Peta Credlin: NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian is showing Australia how to live with Covid
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has been no match for NSW leader Gladys Berejiklian when it comes to dealing with Covid and our future living with the virus, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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The battle between the NSW and the Victorian premiers over how best to handle the pandemic is over, and Gladys Berejiklian has won.
For weeks, Daniel Andrews tried to eliminate the virus but is now forced to accept that’s impossible despite locking down harder and faster, and belittling his NSW counterpart for her approach.
By contrast, last year and this year, Berejiklian has mostly tried to live with the virus and now – thanks to high vaccination rates – the people of NSW are the first Australians with a definite light at the end of the Covid tunnel.
There’s little doubt that Australia started the pandemic better than we’re ending it. Thanks to early border closures (about the only big decision we’ve made that was solely in the remit of the Federal Government), the virus didn’t become rampant here. Except for the Victorian breakout last year, due to incompetently run hotel quarantine and systematic failures in governance, we’ve largely avoided the illness and death suffered in countries such as Britain and the United States.
Our temporary success, though, encouraged the notion that we could eliminate the virus; a complacency that it’s taken the delta variant finally to explode. In Western Australia and Queensland, Labor premiers still can’t break with Covid Zero.
And for nearly a month into its sixth lockdown, that was Victoria’s approach too. Indeed, Andrews’ whole rationale for locking down hard and fast a record sixth time, after just eight cases, was supposedly to avoid losing control. For several weeks he kept sneering about the virus “from NSW” and not getting into the “same situation as NSW”.
Yet despite his arrogance about lockdowns, the facts show that virus has spread faster in Victoria than in NSW; a statistical reality that no amount of spin from the Victorian Premier can hide.
Here is the inconvenient truth that Daniel Andrews isn’t telling Melburnians who, today, have been locked up for a record 224 days. Take a look – in NSW, on Day 37 of this current outbreak (Friday 23 July), there were 136 new Covid cases. On Day 37 in Victoria, which was last Friday, Victoria had 334 new cases. Tellingly, NSW did 86,620 Covid tests on Day 37, compared to just 42,998 in Victoria. Also, on Day 37, NSW administered 124,645 jabs, compared to just 85,605 in Victoria.
The numbers don’t lie.
The cases in Victoria are climbing much faster the NSW, half the number of Victorians are getting tested than in NSW, and there’s around 40,000 more jabs in arms on any one day.
These statistics blow-up the Andrews lie that NSW was in trouble because of a wimpy premier who wouldn’t lock down hard enough; he did, and as the numbers show, his outcomes are worse.
It isn’t about vaccine supply either – his latest excuse – given that each state has been given advances on its per head allocation in response to outbreaks, including Victoria, and it’s months since there’s been any shortage of AstraZeneca.
Whether it is NSW not locking down hard enough, bad Victorians doing the wrong thing, ‘deadly Delta’, not enough vaccines – and on it goes – with Daniel Andrews, it’s always someone else’s fault. I’ve never seen a political leader so quick to dodge responsibility and blame others. But then, of course, he’s afraid that if Victorians work out that it’s the health system that’s failed them, he will wear the blame given that he’s been in charge of it, first as health minister and then as premier, for 11 of the past 15 years.
It’s a health system that initially couldn’t get test results back within 48 hours, couldn’t manage an IT-based tracing system till over a year into the pandemic, couldn’t get hotlines working that didn’t routinely crash, and took months to organise an online booking system for vaccinations. It’s a government that only went to mandatory QR codes a couple of months ago (rather than a year ago in NSW), deployed curfews that most experts say don’t work, and closed playgrounds without cause. Indeed it locked down regional Victoria with around 200 statewide cases but opened it up again with 24,000 statewide cases; how does that make sense?
It doesn’t. All it says is the only “science” that drives Dan Andrews is political rather than health-based.
Even now, NSW has delivered two million jabs via GPs and pharmacists, compared to just one million in the People’s Republic of Victoria, which doesn’t trust the private sector to do such important work; which helps explain why NSW now has 76.41 per cent of adults with at least one jab, compared to just 63.54 per cent south of the Murray.
On October 18, or thereabouts, NSW will reach the fully vaccinated rate of 70 per cent and Premier Berejiklian has committed to reopening schools, and state-wide travel; and to open restaurants, pubs, clubs, and shops to the double-jabbed. In Victoria, all Premier Andrews has on offer is an extra hour of exercise.
Is it any wonder that already this year there’s been a net migration of 34,000 people out of Melbourne?
Rightly, Prime Minister Scott Morrison deserves credit, for shepherding the premiers and chief ministers into accepting the Doherty Institute plan to end lockdowns at 70 per cent vaccination and to end border closures at 80 per cent, but it’s Berejiklian who’s really leading us out of this pandemic. With Queensland insisting on the untested vaccination of children, and with WA insisting on 90 per cent vaccination before their state borders reopen, people from NSW are likely to be travelling the world before they’re able to travel interstate. Yet once NSW is living normally the pressure on the other states to open up will be compelling.
Thanks to Berejiklian’s quiet courage in standing up to the bullying of Labor premiers, she is now leading her state out of suffocating lockdowns, and in doing so, she’ll force the hand of other states.
I know I’m not the only Victorian who is relying on NSW for hope at the moment.
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