Kylie Lang: Palaszczuk government too busy dealing with integrity crisis to keep Queenslanders safe

One wonders if the Palaszczuk government was too distracted by an integrity crisis to keep Queenslanders safe from the state’s third Covid wave, writes Kylie Lang. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Good of Health Minister Yvette D’Ath to tell us the government “doesn’t know what’s coming”, referencing the most severe Covid-19 wave ripping through Queensland.

A fair question to ask is why not?

We’ve scarcely heard boo from the Palaszczuk Government since the last big wave in January.

Given the near silence from authorities including chief health officer John Gerrard, we could have been forgiven for thinking the pandemic was on the way out.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: Patrick Woods.

Those of us with our fourth immunisation shot could feel additionally confident the worst was over.

Not so.

On Tuesday, Ms D’Ath said Covid-19 modelling received earlier this year had not predicted the state’s current virus surge.

“We thought and the advice we were getting and the modelling we saw at the start of the year that we’d keep having waves for months and years, but they’d slowly reduce and our immunity would build,” she said.

“But with these new variants and sub-variants, we’re not seeing that.”

This is a disappointing, if not alarming, response.

Was the government focusing more on restoring its tattered image over integrity than “keeping Queenslanders safe”?

The Premier’s once favourite phrase took a holiday in recent months but we’re likely to get an ear bashing with it now, as Courier-Mail data reveals Covid-19 hospital admissions hit an average daily high of 886 on Monday, surpassing the average high of 878 patients during the initial Omicron wave.

We don’t want lockdowns and we don’t want mask mandates, but we do want, and deserve, to be kept well-informed of the movement of this virus through our communities.

Drip-feeding updates with the absence of advanced modelling simply isn’t good enough.

• Kylie Lang is associate editor of The Courier-Mail

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