NSW exit plan buries any chance of a unified national approach to reopening the country

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian provides an update on COVID-19 on September 9, 2021. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

New South Wales has detailed how and when it will start exiting its lockdown.

It does not tell us what life even just might look like when we are supposed to be living with both the virus and the vaccines.

Even just in NSW, far less in the other states.

It also, indirectly if all too clearly, “announces” there’s zero chance of any uniform national plan in relation to any of this.

Every state will continue to go its own way.

This wouldn’t matter quite so much if all the states and the Commonwealth at least agreed on a date - presumably vaccination-level related – after which any and all state border closures were prohibited.

And then, even more importantly, actually stuck to it.

So yes, states could do what they liked within their borders, but that they would have to give completely unimpeded access to people across state lines.

Vaccinated and unvaccinated.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian provides an update on COVID-19 on September 9, 2021. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

No pulling stunts like closing a border, even to that state’s own citizens.

To state this is to show it’s just not going to happen. Every state will continue to go its own way, including retaining the right to close its border without reference to any other state or indeed the so-called national cabinet.

I don’t know that NSW had to do anything particularly to reinforce that “we - as in I, very definitely the premier – will determine who enters our state and the circumstances in which they do”, but the pathway it’s detailed certainly cements that inevitable outcome.

Premier Berejiklian is freeing travel for those in NSW who are fully vaccinated at the 70 per cent vaccination level.

There is no way that the two premiers at the nation’s extremities, Premier McGowan and Premier Palaszczuk, are going to give even those fully-vaccinated people free access to their states.

And as for the other 30 per cent, well...

Even at 80 per cent full vaccination, I don’t see these two premiers, or indeed even the premiers of SA and Victoria, taking their borders back to where they were in 2019.

That’s to say, completely open.

And committing to keeping them open.

As I’ve long argued, it is the threat of lockdowns which is almost as destructive as the lockdowns themselves.

People are seen exercising along the Sydney Harbour shorefront this week. Picture by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images.

Exactly the same is the case with state borders.

You can’t have an ‘open’ border if there’s a continuing risk that it could be snapped shut on little or no notice. Or even extended notice.

There are two core aspects to the so-called national plan built on the 80 per cent vaccination level. One is the commitment to minimal interventions like lockdowns.

The other is that it has to be national: you can’t have an individual state opting out at its own choosing.

That’s what living with the virus and the vaccines means and what it has to mean.

Businesses have to be able to take it as locked in cement. People have to be able to build their travel plans on the same basis.

Now, yes what NSW has done had to be done in its own terms and in itself does not contradict the national plan. Just as Victoria is going to have to do something similar, hopefully in the not too distant future.

But unfortunately, what NSW has done is both expose the inherent fragility and indeed inevitably breakable brittleness of the national plan, and do a bit of direct shattering of it as well.

A footnote: What Crown’s now departed executive chairman Helen Coonan did on the way out the door was a downunder version of what US presidents do as they exit the White House.

Instead, though, of handing out pardons to assorted favoured crims, as happens in the US, Coonan has been handing out “golden goodbyes” to departing executives. Some $24m in total.