20% of the passengers (and rising) on the cruise ship Ruby Princess acquired COVID infections, representing 10% of all those infected in Australia (rough numbers). And they were sent home without testing. A major clusterfuck that shames all those involved.
And Anthony Albanese, leader of the political opposition in Australia, is no TV saying “deaths will follow”. Well no shit.
Dispersing the passengers to states where there were few cases spread the case load out, but created political problems for the state governments who saw their raw numbers go up, contradicting their state political message that 'it’s all under control, we are brilliant and it’s all down to our brilliance"
And if the passengers had been forced to remain on the cruise ship MANY MANY MANY more deaths would have followed. That’s what pisses me off. What he is by implication calling for would have been close to worst case, that would have killed people. Deaths would have followed.
I’m pretty close to centre of Australian politics. I’m a swing voter. I split my vote. I’m not calling out Albanese because I’m a political opponent. I’m calling him out because he’s an irresponsible asshole who is suffering from relevance deprivation, and will say anything to get himself back in the news.
Our federal parliament is shut down for the duration. The only way Albanese gets in the news is by attacking the government on COVID-19. I won’t say it’s bringing out the worst in him, but it’s preventing the news from reporting anything constructive or helpful he might have said on any other subject, and from my point of view, this would take a lot of good stuff to balance out.
Is anybody saying the passengers should have been left to stew on the cruise ship?
They should have been taken off in an orderly manner, sent to quarantine immediately, and only released back to home states once they had been cleared as definitely covid-free. This seems like a no-brainer - who lets a bunch of potentially highly infectious people get on planes to locations all over the country in the middle of an epidemic? The government’s been touting how we apparently have the best test-per-population numbers in the world … so just go ahead and test them!
It takes a special kind of fuckwit to use the Ruby Princess debacle to have a go at Albanese, rather than, you know, the actual Liberal State and Federal governments at fault.
This is, quite frankly, a fucking idiotic “analysis.”
First, people are criticizing the dispersal of the passengers NOT because it “created political problems” for state governments, but because it contributed to actually increasing the community transmission of the virus in the nation, which is precisely what quarantine measures and social distancing are designed to reduce.
Second, as Aspidistra notes, no-one (including Albanese) is arguing that the passengers should simply have been left on the ship to fend for themselves. There were procedures available for helping them while also ensuring that they didn’t become nationally-dispersed disease vectors.
You sure your second gig isn’t writing Op-Eds for the Murdoch press?
God no, nobody was saying that they should have been left on the boat. The weren’t saying anything, other than that the boat could have been turned back at the heads, and that the passengers should not have been let off the boat.
And firstly, the reason people in Victoria and Queensland and WA criticized the dispersal of the passengers is precisely because the passengers wound up in Victoria and Queensland and WA.
Second, there were no procedures available for helping the passengers: that failure of preparedness was the real failure: the lack of procedures for dealing with the situation.
I’d ask if your second gig isn’t writing op eds for for the Murdoch press, except that the Murdock press is following the same line of ending commentary at the point of attacking the NSW government for letting people off the boat, instead of following up with the fantasy about existing procedures.