Has Scott Morrison Lost his Mind?

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Truly, I am at a loss for words. Have a good look at the composite above. You see the little boy playing with a toy forklift? Charming, isn’t it?

Would you believe me if I told you that that’s how Scotty from Marketing thought he could solve the supply chain problems crippling the Australian economy?

Nah, you say. I’m exaggerating. I’m going bananas, right?

Not quite. The idea that genius put forward today was to lower the age to drive forklifts. That’s how he initially announced it. Full stop, period, end of the story.

It was only after state premiers and territory chief ministers – apparently unanimously – rejected his brain dead idea, that he, at the end of the National Cabinet meeting, dejectedly added: he thought to lower the age required to drive a forklift to 16, as if that made the whole thing sound less unhinged.

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Let me tell you something. In Australia, 16-year-old kids can get a learner driver’s licence and drive a normal passenger car, but nowhere can they drive by themselves unsupervised by a fully, unrestricted licenced driver (normally, mum, or dad or an older sibling).

Unless Scotty wants his teen forklift drivers to work next to a fully licenced forklift driver, he is asking for a lower threshold for forklift licences.

There is a huge variety of forklifts, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t specify, but let’s suppose he isn’t thinking about those really big, expensive, heavy ones able to handle fully loaded shipping containers weighing 50 tonnes (49 tons) and more (or the equivalent of more than the gross vehicle mass of a fully loaded 6 axle semi-trailer truck).

No. Let’s imagine he is thinking of the smallest motorised forklifts, capable of handling between 400 and 500 kg (880 to 1,100 lb), equivalent to the combined average weight of 6 or 8 persons. His idea is to take a teen learning to drive the family car with mum or dad sitting next, give him/her a couple of hours training and sent him/her alone to drive that forklift inside a warehouse. What could possibly go wrong?

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I can remember only one precedent to this cinematographic demonstration of unmitigated imbecility: Donald Trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat COVID.

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That man is running this country during a pandemic, people. It’s him who decides the policies shaping Australia and even the world: from climate change response to the economy to China. Our lives and the lives of our children are literally in his hands.

That’s not funny.

Will I ever see a journo ask him the questions hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Australians are asking themselves: is he out of his mind? If you are a journo reading, you can ask him something like this: "Are you drunk or on drugs, Prime Minister?” Or “are you really that stupid, sir?”