Annastacia Palaszczuk lashed as hypocrite for failing to lock Queensland down

A former premier has slammed Annastacia Palaszczuk’s failure to lock Queensland down amid rising Covid case numbers.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has been slammed as a hypocrite for failing to lock down the Sunshine State in the face of rising case numbers after spending months criticising NSW for being too soft on the virus.

As the state notched up six new cases divided between two clusters, former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said that this was the “ultimate test” for Palaszczuk, who had been looking forward to hosting the NRL Grand Final in a Covid-free Brisbane this weekend.

“If the premier was being consistent she would go into lockdown overdrive, everything would be shut down and there would be no NRL grand final in Brisbane,” said Newman, now running as a Senate candidate for the Liberal Democrats.

“That’s what should happen, but it won’t,” he predicted.

Former premier Campbell Newman criticised Annastacia Palaszczuk’s response to the new Covid cases in Qld. Picture: Steve Pohlner

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: Patrick Woods.

Palaszczuk has been one of NSW’s most strident critics and since July has kept a hard southern border maintained not just by police but an army of robotic health bureaucrats tasked with refusing even the most compassionate exemption requests.

As NSW’s current outbreak spread earlier this year, Palaszczuk demanded NSW do more to stop it.

“NSW needs to have a clear plan for containment,” Palaszczuk told reporters on August 13.

“It’s encroaching north, it’s encroaching south, it’s now in the ACT.”

“We need to hear very clearly from NSW what their clear plan is for containment … it’s absolutely imperative that NSW contains this virus,” she said.

This is not the first time the Queensland government has been accused of being inconsistent and self-serving.

Palaszczuk was accused of hypocrisy in August for allowing NRL wives and girlfriends to fly into the state while at the same time ending hotel quarantine for ordinary Queenslanders seeking to return home.

More than 132,000 people also signed a Change.org petition asking Border Force not to grant the Queensland premier an exemption to go to Tokyo for the Olympics when she was at the same time locking people out of her own state.

Bizarrely, last week Palaszczuk slammed the idea that ordinary Australians would even want to travel overseas, given the delights of Queensland.

“Well, where are you going to go? Are you going to go to India?” she said.

“In Tokyo, you have to sit in Perspex screens with masks on, and if you remove your mask you can’t talk while you’re eating.”

“I’m pretty proud of the life we have in Queensland,” she said.

Newman said he predicted that Palaszczuk would try and keep the state open through the Grand Final before plunging the state into lockdown.

“Even if the premier allows this to go ahead I would predict we will be subject to a lockdown immediately after the game is over,” he said, adding the current situation embodies so much of the trouble with the country’s coronavirus response.

“One minute the people on the left are saying if you protest it’s a super spreader event, but then you can go and sit in a major sports stadium closer to people for a longer period of time and that’s OK.”