Morrison and Johnson lead the Coalition of the Incompetent in support of Netanyahu

Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson have much to offer Benjamin Netanyahu in their visit to Israel. All three are spectacularly incompetent, after all.

Scott Morrison visits kibbutz Kfar Azza, Israel (Image: AAP/Ariel Schalit)

How apt for Scott Morrison to take advantage of an “opportunity that has arisen for him” to join Boris Johnson on a trip to Israel, as he put it in a clunky press release today issued by his media team. Unsurprisingly for a prime minister who sought to defy international law and legitimise Israel’s illegal declaration of Jerusalem as its capital, Morrison’s media release is a checklist of pro-Israel talking points: the Hamas atrocities were comparable to 9/11, criticism of the Israeli response is anti-Semitic, nothing short of full support for Israel is acceptable, Israel doesn’t have a partner to establish a two-state solution with; the only clichés missing were “the Middle East’s only democracy” and “Israel made the desert bloom”.

Morrison’s travelling companion Boris Johnson is not so much visiting Israel as fleeing the UK, where his colossal failures in handling the pandemic, which cost thousands of British lives, are currently the subject of a parliamentary inquiry. That has revealed further detail of just how astonishingly dysfunctional Johnson’s government was in its response to the onset of COVID and how experienced officials predicted that a catastrophe would occur as a result.

Morrison’s pandemic failures — mainly thanks to the hard line held by state premiers — are only small compared to Johnson’s, thank goodness, although the death toll in our aged care homes, the badly bungled vaccination rollout and the grotesque waste of taxpayer money were bad enough. In other respects — an addiction to lying, an obsession with announcements over substance, the stench of widespread corruption that characterised their government, the C|T-run campaigns, the contempt of colleagues, and the sordid scandals, Morrison and Johnson are two peas in a pod, with only the Brit’s unruly mop of hair likely to enable puzzled Israelis to be able to tell them apart.

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