“Split over go-slow Gladys”. “$3 billion bungle”. These were the page one headlines on The Australian and The Daily Telegraph last Thursday, the day after NSW extended its lockdown of greater Sydney by a week.
Not that professional Murdoch haters will have noticed. In the mad world of social media’s keyboard warriors, Prime Minister Scott Morrison can do no right, Victorian and Queensland premiers Dan Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk can do no wrong and the News Corp media run ubiquitous interference to support Coalition politicians. But it just isn’t so.
Morrison is criticised by some conservative News Corp commentators and supported by others. As this column has often argued, News is more pluralistic than the ABC or Guardian Australia. Sky News’s controversial commentators Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, Paul Murray and Alan Jones often criticise Coalition governments.
All include a range of guests across the political spectrum including regular Labor commentators such as former Rudd and Gillard government minister Stephen Conroy, former Gillard chief of staff Nicholas Reece, Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon and former Hawke and Keating minister Graham Richardson. A regular Jones guest has been new NSW Labor leader Chris Minns; Troy Bramston, Dee Madigan, Darrin Barnett and others of the Left also appear often.
Some conservative News Corp commentators have argued against lockdowns, even during the present Sydney outbreak. But the newspapers and other columnists have criticised NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for not locking down earlier, effectively accepting lockdowns really do work. The papers have slammed Berejiklian for the health bungle that triggered the latest outbreak: an unvaccinated driver taking an international flight crew to hotel quarantine.
It’s eerily similar to the hotel quarantine bungles by security guards that precipitated Victoria’s 112-day winter lockdown last year. So is the present virus outbreak at Sydney’s SummitCare Aged care home in Baulkham Hills, in the city’s northwest. It came from infected workers, as did last year’s Sydney Newmarch House outbreak that killed 28 residents. Same with the 120 outbreaks in aged care homes in Melbourne last year that killed 648 residents.
This column last August said more than half of all Covid deaths in Britain and US were in aged care. It said most aged care facilities here were regulated by the federal government and asked what was being done by the Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck about the virus being taken into Victorian centres by workers with shifts in multiple facilities. Well, that’s still happening, and there’s not much political joy for Labor in the issue.
Federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese tweeted last Wednesday: “Five months into the rollout and we’ve still got unvaccinated workers and residents. It’s not good enough.” No it’s not, but what is he doing to bring vaccine-hesitant Labor-affiliated unions to heel?
Australian Nursing Federation WA secretary Mark Olson told 6PR’s Liam Bartlett on June 18 that he had written to the PM and his state’s chief heath officer, “pleading with them to offer choice”.
A survey of 4000 workers in the sector had found 62 per cent opposed mandatory vaccination.
ABC Investigations’ Anne Connolly on June 5 reported the federal Department of Health told the aged care industry in an executive update: “It is voluntary for workers to be vaccinated and to disclose if they have received a Covid-19 vaccination.”
Nick Bonyhady in the Nine newspapers on June 9 quoted Annie Butler, federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, calling a push for mandatory vaccination of health workers “a smokescreen”.
Cabinet finally decided on July 2 to mandate aged care workers’ first vaccinations by mid-September, but why the wait until after winter? Relatives of aged care residents are forced to show proof of flu vaccination but have no right to know if the workers looking after their loved ones are vaccinated for Covid.
It’s time for Morrison to muscle up. Rather than simply urge young people to talk to their doctors about AstraZeneca, Morrison and chief health officer Paul Kelly should have insisted ATAGI (the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation) revisit the advice that Pfizer be the “preferred” vaccination for people under 60. This advice has shattered public faith in a vaccine that saved Britain.
And it’s time for journalists to be more honest. The ABC and Guardian love pointing out Australia is last on the OECD vaccination list. Yet they never point out NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has achieved half the vaccination rate Australia has. Nor do they report that on total infections, Australia is 124th globally and on economic growth second in the OECD.
Too many journalists won’t acknowledge that 12 months ago AstraZeneca looked a smart choice. It was old and proven technology and could be made here. The newer mRNA technology used in the Pfizer vaccine was untested and could not be made here. Then US president Trump had been forced to indemnify mRNA vaccine makers against possible adverse effects of their products.
Does any reader really think if Morrison had gone with Pfizer a year ago he would not have been condemned for using a vaccine pushed by Trump? Does anyone imagine problems with heart issues among young Pfizer recipients admitted by the US Centres for Disease Control and the Israeli government would not now be the hot issue that very rare AstraZeneca blood clots are?
Not only do politicians need to be more assertive over doctors always fearful of legal action, but leaders need to learn from the failures of others. How can NSW have made the same lockdown messaging mistakes in ethnic communities in southwestern Sydney that Andrews made a year earlier in Melbourne? ABC health editor Norman Swan got his maths wrong at the start of the pandemic but was right on Thursday, tweeting: “If we don’t want to make the early mistakes Victoria did in the northern and western suburbs, NSW needs huge community engagement using leaders and people on the ground.”
Finally, critics of News Corp need to be more honest, starting with old left-wing journalists led by former ABC Victorian host Jon Faine having a crack at Sydney’s lockdown but blindly defending Andrews’ epic fails. Victoria at its peak last year was reporting over 700 infections a day, and has had, by last Friday, 20,718 infections compared with 6064 in NSW. Victoria has recorded 820 Covid deaths compared with 54 in NSW.
And when obsessive News critics such as former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and ex-treasurer Wayne Swan call the vaccination program Australia’s greatest ever public policy failure, have they really forgotten their own blunders on boat arrivals that killed 1200 people, and the pink batts disaster that killed four installers and burnt down houses?
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