The cover of April’s The Australian Financial Review Magazine – which praised Gladys Berejiklian as “the woman who saved Australia” – has become a social media meme that rubs the NSW Premier’s nose in her failure to lock down hard and fast enough against the delta variant outbreak that has shut down Greater Sydney for the past six weeks.

NSW’s gold-standard contact tracing system allowed the nation’s largest economy to remain open without losing control over the virus throughout most of 2020 and the first half of 2021. Ms Berejiklian now finds that policies that previously did the job struggle because the delta variant is so much more infectious.