Peta Credlin: State premier games put Australia’s COVID-19 recovery at risk
With so many lessons coming out of this crisis, the behaviour of our state and territory leaders should be serious cause for concern for all of us, writes Peta Credlin.
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It would be a real shame if Australia almost entirely escaped the health consequences of this pandemic only to suffer the full force of its economic hit.
With just over one hundred dead, new infections coming down towards single figures and a mere 39 people in hospital, we haven’t just “flattened the curve”, we’ve crushed it.
From where we thought we would be, to where we are now, all credit to everyone who has made it happen. But instead of taking the win and ending the shutdown to minimise further job losses, the majority of states seem gripped by health analysis paralysis, making the economic pain inevitability worse.
It was telling last week, the first time we haven’t had one of the Prime Minister’s national cabinet meetings, that the whole show seemed to unravel without his dominant presence, with states scrapping among themselves and the politics back in play.
Indeed, most of the states have the politics of this virus at the forefront of their decision-making given they think they’ll be blamed for any sudden spike in corona cases while confident Scott Morrison who will wear the blame for what happens to the economy.
This is what happens when you’ve got one level of government that largely delivers services and another level that allocates the money and makes the big national calls. It’s also what happens when it’s the only the federal government that attracts both intense media scrutiny and the best of those people willing to enter our public life.
It’s become glaringly obvious over the past two months that while we expect the federal government to run the country and to pay for things, it’s the states that still determine most of what matters in people’s daily lives: the national government might run our foreign policy (although, on China and its soft loans, Victoria is not so sure) and make the economic settings but it’s the states that control schools, hospitals, planning, police and infrastructure.
It’s also become obvious that it’s much easier to respond to a crisis than to handle its aftermath. Shutting things down to avoid a hospital meltdown and tens of thousands of deaths was relatively easy, and a worried community came with them. Spending on an unprecedented scale was also easy because whatever a Liberal government wants to spend, Labor always wants to spend more so no obstruction there. And relying on “expert advice” is also easy because it saves politicians from having to take responsibility even though that’s what we elect them for.
Despite the welcome news on Friday that there are ‘only’ around 5.1 million workers on government support payments right now across JobKeeper and JobSeeker (the double dole), instead of the 7.9 million previously estimated, that’s still well over 40 per cent of the workforce that’s either unemployed or not working normally.
The longer people are discouraged from returning to our CBDs and shopping centres or using public transport; the longer pubs and clubs, restaurants, cafes and gyms are subjected to unreasonable restrictions; and the longer domestic travel is all-but-banned, the harder it will be to return to normal. And the longer businesses are getting life support and people are being paid not to work, the harder it will be to shake the illusion that there really is something for nothing, that big government is good for us, and Canberra has a money-tree.
We all have elderly parents and grandparents that we don’t want to put at risk. But with domestic corona cases all-but-eliminated, the states’ continued insistence on keeping borders shut and businesses closed is madness given the national medical experts don’t believe borders should remain closed and never advised to close them in the first place.
Provided we keep our national border controls in place and that anyone coming to Australia is subject to fair dinkum hotel-based quarantining, not the home isolation lurk, then what are we waiting for?
I fear that what we’re really waiting for is a better class of state leader. The eagerness of state politicians to trade up to Canberra (witness John Barilaro and Andrew Constance) yet the failure even of former premiers to shine on the national stage (witness Bob Carr and Kristina Keneally) shows the extent to which state parliaments have become the second or even the third eleven of politics.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is about the best of them – and is prepared to let pubs and restaurants reopen next month with up to 50 patrons – but I suspect it’s her success as a tough treasurer in the past that’s focused her mind on the economics. Plus she’s decent and collegiate and unlike counterparts in QLD and Victoria, runs a tight ship that’s avoided the stink of corruption.
Yet more and more, our state parliaments are dominated by career politicians – union hacks and right-wing student politician branch-stackers – with little experience outside the “bubble”. That means we often end up with the economic future of our country largely in the hands of timid and underwhelming premiers, who are OK at politics but not much good at anything else.
With so many lessons coming out of this crisis – manufacturing self-reliance the biggest – and given the reforms needed to bring about change, the fact that states are back playing politics should worry us all because the economic challenges ahead make the health crisis look like a doddle.
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China’s leaders have taken to heart Sun Tzu’s advice to win without fighting. Why have to beat someone when you can buy them instead? The whole point of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is to make other countries economically dependent and thus strategically subservient to China. Under the BRI, from Europe to Africa and our own region, Chinese money and Chinese workers are building ports, railways and government buildings to curry favour with local leaders and to bring weak economies into China’s orbit. When Sri Lanka couldn’t repay the loan to build the new port of Colombo, China took it over and now uses it for naval ship visits that the local government doesn’t feel it can refuse.
On security advice, the Australian government has refused to sign up to Belt and Road but that hasn’t stopped Dan Andrews and the Victorian government which this week refused to say how much of the latest $24 billion it’s planning to borrow will come from China. With great power rivalry between China and the US increasing by the day, the last thing we need is another fiasco like allowing a Chinese company to buy the Port of Darwin when Malcolm Turnbull was PM.
Much as Victoria’s state government might want cheap Chinese money, Canberra’s Foreign Investment Review Board must now allow Victoria to become an economic colony of communist China. It’s time for FIRB to get some real teeth.