It’s a month since the Australian Financial Review ran the memorable headline: “Morrison stares down Omicron: ‘It’s manageable’”.

It was a reasonable spin to put on the Prime Minister’s announcement that opening the borders to skilled migrants and foreign students would go ahead, followed up by his “victory lap” speech to the Sydney Institute that night.

“In a truly global pandemic, Australia’s response has been a positive standout,” declared Scott Morrison, listing the ways in which the pandemic was now in the rear-view mirror while his government’s sights “are firmly through that windscreen on the road ahead”.

But oh boy, that speech and the AFR’s headline have not aged well.

In the days following, the Morrison government and most of the states removed most pandemic restrictions for Christmas, to everyone’s relief but against the advice of epidemiologists.

It was probably against the advice of their chief medical officers, as well, although only the inevitable royal commission will tell us that, when they’re questioned under oath, one by one.

There seems to have been no planning of any sort for the increase in COVID-19 cases that was always going to result from Omicron.

The result has been a shambles: Tests unavailable, businesses closing, supermarket shelves empty, hospitals and emergency services overwhelmed, the economy taking another swan dive, and the unvaccinated Novak Djokovic getting a visa, later withdrawn.

...

Watching from the sidelines of annual leave, it has been shout-at-the-TV exasperating, no holiday at all really, but the question that keeps coming back to me is: Why is it that governments, especially conservative ones, don’t do risk management?

Other organisations do it. In fact, half of most board meetings are spent discussing the risk of decisions going wrong and the things they need to do to prepare for a worse-case scenario, all while telling the market, of course, that the decision is perfect and everything is going to be just hunky dory.

Not conservative politicians. They reassure and then believe their own reassuring bullsh-t, and/or their neoliberal ideology, which tells them that governments are always the problem, not the solution.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2022/01/17/omicron-neoliberalism-alan-kohler/