“It’s not a race.”
It’s one of the most infamous remarks of Scott Morrison’s prime ministership and has come to symbolise a hopelessly bungled vaccine rollout that was eventually rescued by state governments, while areas of Commonwealth responsibility such as disability and aged care saw vaccine crawl-outs that left the elderly and Australians with disability at serious risk.
Once Morrison realised the slogan was being used with deadly accuracy by Labor against him, he had to find a way to neutralise it. Outright denial (as he did with “Shanghai Sam”) was difficult — he’d said it over and over on camera. The PMO got to work, trying to find a way to explain it away, and came up with the explanation that when he said “it’s not a race” he hadn’t meant “it’s not a race”.
Pressed on the statement on breakfast television on July 29, Morrison claimed “when Professor [Brendan] Murphy and I made those remarks, we were talking about the regulation of the vaccines, Nat. I’m not sure if people are aware of that.”
Problem is, that was a lie. It’s true that when Murphy first used the phrase “not a race” he was talking about the approval process for each vaccine. Morrison aped Murphy and used the same phrase. Except, contrary to his claim to Natalie Barr, Morrison kept using it after the vaccines were approved and the stroll-out began.
This is Morrison on March 31:
We are already at over 650,000, I expect by next week we will be into the million, and each week the distribution and the vaccination dosage gets stronger and stronger and stronger. We’re on track for our first dose for everyone by the end of October. In particular, the states and territories are moving through their workforce, as is their part of the responsibility. We are working through the GPs as we move into 1B and the 6 million Australians that are part of that. And so, it’s not a race, it’s not a competition…
Except it was always a race, and hundreds of people dead from COVID might still be alive if the rollout had gone to schedule.
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