Premier hysteria: Queensland and WA lockdowns are just embarrassing

The NSW lockdown is serious. The lockdowns in Queensland and WA are just embarrassing. The one in the NT is simply irrelevant.

NSW moving to its first Sydney-wide lockdown – even if only for, we hope, two weeks - since the national lockdown of the June quarter last year is serious on two levels.

The first is basic economic arithmetic – the damage it does to the NSW and thus the national economy.

Last year, Victoria’s special ‘Chairman Dan curated’ lockdown through the September quarter was sufficient to lop nearly two percentage points off national GDP.

GDP growth for the quarter was 3.3 per cent – about half recovering the June quarter’s numbing 7 percent collapse. September quarter growth would have been around 5 per cent but for Victoria.

And remember, that was when we still had JobKeeper pouring $750 a week into the hands of 3.6m Australians and especially Victorians, plus a temporarily boosted JobSeeker for those officially unemployed.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian provides a COVID update on June 30. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

Now JobSeeker is almost back to its pre-virus level and federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has turned fiscal Scrooge with JobKeeper 2.0.

Those in NSW don’t get the much-reduced payment for the first week; and those in Queensland, WA and the NT – and SA if it follows into lockdown – won’t get it at all, unless their lockdowns go into at least a second week.

Yes, Victoria’s lockdown went for nearly four months, but Victoria was ‘only’ one-quarter of the national economy while NSW is closer to one-third.

Now true, in the classic manner of what you feel when you stop banging your head against a brick wall, when Victoria DID rejoin the rest of Australia in the December quarter, it acted like a super- charger.

National growth in the December quarter was almost as much as in the September quarter, taking the economy back to within a whisker of where it had peaked pre-virus.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her deputy Steven Miles arrive for a Covid update press conference on June 30. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

So, if NSW comes out of lockdown after the two weeks – or at worst, one or two weeks later – both the state and the nation will spring back, like we did after Victoria last year.

Pity about the lives and businesses damaged and in many cases destroyed, but from an overall economic perspective, we’d be bouncing back quickly and strongly.

It would be an altogether different – actually, only too chillingly similar to Victoria matter, if NSW’s lockdown headed past a month.

The real horror scenario is if Victoria joined in. Did anyone else feel, that strong, confident, aggressively rejuvenated Chairman Dan was just itching, itching, to take Victoria back to a 2020 command and control future, at the slightest sign of ‘the beast’ erupting south of the Murray?

That’s why the second level seriousness of the NSW lockdown was even more potentially potent: the decision was made by the only serious state government in Australia, and there were seriously disturbing signs of Premier Berejiklian channelling for the first time her “inner Annastacia”.

All the other premiers, apart from Berejiklian, have exhibited varying if all serious degrees of hysteria, but the Queensland premier has outclassed them all. Wednesday, she was even calling to all-but close off Australia to even Aussies desperate to return.

It would be seriously disturbing if the NSW premier was finally ‘joining the club”; it would be real “dark night of the soul” territory, if she was heading straight to “full-on Annastacia”.

It was not the lockdown itself that raises this concern, but the metric she set for avoiding future lockdowns – 80 per cent adult vaccination penetration.

We are certainly not going to get there by Christmas; we probably won’t get there by 2022’s mid-year (slow) opening to the world. And indeed we may never get there.

Victoria’s was supposed to be “the last lockdown”. I didn’t fully factor the “premier hysteria virus”.