James Campbell: Why Daniel Andrews has changed his tune
After more than 100 daily press conferences in a row, there was a noticeable difference when Daniel Andrews faced the media on Wednesday, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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If you do one hundred and whatever-it-is press conferences in a row, sooner or later you’re bound to start freestyling.
And so it happened on Wednesday when Daniel Andrews began musing publicly about the cost of the lockdown.
The measures, he explained “do come with a cost”. Not only that, if you listen carefully, it may be the case that our leader is starting to wonder if it has all been worth it.
“At some point the cost of the restrictions will be greater than the increased risk,” he said, before going to add, somewhat confusingly “and the increased challenge for our public health team to keep suppressed the virus if we open earlier than we had planned.”
What are we to make of this? Was he just thinking out loud or is he softening us up for a back down.
It is hard to imagine the government can be thrilled at the way things are panning out at the moment. Yes, we have got the daily case numbers down to low double and even single digits.
But as we can see with the Chadstone-Kilmore-Shepparton outbreaks, it only takes one superspreader and this virus is off and running.
The problem for the government is suspicion lingers that the state’s tracking and tracing regime clearly still leaves a lot to be desired.
The stories out of Shepparton don’t fill one with confidence, with people queuing for hours before being sent home without being tested.
On the one hand, you can’t really blame DHHS officials if people lie or forget where they have been or to whom they have spoken. But it shows the scale of the problem.
Are we really expecting DHHS staff to interrogate every employer about where all their staff have been?
It’s not fault, but wasn’t there meant to be a phone app that could help with this? What happened to that one?
That it took two weeks for the Shepparton outbreak to emerge shows how far the virus can spread before it is picked up. And this is with Melbourne completely locked down and the rest of the state not that much better.
Once things return to anything resembling normality there’s every chance we won’t be dealing with a few dozen cases each time there’s an outbreak but hundreds.
The speculation from the Premier, coming days after he junked the hard targets in his road map, suggest it is dawning that we have painted ourselves into a corner from which there is no escape. Not without the admission that this might all have been in vain.
We will find out on Sunday but in the meantime we need to ponder what we are prepared to tolerate if and when we get another serious outbreak.
Will the Government do this to us again as soon as the numbers deteriorate? Or will they admit the cost of the restrictions are simply too great for us to think of going through this again.