FORMER Liberal leader John Hewson cannot understand why New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern is receiving bouquets for her handling of coronavirus while Victoria’s Daniel Andrews is receiving brickbats.
He thinks both should be applauded as pandemic-fighting superheroes.
Hewson tweeted at the weekend:
“Double standard? Ardern is being lauded and electorally rewarded for what is virtually a COVID eradication strategy at very significant cost yet Andrews is being attacked everyday for his efforts to contain the virus.”
The difference is slightly more difficult to understand than the GST on your standard cake, so Hewson has little chance of wrapping his mind around it. But let’s try.
An obvious difference is that the Kiwi Prime Minister got the virus under control. The Victorian Premier, by contrast, succeeded only in spreading the virus.
His government’s now infamous hotel quarantine bungle resulted in around 800 deaths and a draconian state-wide lockdown.
So the difference in attitude toward Ardern and Daniels is akin to the difference in attitude one might have towards a fire fighter and, say, an arsonist holding a hose.
Here’s another difference. Ardern subjected our cousins across the ditch to six weeks of lockdown as a preventative measure. Meanwhile, Victorians have been forced to endure the world’s harshest lockdown for 15 weeks – and counting – to recover from Daniel Andrew’s mistakes.
Or you might like to consider that, unlike Daniel Andrews, Ardern didn’t send police into homes to handcuff pregnant women in their pyjamas for crimes against Facebook.
In short, the scenarios are so different that only a former federal leader struggling with the same irrelevancy syndrome as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull could fail to see it.
The real question is why ex Liberal leader John Hewson is more supportive of Daniel Andrews than is the current Labor leader Anthony Albanese.
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James Macpherson is a sought after international speaker with a background in journalism at the Courier Mail and Daily Telegraph. He previously pastored a significant church in Australia and South Africa. James' weekly Good Sauce podcast comes out every Tuesday. He also writes regularly for The Spectator.
