Scott Morrison resumes regular National Cabinet meetings amid vaccine debacle
Australia’s National Cabinet will resume regular fortnightly meetings as the Prime Minister prepares to move the country onto a war footing to get vaccine jabs into arms.
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Australia’s National Cabinet will resume regular fortnightly meetings as the Prime Minister prepares to move the country onto a war footing to get vaccine jabs into arms.
Faced with the twin crises of contracted doses not showing up from Europe as expected and health advice about the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that National Cabinet will resume meeting every other week on an “operational footing”.
“There are serious challenges we need to overcome caused by patchy international vaccine supplies, changing medical advice and a global environment of need caused by millions of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” Mr Morrison said.
“This is a complex task and there are problems with the program that we need to solve to ensure more Australians can be vaccinated safely and more quickly.
“I have requested that National Cabinet and our health ministers move back to an operational footing — to work together, closely, to tackle, head on, the challenges we are all facing with making our vaccination program as good as it can be.”
Australia’s National Cabinet was a key body in the early stages of the pandemic but the group, made up of state Premiers and the PM, stopped meeting regularly every two weeks last September amid infighting and disagreement.
In December, West Australian Premier Mark McGowan decided to skip an in-person meeting to avoid being in the same room as South Australia’s Steven Marshall, whose state at the time had one COVID case.
“There are issues we are trying to deal with as a federal government, and I have been upfront about those. But among the states and territories, they are also tackling their own unique issues and working together we are all going to be in a better position to find the best solutions,” Mr Morrison said.
HEALTH MINISTER POURS COLD WATER ON AUSSIE BORDERS RE-OPENING
Australians with itchy feet, or just hoping to see relatives overseas, have been dealt another blow by Health Minister Greg Hunt, who has told reporters that even a 100 per cent vaccination rate would not guarantee the government would open the borders.
“Vaccination alone is no guarantee that you can open up, and this is a discussion I had with Professor (Brendan) Murphy in just the last 24 hours, that if the whole country was vaccinated, you couldn’t just open up the borders,” Mr Hunt said.
Mr Hunt also denied that the opening of international borders would harm the country’s economic position, despite Treasury’s modelling around a sustained recovery having originally counted on an opening of the country later this year.
“Australia has been one of the standout health outcomes globally, as well as being one of the standout economic outcomes, and when you bring the two together they have … consistently performed the budget expectations that have been played out.”
Mr Hunt’s dumping of cold water on Australia’s reopening to the world comes a day after Deloitte Access Economics issued a report suggesting that normal travel might not return until 2024 due to expectations that the government would maintain hotel quarantine arrangements for the foreseeable future.
That keeps international travel – both inbound and outbound – pretty weak in 2022, and it may not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024,” Deloitte economist Chris Richardson said.
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