Jenna Clarke: The longer the pandemic goes, the more chickens we’re seeing come home to roost for our pollies

You can tell a lot about a person with two metrics. One, how they treat people who work in the service industry, such as wait staff and cleaners. And two, how they react when they are faced with the consequences of their own actions. Basically, in the Venn diagram of “decent human” you’d want to be in the intersection of two circles — “cool, calm and collected” and “John McEnroe”. Over the past couple of weeks, while some of us were getting excited about the Friends reunion, some powerful people have been realising who their real friends are. The longer the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the more chickens we’re seeing come home to roost for our pollies and the politically adjacent. I always thought conventionally attractive celebrities whose careers are based on superficiality were the only ones lacking self-awareness. Turns out our “leaders” are not immune to being one-dimensional biddies with the constitution of jelly and such acute myopia that looking in the rear-view mirror reaps nothing but fuzzy shapes. Take this week in Federal Parliament, an institution that’s morphing into a Swarovski museum thanks to the plethora of glass jaws, when the Health Minister took umbrage with the media’s cross-examination of the Government’s botched COVID vaccine rollout. Greg Hunt was questioned on Sunrise on Friday over the national vaccination program and said Australia was likely to have 4 million people inoculated by close of business — a goal meant to have been achieved by the end of March. “We’re likely to pass the 4m mark today, that would be approximately 20 per cent of the adult population,” Hunt said. But host Natalie Barr pushed back, saying only 2 per cent of Australians had been vaccinated, referring to a figure Hunt cited in an interview with the ABC’s 7.30 the night before, when he revealed only 500,000 people had been fully vaccinated with the two doses. Half a million of Australia’s total population of 25.7 million is slightly less than 2 per cent. “That’s not correct,” Hunt replied before citing the 20 per cent figure he mentioned earlier, but because that statistic was calculated as a proportion of the adult population who have had any number of jabs, it did not mean Barr was wrong. Barr also stated some people might be waiting to get vaccinated because the Federal Government had given them an impression there was “no rush”. “It’s because you and the Prime Minister told them that. You said there is no rush, for weeks and weeks,” Barr said. “That’s false,” Hunt interjected. “That’s not something I’ve ever said.” While the Government may not have told Australians who are eligible for their jabs to hold off on getting them, Scott Morrison has not exactly been tapping his marketing skills by launching a massive advertising push. He’s also previously said there was no rush getting vaccines approved. “There’s been no delays. We’ve been moving as quickly as we possibly can. But equally, there’s been no rush,” Scott Morrison told Sydney’s 2GB radio in January. As recently as April 21, Morrison said: “Australia proceeded very carefully to go through the approval phases of our vaccines.” Politics, you see, is about semantics, not actual progress right now. You’d almost think there was an election looming. The Indian strain of COVID is deadly. So, too, is the UK variant of passing the buck. We saw this play out when Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s top adviser, gave extraordinary evidence in a health committee hearing this week. While the UK vaccine program is progressing well, more than 128,000 died because of the Government’s slow and chaotic reaction to the initial emergency. Of all the “explosive” claims Cummings made, the most jarring was his seeming existential crisis, which has racked up more than 1.2 million views online — a video our leaders should watch. “It was completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position ... I’m not smart. I’m not someone who builds great things in the world. The problem with this crisis was lions led by donkeys over and over again,” Cummings said. No doubt our leaders are under a lot of pressure, which really showed this week amid Melbourne’s new lockdown caused by a leak from the Federal Government’s hotel quarantine system and the lack of cohesion with the COVID jab program. So will they crack like Cummings or turn these distractions into diamonds?