over.

All this represents the most serious failure of the political class in the history of the federation the Australian people, and not the politicians, created.

Once this crisis is behind us, the Australian people should be encouraged to take back their country from an increasingly incompetent and morally and at times venally corrupt political class.

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