Many journalists reporting on Covid-19 in Australia apply different standards to different premiers, depending on the party in government.
It’s not about former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Twitter obsession with the idea News Corp runs a protection racket for the Berejiklian Coalition government in NSW. Quite the reverse actually.
Look how Berejiklian was slammed by the ABC, the Nine tabloids, Guardian Australia and news.com.au when she said on September 10 that she would no longer be attending all daily 11am Covid-19 press conferences. Patricia Karvelas on RN Drive spoke for many when interviewing former health bureaucrat Jane Halton that night: “Full disclosure. I have been very critical of that (decision). It’s a very important accountability measure for journalists, particularly as cases are rising.”
Yet I have seen and heard little comment from journalists about Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews no longer attending daily pressers more than about half the time. Victoria’s daily briefings are often led by state Health Minister Martin Foley.
Berejiklian said she had other work to do. Fair enough, but just before a forecast peak in infections it looked to some like she was dodging scrutiny. NSW has in fact continued daily live press conferences rather than the health video Berejiklian had flagged. The briefings have been fronted by health officials and Health Minister Brad Hazzard. Yet Berejiklian did front about half of last week’s pressers.
Some Victorian reporters believe Andrews is trying to distance himself from Covid and lockdowns in the lead-up to the November 2022 state election. Whatever the strategy, he is being judged less harshly than Berejiklian for taking a similar approach.
Worse has been the media pile-on suggesting Berejiklian has let the case numbers in NSW get out of control. The numbers are not out of control – lockdowns are working and so is vaccination. There was every sign last week that NSW cases had peaked, but the premier was too cautious to claim it.
Warnings from Sydney University modelling, published by the ABC on August 26, of 6000 NSW cases a day by early October have never looked like materialising. The same modelling claimed NSW would face 40,000 cases a day when lockdown restrictions are lifted.
Any outlandish prediction of failure in NSW always gets a run in some parts of the media. In fact Berejiklian really is leading the way for Australia, her hand forced by the infectiousness of the Delta variant. As she told Peta Credlin on Wednesday night on Sky News, it was no surprise Delta took off first in Sydney given the city took more returning travellers than all the other states combined.
Yet many journalists, and particularly those at the ABC with safe, government-guaranteed pay packets, criticised the NSW approach throughout the first month of the present outbreak. They were sure Berejiklian was not locking down hard enough and had not locked down sooner.
She had tried to confine the lockdown to the city’s CBD, eastern and southern suburbs, which were the first areas affected when the virus was spread by an unvaccinated airport driver. The same strategy had worked in January on Sydney’s northern beaches. But the increased infectiousness of Delta forced Berejiklian to lock down all of Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, the Illawarra and the Central Coast on June 26.
Too many reporters in the weeks after that decision eagerly repeated Andrews’ self-serving lines about Sydney needing a Melbourne-style “ring of steel”. Andrews knew, these reporters believed, because his government had been the only one in the world to have defeated Delta during the state’s fifth outbreak. Except that may not be correct.
As Credlin said last week, that outbreak was largely the Kappa variant, with few Delta cases. Given Victoria’s sixth lockdown came on August 5 and lockdown five ended on July 27 it seems likely there were undetected Delta cases in the community at the end of the fifth lockdown, and Victoria had probably not “defeated Delta”.
That sort of free pass for a Labor leader is par for the course in much of the media these days. More surprising has been the tick given to Andrews for now taking the same line as NSW on vaccination being the way out of lockdown. Victoria has learned NSW was correct when Berejiklian said lockdowns and contact tracing could not defeat a variant twice as infectious as previous strains.
When Berejiklian in late July said her focus was moving from case numbers to vaccination, many at the ABC, led by health editor Norman Swan on News Breakfast on August 3, suggested she was planning a dangerous experiment on her citizens. Yet there was no such criticism about Andrews when he – correctly in my view – made the same vaccine calculation a few weeks later.
Swan was wrong. Last Tuesday on ABC’s 7.30 he reported on the opening up of Denmark at 74 per cent full vaccination. Turns out NSW was not conducting a world-first experiment. Denmark has been doing what Berejiklian plans to. Imagine that: a state health department with experts who know what’s happening in the rest of the world.
More worrying has been the failure until last week of much of the media to notice Victoria’s outbreak has been growing faster than the spread in NSW. Earlier this month, Credlin on Sky News and in her column in the News Corp Sunday newspapers nailed the issue.
Said Credlin last week of her September 3 story: “I looked at the two data sets out of day 30. What struck me was that Victoria’s new cases at 208 were over double where NSW was (on day 30) at 97.”
Testing on day 30 in NSW was at 77,587 compared with 48,572 in Victoria.
“The numbers for day 37 got worse in comparative terms,” Credlin said. “In NSW, Day 37 … saw 136 cases, 86,620 tests. In Victoria … new cases were 334 (so now almost triple), and half the tests of NSW at 42,998. Worse still were the vaccination rates – NSW 124,645 (day 37), 85,605 Victoria.”
By last Friday, Victoria’s relative performance was deteriorating further. New cases in Victoria on day 44 new totalled 511, compared with 172 on day 44 in NSW. Equivalent day 44 testing rates stood at 95,446 (NSW) and 55,476 (Vic).
“The actual gap (between outbreak numbers) has significantly widened between days 30, 37 and 44,” Credlin said on Friday.
The Nine papers picked up the Victorian angle in a piece by Caitlin Fitzsimmons on September 12. Fran Kelly followed on RN Breakfast the next day, interviewing Victorian epidemiologist Tony Blakely. Yet The Age back on August 25 had actually reported Deakin University epidemiologist Catherine Bennett and University of South Australia’s Adrian Esterman saying Victoria’s virus reproduction rate was higher than that in NSW.
Many journalists who bag Berejiklian, especially on Twitter, continue to operate as if the only KPI a premier should meet is Covid zero. They are about to learn Berejiklian is right. We need to learn to live with the virus, and vaccination is the pathway. Even Andrews has seen the light.
Unless WA and Queensland plan to keep their borders closed forever, their health systems are going to have to deal with outbreaks when NSW and Victoria open and international travel resumes.
More Coverage
Read related topics:Coronavirus
Join the conversation
‘Distressing’: Nine’s bombshell report to be released
The findings of the troubled TV network’s independent review into workplace misconduct will be released this week and staff offered extensive support.
Read more
‘What you saw, is what you got’ with larger-than-life presenter Negus
George Negus was made for TV. The pioneering journalist, one of the three original members of 60 Minutes and the inaugural host of ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, has died at the age of 82.
Read more