George Clooney has praised Australia’s harsh Covid lockdowns, telling Network 10’s The Project the lockdowns were impressive.

Then again, Mr Clooney has spent his life reading lines given to him by others. Expect him to tell us next week about how good it is to eat bugs.

The man who rose to fame pretending to be a doctor on the hit TV show ER claimed 900,000 lives would have been saved if only America had implemented Australia’s tough lockdown measures.

And he knows this because he rose to fame pretending to be a doctor on the hit TV show ER.

Why only 900,000 lives? Why not a 1.3 million? If we’re making numbers up impromptu, why not a gazillion?

I’m no doctor but I do know I would have saved two hours of my life had I not watched Oceans 13.

Clooney, whose brain appears to still be in lockdown, told a fawning Carrie Bickmore:

‘Look at what you guys were able to accomplish, and I know it was incredibly difficult, but had the United States done that, we would have saved 900,000 lives.

‘The idea that you believed in science is so admirable. 

‘The whole time I was there I thought, I am so impressed with the people of Australia who said let’s suck this up and get this done. I was so impressed.’

What Mr Clooney forgot to tell viewers was that he and co-star Julia Roberts were granted special exemption from the lockdown measures he so admired when they arrived here last year to film a new movie.

All of which means Mr Clooney knows lockdown was ‘incredibly difficult’ in the same way that Meghan Markle knows what it’s like to be Nelson Mandela.

George Clooney and his family endured their two-week quarantine on a sprawling Southern Highlands property where they were pictured strolling around the $9m estate.

Julia Roberts was given an exemption to stay at a $56m waterfront mansion in Vaucluse.

Meanwhile, those Australians actually permitted to enter their own country from overseas were marched off to hastily constructed quarantine camps, or to tiny hotel rooms where they remained under police guard and survived on barely edible food packages.

Minor details.

Warming to his subject, Mr Clooney told The Project:

‘I look at what particularly Australia did, and some of these things get politicised.’

That’s the wonderful thing about being an A-lister who receives special treatment. You can afford to be a purist.

Hotel quarantine was certainly impressive when it applied only to other people. And lockdowns were clearly admirable when they didn’t affect your own ability to earn millions.

But yeah, some of ‘these things get politicised’ by the people shut out of their own country, or locked in hotel rooms, or banned from working, or barred from sending their children to school, or denied the chance to visit dying loved ones.

If only those who ‘politicised’ the lockdowns were blessed with the perspective of Hollywood stars.

They would have realised how impressive the two years of lockdowns really were, and how admirable it was that they got to be part of it.

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

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