Anna Caldwell: How Gladys Berejiklian trashed her brand

The premier is stumbling in the battle against Covid, letting down workers trying to do the right thing, writes Anna Caldwell.

Workers trying to do the right thing in this pandemic have been let down by the NSW Government.

One of Gladys Berejiklian’s favourite refrains in question time is to leap to her feet and chant “we are the party of the worker”, in a bid to get under Labor’s skin.

Today marks a month since the limo driver tested positive and Covid-19 Delta hell was unleashed on Sydney.

Gladys Berejiklian is stumbling in the battle against Covid. Picture: Terry Pontikos

The bloke was careless in being unvaccinated, no doubt, but ultimate blame is squarely sheeted home to the state government, which took a laissez faire approach to its health orders and failed to mandate vaccination or masks among the airport drivers.

Now, as we grapple with an indefinite lockdown — and the most out-of-control outbreak this city has faced — the same lax approach is forcing workers to wade through conflicting messaging as our case numbers limp along.

An ideological stubbornness — an innate belief that a Liberal government shouldn’t unnecessarily obstruct business — has stopped this government from defining what they mean when they say only “essential workers” should keep leaving their house for work.

This matters.

Not because I’m arguing for a more draconian lockdown, but because workers should not be leant on to make hard, life-altering decisions about their pay cheques which ultimately influence the safety of whole communities when it is the government that put us in this predicament.

In a crisis, we look to our leaders to lead, not to inflict stressful decisions back on us, complete with the threat that, hey, if you get it wrong we’ve got some cops in the street to slap you with a fine anyway.

Workers need clear-cut guidelines from Gladys Berejiklian and Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire

While the advice to work from home if you can is simple enough, many people actually can’t work from home, have insecure casual work or juggle multiple jobs.

Berejiklian this week told workers to “think twice” about whether they need to go to work or not but refused to set in place an actual framework for making that decision.

This failure to provide clear leadership in turn has very real consequences.

As we revealed, the federal government won’t necessarily stump up payments for people who “think twice” and just decide it’s not safe for them to go to work.

They will only stump up the payments if Berejiklian’s rules stop them from going to work. Berejiklian tried to duck for cover initially on this issue, saying “the whole point” of the federal payments was to support ­people if they couldn’t work “for any reason”.

Not so. The federal government confirmed the payments are only available if it is Berejiklian’s own lockdown rules — and those rules only — that prevent someone from going to work.

“If there’s work that’s available to you, well and good,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday.

Asked what a retail worker should do if their boss wants them to do a shift but they don’t feel safe doing so, he sheeted home blame to NSW.

“That’s a matter for the Premier, ultimately, and there’s rules in NSW about what’s open and what’s not.”

State Political Editor Anna Caldwell.

There is no rule preventing people who can’t work from home from going to work in a retail setting or a construction setting.

This means that Berejiklian’s ideological outsourcing of the decision-making to mums and dads at home trying to figure out the right thing to do risks leaving them without a financial safety net.

This approach is also part of the reason we saw horrible scenes of workers spending up to six hours in queues, some through the night, to wait for testing in Fairfield.

These queues were predominantly made up of people who were symptom-free, but simply trying to follow government orders that they needed a surveillance test if they were going to leave the area for work.

The government is right to mandate a strict testing regime so we can have oversight of the virus — but they are not right to mandate it on workers when they don’t have the testing ­infrastructure or a clear criteria in place to juggle it.

You could see from those queues just how many tradies, cleaners, retail workers and others viewed their work as “essential”.

It is good that the federal and state governments announced a multi-billion dollar support package this week, but the outcome took too long to reach — and it wasn’t without hefty ­behind-the-scenes tension.

In the days leading up to the ­announcement, Canberra was particularly miffed that NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet pursued the idea of setting up his own JobKeeper fund and costed the program with the ­assistance of Federal Treasury.

There was a sense in Canberra, at the highest levels of government, that if NSW stepped up with such a scheme after Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg had publicly ruled it out, Canberra would look like it had let the state down in its darkest hour.

It was only after Mr Perrottet made public on Sky News on the weekend that he was costing his own scheme that Canberra properly came to the table for negotiations. Morrison, Berejiklian, Frydenberg, Perrottet and both federal and state treasury bosses came to the table for a meeting on Monday to nut out ­billions in support.

The financial result for the people of NSW — the thing that really matters — was a good one. But it never should have taken as long as it did.

Back in the 2020 iteration of this state’s lockdown, both the PM and Berejiklian considered an essential worker as anyone who had a job and repeatedly said this.

Basically, the rule was if you had a job that was willing to pay you, then you should keep working.

This was a pro-business position befitting of conservative politicians and also befitting of the times when we were managing an outbreak well with declining case numbers.

The times have changed and the stakes have never been higher. The crucial cases-in-the-community number has remained stagnant for days.

There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the Sydney lockdown, and by last night we had spread our misery to Melbourne.

There is no room for uncertainty and good, clear governance is needed. That’s one thing that is essential.