Peta Credlin: Scott Morrison’s vaccine targets a risky political gamble
By sanctioning continued lockdowns until Australia reaches vaccination targets, the Prime Minister has taken the biggest political gamble of his life, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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On Friday night, Scott Morrison rolled the dice in the biggest political gamble of his life.
By sanctioning continued lockdowns until Australia reaches new vaccination thresholds of 70 per cent (with some freedoms back) and 80 per cent (with much more), he’s putting his job on the line that we will reach these levels and be on the road back to normality before he faces voters at a federal election due before May next year.
If we don’t, if we are still stuck in lockdowns and the economic damage they bring, then Morrison will be punished.
If we make it, then he will have a very strong platform to pitch for a historic fourth term.
It’s a gamble where his political future is in the hands (or arms) of voters like never before, and in the grip of a fickle band of premiers, too.
Let’s be clear what these targets mean. Until we meet them, we will be living a stop-start life; definitely for the rest of this year, and likely well into next year too.
All our governments, Liberal and Labor, have now decided that it’s not safe to have any Covid at all in the community without first getting vaccination to British and Israeli levels, so swift lockdowns henceforth will be our immediate response to any cases.
Friday’s national cabinet decision to implement “early, stringent and short lockdowns if outbreaks occur” was an implicit rebuke to NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her government’s previous attempts to employ lockdowns as a last resort rather than a first.
Because less than 20 per cent of the adult population are as yet fully vaccinated and just 40 per cent have had their first jab, and because vaccinations have only now accelerated to over a million a week, it will take at least six months to get vaccination rates up to 70 per cent.
All that would change when we get there, under Friday’s plan, is that lockdowns are “less likely” but still “possible” and international travel will remain severely restricted.
Even when vaccination reaches 80 per cent, there could still be “highly targeted lockdowns” (although hopefully an end to citywide, state-wide shutdowns), ongoing restrictions on most international travel and open state borders only for people who are fully vaccinated.
A “vaccine passport”, in the form of the “digital Medicare Vaccination Certificate” won’t be compulsory, but it will be necessary for anyone who wants to travel beyond the state and likely necessary for entry into mass public events.
I can understand why the PM felt he needed to bring the lockdown-addicted state premiers with him, but this is a tough plan for already shattered small business to cop. For the next six months, and probably beyond, they will be subject to sudden closure.
For families, too, it’s more disruptions, with likely bouts of home schooling and no ready end to the mental ill-health we know is afflicting our young people.
For everyone, we will face ongoing uncertainty making it hard to plan; no holidays, no weddings and no parties until vaccination rates go beyond anything so far achieved anywhere, including countries where Covid has had far worse health impacts than here.
I would have hoped the plan might have given fully vaccinated people like me some greater freedoms now, like the ability to travel overseas, but that won’t happen until the rest of the country is up around 80 per cent; it’s frustrating, particularly as we watch the rest of the world opening up, but that’s life for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the economic loss of the indefinite Sydney lockdown is at least $1 billion a week and, with the extra government support just announced, there’ll be a further billion a week put on the nation’s credit card.
This pandemic was always going to be a character test for our country and for each one of us. At the start, I thought the challenge would be dealing with early death and the need to keep going in the face of danger. Thanks to lockdowns whenever the virus has appeared, it’s been the loss of freedom, the frustration of idleness and the disruption of routine we’ve mostly had to cope with.
For some, having to be a homebody has hardly been a hardship. For those with a good home life and a middle-class job where they can work off a laptop on the kitchen table, it’s been frustrating but bearable.
But for those where hours have been cut, employment lost or where home life isn’t easy, it’s been very tough. It’s a pandemic where the divide between rich and poor, safe and at-risk, digitally enabled and not, has only widened.
But whether you’re someone who’s worried about the virus and accepts the restrictions put in place to deal with it; or someone who chafes at the loss of freedom and worries that governments have liked too much the chance to order us around, the longer the pandemic lasts the more it’s started to get on our nerves and mess with our minds.
Last weekend thousands of people took to the streets, essentially to proclaim their conviction that it was utterly wrong for governments to tell us that we have to stop living in order to prevent dying.
I can understand their frustration; but not their stupidity, because quite apart from the possibility of spreading the virus, its practical effect was to incite the previously more easygoing NSW government to impose even tighter restrictions on large parts of Sydney, increase fines for not wearing masks, and give police the power to close down premises that were breaching social distancing rules.
As frustrated as we all feel with the loss of our liberty, and at over 180 days now of cumulative lockdown I understand it well, breaking the law is never the answer; it wasn’t right when I argued against 80,000 Black Lives Matter protesters and it isn’t right now.
The reality is that there was never going to be a good way to deal with the sudden appearance of a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease.
Lives were always going to be lost. Freedoms were always going to be restricted. The only question was how many and how much; and getting the balance right was always going to be an impossible task because everyone has a different instinctive judgment.
I believe the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the loss of liberty but, interestingly, the fact that dob-in callers to Crime Stoppers apparently outnumbered last weekend’s protesters by five to one suggests that the public remains far more concerned about the virus than about the actual erosion of our freedoms.
My hope is that three things happen now: first, the PM releases a statement that all of the premiers have signed committing every government to sticking to this plan, because to date, national cabinet has provided little certainty.
Second, that the health advice from the Doherty Institute and Treasury’s economic advice be published immediately so we can scrutinise the advice that is up-ending our lives.
Third, that all Australians be given their choice of vaccine because I firmly believe that is the biggest reason for hesitancy.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
Originally published as Peta Credlin: Scott Morrison’s vaccine targets a risky political gamble
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