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Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is back from his deathbed and doing what he does best and feeling like a victim of the opinions of academics.
Deputy Chief Health Officer Dr Annaliese van Diemen has come under pressure for a tweet on the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s arrival in Australia.
Dr van Diemen, whose own name sounds a lot more like someone qualified to talk about the history of Australia than a former highway cop from North Brisbane, has been dragged over the Yassmin coals for drawing paralells between the arrival of COVID-19 infections in Australia and the arrival of white people, who brought smallpox, which killed a lot of Aboriginal people.
The comments have resulted in sprays from thousands of old conservatives who pretend to care about protecting the legacy of some colonial seafarer that ended up getting speared by Hawaiians in his efforts to discover places people already lived in.
While Prime Minister Morrison says he was disappointed by the parallel, Dutton has gone one further and called for van Diemen to be sacked from her role as one of those medical experts who are doing a much better job of stopping COVID-19 from spreading than a Home Affairs Minister who came back from the USA infected and gave it to an airtasker handyman at his North Brisbane mansion two months ago.
So worked up by this blatant example of a woman having an opinion, Peter Dutton has forgotten to discuss the more recent boatful of old white people that arrived in Australia.
The Minister For Home Affairs is yet to comment on why he allowed thousands of COVID-19 infected passengers to disembark from the Ruby Princess on the 19th of March, in the peak of social distancing measures.
While Federal Government officials have tried previously to blame the hundreds of Coronavirus cases and 21 deaths linked to this cruise ship, Dutton appears too busy to discuss the matter.
Unfortunately, now with all of the commotion around this culture wars-charged non-story about Captain Cook’s arrival, it doesn’t look like he’ll be asked any further questions about it.
The nation waits eagerly to hear his next comments, which will probably be about Muslims or the Safer Schools program.
