Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more public health action’. /1 https://t.co/21z0njEj1g

It’s almost astonishing that this narrative survives and if anything is even stronger today. We KNOW what happened next. Dan Andrews was returned in a landslide, at the next election. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors, by the political libertarians. A trick, a con. /2 https://t.co/XVoz9MYvBk

This is how magicians work, and also good political strategists. They use misdirection. Tweeted yesterday about the literal tiny handful of people on social media who generate nearly all of the *global* anti-vaccine and anti-public health disinformation movements. 12 of them. /3 https://t.co/Y5Zk3h2Pv3

The Victorian election should have completely reversed National Cabinet’s reversal, on Covid action. It showed the community wasn’t behind any of the anti-vax, freedumb rubbish at all. That tiny handful of loons have won, out of the cowardly populist fear of elected leaders. /4

So terrified of losing even a single vote, that all of this theatre representing the tiniest minority of Australian public opinion destroyed Australia’s public health strategy. Opinion injected via social media into a tiny handful of feeble Australians, mostly via the US. /5

The Australian community, probably more than any other in the world, will bend its back to a fight. It relishes it, it’s the most definitive thing about Australian life. The magnitude of the failure of leadership, to ignore this fundamental feature of Oz life, is breathtaking. /6 https://t.co/6WXgL6BDnE

Total capitulation to US libertarian attack politics, run by the tiniest handful of disaffected whingers. Trashing generations of community-led action against disasters. Adopting a manifesto from a tiny free-market libertarian think tank AS our national public health strategy. /7 https://t.co/dwLdkHTnQQ

That last point leaves me speechless every day. That not one journalist for example has even asked why our public health strategy was written by a free market think tank on the other side of the world. With a LABOR government in power. It defies belief. /8

There’s a positive here too. This so, so tiny handful of loons derailed generations of genius Australian public pragmatism. It means you don’t need to mobilise millions to turn this around. They didn’t. The community is ready and willing, it always is. It needs strategy. /9

It needs only a small number of people to ‘influence’ the opposite. The biggest social media draw cards here need to weaponise the good old Australian way again. To instantly tap into the sort of community passion we see in bushfires, and floods. It’s our DNA. /end