Sealing states from rest of the nation ruins lives, jobs

However dearly West Australians would love to remain blissfully free of the Delta variant, Health Minister Greg Hunt was facing facts on Sunday when he said no jurisdiction could keep out the Covid-19 virus indefinitely: “There is no scenario under which any epidemiologist or adviser that I have seen says that any country can avoid this forever.’’ WA Premier Mark McGowan has split from national cabinet’s agreed reopening plan. He wants to keep the state border closed after vaccine targets were met. “The idea that we just deliberately infect our citizens, if we have no Covid when we get to 70 per cent two-dose vaccination, I just can’t do,’’ he said on Friday. “People would die and we would have huge dislocation.’’ And now the rest of the nation knows one of the reasons why.

Mr McGowan cannot change the stark realities of Covid. But what he can and must do is urgently invest more of WA’s budget surplus, derived from its mineral wealth, in its health system. Half of elective surgeries are being postponed from Wednesday in WA, despite the state being Covid-free, as Paul Garvey reports. The reason, as Mr McGowan admits, is fear the state health system would be overwhelmed almost immediately in the event of a large-scale Covid outbreak. That is a damning indictment of him and his government. Australian Medical Association (WA) president Mark Duncan-Smith warns: “The public health system in WA is on its knees. It’s basically been chronically starved of funds for the last four years.’’ And for no good reason. Amid a deadly pandemic that has killed 4.5 million people from 216 million cases, the government has a duty to ensure the health system is robust and able to cope.

This week’s national cabinet meeting will focus on the capacity of the nation’s health ­system to deal with cases when the country reopens. It’s a vital issue, and it also underlines the importance of vaccinations. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is right when she says far greater numbers of people would have been in intensive care during the current outbreak had the state not raced to vaccinate its population.

On Sunday, Mr McGowan made the extraordinary claim that Josh Frydenberg was “100 per cent wrong” to suggest that maintaining border restrictions when vaccination levels reached between 70 and 80 per cent would hurt the economy. Mr McGowan insisted that WA’s dropping its border restrictions would hurt the economy if the virus entered the state. In aspiring to hermetically seal WA, Mr McGowan is seemingly prepared to ignore the economic benefits of aviation, tourism and business travel and the importance of family reunions. Are West Australians expected to cut themselves off from the outside world, including the rest of the nation, indefinitely? Once agreed vaccine targets are reached, the idea is preposterous. Some in the west who are already hesitating to be vaccinated might use such isolation as an excuse to refuse rolling up their sleeves.

Renegade states seeking to break off from the national plan need to outline at what level of vaccination, if not 70 per cent, they would be happy to open up. As Mr Hunt says: “At some point children are going to have to see grandparents. If not at that point, when?” Likewise, interstate and international travel needs to resume as quickly as possible.

As the Treasurer writes on Monday, Australia must bring stringent lockdowns and border closures to an end at vaccination rates of 70 to 80 per cent for two reasons – the national economy and people’s mental health. “One has a quantifiable financial cost; the other is harder to measure, but is even more important,’’ Mr Frydenberg notes. “If states and territories do not adhere to the plan agreed at national cabinet, the cost in terms of lives and livelihoods will be unacceptably and unnecessarily high. Jobs will be lost. Businesses will close. The debt burden will rise. Australians’ wellbeing will suffer.’’ The decline in economic activity caused by lockdowns, running at about $2bn a week, undermines the budget bottom line, Mr Frydenberg points out. Fiscal support, costing more than $1bn a week, cannot continue indefinitely. National accounts for the June quarter, due out this week, and the September quarter figures later in the year will demonstrate the detrimental impact of lockdowns on the economy. Economic activity has been crushed by Delta lockdowns and makes a severe contraction in the September quarter certain.

The Doherty Institute has pointed to a much needed light at the end of the tunnel. Achieving 70 to 80 per cent vaccination, its scientists say, will result in less transmission of Covid-19, fewer people with severe illness, and therefore fewer hospitalisations and deaths. Australians are embracing the message. By Saturday, 18.9 million vaccinations had been administered, with 34.1 per cent of Australians fully vaccinated. Among our most vulnerable people, those over 70, 87 per cent have had one dose and 62 per cent are fully vaccinated. NSW, while struggling under record new caseloads of the virus, is forging towards meeting its 70 per cent vaccine goals during October. After such a torrid period, the last thing our sovereign nation needs is being divided into two Australias – with states such as NSW learning to live with Covid while others, such as WA, are locked down in paranoia, Chris Kenny wrote recently. States such as Queensland, which has also had a tough border policy, must be careful to avoid locking into detrimental, isolationist positions just as the chance to safely return to greater freedoms, economic activity and normality is on the horizon. More important issues than politics are at stake. Regardless of party affiliations, political leaders at all levels of government owe it to Australians to back the nation’s orderly reopening.