Tony Abbott: Australia’s Covid pandemic plan must be made public

The public deserves to know what the government has planned to navigate us out of the pandemic phase, writes Tony Abbott.

Good on NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for resisting the media goading to send Sydney into lockdown on the basis of 36 Covid cases with two hospitalisations. And good on NSW health officials for deciding that the Premier was not a “close contact” of the infectious Agriculture Minister, despite being in the same room as him, and as such required to isolate for 14 days.

After all, if everyone who had been in the same room as the minister since he was infected in a pizza restaurant on Monday night had been required to isolate for 14 days, every MP would be in quarantine and the whole of the NSW government would have ground to a halt. Still, the cinema patrons at Bondi Junction, who were in the same (large) room as an infected person, and were required to isolate for a fortnight, are entitled to wonder about double standards.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

The truth is that there’s no firm definition of who’s a “casual” and who’s a “close” contact. It’s the day-to-day judgment of officials. Just like there’s no definition of when to lock down and when not to. Or when to open-up and when not to. That’s been the problem from the very beginning of this pandemic. There has never been a clear plan about what to do and when – or at least there’s never been one that’s been made available to the public forced to live a stop-start life on the back of it. It’s all seemingly conjured up on-the-run by health officials and then mandated by premiers who always claim to be following the “expert advice” that’s never published and subject to scrutiny.

At least as far as the public know, the difference between NSW and Victoria hasn’t been that one state’s plan differs from the other’s; it’s just that Premier Berejiklian and her Health Minister Brad Hazzard have been (commendably) less inclined to panic than their counterparts south of the Murray – and have certainly been far readier to trust the NSW testing and tracing system.

But nearly 18 months into this pandemic, isn’t it way past time for a published plan to deal with it, and especially for a pathway out of the constant nagging fear that our lives will be up-ended, not by disease but by the measures to save us from disease? Yes, Covid is serious and was always worse than the standard seasonal flu. But for how long and under what circumstances will Australians be expected to attend to their screens daily to hear the latest alerts and instructions from on-high about where you can’t go and what you can’t do?

Multiple venues at Westfield Bondi Junction are on NSW Health’s exposure list after the outbreak. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty

So far, the only hint, and again it’s to her great credit, has come from the NSW Premier: who’s suggested that lockdowns and border closures should be unnecessary once vaccination rates hit 80 per cent. No other leader has been prepared to be specific – and, given the climate of fear that’s been created, I can understand why they’d rather mirror voter anxieties rather than try to calm them. It’s certainly been a successful political tactic up till now. At some point, though, preferably sooner rather than later, people in government will have to stop obsessing over one disease rather than all the others that can kill people; and Australians more generally will have to stop focusing on “staying safe” from just one virus as opposed to all the other challenges we face. But that can’t realistically happen as long as everyone’s plans can arbitrarily be up-ended by governments whose overriding objective is to achieve Zero Covid.

For the past 15 months, the prospect of “ending up like Britain” has been used to justify everything from recurrent lockdowns under ongoing states of emergency to indefinite closure of our international borders.

Yet now that 80 per cent of British adults have had one jab and 60 per cent two (mostly AZ), there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Despite something like 10,000 new daily infections over the past month, even with the “deadly delta” variant, Covid deaths have been averaging single figures. Last week, flu deaths were ten times Covid ones.

In other words, even with variants, Covid has become just another disease, rather than a “beast” to be feared above all else, thanks to a vaccination programme that really has been pursued like it was a national emergency.

So what about this for a plan: given that increased vaccine supply means that everyone who wants one could have two jabs by year’s end, let’s just announce that, come-what-may, all Covid restrictions will end by December 31, at the latest, so that all of us can finally get our lives back?