How Dominic Perrottet and Daniel Andrews united to end Covid restrictions

They were images that burnt him. Now for the first time, this is the inside story of how Dominic Perrottet led Australia out of its greatest crisis since World War II supported by a surprising ally.

It was the month before Christmas and “Let it Rip” Dom needed to prove Twitter wrong.

Despite all the rhetoric of “Covid normal”, Australians were still living in fear of the virus and the newly installed Premier of Australia’s biggest state had more responsibility for this than any other human being in the nation — including the Prime Minister himself.

A largely unfamiliar figure for much of the state — let alone the country — Dominic Perrottet was considered a staunch conservative even within his own conservative party.

Yet he was also a fierce liberal in the purest sense of the word.

He wanted to give people their freedom back.

And so he did the last thing any conservative or liberal would do. He called Dan Andrews.

This is the story of a once-in-a-lifetime global crisis and how a man who was never supposed to even be in charge ended up leading our nation out of it.

Images that burnt the Premier: ‘I’d never seen anything like that in my life,’ he says. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet with his wife Helen and their children plus some cousins visit the Noel Christmas markets at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Unelected by the public and unexpectedly thrust into power late last year by the shock departure of the once-saintly Gladys Berejiklian, Perrottet suddenly had his hands on the nuclear button. What he did next shaped Australian history.

Now, for the first time, The Daily Telegraph can exclusively reveal the inside story of how a cleanskin Premier took NSW, and with it Australia, out of its greatest crisis since World War II.

Dan Andrews celebrates winning the 2022 Victorian state election. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

The beginnings came not when Perrottet was Premier but as Treasurer after the Covid restrictions were first announced in 2020.

“One day, after crisis cabinet, I remember driving past two Centrelinks and seeing the queues outside. I’d never seen anything like that in my life,” he says.

“And I knew I needed to get every single one of our people who had lost their jobs back into work and keep every one of our businesses open.”

That experience burnt him.

Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: Andrew McLean

More than a year later, when he became Premier after the beloved Berejiklian resigned amid an ICAC investigation into her relationship with shady Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire, he was champing at the bit to restore normality — even as the state was in its second lockdown because the Delta strain had defeated NSW’s once world-beating contact tracers.

But in a community gripped by fear Perrottet needed an ally. And so he turned to the last person anyone would expect.

The conservative right Premier of NSW called the socialist left Premier of Victoria and said they needed to join forces.

“I looked at Victoria, and Dan was getting attacked from elements for being too restrictive on his measures and I was getting criticised for being too free,” he says.

“So I thought, ‘well what a great combination this could be if we could work together and align our settings. That would be a very powerful force and if Victoria and NSW were able to both move in lock-step together then the country would move through it as well’.”

Dominic Perrottet is sworn in as Premier by NSW Governor Margaret Beazley on October 5, 2021. Picture: Getty Images

The idea sparked a genuine affection and respect between both leaders which has also led to a groundbreaking joint plan for universal early childhood education.

Indeed, most vital for Perrottet was getting kids back in schools, and this was where the Andrews alliance was most invaluable in neutralising opposition from the lockdown-loving left.

“I said ‘let’s work together on this and then we would line up from that point’,” Perrottet said.

“He had to move to catch up to release some restrictions to where I was, and then every point in time from then on we would speak to each other, line up the next relaxing of restrictions and away we went,” Perrottet says.

“And Twitter’s mind blew up. Because Twitter didn’t know where to go. Because if I’d done it they’d have just attacked me.

“So all of a sudden you had Victoria, a lockdown state, and NSW completely in lock-step on easing restrictions. You had the two biggest states, Labor and Liberal, working together.

“And that moment, that working together, took a lot of the politics out of the pandemic.”

The days of hours-long queues for PCR testing are now a distant memory. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

It worked. While Twitter did indeed lose its hive mind, the stage was set for kids to finally get back in school. But that was just the announcement. Then he had to make it happen.

The problem was that parents were still jumpy. This meant millions of rapid antigen tests brought in from overseas and distributed to every school in the state in a military-style logistics operation directed centrally from the Premier’s own office.

“I had a deadline, so every day we would have to check where the shipping was up to, had it left the port overseas, had it arrived here.

“Then we stored them out at a warehouse and distributed them to every single school — drove them out to places like Bourke and Lightning Ridge — to get them there before day one so parents could pick them up, and that gave parents a lot of confidence to go back.

“So we had 90 per cent of kids go back on day one.”

It wasn’t the first time Perrottet had effectively given NSW citizens a placebo in order to give them the confidence to return to normal.

Perhaps most famously he reintroduced QR codes that nobody was checking and nobody was tracing in order to placate some vocal Covid catastrophists.

“With the QR codes I agreed to do something which I knew wasn’t working because if the public felt comfortable they would be more confident and that became a bit of a comfort blanket,” he says.

Perrottet also later led the push to cut mandatory isolation from seven to five days, and then abolish it altogether.

At the time there were again warnings from increasingly marginal and hysterical quarters that this would be disastrous. The disaster never happened.

Today there are no restrictions and virus obsession is now limited to anti-vaxxers and lockdown luvvies.

Despite the economic and educational damage caused by lockdowns and shutdowns, Australia is returning to something resembling normal.

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