Daniel Wills: As COVID restrictions start to ease, Premier Steven Marshall faces pressure to shift from the script that got him here
Premier Steven Marshall is under mounting pressure to lift restrictions as footy teams and pubs test his limits and 40,000 lose their jobs. The most politically delicate phase of this crisis begins.
Opinion
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Pressure is coming on to ease COVID restrictions and quickly, as South Australia crushes the curve and the tragic toll lockdowns have taken on the economy starts to show.
This was always going to be the most testing and politically challenging phase in the battle to strike that hideous and ghastly balance between saving lives and livelihoods.
It’s a testament to the incredible success that Australia, and particularly SA, has had on the health side of the ledger that these arguments have started so soon after the disease arrived on our shores. Just two long months ago, the nation was in a mad panic as parents pulled kids from school and shoppers looked sideways at each other in the supermarket while raiding the toilet paper.
But now, with a rapidly growing confidence the worst case scenario of runaway coronavirus cases and deaths has been avoided, elements of the public and industry push for a fast return to the way we were.
SA is now so used to announcements of no new daily cases, that it has begun to be taken for granted.
But unemployment data released this week gave a stark snapshot of the other side of this double crisis.
A massive 40,800 South Australians lost their jobs in April, with more than half a million people around the country.
Of those people lucky enough to still have a job, 17 per cent in SA are wanting more hours, and have less money than they would like to spend. It’s a development that threatens to worsen and send a ripple effect through the economy over months and years.
It’s easy to forget that it was just a week ago that Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Premier Steven Marshall released their road maps for opening up and creating what’s dubbed a “COVID safe” economy.
It was a brief moment of celebration, offering many a vision of when the lockdown fog will eventually lift.
Both pubs and clubs are urging more be done sooner, to get them back to work and into physical activity in a state where the borders are closed and only a handful of known cases have been active for weeks.
The level of freedoms allowed across the nation differs, depending on the local political pressures and health situations. This is proof that there is no single best or certain approach to handling the lockdown balance, which is ultimately a political call after hearing expert advice.
Pubs are opening in the NT, where cases are low and thirst most extreme. Victoria is making special exemptions to help the AFL get kickstarted, even though it has less control over the virus than we do in SA, knowing it can’t win a popularity contest with Patrick Dangerfield.
That all raises the question about exactly how this balance is struck in SA, and what our strategy is now.
The transition committee established by Mr Marshall is told to put health, social and economic considerations all up against each other.
But with very few cases, despite the opening up of things like outdoor dining and schools ahead of other states, it has taken a harder line on things like footy as plans are developed for the second phase on June 8.
The threat of a “second wave” of cases is clearly high on the mind of SA’s decision makers, who know there is only one sure way to avoid it.
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That’s to eradicate the disease entirely. Other states now can’t ever hope to do it without vaccine, but SA can have credible hope of achieving what would be a near miracle.
SA isn’t totally isolated; essential travellers like cargo and border residents cross, but it is mostly walled off. If, by June 8, the virus isn’t coming in and there’s been a long period of no community transmission, one imagines opportunities to reopen must be far more expansive as risk plummets. That could mean a far faster jobs recovery, which is urgently and desperately needed in a state with a now chronic unemployment problem.
Hinting at next reopening steps, Mr Marshall said this week: “We have got to do it in a way that is sustainable so that we are not releasing the restrictions, having a flare up and then having to pull those restrictions back down in place,” he said. “It would be a body blow to confidence.
“We do not want to be going backwards in SA.
“We have got one shot to get this right. We are going to get this right.”
Refusing to give the Power and Crows special travel exemption that would have helped with the football season’s start was a politically risky call that could have gone either way. It seems SA has mostly accepted it, as the Government has a lot of capital in the bank.
In a new world where a week feels like a year, holding that line will get much tougher. And fast.