Peta Credlin: PM neutered himself by ceding political authority to the premiers

No only has the PM neutered himself by ceding political authority to the premiers, all of our political leaders have ceded political authority to their chief health officers, Peta Credlin writes.

With half the country under virtual house arrest, and no early end in sight; and with our federation seemingly disintegrating under the pressure of this pandemic, I can’t recall a recent time when Australians were so dispirited and the national mood so bleak.

As yet, I don’t think Sydneysiders are that angry with Premier Gladys Berejiklian, thinking that “at least she’s only locked us up as a last resort”. Paradoxically, I don’t think Melburnians are that angry at Premier Dan Andrews either.

He might tend to lock Victorians up as a first resort, but at least this time it was to prevent the longer, deeper lockdown that Sydney now faces.

To the extent there’s any anger, beyond the resigned helplessness of people facing weeks on end stuck in the house, and the existential worry of people whose businesses can’t survive this stop-start existence, it’s directed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, for the slow vaccine rollout; but even with him, most people understand the issues with global vaccine supply, are willing him to get it back on track and are just begging for leadership.

I think Morrison’s main mistake has been the so-called national cabinet. I can understand why he did it because most health powers lie with the states and at least the national cabinet keeps the PM and all the premiers broadly in the same information loop.

The trouble, though, is that once the novelty wore off, it reduced the PM to being the chairman of a committee rather than the leader of a national government.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “main mistake” has been the national cabinet, Peta Credlin writes. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Calling it a “cabinet” was a clever PR ploy, inferring that the blame game would be put aside in order to manage a crisis, but it was never going to work like one because the premiers, over health at least, are all sovereign in their own states.  

Nothing that’s supposedly been decided in the “national cabinet” has ever survived a premier having second thoughts once back home.

But not only has the Prime Minister neutered himself by ceding political authority to the premiers, all of our political leaders have ceded political authority to their chief health officers. Every single restriction has been justified with reference to the “health advice” that’s almost never made public.

Of course, only foolhardy patients routinely second-guess their doctors. But these public service doctors, most of whom haven’t treated a patient in years and are not infectious disease experts, are not giving medical advice; they’re giving policy advice. And why should health bureaucrats be treated as infallible when defence officials, treasury officials, and prime ministerial advisers are not?

Politicians who have to win elections to survive invariably develop shrewd political antennae. One of the reasons they’ve been so happy to shelter behind the “health advice” is that they know that the public standing of doctors is so much higher than theirs.

But even the least aware voters will eventually start to realise that our democracy has morphed into a kind of benevolent health dictatorship when the elected and accountable politicians always defer to their health officials’ advice, especially when we get last week’s nonsense from South Australia’s Professor Nicola Spurrier that people frustrated by lockdowns should just “reorganise the sock drawer”.

It’s all right for Spurrier on a salary with lots of zeros – try giving that claptrap to young people threatening suicide (a sorry consequence of these ongoing lockdowns) or businesses going under. What is the point of an election if the elected politicians are hostage to such patronising advice?

One of the reasons I fear we might be stuck in a long cycle of panicky Premiers ordering lockdowns that Commonwealth taxpayers largely end up paying for, is that all of this will be very hard to unwind.

How could Scott Morrison declare, for instance, that the national cabinet had passed its use-by date without being told that our federation was thereby under ever greater strain? Having elevated the health advice to the status of Holy Writ, how could any Premier go against it without hysterical accusations of putting public safety in jeopardy?

For the chief health officers, the only measure of success is the absence of virus “cases” – not the numbers sick in hospital, not the number of businesses closed or the debt burden on future generations or even the extra pressure on mental health services; hence this seemingly endless routine of crisis cabinets and daily alerts.

Thanks to the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation’s confusing advice that while the AstraZeneca jab is “safe” for everyone, it’s only “recommended” for people over 60, we have millions of spare doses of AZ and a population that’s still largely unprotected from Covid. This is what happens when government has become a
“doctocracy”. Yet if prime ministerial pressure were to lead to ATAGI changing its advice, it would no longer have any credibility.

The PM shouldn’t have made such a big deal of getting the Doherty Institute’s advice on the vaccination rates necessary to end lockdowns and border closures. Yet again, what is essentially a political decision – the levels of hospitalisations and deaths that we should be prepared to live with – has been subcontracted out
to the doctors, even though the doctors will always value safety
more than freedom.

When he didn’t want to be boxed in by the military experts during the Great War, the French Premier Georges Clemenceau declared that war was “too important to leave to the generals”. What’s becoming
clear is that pandemics are too serious and too disruptive to be left
to the doctors.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm