Steven Marshall opening SA’s borders will be blamed for wrecking Christmas and the new year
Labor has been let off the leash and has gone in hard, calling Steven Marshall the Premier who ruined Christmas by opening the borders, Matthew Abraham writes.
Opinion
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It’s a fair bet being known as “the Premier who ruined Christmas” isn’t a chapter in the 2022 edition of the Dummies Guide to Winning Elections.
These things tend to stick.
Last week, Labor’s Tom Koutsantonis used Twitter to call on the Marshall government to “apologise to South Australians who had their Christmas ruined”.
He said Premier Steven Marshall “didn’t do his job & ensure the state was resourced & ready for when he decided to opened (sic) our borders & allow Covid into SA”.
If you’re looking for a killer Labor election spiel, it’s right there in a nutshell.
The “you’ve ruined Christmas, Steven” criticism taps right into the rampant confusion over shifting rules and restrictions since we opened our borders. It was illegal a fortnight ago to buy a rapid antigen Covid test kit. Now we can’t get enough of them – literally. It’s now forbidden to visit family members in a hospital unless they’re dying, but nurses must keep working there even if they’re deemed to be a Covid close contact.
The changes are no longer being driven by “the very best health advice”, but by a health system struggling to cope.
Rather than being liberated when our borders opened, we’re being shoved back in our little boxes. Visitors to SA face few restrictions, while we’re getting more by the day. This is political lunacy for any government so close to an election.
While the Liberal election chances aren’t terminal, they drastically need a booster shot.
After almost two years wearing a Covid muzzle – not daring to deviate a fraction from the Marshall government’s pandemic strategy – the Opposition is now off the leash.
It’s making up for lost time, big time.
Fairness and politics are strangers, but is it fair to blame the Premier for ruining Christmas, for the fear and the uncertainty and, more importantly, for a Covid caseload now rising at an alarming rate? Nobody can doubt Steven Marshall’s dedication to our safety.
By opening the borders on November 23, the government made Christmas for many families. The joyous scenes of family reunions at Adelaide Airport may be a distant memory now, but they underwrote the cruelty of enforced Covid separations in this big brown land.
Since then, the situation has gone to hell in a handbasket. It’s moving so fast, it’s hard to get your head around it. Our Covid case count has gone from a static number of close to zero for almost two years, to a daily count now topping 2000 in two weeks.
This is a shocking shift in our view of our state as a safe haven from the virus. When the Premier promised us that “we’ve got this”, we didn’t think he actually meant “we’ve got Covid”.
How did it happen?
Chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said the modelling behind opening our borders was based on the Delta variant and before the danger of the highly-infectious but apparently milder Omicron strain was known.
“We have gone back and looked at the model and looked at the first three weeks when it was Delta and it is almost an exact prediction of what happened,” she said. Well, bully for the “modelling”, which is done in-house by SA Health and various academics. It’s good to know they got it so right but got it so very wrong.
Professor Spurrier said it wasn’t helpful to look back and think “what if?” Yes it is. Health departments do it all the time.
“You cannot make a model based on something that you don’t know about,” she said.
Yes, you can. Good modelling tries to project the knowns and the known unknowns.
But, as former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld put it, it’s the unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know – that are the difficult ones.
And we know somebody who knew about an unknown unknown. Professor Spurrier did.
She wanted to keep the borders closed until we knew more about Omicron’s risk, in its infancy then, but was overruled by the rest of the COVID transition committee.
She may be often portrayed as a worry wart, but she was right.
The Premier doesn’t need to lock us down. We’re doing it for him. Until we get our booster shots, and until young children are vaccinated, many of us are pulling our heads in.
Professor Spurrier was bagged for begging people to stay at home on New Year’s Eve, but it was good advice.
After ruining Christmas, ruining New Year’s Eve was small beer.
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