Border farce proves the national cabinet is a joke

The premiers’ failure to agree on a unified strategy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic is an absolute disgrace.

Slamming shut their borders is so much easier for some premiers than ensuring their contact-tracing and other systems are up to scratch . Picture: NCA NewsWire/Steve Holland

The performance of the premiers and the Prime Minister have ensured that — just a week into 2021 — many of us are feeling like it’s going to be Groundhog Year.

It is terrific news that Scott Morrison and his Health Minister, Greg Hunt, have responded to pressure, agreeing to roll out the Pfizer vaccine to vulnerable Australians earlier. But why the political games of delay and obfus­cation? Until their timeline announcement on Thursday, Morrison and Hunt had given us no reason to explain why the timetable could not be expedited once the vaccine was approved by the Therapeutic Drugs Administration. Their silence left us in the dark, needlessly.

It was even more baffling to watch the Prime Minister try to deflect attention from his delayed timetable by claiming that our close ally, Britain, started administering vaccines without conducting basic batch tests.

During his press conference to announce a February start date, Morrison failed to explain why circumstances had changed from a week ago when he said that anything earlier than a March rollout would be “dangerous”. The only explanation from Morrison and Hunt — that they want to under-promise and over-deliver — is simply a political strategy that suits them. It is not a sound policy framework that put the interests of Australians first.

Sadly, a more rapid vaccine rollout won’t change the continuing hysteria, confusion, cruelty and incompetence of some premiers over state borders. Right now, thousands of Australians are locked out of their own states, unable to return without an exemption. Bureaucracies that have had months to get systems in place to allow people to get home in the case of border closures have failed to keep up.

Put this in context. As of Friday, there were four new cases of community transmission in NSW, one in Queensland and zero new cases in Victoria and elsewhere. That’s zero new community cases in six out of the eight states and territories.

Premiers Daniel Andrews, Steven Marshall, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan should hang their heads in shame. The mishandling of state borders, not COVID-19, is a national crisis.

And instead of the constant self-congratulation from Morrison and Hunt about their own ­performance, they ought to be working harder to help end the border fiasco. When the Morrison government squibbed its responsibility to bring home tens of thousands of Australians stranded overseas, it set a precedent for premiers to lock out Australians from their own states.

It is true that Morrison cannot force state leaders to do anything. But federalism has always relied on federal leadership to drive co-operation among the states and territories to serve the national ­interest.

Here is a tiny snapshot of heartache caused by their poor political leadership. On December 31, South Australian Premier Steven Marshall announced a hard border closure with NSW due to a minor breakout of COVID in the Premier State. That same day, a pregnant Adelaide woman and her partner, who had been holidaying on the NSW south coast, packed up their belongings and started their 15-hour journey home via the shortest route through Victoria. Police turned them away at the Victorian checkpoint. They were forced to bypass Victoria and take a 150km road from Wentworth in the far southwest corner of NSW to Renmark in SA, most of it unsealed.

A punctured tyre. A miscarriage under a eucalyptus tree in a gully. Police at the SA checkpoint interested only in checking where in NSW the couple had been.

This is Australia in 2021.

In Victoria, the Andrews government announced that no one from NSW would be allowed to enter the state from January 2. Yet a Sydney couple who flew into Melbourne the day before with a travel permit (they own a business in Melbourne) were forced into hotel quarantine. They were not given the option of getting on a flight home. They were released on Friday, after seven days of wrongful detention.

Last weekend, the Andrews government told Victorians to race back to Victoria if they were holidaying in NSW and Queensland to avoid the Victorian border closing on them too. No rest stops overnight with the family. Take a toilet break, get a drink, then keep driving. Acting Premier Jacinta Allen said Victorians were warned that this could happen.

In other words, Victorians can no longer enter their own state, unless they have an exemption or are essential workers. As of Friday, there were 4000 applications for exemptions waiting to being processed, with only 579 approved. If Victorians were warned to plan for border closures, then so were Victorian bureaucrats. So why the ­bureaucratic hold-up?

Closing borders and locking down people may have made sense early on — but 10 months later, it is a sign of failure, not success. Western Australia locked itself away from most of the country for nine months and continues to hit the panic button when there is a handful of cases in another state. The Premier said he would not be holidaying in any other part of Australia over the Christmas-new year break. Is he oblivious to the fact that millions of Australians simply want to be reunited with their families?

Marshall locked down his entire state, even banning people from exercising for an hour, within hours of a few COVID-19 cases arising in one part of Adelaide. Marshall’s actions were a national embarrassment, and a telling contrast to NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who has managed the pandemic with far more proportionate policy and common sense.

Queensland has played political border wars with NSW, preventing people from regional border towns in NSW from using a hospital just across the border. Palaszczuk said: “People living in NSW, they have NSW hospitals; in Queensland, we have Queensland hospitals — for our people.”

Her wicked parochialism ignores the fact that Australian ­taxpayers across the country contributed almost $5bn to Queensland hospitals last financial year. On Friday morning, Palaszczuk locked down greater Brisbane for three days after recording a single case of the new UK strain. The Premier said: “Think of it as a long weekend at home.” Too bad if you rely on a weekend job to pay the bills. Then all the states and territories declared Brisbane a hotspot and imposed travel restrictions.

There is an irrefutable and central truth that explains the border mayhem of 2020, and why it will continue in 2021. The premiers who have inflicted the most confusion and pain on their people and whipped up the greatest amount of hysteria have little faith in their state’s ability to manage effective testing and contact-­tracing systems to deal with the smallest outbreaks. That raises the real prospect of more border mayhem in response to more sporadic cases of a virus that will linger long after a vaccine has been rolled out.

The chaos around borders is a stark reminder that Morrison’s big idea of a national cabinet for dealing with COVID-19 was the biggest policy fizzer of 2020. And nothing has changed in 2021. Despite Australians being stranded outside their own states, national cabinet was not due to meet for another month. And there are no plans to discuss state borders.

Morrison is good with symbolism, like wearing an Australian flag on his mask. But his national cabinet risks being remembered as a lightweight operation that dealt only with the no-brainer issues. Like Friday’s “urgent” meeting where national cabinet agreed on measures to deal with the more contagious strain of coronavirus.

To be sure, securing common agreement about borders is a more difficult issue. It’s also true that Queensland voters have indicated that they don’t mind being subjugated by a parochial Premier who plays politics with the border.

The same will likely happen in WA at the state election in March. It is a sobering reminder of two ­realities: first, we get the government we deserve; and secondly, a poor opposition makes it much easier for a lousy government to get re-elected.

That said, wasn’t the point of national cabinet to work out the sticky issues among states and territories rather than just convening a get-together for the cameras to rubber stamp the easy decisions?

Scientists have been working day and night to come up with lifesaving vaccines, yet bureaucrats and politicians cannot work out a sensible national definition of a hotspot, nor agree to common rules around border closures. Pick a number, any number, say 40, 50 or 60 live community cases that trigger a border closure so that Australians can get on with their lives with greater certainty.

Sadly, national cabinet may become a showcase for Morrison’s governing skills where he is slated as more middle management than leader. And don’t the premiers know it.