Jenny's Column

I am almost (although not quite) beginning to feel sorry for Scott Morrison. Since his unlikely victory at the polls in 2019, his prime ministership has been one damn thing after another - bushfires, Covid, predatory ministerial staffers and compromised ministers, vaccine issues - and underlying it all, and exacerbated by the pandemic, the continuing problems in aged care. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which reported in March this year, did not tell us much that was new, but it gave his government plenty to work with.

Overall, from the vantage point of April 2021, Australians are in a self-congratulatory mood about the national response to COVID-19. Are we being realistic, or a touch hubristic? Infection rates have been kept very low, but then, we had a lot going for us - Australia is an island, our settlement pattern is relatively low-density, and the population is younger and healthier than in many European countries.

I was walking home from the shops the other day, when I encountered a man using a leaf blower to eject leaves from his driveway onto the road. The leaf blower was an electric one, so at least the noise was not as deafening as the petrol-driven ones produce.