Hysterical Dan Andrews stops his damage at $1bn

The last week has shown, bluntly and clearly, that Daniel Andrews is a real, a serious, and unique menace to the whole country as Melbourne’s lockdown takes a national toll.

Another billion dollars straight down the drain and thousands of lives disrupted, damaged and indeed even destroyed – all down to one hysterical premier terrified of losing the next election or his job well before it.

Victoria’s all-on-its-own Lockdown 2.0 in the September quarter last year cost the national economy around $10bn.

That mostly hurt Victorians directly, in lost jobs and shuttered and shattered businesses. But it also indirectly cost every single other Australian.

All this was neatly and exactly captured in the ‘good news’ numbers on JobKeeper from treasurer Josh Frydenberg this week.

Yes, they showed the number of Australians on JobKeeper had plunged from 3.6m in the September quarter to just 1.54m in the December quarter, as most of Australia got back to work. But Victoria which has 25 per cent of the nation’s population claimed fully 40 per cent of those subsidised jobs.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

Most striking was that Victoria had 27 per cent more people on JobKeeper through the December quarter than the bigger population state of NSW - which under the leadership of the non-hysterical Gladys Berejiklian has managed the virus so much more competently and avoided not just state- wide lockdowns but Victorian-level deaths.

So yes, Victorians are paying the direct and heaviest penalty from their state’s governance

incompetence and their premier’s hysteria.

But every Australian is ultimately footing the bill for something like JobKeeper (and JobSeeker) and those dollars which are flowing, which have to flow, in excess to Victorians. Well might the other 20m Australians say to the 6.5m Victorians: we feel, we really feel your Dan pain.

As I’ve explained, looked at from the national economy perspective, if Victoria’s Lockdown 3.0 lasted only the five days, it would be a ‘blip’ and nothing like the damage Premier Dan did to Victoria, and ‘with Victoria’, did to the whole of Australia last year through his Lockdown 2.0.

But ‘blip’ as it might be nationally, the damage it’s done to Victoria and Victorians is real and it is significant. And totally, utterly, unnecessary, on the basis of the evidence that’s now in. Since the premier threw the switch to panic last Friday, in the five days of lockdown just six cases have emerged in the community – from well over 100,000 tests.

To stress, that’s not six-a-day but six in TOTAL – an average of just ONE-A-DAY. OK, if you want to be pandemic pedantic, 1.2 a day.

None of that virtually non-existent community transmission can be attributed to the lockdown being a success or even just proving necessary.

All those cases were already ‘locked-in’ pre-lockdown, and could have been and indeed were

identified by contact tracing from the quarantine failure; and then ring-fenced from the people already isolating. In short, there was no leakage into the broader community which would be the only justification of moving from tracing/isolation to lockdown.

The numbers also categorically destroyed the premier’s claim that Victoria had to lock down because the virus was ultra-infectious and moving at “light-speed”. More like a speeding turtle, it would seem.

We simply cannot run a country this way with this level of governance hysteria from the top.

Last year, the premiers of the ‘outlier’ states – Queensland, WA and SA – were arguably over- reacting when they closed their borders, apart from that period when they did so directly and appropriately against an out-of-control Victoria. But at least they let their internal economies continue to function; they didn’t react hysterically at every virus shadow. In a way, they were only doing at the state level what the prime minister had done, so effectively, nationally.

The last week has shown, bluntly and clearly, that Daniel Andrews is a real, a serious, and unique menace to the whole country.