Bad sight of the week was definitely Scummo at the cricket. Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV and watch a little Ashes, up pops this smirking goon, sitting in the commentary box with Adam Gilchrist and Isa Guha. I’m trying lately not to look at him, as he makes my blood boil, but he makes himself unavoidable, and doesn’t improve upon further acquaintance. When he starts a spiel about how great his government is, and how we have to learn to live with Omicron. As an example, he quips: “Australians are taking wickets in the virus!” Arrrghhh!
Let’s unpack this latest piece of insensitivity. First of all, it’s a bad look to appear at the cricket while the entire nation is in the grip of a COVID crisis that’s keeping a lot of people at home. Secondly, it’s grotesque to use the occasion as a political platform. I may be wrong, but I can’t recall John Howard using the test match in that way, even though he turned up every year at the SCG.
Next, we have a man who was too busy to meet with the women who descended on Canberra for the big protest march last year, taking a free ride on the popularity of the so-called “pink test”, which has become a massive fund-raiser for the Jane McGrath Foundation. Following his usual pork-barrelling template, he announces a $40 million donation – of taxpayers’ money – to the McGrath Foundation Breast Care Nurses Program.
It would be hard to criticise money spent this way (rather than handing it all over to his mates like Rupert Murdoch and Gerry Harvey), but it’s typical of his willingness to exploit a good cause to make a spectacle of his own largesse. It would have been better if such hand-outs were independently assessed, to see which areas of cancer care and research were most in need of assistance. I suspect the Breast Cancer programs are doing much better than some other areas, due to the high-profile promotion of the pink test.
The irony is that the government’s end-of-year changes to the Medicare rebate mean that people will be paying more for over 120 telehealth services, including cancer and mental health consultations. It’s the same old story: make a big show of your generosity in one small area while pulling back resources from everything else. We see the same sleight of hand, the same cynical belief in how easy it is to fool the general public. Labor might consider another ‘Mediscare’ campaign for the next election, as they have plenty of fresh ammunition.
While all this slippery behaviour is going down, the Omicron numbers are going up, astronomically. The NSW Health Mnister, Brad ‘Bio’ Hazzard, let the cat out if the bag when he told a press conference we’re all going to get it. That, I’m afraid, is the underlying strategy most governments are now employing, even if they don’t like to admit as much. They’ve decided that the Omicron strain is mild enough for a largely vaccinated population to all catch it, if need be, and develop an overall resistance to the virus, which then becomes nothing more than another common cold.
It’s a dangerous strategy because people with underlying health conditions will still suffer and die, and the strain on a chronically depleted health care system is huge. Already, elective surgery is being suspended all over Australia, meaning that people who don’t have COVID-19 may also become its victims. Queues are stretching for hundreds of metres from overstretched testing facilities. Scummo’s policy of cutting the rebate for testing means it’s not worthwhile for many doctors and pharmacies to provide these services any more, while charging for the RATs, is going to ensure that more and more people simply don’t get the tests they need. It’s all false economy because the worse log-jam in the healthcare system becomes, the greater the drain on the system. The only way to proceed is to put health care first, otherwise the hit to the economy will not be avoided, merely delayed, and will ultimately be much worse. One might think that Scummo would have figured this out by now, but he keeps doing the same things, falling back on his old instincts of saying one thing, doing the opposite, and spinning a story.
The election can’t be delayed any further than May, and by then, with a bit of luck, he will have spun himself deeply into the ground.
The art column looks at the Five Hundred Arhats at the Powerhouse Museum – definitely the kind of show we need at the moment, with tensions running high. A little Buddhistic contemplation might be the right prescription to ameliorate another few weeks (?) of forced isolation at home.
This week’s film, The House of Gucci has received a very mixed bag of reviews, but Ridley Scott is too old and wise a director to make an obvious dud. If he’s chosen to push this lurid family saga close to the edge of comedy and caricature, it may be because the actual events tended naturally in that direction. Lady Gaga shows us that her performance in A Star is Born was no fluke, and Adam Driver is his reliable self. As for Jared Leto… well, it’s a lot of fun. There are more frightful things to be seen at the cricket.