Thread by @timdunlop

Still trying to get my head around all those hagiographic stories over the last week about the changed, transformed, post-ideological Scott Morrison and team.
Everyone one of those accentuate-the-positive stories is a abrogation of journalistic duty, given what we actually know

This govt has presided over the sports-rorts scandal, with still serious and unresolved questions.
It mishandled the response to horrendous fires at the start of the year, including the PM going missing at the height of it, and including the non-payment of promised relief funds

It had a role in the release of Covid-19 positive passengers from the Ruby Princess liner, the proximate cause of many of the infections detected in Australia.

It's response to the economic disruption of lockdown has been inadequate, leaving out key sectors such as higher education and the arts. It left huge holes around sole traders, and has thrown foreign students, a key part of our third-largest export industry, under the bus.

Then there was the CovidSafe app which was dishonestly oversold as "sunscreen" and is now all but dead, another failed tech project of the people who, by the way, gave us RoboDebt.

And in amongst all this, they effectively closed down parliament and instigated a new national governance body that specifically excluded the official federal opposition.

What's more, they appointed a manufacturing taskforce to the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission, a group stacked with energy industry executives and surprise surprise, guess what they recommended?

As @AmyRemeikis has reported: "Australian taxpayers should underwrite a massive expansion of the domestic gas industry – including helping open new fields and build hundreds of kilometres of pipelines..."

And, to top it all off, we now find that they completely botched their calculations for the JobKeeper wage subsidy. (To get an idea of what happened, read this piece that @billy_blog wrote a month ago: bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=44812)

Oh, and just for good measure, they, and significant parts of the media, have started a trade war with our biggest trading partner, resulting, so far, in the imposition of tariffs on Australia's $1.5 billion in barley exports to China.

How this is anything but a trail of incompetence, neglect and quite possibly shady dealing. Tell me that if this was a Labor govt, the media wouldn't be screaming for their removal.
But here we are. Scott Morrison is transformed. He has learned. We are now post-ideological.
FFS.