Victorian state MP Georgie Crozier (‘Crazier’ to many) has been one of the lesser lights in the whining by the Victorian Liberal Party over the Covid-19 lockdowns in that state, with Tim Smith leading the charge, seemingly with the ambition of becoming opposition leader in place of the even less inspiring Michael O’Brien1.
Now, with the advent of yet another lockdown in Victoria caused by the escape from New South Wales of the Delta variant, Crozier has started up again. She has posted a bogus to do list on Twitter, with an image of a small notepad headed ‘Lockdown #5 Checklist, with the following items:
“Setup kids’ desks for home schooling
Call Mum and explain I won’t be able to visit her in the nursing home as promised
Check pantry and write shopping list – only one shop per day – need to plan
Contact office about wfh (working from home) arrangements
Reschedule mammogram
Tell everyone I know to get vaccinated so we can stop living like this”2
What she calls ‘home schooling’ isn’t, it is remote learning. While this may seem a trivial difference, it is not. Home schooling is where people teach their children at home because they do not want them to go to school. The child is not enrolled at any school. Often this is because of some misguided belief that schools are evil or because they do not teach the parent’s particular brand of pseudoscience or religious bigotry. Remote learning is where the child remains enrolled at school and their school continues to provide information on when the child will receive learning materials and feedback; give the child a schedule for their learning tasks; assign learning tasks to the child; and remain in regular contact with families3.
The fact that Crozier seems to believe that one has to plan to avoid shopping less than once a day is staggering. I find going shopping for groceries an appalling way to spend time, so I do it as little as possible and I do it only once a week with a list of what is required, with the occasional extra visit to the bakery to pick up some fresh bread. I wonder what Crozier is doing in parliament if this is exceptional amount of planning and is out of the ordinary for her.
The comment about rescheduling her mammogram caused some sensible people, mostly women, to remind her that, as shadow Health Minister, she should know better. Some even pointed to legislation which states that: A person must not give information that is false or misleading. BreastScreen Victoria is open throughout the lockdown, so her assertion that a mammogram would need to be rescheduled is, at best, misleading4.
It would be excellent if everyone could get vaccinated as quickly as possible and it is good to see Crozier having a sly dig at the federal government for their mishandling of the vaccine ‘strollout’5,6. Having a dig at the failures of the federal government is also happening in New South Wales7.
This extraordinarily shallow and uninformed Tweet from Crozier seems to confirm that she is out of her depth in anything approaching a position of responsibility. If someone wants to be in government as she seems to do, you would expect from them a degree of conscientiousness in finding out if any of the stuff they were going to post online was factual and not misleading. However, given the previous drivel posted online and in newspapers by members of the Victorian opposition, something this wide of the mark is to be expected.
Sources
- https://blotreport.com/2021/04/25/belting-victoria/
- https://twitter.com/georgiecrozier/status/1415983506593697795/photo/1
- https://www.vrqa.vic.gov.au/news/Pages/News/article-194.aspx
- https://www.breastscreen.org.au/coronavirus/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/06/26/not-a-race/
- https://blotreport.com/2021/07/02/targets-horizons-pathways/
- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/06/brad-hazzard-compared-the-vaccine-rollout-to-the-hunger-games-has-he-actually-read-it-or-has-he-lost-the-plot
