‘Every right to feel angry’: Project panellists fume over ‘infuriating’ lockdown

Filming live from Melbourne last night, The Project panel could barely contain their anger as Victoria headed into yet another lockdown.

The Project host Lisa Wilkinson last night offered a withering on-air critique of the circumstances that led to Victoria’s latest snap lockdown, saying “every Victorian has a right to feel angry tonight”.

Wilkinson and the other Project panellists were presenting a segment about the “lockdown blame game,” as weary Victorians faced their fourth strict lockdown since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Acting Victorian Premier James Merlino announced a “circuit breaker” seven-day lockdown on Thursday in response to 26 active cases in the state, initially sparked by another virus leak at a hotel quarantine facility.

“Every Victorian has the right to feel angry tonight … four lockdowns in the space of 12 months is just untenable,” Sydney-based Wilkinson told the rest of the panel, who film the program live from Melbourne.

“Especially when the federal government has been sitting on its hands on this for so long. The confusing messages over the vaccine rollout, the fact they’re not setting up properly to do the mRNA vaccine here in Australia … just one thing after another, and here we are again,” she continued.

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Lisa Wilkinson: “Every Victorian has the right to feel angry tonight.”

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Fellow panellist Kate Langbroek also didn’t hold back: “How annoying to live in the most overgoverned country in the world – or one of – and that when you need government, they just can’t do what they need to do. It’s infuriating.”

Their comments came after an interview with epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely – who copped quite the introduction from Project co-host Waleed Aly:

“We did try to get some answers from the Prime Minister, also many of his ministers tonight, but they didn’t want to step up with any answers. At a moment like this, they couldn’t find a single person to speak to us. Fortunately, epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely is more forthcoming, and he joins us now.”

Blakely said modelling showed lockdowns should only be lifted after a virus outbreak was contained to an average of five cases a day – something he was unsure could be achieved within this new seven-day lockdown.

And with a little over 1 per cent of Australians fully vaccinated, Blakely suggested a vaccination rate of 30 per cent could have been enough to “dampen the spread” of the virus and prevent this latest lockdown.

Kate Langbroek: “It’s infuriating.”

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“Then when we get up to 80 per cent (vaccination rate) or so, that may be enough that we have herd immunity and we’re pretty resilient and we can open our borders. We’ve got a long way to go to 80 per cent, but just getting to 20-30 per cent will really dampen things down and help with controlling these outbreaks,” he said.

Langbroek asked Blakely if Victorians heading into lockdown should be “laying the blame for that at the door of the federal government,” given this latest outbreak arose from a South Australian hotel quarantine breach and state governments have been “crying out” for a commonwealth response to quarantining returned travellers.

“Let’s put the blame side of it away and talk about responsibility,” he said. “Myself and others have been saying this for 12 months: In our textbooks in public health medicine, it doesn’t say ‘Use CBD hotels for quarantine’. We’ve been saying you need purpose-built facilities for 12 months; we need to crack on and do it.

“And then we need to stratify, so the people coming in from Sri Lanka, India, UK, countries with high infection rates, they go to those facilities, and we only use the CBD hotels for those coming from low-risk environments like Taiwan, South Korea, that sort of place.”

Aly summed the frustrations of the panel when thanking their guest: “That almost sounds like a plan, Tony.”