Victorian premier Daniel Andrews is clearly besotted with the Chinese communist party. Not only does he happily trouser their filthy lucre, he’s copied their response to the Wuhan virus slavishly.
Lies, cover-ups, evasions, political cronyism, police-state authoritarianism, locking people up in their apartment blocks. So far, no journalists or doctors have disappeared – but don’t give him ideas.
The only way Andrews hasn’t been able to ape his Dear Leader Xi is in covering up the appalling failure of his policies. Though he surely wishes he could. Victoria has become the sick joke of Australia: while the rest of the country has all but shaken off the virus, Victoria’s cases climb by the hundreds daily.
The Andrews government and its bureaucracy have steadfastly denied that allowing thousands of leftist rent-a-crowds to jam into the city – while everyone else was banned from having funerals, weddings or even playing golf – had anything to do with the surge in infections a week or two later (coincidentally, the median incubation period of the virus).
Now that lie is busted.
Victorian health authorities have confirmed a link between two COVID-19 cases in people who attended the Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne’s CBD just over a month ago, and the cluster of at least 242 cases in public housing towers in the city’s inner northwest.
Still, the evasions are continuing.
But the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to say whether members of the cluster, which includes the protest attendees, live in the public housing towers.
DHHS says it has still not established the source of any of the interlinked clusters, with Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton on the record expressing scepticism that the protesters caught the virus at the rally.
This dismissiveness is in curious contrast to his attitude before the rally, when he warned that, “just one COVID-19-positive person at the rally could squander the gains made during the virus lockdown”.
Looks like he was right. But don’t ask Daniel Andrews about that.
The Andrews government has consistently lied and covered up over the virus in that state. While some early clusters were quickly publicised, the state’s worst – linked to a factory run by a Labor party donor – was kept secret for weeks. While police were issuing heavy fines to Victorians for just washing their car (legally) or taking their kids for driving lessons, a large Islamic wedding was allowed to go ahead.
While the confirmation stops short of establishing the protest as a cause of the public housing megacluster, it demonstrates clear links between the mass gathering, attendees who tested positive, and the state’s largest COVID-19 cluster to date.
It also poses new questions about when authorities first became aware of the risk to the 3000 residents of high rise public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, who were last week subjected to the harshest lockdown in the democratic world[…]
Asked what the link between the clusters was, and whether members of the family outbreak lived in the towers, the spokesman said: “We won’t be able to provide that level of detailed response”.
Which is typical Andrews government arrogance. Blame-shifting, evasion, cover-ups and steadfast refusal to shoulder any responsibility: all this has been the hallmark of the government for the past six years. Yet, Victorians rewarded Andrews with an increased majority at the last election.
Well, now they have plenty of lockdown leisure in which to repent.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.
