Australia’s Covid states of disorder
People are more fed up, impatient, less forgiving of the serial mistakes of our politicians — and all roads lead back to one.
Australia has taken a giant step backwards. It has reverted to state lockdowns, federal financial support and ugly blame-shifting over Covid as the Team Australia concept is torched and the Morrison government is trapped between the infectious Delta variant and its inadequate supply of vaccines.
The country’s plans and hopes for recovery are compromised – how far defies prediction. Yet the public’s mood seems different from last year. People are more fed up, impatient, less forgiving of the serial mistakes, corrections, confused messages, and changed policies from politicians.
All roads lead back to the lack of adequate vaccine supply. Scott Morrison is like a conductor on stage working furiously but without his orchestra, pretending to be in control of a situation he cannot control. The Morrison government is hostage to events, the power of the premiers and the necessity it faces to support people and businesses during lockdowns initiated by the states.
With 12 million Australians in lockdown this weekend – as the rest of the world opens up – the crude competitive contest is Victoria against NSW. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has plunged his state “hard and fast” into a full lockdown to contain his smaller virus outbreak, further exposing NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, running a softer lockdown, struggling to make progress and facing a torrential pile-on of media and critics demanding she get far tougher.
The Premier signalled yesterday she would take harder measures if required. But resentment of Berejiklian’s status as the “gold standard” reluctant to lock down has been unleashed.
With his authority under pressure, Morrison finished the week declaring the national cabinet’s “path out” of the pandemic remained in place. Making this assurance credible is the key to his political future. That means putting numbers on the vaccine coverage that will trigger the end of lockdowns, and giving the nation an aspirational target as the passage to its future.
Australia’s reversion this week is highly dangerous. It reveals three threatening themes: the premiers call the shots in a country now consumed by state identity and parochialism in a way unprecedented for most people during their lifetime; the Australian mindset seems addicted to lockdowns as the re-occurring response to new or serious outbreaks; and there must be alarm about Australia’s psychological capability in 2022 even when vaccinated, given there seems to be no tolerance for anything like the deaths and cases as the inevitable price to accompany a genuine opening up of the country.
The message that Australia “must learn to live with the virus” is a cliche making little progress in real life. Australia has developed its own political culture about the virus – heavily risk-averse, instinctively inclined to lockdowns, and demanding the federal government stump up the money to sustain individuals and businesses as long as they are affected.
This is not a tenable mindset for recovery and opening up the economy. The country seems to have lost any agreed narrative on how to steer out of the Covid pandemic.
The blame game is convulsive. The media is awash invoking expert opinions to promote or denounce one or another position. The Morrison government has lost control of the messaging. But each lockdown is a blow for Morrison – a reminder that Australia, short of vaccine supply, is exposed and vulnerable.
On Thursday, Josh Frydenberg hailed the national unemployment rate falling to 4.9 per cent, a triumph by any reckoning. It is the lowest in a decade. Youth unemployment has fallen to its lowest in 12 years, and the economy is rebounding after the first recession in 30 years. These are world-leading results yet the Treasurer was virtually scolded for mentioning them.
The NSW and Victorian lockdowns are each costing the national economy $100m a day. Each week of the ongoing NSW lockdown equates to a loss of $700m. It is entirely in prospect these lockdowns will knock a full percentage point off quarterly GDP growth.
The damage to business confidence may prove even greater.
If the lockdowns become protracted, the danger is a negative GDP quarter – a huge blow to the recovery. Frydenberg concedes the impact on GDP growth will be “significant”.
This week, Andrews offered a master class in the toxic cynicism that infects our politics. In an extraordinary and false attack on the Morrison government, Victoria accused Morrison of a “double standard time and time again”, saying he operated as a prime minister for NSW and that Victorians were “sick and tired” of “having to beg for every scrap of support” from Canberra. Yet at week’s end, Andrews concluded a successful negotiation with Morrison to ensure Victorians will be supported throughout his five-day lockdown.
Andrews won the politics and got the policy he needed. Frydenberg called out Victoria for being “petulant, childish and playing politics”. Last year, Victoria got far more from Canberra on a per capita basis than any other state. Frydenberg said the payments to Victoria for its recent lockdown over two weeks were “exactly the same” as for NSW for the same period. Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell the Victorian government was “lying”, yet much of the media seemed unconvinced, preferring perception to fact.
Everything depends on the vaccination rollout. It is building from a low base reaching a million doses of Pfizer from next week. One in eight Australians is fully vaccinated with two jabs, a third of eligible people have received their first jab and, in a critical measure, nearly 75 per cent of those over 75 have had their first dose. Morrison has affirmed the core goal – vaccination by year’s end for all who choose to have it.
The PM said delays to the rollout meant it was only about two months behind “where we hoped to have been”. The delay is a function of the government’s initial complacency and the unexpected sabotage of its “workhorse” AstraZeneca, heavily attributable to the medical panel making adverse recommendations not reflected in other countries. As Morrison told the ABC this week, he had no option but to accept the medical advice. Indeed, rejecting it would have threatened his government in political terms.
