The groan from Dan Andrews was audible at their media conference earlier in the week when the Victorian Premier’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, suggested that modelling indicated the surge above 500 infections was the likely peak in the spread of the virus.
Politics is often about expectation management. The CHO wasn’t wrong, that is what the modelling says. And he was cautious in how he delivered the good news regarding the modelling. And the numbers since Monday have steadily come down. But Andrews the savvy politician knows that if cases do push higher in the days and weeks ahead, the optics of having over-promised and underdelivered will come back to bite him.
Especially now that it’s is becoming patently clear that divisions are opening up both within the Victorian response teams and between the Victorian and commonwealth health teams. Tensions are high. The blame game is in full swing. Journalists are being backgrounded by all sides. The gloves, so to speak, are off.
The Premier on Tuesday pointedly highlighted that aged care is a federal responsibility, but his government is ready and willing to help manage the crisis. Greg Hunt fired back at Andrews’ remarks that he wouldn’t put his mother into the private aged care system, labelling them irresponsible.
Politicians try to maintain the confidence of their constituents, and doing so is never more important than it is during a crisis.
That’s why they sometimes descend into generalisations which are designed to instil confidence even if they aren’t necessarily entirely accurate. Remember the PM’s rhetoric about schools being safe? He couldn’t be any clearer than that. Today in Victoria dozens of schools have been shut for deep cleans. Students are moving online. Contagions within schools have been reported. And internationally evidence of the effects of the virus on the young is growing.
But the PM won’t regret or resile from the words he used to instil trust in schools. His aim was to get students back in classrooms and dissuade nervous parents from keeping their children home.
While Andrews might have been speaking the truth when he exclaimed that he wouldn’t entrust his own mother to his states private aged care system, saying so was incredibly undermining of the system itself. No wonder it drew a sharp rebuke from the feds.
From here we need to hope that the crisis itself in Victoria gets better, not worse, and the CHO’s words regarding modelling get proven right. But what will certainly get worse from here is the animosity between the commonwealth and Victorian governments – the veneer of respect and co-operation between these parties has been exposed on be exactly that: shallow and limited.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University
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