On full display to me, at least, because I can read his mind.
On the surface, he is sympathetic to his Sydney mates, saying “I know how you feel” and offering other murmurings of support when they complain of their disrupted plans and having to stay home.
I heard him on the phone to one of his pals up there, saying how sad it was that his mate couldn’t take his kids snow ski-ing at Thredbo during the school holidays.
“Poor little blighters,” I heard him say. “You have all that snow cover up there too!”
His face looked earnest enough but, on the inside, I reckon he was chortling quietly to himself.
It was the same tone of voice he uses when telling me to stop chasing the trail-bikers tearing up the river bank and the sand bar – he doesn’t really mean it.
Seems to me he’s had enough of his pals in the northern states saying he lives in a basket case or that he should pull up stumps and move to a state that functions.
He's tried telling them that Victoria has had a bit of bad luck with the virus and explaining how Melbourne is much easier to move around than Sydney so families are more mobile and things spread more quickly.
Or insisting that it was much easier for Sydney to lockdown particular suburbs like the northern beaches by closing a couple of bridges. Or that it didn’t seem so silly at the time to use security services in quarantine hotels when it’s the same security services they use to protect the parliament or banks or government offices.
And they’d just laugh at him and tell him their states were better run. And that New South Wales was “the gold standard” in contact tracing.
The Boss admits that NSW had a better contact tracing system to start with – that became obvious when Victoria abandoned its centralised system and allowed regional services like Goulburn Valley Health to do the tracing and got on top of our local outbreak last year. Victoria has improved.
Even though the recent outbreak caused by the traveller from South Australian quarantine got away quickly, he thought Victoria’s contact tracers got on top of a fast-growing spread with a minimum of fuss. “They’ve learned a bit, General,” he told me.
But of course, his Sydney mates and the media piled on again, asking why Victoria couldn’t manage these things as well as New South Wales did.
Except they’ve gone a little quieter this week.
While Mr Murdoch’s Sydney Telegraph uttered a gentle announcement of the city’s lockdown – Smart Strain Slips Net – The Boss thought it rather kinder than when his Herald Sun screamed State of Disaster about Victoria’s lockdown a while back.
Same virus. Same lockdown. Same news. Different government.
The Boss looked like he'd seen it all before. "It reminds me of the patter of that lady selling fake Rolexes in Ho Chi MIn City, General. 'Same, same but different." “
Woof!
15°C