Peta Credlin: Australia’s Covid exit plan depends on our state premier clowns

The PM’s plan out of Covid is good but it’s reliant on the states and its premiers — and their combination of incompetence and heartlessness.

If there’s one thing this pandemic has put up in flashing neon lights, it’s the role of the states in managing a health crisis and the importance of premiers in shaping our daily lives.

For 18 months now, we’ve been glued to their near-daily media conferences, in the hope of being given back a few of the mundane freedoms we always took for granted: like leaving home, going out to a restaurant, having friends over, visiting a loved one in hospital, or – wow – actually going interstate!

All too often they’ve had no good news for us, but like solicitous primary school principals, we’re nearly always told how good we’ve been; getting tested, dutifully wearing masks, and dobbing in others, even if – sorry – the peril is far too great for any of the rules to be relaxed just yet.

To reinforce the message that things are always very serious, it’s rarely just been the relevant premier telling us what we can and can’t do; invariably by their side have been those infallible medico bureaucrats: the chief health officers. No matter how miserable and impoverishing for the rest of us, these have been great times for premiers and their
key officials.

Not only have the premiers become nationally known household names for the first time in a generation but chief health officers and police commissioners, acting hand-in-glove with their premiers, under draconian states of emergency, have been able to make the most intrusive rules about almost every aspect of daily life.

The dismaying aspect of all this is that people have largely lapped it up. Since the pandemic began, all four state and territory governments up-for-re-election have been returned, every one of them much more convincingly than would normally have been expected.

Indeed, fear has helped drive the vote of incumbents which is why we’ve had so much of it from politicians wanting to hold on to their job.

I’ve had a particular animus against the Andrews’ government in Victoria, for its collective amnesia and incompetence in managing quarantine hotels that allowed the virus to escape and kill over 800 people.

But when it comes to a peculiar combination of incompetence and heartlessness, masked by arrogant self-belief, it’s hard to go past the Palaszczuk government in Queensland.

It was Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who said that Queensland hospitals are for Queenslanders when an expectant mother lost her baby after being forced to travel to Sydney rather than to a nearer hospital in Brisbane.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Regret?

I doubt it after all, she was relying on “expert health advice”, of course.

Last year, a young Canberran was barred from attending her father’s funeral in Brisbane, notwithstanding a phone call from the PM to the Premier – even though there were zero Covid cases in the ACT at the time.

Eventually, she was allowed to view her father’s body after the service and without access to her family and only while wearing full PPE. There was the Brisbane resident who went to Sydney for urgent brain surgery, only to be refused access to convalescence at home, until the ALP national president intervened after a petition of 22,000 people.

And just a week back, Premier Palaszczuk refused access to Queensland to a fully vaccinated man coming from the United States via Sydney to visit his dying father.

She finally relented after another plea from the PM but insisted on him spending $15,000 on a private plane to get there. If the heartlessness wasn’t bad enough, it’s the hypocrisy that says it all about who Palaszczuk thinks matters, with example after example of special arrangements or exceptions being made for movie stars, AFL footballers, and millionaire yachties to enter Queensland.

QLD’s chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young. Picture: Tara Croser

Meanwhile, Dr Jeanette Young hardly needs to be appointed governor of Queensland. Given the Premier’s slavish adherence to her advice, she’s been running the state for the past 18 months.

After refusing to appear on a TV program to answer questions about the slow vaccine rollout, and whose fault it really was, the Queensland Premier last week then cut off questions from that program’s reporter at a later press conference, called her ‘rude’, and then cut off another reporter who’d suggested the Premier had told fibs about eligibility for the AZ jab.

She might employ 18 media advisers, but Palaszczuk doesn’t welcome scrutiny or tough questions.

On Friday, the Prime Minister finally tried to take charge of our pandemic response by announcing a four-phase pathway back to normal starting with an end to lockdowns once a yet-to-be-determined percentage of the population are vaccinated.

But it’s the Premiers, rather than the PM, who have the constitutional authority to make health orders; and as we’ve seen, they have previously agreed with the PM plenty of times before, only to then do whatever they liked anyway (the NSW Premier excepted).

Scott Morrison’s plan out of Covid is a good one; it’s just a shame he has to rely on these state premier clowns to deliver it.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm