Boats, blame and bluster - Morrison's deadly ineptitude
By Ranting Panda, 13 September 2020
Right-wing commentators and pundits roundly criticised former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for his $51 billion GFC stimulus program as being fiscally irresponsible socialism, yet are now praising Prime Minister Scott Morrison's $200 billion COVID-19 stimulus program as being the epitome of good economic management. Perhaps someone should explain that both stimulus programs are straight out of the same Keynsian economics playbook ... you know, the bit where the government shares the wealth, which is an essential element of Socialism.
Socialism saves the day. Yet again. It saved Australia during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and it is needed to save Australia during 2020's COVID-19 pandemic.
Let's explore the two stimulus programs in a tad more detail. The Rudd stimulus saved around 200,000 jobs according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (ABC 2009). The Rudd and Gillard Labor governments were criticised ad nauseum by the media and conservative voters who didn't understand the economics of stimulus: that is, in an economic downturn, when businesses stop spending and people have no money to spend, the government must inject funds into the economy so that businesses and consumers have money to spend ... to stimulate the economy. If businesses, consumers and government stop spending, the economy grinds to a halt. Australia was the only developed country to avoid recession during the GFC (Dobbie 2009). Prime Ministers Rudd and Gillard were criticised for creating a debt and deficit disaster that would haunt future generations for decades.
As an aside, in the 10 years since the GFC, Australia squandered its comparative advantage. Tony Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013, and since then Australia has been governed by the conservative Liberal and National Parties. Since 2014, Australia's living standards have flat-lined, while other nations saw household incomes improve dramatically. By contrast, real disposable income in Australia outgrew the OECD average from 2007 to 2013 under successive Labor governments during and following the GFC, while in 2019 following six years of successive conservative government, Australia experienced its worst annual growth for a decade (Jericho 2019).
Former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Steiglitz, described the Rudd stimulus as 'one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country in the world' (Rudd 2020). Rudd's stimulus avoided recession. Morrison's stimulus has plunged Australia into a recession and will take decades for Australia to pay back. And just like that, conservative anti-Marxist pundits no longer care about debt, deficit and future generations, and are raving about how wonderful Morrison's (socialist) stimulus is.
While Morrison certainly needed to implement a stimulus program, it remains to be seen how effective it will be. The Rudd stimulus was immediate, it injected cash into the economy through instantly paying $900 grants to everyone and immediately establishing building projects, while Morrison's stimulus took months to be implemented and still managed to miss around two million people. Had it been rolled out instantly and more comprehensively, it would likely have saved many more businesses and jobs (Mannheim 2020).
Part of the Rudd stimulus involved a 'pink batts' scheme, to install insulation into roofs. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous businesses took advantage of this scheme and employed people with little to no training. Four young men died after being electrocuted in the roof spaces of the buildings they were working on. It was a tragedy caused by a lack of compliance with Australian Standards. The four employers were prosecuted under their respective state's health and safety legislation. Critics blamed the Rudd government for not managing it properly. Certainly, greater precautions could have been taken to ensure the companies were experienced, licensed under the scheme and complied with Australian Standards.
Meanwhile, when more than 2,000 people suicided as a direct result of the Morrison's government's Robodebt debacle (Medhora 2019), the conservative media and critics were nowhere to be seen. Tumbleweeds. They gave Morrison a free pass, even though his program callously and erroneously targeted Australia's poorest people, issuing demands for large sums of money that people could not repay and often did not owe, resulting in more than 2,000 suicides, and destroying the lives of many others.
With thousands of people dead from Robodebt, Morrison refused to accept responsibility for the fatal failings of his callous program. Even now, with hundreds more people dead from coronavirus, Morrison continues attacking Labor premiers, by playing politics with the pandemic and blaming others (Bongiorno 2020). He has failed to take responsibility for the deadly ineptitude of himself and his government, choosing instead to defend his abysmal record. He is the Prime Minister. He should show true leadership and actually lead the nation by example through taking responsibility, keeping people informed, responding appropriately to the crisis and uniting the nation rather than dividing it.
His ineptitude is continuing to cost lives as the world is ravaged by COVID-19.
Posted by Anthony Albanese, Facebook, 26 August 2020
Much of the COVID-19 death toll has been in aged care homes. Aged care is a federal government responsibility, something Morrison is intimately familiar with. As Treasurer in 2015 and 2016, Morrison slashed almost $2 billion from the aged care budget - what could go wrong, right? Currently, the COVID-19 death toll in Australia is more than 800, with at least 500 deaths in aged care facilities (Murphy 2020). The first aged care cluster was in Sydney's Newmarch House, where 19 residents died (Gilbert & Lilley 2020). Instead of learning from this, Morrison's government failed to take adequate precautions in other aged care facilities. There is now a Royal Commission into the extremely high ratio of deaths in aged care facilities. Peter Rozen QC, counsel assisting the royal commission, stated, 'This is what we mean when we say the aged-care sector is still not properly prepared for COVID-19 ... It is unacceptable that such arrangements were not in place in February. It’s unforgivable that they are not in place in August' (SBS 2020). Privately run aged care facilities are solely the responsibility of the federal government. Morrison has blood on his hands. Instead of facing the public, he has run away and hidden, releasing only a pre-recorded video about the matter. The Royal Commission has stated that these issues were entirely foreseeable. (Butler 2020).
