Covid-19 has made Australia realise just how different it is from America

An opinion piece published on Sunday (May 10) in The Sydney Morning Herald shared the perspective of columnist Shaun Carney on how it took a pandemic to prove how Australia and America no longer have the same future goals.

He explained how America and Australia have figuratively walked hand-in-hand for the past 80 years, sharing in his personal opinion what he believes was not only a need but a kinship as well. He cited that this was mostly because both countries had the same political convictions and beliefs. But now, Mr Carney thinks everything has changed all because of one man, Donald Trump.

While a number of superpowers were continuously in the spotlight as the world changed, China was slowly developing into a nation that they would basically be forced to rely on for economic growth as the world continued to move into a new millennium. Australia was comforted knowing that the US was “managing” China and it’s growth through investments and trade. But would anyone know what this new world would actually be like? Mr Carney opines that no one could possibly know.

In his smh.com.au article, he said that it took the 45^th President of the United States, businessman and real estate mogul Donald Trump, to ruin an amicable relationship between Australia and America. Trump and his 63 million supporters have not only changed the way China has done business, but Trump has backed up China’s aggression since he took a seat in the Oval Office. As mentioned by the columnist, despite how former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull “pushed back hard against China,” it hit the breaks on the country’s relationship with the USA.

In the writer’s opinion, aside from his blind followers, if anyone is still remotely charmed by Trump, his frivolous and almost laughable response to the Covid-19 pandemic should truly wake them up. Current Australian PM, Scott Morrison, has tried to get China to basically tell the truth about the origins of this virus in what he calls “pursuit of a sensible goal,” given that the entire world would benefit from the knowledge in order to best deal with it. Of course, there is no way that China will ever give that up, especially since Australia no longer has the backing from its former superpower friend.

Add to that the fact that Trump and US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, used PM Morrison’s probing into China’s handling of the virus as a way to back up their own selfish political schemes. And this isn’t the only time that Trump has managed to abuse his power either. In fact, Carney shares that the way the US president has handled the entire Covid-19 is both laughable and honestly, quite outrageous. But then again, isn’t it even more depressing that people continually turn a blind eye to everything he does?

He claims that he’s pro-America, yet it seems like he doesn’t care for the lives of the American people. As the columnist explains, Trump doesn’t care about anything except how to compensate for his own insecurities. Moreover, he even thinks Trump has “given up trying to fight the virus” at all, allowing states to re-open before they’ve even flattened the curve of the first wave of infections.

According to Mr Carney, if anything has come out from observing how Trump has handled this pandemic, it’s that Australians should be concerned about the possibility that he has an incredibly high chance of winning the next Presidential election in November 2020. Given that the two countries have handled the pandemic in completely opposite ways, he warns that Australia cannot afford to put any more trust in the United States considering they are no longer on the same course. The decision to go separate ways might be expensive, Carney shares, “but there is no other choice.” /TISG