Peta Credlin: Daniel Andrews’ health system fails Victorians again
NSW has yet again shown that its health system leaves Victoria in its wake and Premier Daniel Andrews must take responsibility for this disparity, Peta Credlin writes.
Opinion
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The argument to lock down Melbourne, hard and fast, said Daniel Andrews, was to avoid the Covid catastrophe of Sydney.
For weeks the Victorian Premier sneered at his NSW counterpart, as he pushed his zero-Covid strategy, claiming his response was the only way to get Delta under control.
Gladys Berejiklian was hopeless, he inferred, because she took too long to lock down, so he would show her how it was done.
As with everything from Andrews, the spin doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and now that the facts are in, it’s NSW that’s yet again shown that its health system leaves Victoria in its wake.
Here’s why.
On June 17, NSW officially reported its first infectious case in this current Delta outbreak. On
Day 30 (July 16), there were 97 locally acquired cases and 77,587 tests.
Now compare apples with apples in Victoria.
On August 5, Victoria officially reported its first infectious case in this current Delta outbreak. On Day 30 (which was Friday), there were 208 locally acquired cases and a worryingly low 48,572 tests.
How is it that the state that locked down the hardest and fastest ended up with twice as many cases, on Day 30, than the state that didn’t?
It can’t have been the fault of citizens (despite Premier Andrews’ enjoyment in blaming others) because Victorians were locked in their homes, allowed only two hours of exercise a day, fully masked when outside and subject to a curfew.
By contrast in Sydney, the lockdown was slower, exercise is unlimited and maskless, and there’s no general curfew.
Yet again it’s been the health system that’s let Victorians down and it’s the health system that Andrews must take responsibility for given he’s been either health minister or premier now for 11 of the past 15 years.
Just as we saw in 2020, when Victoria’s broken hotel quarantine system and sub-par contact tracing and testing system led to over 800 deaths, the Victorian Covid health response still doesn’t come close to the NSW experience.
If it did, the near-immediate lockdown of 6.5 million Victorians wouldn’t have seen double the cases on Day 30 that were recorded in NSW, which didn’t have anywhere near the same draconian lockdown.
This matters because after last year’s deaths, and the Coate Inquiry, which was supposed to fix the problems, Victorians are still being let down by a system that is struggling to cope and a government that’s too arrogant to admit its failures.
Instead, lockdowns remain the government’s first response.
Even though their devastating impacts are now all too apparent in families right across the state with more teenagers dying from suicide this year than patients from Covid. Not all of these teenage suicides were caused by lockdowns, but almost every expert agrees that lockdowns don’t help and, in many cases, exacerbate mental health issues.
Add in the financial devastation that lockdowns are causing the private sector, particularly small businesses, and the flood of people leaving Melbourne (a net loss of 34,366 in recent figures, since the start of the pandemic) and you have clear and compelling evidence that our country’s second largest economy is on its knees with its community broken.
It’s a travesty that over much of the past 18 months of this pandemic ordinary Australians have been the hardest hit, while the rich, or those on the taxpayer purse, have largely avoided any pain.
If you’re an NRL WAG or a Hollywood superstar, you can move across state borders easily, yet, as we saw last week in Queensland, not so if you’re a little three-year-old boy trying to return to Mum and Dad.
We never gave politicians licence to treat us like this. They never detailed any of these lockdown restrictions in legislation that parliament duly scrutinised. Instead, emergency powers were approved like blank cheques on our liberty that unelected health officials filled in and weak leaders signed.
Last week, former Andrews government health minister Jenny Mikakos, who was there during the crisis of last year, backed a full royal commission into this pandemic, saying there would be a time when Victorians would know “the truth in all matters”.
Tellingly declining to say she had confidence in Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton, Mikakos instead reiterated her disappointment about the lack of briefings, her frustration about the state’s pandemic response and said, “when I was referring to departmental officers (in my resignation statement), I also had Dr Sutton in mind in that”.
Given the lives lost and the hundreds of billions spent, given the fact Australia will be one of the last countries in the world to exit this pandemic, surely the Australians who will foot the bill and bear the consequences for years to come deserve to know what has gone on in our name, but behind our back, when it comes to dealing with Covid.
Yes they do, or democracy means nothing.
Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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