In fact, Morrison received a federal report in April 2020, but kept it confidential (Crowe 2020). The government failed to act, even though the report warned of inadequate staffing to address the pandemic and providing lessons learned from the first wave. This ineptitude has cost hundreds of lives, the bulk of which are in Victoria and directly attributable to the negligence of the Morrison government. In late August 2020, the federal Aged Care Minister announced a further $563 million injection into aged care and a requirement for residential providers to appoint a designated infection control officer (Lucas 2020). Eight months after Covid first hit Australia, and hundreds of preventable deaths later, the government decides to act on aged care.
Even before the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney on 19 March 2020, there were reports that it was carrying passengers infected with COVID-19. The Ruby Princess carried 1000 infections, which were attributable to at least 30 deaths (Bongiorno 2020). This was an even worse scenario than the 14 deaths experienced on the Diamond Princess. And Morrison knew! Instead of quarantining the passengers, he allowed them to disembark and fly across the nation. Qantas and Virgin Airlines attempted to stop passengers boarding. They attempted to get hold of passenger manifests, however, the government had not put in place measures to contain the infected passengers (Probyn 2020). Then there was the matter of the Ruby Princess cruise ship which docked at the Sydney Overseas Passenger Terminal, with confirmed cases of COVID-19 aboard. The federal government is responsible for international borders. In fact, Morrison was formerly the Minister for Immigration. For years he boasted that his government's strict international border security policies had 'stopped the boats'. Morrison failed to stop the Ruby Princess, even though there had already been a disastrous and much-publicised case of a cruise ship contaminated with COVID-19, the Diamond Princess, which was not allowed to berth in Japan.
Morrison and his ministry have been attacking Dan Andrews over Victoria's stage 4 lockdown, and Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, over the strict closure of the Queensland border. Apparently Morrison knows more than the medical professionals who have recommended these steps. Palaszczuk has been criticised for 'politicising' the situation to score votes in the upcoming state election. The only party politicising this is the federal Liberal Party who are using this to distract from the Royal Commission into their shocking and negligent treatment of aged care that has resulted in hundreds of deaths. Why in the world, would anyone listen to Morrison and his murderous ministry that has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of elderly people?
When Victoria's Premier Dan Andrews locked the state down to combat a resurgence of COVID-19 in July 2020, people were quick to criticise him. In fact, they criticised him when he locked the state down in the first wave of the pandemic. When the second wave hit, these critics accused him of not being strict enough, while criticising him for being too strict. They blamed him for the high number of cases and the tragic loss of life. They blamed him for the more than 100 suicides that occurred following the second lockdown. What these critics seem to have ignored, is that had the Morrison stimulus package actually been implemented immediately and more effectively, then it would have helped protect many more businesses and jobs affected during the lockdown, avoiding many of the suicides that resulted from business closures. Rather than blame Morrison for an expensive, and largely ineffective stimulus, critics blamed Dan Andrews for trying to limit the impact of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Andrews' stage 4 measures have been successful, reducing the infection numbers from more than 500 a day to a couple of dozen, and deaths in the dozens, to now being in single digits (McMillan 2020).
Andrews was blamed for employing untrained security guards at a hotel that was used to quarantine travellers arriving from overseas. Allegedly, at least one guard had sex with one of the travellers. Other guards failed to enforce the quarantine measures. Much was made of the guards holding down three jobs, working as Uber drivers and so on. Yet, the security companies Andrews used, were the same that Morrison uses to protect federal establishments. It is well-known that the security industry is rife with exploitation, in which the contracted company outsources to another firm, who then outsources to someone else and so on. There can be multiple layers of sub-contracting. The guards at the end of this chain, are often underpaid, under-trained and exploited. Yes, Andrews should have ensured that there were measures in place to verify the qualifications of the guards, that they were being paid correctly and that they had the skills and qualifications necessary for a job with this much risk. But has Morrison been held to account for using the same firms? Has he been asked to verify that the guards used to protect Commonwealth properties are trained and not being exploited?
While the second wave in Victoria was blamed on one of these security guards, it has since emerged that patient zero was not a security guard at all, but a night duty manager at the Rydges hotel (Baker 2020).
