Confident leaders have more faith in their teams

The only guarantee for Victorians who were released from a five-day COVID-19 lockdown at midnight on Wednesday is that another statewide lockdown could be just around the corner. As businesses count their losses and citizens prepare to resume social activity, Premier Daniel Andrews is using mind games and trickery to defend past actions while warning of more disruption to come. “I can provide no guarantee (another lockdown won’t happen) because I am not prepared to present to the Victorian community this is over,” Mr Andrews said. In short, Victorians can be confident not that they have a government in control but one that will continue to make drastic decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods.

Many in Victoria no doubt will accept Mr Andrews’ claims that they have been saved from the possibility of greater confinement and loss should the lockdown not have happened. But the hard numbers are in. During the five-day lockdown period there were six locally acquired cases, all of which were linked to the Holiday Inn outbreak and well contained.

Mr Andrews insists the lockdown was worth it, and that it was impossible to know how fast and far the UK variant would have spread around Melbourne had the city not had a “fourth ring” of protection provided by the lockdown. But as Health Editor Natasha Robinson writes on Thursday, the words of Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, give the lie to the Premier’s theory.

Professor Sutton said he was confident that the state’s traditional public health response of testing, tracing and isolating was capable of containing the coronavirus, whether a variant of concern or not.

“Victoria’s contact tracers have faced a challenge and they were up to it,” he said. “For every positive case, they traced 66 close contacts and placed them into isolation, erecting an iron-clad ‘third ring’ around the virus.” Professor Sutton said this reinforced that the three-ring principle of test, trace and isolate was the right way to go, and it could deal with variants of concern as well.

Epidemiologists say Victoria should now have confidence in its contact tracing, and that the UK variant does not move at “lightning speed”, quicker than contact tracers can keep up, despite what Mr Andrews has said to justify the latest harsh lockdown.

Mr Andrews’ vaudevillian performances at his daily press conference on the pandemic have become a masterclass in distraction, slapdown and spin. By submitting the people of Victoria to a daily theatre of psychological game-playing, Mr Andrews is claiming compassion but looking after his own interests first. This is the opposite of grown-up government and good leadership. Despite the positive news from health advisers on the latest outbreak, Mr Andrews seems unwilling or unable to trust the advice of experts. This is consistent with our view that past failure on hotel quarantine has limited the Victorian leadership’s ability to deal objectively with the facts. Fundamentally, all of the decisions made by Mr Andrews are being made under the influence of the trauma of last year’s hotel quarantine disaster that resulted in 800 lost lives. Nobody could ever wish on a society a repeat of 800 deaths, 20,000 infections and 112 days of lockdown. However, as we have stated previously, rather than panic, state leaders should have confidence in the changes they make to ensure those outcomes do not happen again.

Leadership is never risk free, but good leaders must be prepared to make brave decisions. Clearly, the NSW government took risks in its decisions to control the recent Sydney outbreak with limited lockdowns and faith in contact tracing. As a result, the NSW economy has continued to rebound strongly. Mr Andrews’ actions suggest he is interested only in eliminating all risk. As we report today, the economic cost of the five-day lockdown has been substantial. Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra said business had missed out on what could have been the busiest weekend of trading for a decade because of the lockdown. He estimated losses at between $500m and $1bn. Economists have warned that leaving the door open to stop-start lockdowns in future saps confidence and will lead to Victoria slipping further behind other states.

Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien has struggled for attention but his points on the latest lockdown are well made. “We can’t keep having this yoyo where we open, then close, then open again. Schools are open, schools are closed. Businesses are open, businesses are closed. Masks on, masks off. We just need to get it right,” Mr O’Brien said. “If the government gets hotel quarantine right and they get contact tracing right, we can get on with our lives. NSW has done it, NSW is doing it. That’s the model for Victoria: good contact tracing, good hotel quarantine, proportionate responses, stay open. That’s where we need to be.”

Mr Andrews needs to relax the politics and gamesmanship of the pandemic and reflect on the longer-term societal cost of his actions, have more confidence in the future, and not let it happen again.