TNow, I’d think that this is hardly worth mentioning but then sometimes I think that and people go: “Wow, I never thought about it like that!” or “Gee, I’d forgotten that!”
In the past few days, an “important message” appeared in my letterbox. It was addressed to the adult householder and sealed so while I was tempted to think that it was something akin to the old sealed section of Cleo and dismiss it, I thought I’d better open it just so I could assert that I was, indeed, an adult member of my household.
To my astonishment it was from Clive Palmer telling me the figures from the CDC in the USA which showed how dangerous vaccinations were…
At this point, I should once again point out that I’m always wary of statistics, particularly when they come from people with an agenda. For example, “Never go to hospital! More people have died in Australian hospitals than all the astronauts killed in space flights put together, and we all know how dangerous space travel is.”
So back to Clive Palmer. I happened to mention this booklet to a work colleague and they expressed the view that, while they hadn’t read it, it certainly confirmed all their worst fears about the vaccines. I simply asked them if they had any similar concerns when Palmer was pushing hydroxychloroquine. They had no memory of it.
“Yes,” I insisted, “last year he donated all this hydroxychloroquine to the federal government. I’m just wondering if he’s got a stockpile somewhere and he’s trying to get people worried about vaccines so that he can shift his stockpile.”
I was accused of falling for a conspiracy theory yet again.
“Yet again?”
“Yeah, like how you’ve embraced all this climate change stuff even though there’s no evidence that the polar ice is melting. That photo with the polar bear was staged, you know.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I can’t remember but it was a very reliable source. And you’re just going along with this whole Covid thing without thinking about it.”
“Whereas those listening to Clive Palmer and Alan Jones are thinking for themselves?”
“Exactly. This Covid is no worse than the flu.”
“But the flu kills millions.”
“Yeah, but we don’t lockdown whole cities and quarantine and vaccinate people because of the flu.”
“Actually we do vaccinate people because of the flu.”
At this point I started to understand how Sky After Dark has an audience, but later on that day I had an even bigger epiphany.
The news followed a report on Gladys Berijiklian’s progress in getting Sydney’s Covid situation under control with a report about some group or other telling us that governments needed to work together on climate change action.
Now I know this is obvious but I couldn’t help but think how putting the two things together made what I’d generously call the Liberal way of preparing for the future. It’s surprisingly the same modus operandi.
- While other governments are taking precautions and shutting down, we want to keep things open. No need to reduce emissions/lock Sydney down until we’re sure there’s a problem.
- All right we can see a tiny problem here, but there’s no need to panic and shut down because we can just mitigate the effects and keep a strong economy while adopting a “Can do” attitude.
- Ok, it seems to be getting a little bit out of control and people want us to do something but we might just wait and see if it’s really out of control because there’s no point in doing something until we’re absolutely sure our actions will be balanced.
- Mm, this is a real worry we should do something but not too much because we don’t want to cost people too much. We need to balance the economy with people’s lives and work out which is more important in a given instance.
- Well, it’s all happening, so it’s really too late for prevention so we’ll just rely on people and businesses to do the right thing and hope that technology/vaccines can save us.
Like I said, it’s obvious really. I once said that when I first bought a home, I one day hoped to live in a million dollar property. Little did I realise that it would happen without me moving. I also imagined that it would be a beachfront property. Given the way climate change action is happening, that might also happen without me moving, too
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