Without a doubt, there were failings by the Andrews government in its handling of hotel quarantine. An inquiry has been told that quarantined guests were allowed to leave the hotels unsupervised for compassionate reasons, such as attending funerals or visiting terminally ill relatives. The same people who criticise Andrews for this, also criticise Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, for not allowing people into the state for compassionate reasons, such as visiting terminally ill relatives or attending funerals. Queensland is the model for exceptionally low infections and an exemplary management of the pandemic. What do these critics want? They are confused. They want Andrews to be tough on quarantine, but then criticise Palaszczuk for being tough on quarantine.
Morrison has accused Andrews of failing to have adequate contact tracing in place, yet it was Morrison who spruiked about the federal government's multi-million dollar CovidSafe app, which was a contact tracing application for mobile phones. To great fanfare, Morrison said that he could lift restrictions if more than 40% of people installed the app (Taylor 2020). CovidSafe was a dismal failure. It was untested, and incompatible with iPhones. Of those who did install it, it detected nothing (Patton 2020). Does Morrison take responsibility for this expensive failure? Of course not. Furthermore, by July, Victoria was the only state to have used the data from the app to contact trace infected people and were unable to (Patton 2020). The second Victorian wave may have been minimised had Morrison's CovidSafe contact tracing app actually worked.
The differences between Andrews and Morrison are stark. Andrews accepts responsibility for his mistakes, he gets in front of the cameras every day to keep Victorians informed of the situation and what he is doing. He acknowledges people's pain and empathises with them. He doesn't blame others. Morrison on the other hand, refuses to take responsibility for his numerous failings in aged care, the Ruby Princess, the CovidSafe app, and the two million people not covered by his stimulus package. Morrison is rarely in front of the cameras to brief the nation on the state of the coronavirus, he shows little empathy or sympathy for people's suffering, and he constantly scapegoats others. He is all bluster and no acumen.
Morrison is portrayed as a strong leader by his supporters. This perception exists solely because he attacks the weak. He is a bully. Strong leaders build up the weak, they do not beat them up. Morrison targets the unemployed, refugees and asylum seekers. When was the last time Morrison took on big business for exploiting workers and the environment?
Morrison's 'strong' leadership in confronting the worst pandemic in a century, is to bully Andrews and Palaszczuk, rather than being productive and collaborative. Not that this tribalism is just the fault of Morrison: it's the culture of the federal Liberal Party. 'If you can’t fix a practical problem, polarise the country. This has been the working maxim of the Liberal party since the Howard era' (Murphy 2020).
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton attacked Queensland for allowing Tom Hanks into the state, while denying entry to other people. However, as Immigration Minister, it was Dutton's own department that issued Hanks with the visa to enter Australia (Remeikis & Karp 2020). Just further evidence that the Liberal Party is playing political games, while the pandemic continues costing lives.
Morrison did need to act to protect the economy given the job losses and numbers of businesses that were forced to close during this time. However, he failed to protect lives or do anything substantial to combat the virus. A good leader would have been able to do both at the same time: protect lives and protect the economy. Yet, Morrison is criticising those Premiers who are doing their best to protect lives. Rather than playing partisan politics which dog-whistle to populism, he should be supporting the life-saving measures of the Premiers. The economy will never be strong while there are significant infection rates and large losses of life, with data showing that there there is a direct link between high deaths and low economic growth (Jericho 2020). Economists in Queensland agree that the economic costs border closures is the better option and far less costly economically, than a resurgent coronavirus outbreak (Dennien 2020). Firstly, people won't go to shops if they fear being infected ... and secondly, dead people do not make good customers.
Then there's the little matter of Morrison commencing the winding down of the JobSeeker and JobKeeper stimulus at a time when it is most needed. There will likely be more suicides from people losing their businesses and jobs, which the federal government could help prevent. An analysis by Deloitte Access Economics in September 2020, has predicted that if Morrison ends the JobSeeker welfare payments by the end of 2020, it will result in a further 145,000 job losses (Haydar 2020). Morrison has clearly not understood the importance or efficacy of a well-implemented stimulus program. Perhaps, he should consult Kevin Rudd. In the meantime, Morrison should be working with the premiers, providing the economic lifelines necessary for businesses and workers, while the States work with their health professionals to reduce infections and deaths.
Suppose that Victoria and Queensland capitulate to Morrison and the anti-lockdown critics. Say they lift their restrictions and within a few weeks there is another wave of infections, with hundreds more dying. Will Morrison take responsibility for it as it the lifting of restrictions would be directly in response to his demands? Would the anti-lockdown critics admit that Andrews and Palaszczuk were correct in locking down their states? Of course not. They are only interested in scoring political points against Labor, not in stopping the virus or protecting people from the pandemic. Thank God, that Andrews and Palaszczuk are listening to medical professionals and not to Scott Morrison.
References
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Updated 15 September 2020
