Vikki Campion: National Cabinet needs to take control over state premiers
Our eight Premiers are acting as kings and queens of their fiefdoms they fail to acknowledge they all actually live in one nation. And that has to change, Vikki Campion writes.
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An elderly gentleman living on the border at Killarney, near Warwick, was stopped at his driveway in Queensland on Wednesday and not allowed into his own house in NSW.
That same day, several grandmothers who profess they don’t have the same IT proficiency as a bureaucrat in Sydney, were refused entry back to NSW after going to Stanthorpe for the big shop, and lacked any border declaration or on-road technology to get one.
Getting groceries suddenly required a passport.
Jennings and Wallangara, basically the same town straddling the border, now have the bizarre situation where someone who walks to the pub in NSW needs an entry form. And to stumble home up the street to Queensland needs a separate one.
Farmers with blocks spanning across the border harvesting your vegetables are now required to print 40 Queensland border passes for workers to pick one side of the farm, and every day 40 new NSW border declarations for them to bring the vegetables back to the packing shed.
The 24-hour pass has made sacred an arbitrary line, in this case, drawn 163 years ago to stop a virus that 30,610 people in Australia have had and 97 per cent have recovered from.
This is a repeat episode of the same infuriating soap opera we had when Queensland and Victoria pulled out their border declarations.
It asks serious questions about whether the main players in the National Cabinet work together. Why didn’t NSW learn from Queensland and Victoria?
Because the eight Premiers acting as kings and queens of their fiefdoms so jealously protect their egos they fail to acknowledge they all actually live in one nation.
National cabinet seems to be for two purposes: Premiers grafting off the Commonwealth; and second, sermonising about how hard done by they are while we are all locked in our bedrooms.
There were 11 million Australians caught in lockdown this week and the only thing they wanted to hear was the government rattling the keys to unlock them.
Instead they got the blame game.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk blamed the federal government for quarantine when it was the National Cabinet, of which Labor states and territories make up more than half, which determined states would handle it.
Flanked by her Deputy and Health Minister they refused to acknowledge they put a miner, from Covid-free Bendigo, into quarantine beside Covid-positive people and he flew the Delta strain back to the mine, which showered the virus across four corners of the country, inciting snap restrictions and confusing regulations.
They blamed that episode on the Commonwealth, calling for international travel caps, which
has little to do with a gold mine in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory.
Deputy Premier Stephen Miles pleaded on social media: “GET TESTED IF YOU HAVE ANY SYMPTOMS AT ALL. Testing is one of the most important weapons we have.”
Is that why the Queensland Health’s window for testing in Yeppoon is only between 8am and 10.45am, in Biloela just one hour from 8.30am to 9.30am and in Gladstone between 8am and 11am?
The Covid-novelty is over.
We have to live with it as we do any other virus.
After Queensland assured us that Covid vaccine AstraZeneca was just great after Senator Matt Canavan called for a pause on the rollout back in March, Queenslands’ chief medical officer Dr Jeanette Young this week told a press conference: “I don’t want an 18-year-old to die from a clotting illness who if they got Covid probably wouldn’t die.
“We are not in a position that I need to ask young, fit, healthy people to put their life on the line by getting a vaccine that could potentially harm them.”
The young people who want AstraZeneca are the ones being belted economically, mentally and socially by the lockdowns.
If you believe in body autonomy, the issue is informed consent and if young people consent to the risk, let them take it.
Their decision may be swayed by other things: Their job, their house payment, their sanity.
Borders between states are a colonial relic – the air doesn’t change between Jennings and Wallangara.
It’s our patience and discipline that has given Australia the track record it has – not the proclamations of Premiers in torturous monologues on ABC 24.
For too long states and federal governments have been blaming each other over mismanagement when they all sit together, decide together, in one National Cabinet.
Where once the only certainty after each National Cabinet was that they would sledge each other as soon as they left the room, usually on the nearest ABC microphone, Friday’s deal to phase out lockdowns shows what can be done when the kings and queens finally acknowledge we must treat Covid-19 like any other infectious disease.
When you are stopped by police pulling into your own driveway for the crime of not knowing about some new 24-hour border declaration and refused entry into your own house, this is no longer managing a virus, this is the state owning your life.
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