Gladys Berejiklian and co must be held to account for this mess
Having lived through our long lockdown and learnt the hard way, Victorians can see the errors being made.
Back in May, Melbourne was experiencing another outbreak of Covid-19, since driven to ground.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian appeared on Sky News.
“I fear for Victoria and I worry about what their government may do,” she said. “We’ve demonstrated to other states that it is possible to manage an outbreak and not shut down a city.”
In Victoria, we’ve copped a lot of hits from Covid. We’ve copped a lot condescending gibes from NSW politicians, too. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have made plain their views again and again: Victoria bad; NSW good.
We received the memo, loud and clear. What a shame the virus didn’t, and changed its behaviour accordingly. There are so many factors in play in outbreaks, and luck plays a part. As things stand right now, people in Victoria fear for the people of NSW and the rest of the nation.
Having lived through our long lockdown and learnt the hard way, we can see the errors being made. What we cannot understand is why others have not learnt from our mistakes.
It is clear to all that the Delta variant won’t respond to the lighter touch.
During Victoria’s second wave, on day 38, 864 cases had been reported. In this outbreak, NSW locked down much earlier than we did yet reached this number on day 28.
The key number, the daily numbers of people infectious while in the community, is not dropping, and this spells trouble for us all. Hard questions need to be asked of the NSW government and they need to be asked now. If the NSW government really is trying to achieve zero transmission in the community before it lifts the lockdown, then why is it sticking with current settings?
On Thursday, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said on ABC radio, “I believe, as the Premier has said, the policy settings that we have in place will ensure that we get out of this lockdown as quickly as possible.”
However, recently published modelling from the Burnet Institute suggests on current settings cases will still be at 40 a day in six weeks. Yet if settings were moved now to a hard lockdown, then that number would drop to below five.
If the government does not want to accept this modelling, then why hasn’t it done its own and shared it with the rest of the country?
From the outside looking in, the situation is baffling. Political differentiation is clearly being applied to a pandemic setting. At the same time, there is belligerent insistence that all decisions are being made on just the health advice. The lockdown is half-hearted and the health orders are confusing. The messages from the government are muddled and increasingly intemperate.
Employers and employees are supposed to agree between themselves whether work is essential and can be done from home. People are supposed to decide on what shopping is essential in the moment. At the same time, individual errors are detailed and people are ridiculed for their “stupidity”, which NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard says cannot be legislated against.
At press briefings, responsibility for the lockdown length repeatedly is sheeted home to people doing the right thing. Yet the right thing cannot even be defined by the government when pressed. Instead, success or catastrophe is dependent on the various interpretations made at any given time by eight million people about a set of bewildering instructions.
It feels like the whole thing is a set-up for failure, designed by a government that won’t make the tough decisions or, worse, has an agenda it won’t reveal.
The narrative for the worst-case outcome has already been conveyed; if the lockdown drags on, if the outbreak gets out of control, the finger of blame will be pointed at constituents.
Up until this week, reporters at the press conferences hadn’t put much heat on the NSW Premier and her team. Now, though, it seems that everyone – except the NSW government – can see the current settings are not changing the trajectory of infections to the extent required for the lockdown to lift in a timely fashion.
On Thursday, a reporter demanded to know why the lockdown couldn’t be tightened, because “Victoria did it very successfully”. “No they did not,” Berejiklian scoffed, with a laugh and a shake of her head. As the questions continued to rain down, the Premier said it wasn’t very nice to be shouted at and left the podium, before returning to insist that she could see “green shoots”. Optimism is one thing but magical thinking is another.
Of great concern is that all the focus is on when the lockdown will end, not if. Success of this lockdown is not guaranteed. It is possible the virus may jump the soft settings and get beyond everyone, to spread throughout the nation. Victoria has 11 cases linked to the NSW outbreak. A snap lockdown is under way.
Here is where the NSW government must be held to account. Its actions endanger its own people and the rest of the nation. Failure will cause misery, illness and death, and eliminate our one strategic advantage – isolation and international border closures.
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