Unsurprisingly, Morrison’s message to people is to “keep looking forward”. But the next two months, before Pfizer arrives en masse, will be a political nightmare for the Morrison government and a daunting test of its nerve.
Facing a mood of rising anger this week, Morrison invoked the Australian spirit. “No matter what is thrown at us, we get through it,” he said. “This is the test that our generation is facing and our generation is up to it.” With the country restless and agitated, the ultimate test of Morrison’s leadership is at hand. Strong on rolling out policy detail, he needs a better emotional engagement with the public.
What counts for Morrison, at the end, is vaccination coverage. If this is high then he turns the vaccination row into a plus. Projecting into the future, he says the country must soon shift to new metrics – not case numbers, but hospital admissions, deaths and intensive care numbers. New measures of success mean a new attitude.
The troubling question raised by this week’s events must be faced. How does Australia escape the lockdown habit driven by its intolerance of new variants and case numbers? The government needs, as soon as practicable, to unveil the vaccine thresholds that will trigger Australia’s movement out of our current stage one “suppression” in the national framework unveiled a fortnight ago. That will offer a badly needed aspirational national target of hope to which everyone should rally.
It means looking forward not back. For instance, what about a 50 per cent threshold coverage for the community and 75 per cent for over-70s to trigger our move into phase two? The decisive question, of course, will become the threshold at which there are no more lockdowns. Yet what chance the premiers and the public agreeing on thresholds that can carry Australia into the risky vaccinated future where other nations still have significant numbers of deaths?
While journalists keep pressing Morrison on what he has done wrong, one of the PM’s traits is to focus on what he does now, not cogitate on the past – a trait fundamental to his winning the 2019 election. “There are things that you might have done differently,” he told the ABC. “Well, you try and improve them as you go forward.”
The inevitable assumption behind the Morrison government’s latest financial support policy is readiness for even more lockdowns. “Of course, we don’t want to see these lockdowns,” Morrison said. “We prefer they not happen.” But Morrison, initially reluctant, functioned as a political realist this week. What did this mean? He had one support policy for Tuesday, essentially driven by NSW, and another for Thursday afternoon with final modifications Thursday night, essentially driven by Victoria.
It was policy on the run, but that’s the nature of the beast. As Morrison says, Covid (and its Delta variant) “writes the rules” and governments must follow. The upshot, finalised on Thursday night with Morrison, Frydenberg and their Victorian counterparts, involves federal income support for individuals at $375 and $600 weekly according to work hours lost and covering people who live or work in a commonwealth-designated hotspot. The rates equate to the December 2020 JobKeeper levels.
The state government will fund payments over the rest of the state. Eligibility applies from the start of Victoria’s five-day lockdown. People receiving existing income support payments are not eligible.
This followed Morrison’s earlier statement on Thursday in which his government decided to fund support for individuals in arrears from the first week of a lockdown. The liquid assets test for eligibility would be waived.
At the end of the second week of any lockdown, Morrison announced, the decisions already taken in relation to NSW would apply universally – businesses with a turnover between $75,000 and $50m would have 40 per cent of their payroll made in a weekly payment with a minimum of $1500 and a maximum of $10,000.
The principle is cost sharing between the federal and state governments.
Asked how he reconciled the current resort to lockdowns with the national cabinet framework agreed a fortnight ago that lockdowns were a “last resort”, Morrison said: “With the Delta variant, you come to that position a lot more quickly.”
What else can he say? Morrison cannot criticise Berejiklian or Andrews for the decisions they have taken. The Delta variant is more dangerous. Premiers must respond according to their judgment – yet the viability of the national framework hangs in the balance and the damage to economic recovery will be material.
Total federal government support during the pandemic now totals about $300bn, a figure previously inconceivable. There cannot be any open cheque going into the future. Morrison and Frydenberg were correct in refusing to restart JobKeeper, a policy devised for a national health and economic crisis in earlier 2020. The economy is now in recovery. There are labour shortages. The response needs to be flexible and targeted across states. The new model is far better suited to this situation than JobKeeper.
Above all, Morrison and Frydenberg need to ensure this is only an interruption to economic recovery. The economy and record low levels of unemployment should be the government’s biggest asset at the 2022 election.
Labor has misjudged and repeatedly underestimated the recovery, with opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers frequently saying in 2020 that the biggest test for the government “will be what happens to jobs”. The government, so far, is passing that test with honours.
That means Morrison and Frydenberg have got a recovery to protect. They won’t be afraid to offer more support, if needed, according to the Treasurer’s rule: “As the virus evolves, so does our response.”
In this turbulent week, the final observation cannot be overlooked. The most irrelevant lobby in the country today are the libertarians arguing there is no case for lockdowns anywhere of any scale. This is intellectual nonsense. Making this argument when only 12 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated is a reckless proposition that could be advanced only by those without any obligation of public responsibility. No government would countenance the notion.
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