General Frewen meet David Ricardo

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Why would he? In war it’s just shoot ’em up. But in vaccine rollouts, one has to be careful what one says.

From the top, the rollout is still leading the Third World:

The media is doing its best to motivate with fear. Here’s a couple of X-Rays floating about showing the difference between being immunised and not if you do contract COVID (I have had one jab so far). I would take this as a metaphor given two cases amount to statistical zero:

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Scott Morrison is continuing his lies:

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Clearly Morrison is currently feeling the heat from the shambolic vaccine rollout, his forced U-turn on lockdowns and the humiliation of seeing Daniel Andrews vindicated and Gladys “gold standard” Berejiklian struggling with a months-long lockdown of Sydney. The lies and falsehoods are piling up fast.

Just yesterday, as Morrison struggled to dismiss Anthony Albanese’s proposal for a cash vaccination incentive — Morrison being the proud personal author, at News Corp’s direction, of a cash incentive for vaccination via the no jab, no pay/no play policy — he misled Parliament about the opposition leader. “He could start by talking to General Frewen who he has not yet sat down with — not once — since he came into the job … He hasn’t even bothered to talk to him,” Morrison told question time.

In fact, as Albanese later explained, he’d been trying to talk to Frewen — the stuffed uniform deployed by Morrison as political cover for the vaccine bungle — since late June and it was the government that had put off any briefing until later this week.

Albanese also asked Morrison about a now oft-repeated claim of Morrison’s that the notorious phrase “not a race” was only used by Morrison — at the instigation of health secretary Brendan Murphy, he insists — in relation to the approval process for vaccines, when Morrison clearly used it in relation to a question about the slow pace of the vaccine rollout on March 31. Morrison stuck resolutely to the lie.

But today’s gaffe gong goes to General Frewen who then made Morrison’s refusal to deploy incentives even worse:

COVID-19 Taskforce Commander Lieutenant General John Frewen says vaccine incentives may be discussed later in the rollout as currently “demand is still exceeding supply”. “I have said incentives is something we will consider but right now Australians are coming forward, in the last seven days, we’ve have had 1.2 million doses going into people’s arms,” he said. Lieutenant General Frewen said incentives may be introduced to get “some of the more hesitant” groups to get inoculated and “positive alternatives” are being considered. “There’s cash, there’s the ideas of lotteries, all these things have been discussed but what is resonating with people right now really is being able to get back to the sort of lifestyle we used to enjoy.”

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What’s the best way to stop people getting the vaccine now? How about dangling a financial incentive in the future if you wait?

This is classic Ricardian equivalence, that a population will respond to government stimulus by doing the opposite. It’s often a pretty useless notion but on this occasion fits the bill beautifully.

That’s what happens when you hide your PM’s failures behind a politicised army general who has no experience at vaccine rollouts.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.