Are they seriously trying to pretend they don’t know what their own state health advice is? | Samantha Maiden

They make it sound like Santa is going to come down the chimney and tell us whether Covid iso should be five days or seven, writes Samantha Maiden.

Do you ever get the feeling state premiers and national cabinet are still just making it up as they go along?

As political leaders wrestled with the decision on whether to reduce the mandated isolation period for Covid-19 from seven to five days this week, it sure seemed like it.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet was clearly arguing for the change.

But many other premiers were mumbling behind their hands over what would happen.

The Prime Minister wasn’t much help in deciphering where it was all headed.

Why is it so? One reason is political leaders learnt during the pandemic that rules and KPIs are constraining.

For businesses and families, that means there is still no framework where we are told that if cases drop below a number that X means Y.

It’s hardly surprising this was the case at the beginning of the pandemic.

It seems a matter of common sense that wrestling with the most dangerous and unpredictable virus outbreak in a century involved some hit and miss. But two and a half years after the pandemic first appeared on the horizon, it is surprising that a better road map is not in place.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at National Cabinet. Picture: Twitter / @AlboMP

Political leaders like to tell us that decisions will be based on “health advice”. But we don’t know enough about what the health advice is and how it is evolving.

Anthony Albanese and state premiers like to give the impression that the “health advice” is some magical box with magic secrets inside.

They say they won’t know what is in the box until they sit around the national cabinet table – or to be accurate get on the phone hook up.

They make it sound like Santa Claus is going to come down the chimney and tell us whether the iso period should be five days or seven.

“I can’t tell you what that advice will say because it’s not coming from pollies. It’s coming from public health experts,’’ Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said.

But this is nonsense. The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, the key decision-making committee for health emergencies, consists of the federal chief medical officer and the state CMOs.

Are they seriously trying to pretend they don’t know what their own state health advice is? And that they don’t know what the acting chief medical officer Michael Kidd is going to say? They don’t know the percentage of people who are still infectious at day one, five, seven and 10 of a Covid infection?

We do know these things. But political leaders want us to believe it’s some giant mystery.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joins state and territory leaders for National Cabinet. Picture: Twitter / @AlboMP

“I am open-minded to this change, subject to the health advice,” South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said this week.

What was the health advice? Until political leaders worked out what the “consensus” was we were not allowed to know. Political leaders want to maintain maximum flexibility for political purposes.

They also want to control how much information the public is given.

They are feathering their own nests in a way that is no better than the former prime minister Scott Morrison’s bizarre and egotistical power grab of ministries.

In the beginning, when Australians were told that all decisions would be based on “health advice”, it made sense.

Decisions on closing borders and locking down suburbs quite correctly were based on health advice.

However, such decisions also involve outsourcing decision-making that should fall on political leaders.

As became apparent, it also involves weighing complex economic impacts and mental-health consequences that might not be covered by the advice of epidemiologists alone.

A good example is the Victorian government’s recent decision not to mandate masks indoors in recent months despite the fact that the health advice from the Victorian chief medical officer was clear.

Victoria’s Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas explained that she rejected advice for a mask mandate from the state’s acting chief health officer Professor Ben Cowie.

“I made a decision based on the advice that I had received that further mandating masks was not the most effective way to get the message out about the importance of mask wearing,” she said.

In other words, given all the onerous rules and regulations imposed in recent years, you may get better results from a carrot rather than a stick approach. If you allow people to make a positive decision to wear a mask in confined areas based on their own free will, you will build greater social cohesion.

Some people will disagree, but decisions also have to be made around whether it’s worth tying up police resources issuing fines to people not wearing masks.

If you mandate such measures that means someone also has to enforce them.

The same principle applies to treating voters like adults over health advice.

It’s time for political leaders to stop pretending that voters can’t handle the truth or that they don’t deserve it. The “health advice” is not a magic Christmas miracle.

What’s in the box is something that should be shared more openly if you want to build trust with voters.

It’s not too much to ask that state premiers and prime ministers take voters into their confidence.