Anna Caldwell: NSW lockdown will test public confidence
With millions of people in lockdown and no certainty when it will end, NSW has quickly transitioned from the lucky state to a state of crisis, writes Anna Caldwell
Opinion
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Our so called gold standard in NSW is taking a battering.
From the day the nondiscriminating Delta variant sunk its claws into Sydney, there has been a string of mistakes that hark back to the bungles the Victorian Government made which left the state in 112 days of lockdown last winter.
With thousands of people in NSW now under two-week isolation orders, millions in lockdown and no certainty that we will be free in a week, we’ve very quickly transitioned from the lucky state to a state of crisis.
After 15 months of living in the warped paradigm of Covid uncertainty, there is enormous and deserved good will towards Premier Gladys Berejiklian and chief health officer Kerry Chant.
NSW people felt proud and as if they were the luckiest on earth right up until as recently as last week.
We had a sense that we were the ones who knew how to coexist with the virus.
The NSW government had proven itself as the best leaders in the country — the ones who, with an army of first-in-class contact tracers, could get the settings just right.
Now we know that the Delta strain is just that bit better than the NSW defence armour.
Thanks to that past success, Berejiklian and Chant have a decent amount of respect and trust in the bank.
Because of this, the community will tolerate a small number of low-impact human mistakes.
But they will not tolerate systemic error.
And, more significantly, they won’t tolerate special rules for the political class.
That’s why the debacle of Victor Dominello being released from isolation early, only to be locked up again when media inquiries raised serious concerns, is so problematic.
After seeing Dominello standing alongside Berejiklian at a press conference on Wednesday, this newspaper sent a photo to the parliamentary chamber to NSW Health asking how the customer services minister could possibly have a different status to his colleagues.
Every MP seated around Dominello, several far further away from infected Minister Adam Marshall, had been classified as close contacts requiring 14 days isolation.
We asked how they could explain this inconsistency.
Within hours, Health backflipped on Dominello’s status.
For perspective, no one really cares about politicians and their personal isolation predicament. What people do care about is that rules are applied consistently and fairly.
Dominello has assured me he did not make personal representations to either the premier, chief health officer or health minister about his circumstances.
Chant says she has had no text message correspondence with Dominello since December.
Despite these assurances, there are persistent rumours and claims from other MPs that there was tailored assistance and interviews offered to the most senior ministers in the state to ensure they were deemed only casual contacts of Marshall and not forced to isolate.
There are also claims others have repeatedly asked for reviews of their status.
To date, no one has obtained any proof of these stories.
But the community will wonder, if Health made this mistake in relation to Dominello, how many others are being made?
Earlier this week, NSW Health identified the wrong hotel as an exposure site — confusing the Crossways Hotel for Crossroads.
Chant profusely apologised. Of course, contact tracers are human and make human errors, but the impact on those hotels and the people who visited them was real.
Before that, of course, was the government’s catastrophic failure to mandate and enforce vaccination and mask requirements for airport drivers — the very mistake that got us into this mess.
These errors are not dissimilar to the types of blunders that many criticised the Victorian government for last year.
There is no doubt that our officials have worked relentlessly for 15 months now to keep us safe.
This includes, above all, Berejiklian, Chant, health minister Brad Hazzard and the scores of NSW health staff and contact tracers.
They deserve our thanks but what this outbreak shows is that they, and our systems here in NSW, are not beyond reproach.
Public confidence is a fragile thing. Two weeks of lockdown will test it.
Of course the far bigger failure than anything happening in NSW is Canberra’s handling of the vaccine rollout.
As the world moves on, we will have to continue to forensically watch every step we take at a state level for fear of a nation-stopping outbreak until we get a country full of jabbed arms.
We have all been let down by the pace of this vaccine roll out. We’ve all been let down by hopelessly confusing and fear-inspiring public health messaging.
As other nations power ahead and open up to the world, our own failures with the roll out will only become clearer.
The people of NSW have lots to be proud of but we are right to expect better than what this winter has delivered from both levels of government.
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