By Tony O’Reilly-
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has accidentally knocked over a boy while playing football at an election campaign event.
The 54-year-old was being strategic as part of an election stunt, when he fell on top of the child in Devonport, Tasmania – before checking he was not hurt and exchanging a high-five.
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He later received a hero’s welcome at the Devonport Strikers soccer club for the stunt , which went viral on social media.
Morrison shed his suit jacket and got in amongst it moments after arriving, displaying some footwork as the children cheered him on.
The Australian prime minister was campaigning in the state of Tasmania on Wednesday when he decided to promote his skills by engaging a young boy in football.
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Photos and videos of the incident immediately hit social media platforms, with people mocking the Morrison’s bizarre stunt. Why was Morrison playing soccer with children? Your guess is as good as ours, to be honest. But since the prime minister recently described himself as a “bulldozer,” today’s move seems particularly fitting.
Australians go to the polls this Saturday, and Morrison is running neck-and-neck with Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, a man who is proving to be tougher competition than the child the prime minister absolutely crushed today.
This isn’t the first time Morrison has been turned into a meme. Last year, the PM went on the radio to deny that he’d ever shit his pants at McDonald’s. A Twitter meme claimed Morrison shit his pants at a McDonald’s in Engadine, New South Wales in 2019. That story went viral just before Morrison was first elected in 2019 .
Opinion polls show Mr Morrison’s conservative coalition trailing the Labor opposition ahead of the general election on Saturday.
Nearly half of the 17 million electorate have already cast their ballots through the post or early in-person voting, official data shows, with an additional 1.1 million postal votes have been received so far versus the 2019 election.
Morrison, whose government kicked out tennis star, Novak Djokavic from his country earlier this year over the player’s reckless attitude to the virus, was today dismissive of the rising death toll in Australia in relation to Covid.
He told reporters on Wednesday medical advice does not currently support a fourth Covid vaccine for the general population and asserted, without evidence, that Labor under Anthony Albanese may return to lockdowns to combat Covid.
In relation to Australia’s ongoing high rates of Covid-19 transmission and deaths, he suggested many Australians are dying with, not of, Covid.
Morrison has leaned heavily on Australia’s record combating Covid in his campaign for re-election by citing low deaths in the first two years of the pandemic, when the country’s borders were shut to the world, but he has now changed his tone to suit the statistics and the times, as election day draws near.
Australia now has one of the highest Covid transmission rates per capita in the world, with 5,633 deaths so far this year alone and a seven-day average of 45 deaths a day, but Morrison now says people are dying with, not of covid- words that never came out of his mouth during the height of the pandemic.
His level of sincerity should be high on the minds of the Australian electorate.
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