Piers Akerman: False sense of security in WA under ‘Supreme Leader’ McGowan
Premier Mark McGowan’s Soviet-style response to Covid is simply delaying the inevitable, all the while keeping families apart, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Toward the end of the Cold War, a senior Soviet technocrat explained why he wasn’t in favour of defecting to Australia.
The USSR, he said, provided free medical and dental care, education, housing – all of which he would have to pay for personally in the West – and besides, he had heard about the dangers of life abroad. He was kept safe by the system.
WA Premier Mark McGowan has now been keeping people safe behind closed borders for 660 days and the majority of Western Australians are grateful to their Supreme Leader for keeping them behind their locked borders and Covid, not to mention Eastern Staters, out.
WA is essentially a one-newspaper state with The West Australian owned by one of the state’s biggest players, the communications and engineering billionaire Kerry Stokes. The newspaper echoes his proprietorial interests far more closely than does any other Australian newspaper reflect the commercial interests of its owners. Thus Stokes’ newspaper’s decision to question McGowan’s reneging of his promise to lift the border closures from February 5 marked a major shift in support for the premier.
Not that it is likely to cause McGowan any grief. Since last year’s state election, WA has been a de facto one-party state and there seems little prospect of the Liberal Party presenting a credible opposition to challenge the ALP before the next state election, due on March 8, 2025.
Speaking to senior figures in the WA business community it is clear that there is a growing sense of unease with the McGowan government but not sufficient to worry the incumbent.
Keeping Covid out remains a potent message and though McGowan has moved the goalposts on reopening, the there is an overall (false) sense of community security. The border restrictions were to be eased when third doses reached 80 per cent of the community and they’re nowhere near there.
“It would be reckless and irresponsible to open up now,” McGowan said when he sprung his backflip Thursday night.
“I can’t do it.”
He said there were a large number of people in WA who were not yet eligible for their boosters, saying getting a third dose was important to tackle Omicron. “So far, the science shows that people with only two doses of a Covid vaccine have only a 4 per cent protection against being infected by the Omicron variant,” Mr McGowan said. “With a third dose it can provide a 64 per cent protection against infection.
“The aim is to get it up above at least 80 per cent, perhaps 90 per cent,” he said. In a statement he also added: “A decision on further easing of the new hard border controls will be made in the near future – once the east coast has reached the peak of infection, and we have a better understanding of the true impact of Omicron”.
Don’t book to go to Broome yet as just 25.8 per cent of those aged 16 years and over have had a third dose. Vaccination rates, particularly in the regional areas of the north, remain appallingly low but then again, the whole state health system is itself on life support and has been for years because of chronic underspending. Health administration has, if possible, only worsened under the McGowan administration. The lack of preparation for Covid by the WA government is inexcusable.
Thousands of families trusted McGowan’s pledge to reopen the borders from February 5 and are now stranded in Tasmania or the Northern Territory and thousands of others who had booked to arrive in WA on February 5 are now stuck in other Australian capitals or still overseas. The main beneficiaries of the harsh lockdown (the only two other places in the world still seeking Covid-zero are Hong Kong and China) would appear to be the iron ore and LNG producing companies which don’t want their supply chains disrupted.
With a federal election in the offing, WA residents will be spared the ritual visits of federal politicians but the inability of Prime Minister Scott Morrison to campaign around the state will have an effect on the party’s polling. The state’s isolation has so far staved off the inevitable spread of Covid and spared it the casualty figures experienced elsewhere – but that will not always be so and the unavoidable collapse will be brutal.
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