The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, used a major foreign policy speech last week to warn about the dangers of disinformation – a challenge she said was highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic, when false information had the potential to cost lives.
There is a bunch of toxic hypocrisy about this one. The Australian government has purposely waved their tame political wonk Chief Medical Officer as if he is representing evidence based research. He is purposely deceptive. Remember initially he encouraged us to go out and ignore COVID-19 as a problem, that he said school children were safe to pack in together, that using masks was not effective. None of that was true. He hid behind the shield of some weasel words “no evidence …” by which he meant specific scientific evidence, which he knew would take many weeks or months to be published, and he ignored evidence from prior pandemics because “it is not the same” for which he produced no evidence. He also produced no evidence for decisions made by himself and his team, despite requests to do so. This disinformation has cost lives. Fortunately, we don’t have a Trump/Bolsanaro/Johnson/Löfven … but we have a Trump-Lite buffoon in charge, and the propaganda is thick on the ground. COVID-19 is not a hoax, we only did OK in keeping cases down, we could have done better.