The rest of the nation will follow. Nothing is surer.
At the national broadcaster, one doctor-cum-journalist has been given an extraordinarily prominent role for the best part of two years, and many ABC loyalists might be desperately in need of a different pandemic diagnosis.
Norman Swan is a medico who swapped his stethoscope for a tape recorder almost 40 years ago to become an ABC health reporter, and he has been as ubiquitous as Covid-19 at Aunty since the pandemic hit.
Apart from presenting his regular Health Report program, Swan has shared his views on a coronavirus podcast, filed stories for TV, radio and digital programs, and been used as Aunty’s preferred expert pandemic commentator on a wide array of ABC programs. This means that his opinion has been one of the loudest in the country throughout this health crisis.
Swan has been alarmist about the potential threat from Covid and a strong advocate for hard lockdowns and draconian measures. It is little wonder this prescription, most notably imposed by Labor premiers in Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, has become the discernible corporate position of the ABC.
The trouble is that it has been the wrong approach. That has long been clear to many experts and commentators but it is now beyond contention after Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews last month swallowed his pride and effectively announced he would emulate NSW’s approach.
At his daily Covid-19 media briefing on August 20, Andrews said, “There’s no living with this”. But less than two weeks later, on September 1, Victoria abandoned its goal of eliminating community transmission and Andrews said his aim was to live with the virus: “We get to 80 per cent, and we get our freedom back, and we find a Covid normal, and as is sometimes used, not as a news flash but just as a statement of fact, we will be living with Covid then, we absolutely will.”
Swan too, has been no stranger to dramatic turnarounds in his ABC commentary, and many of his predictions have proven to be wildly wrong. In March last year, with the nation on edge early in the pandemic, he appeared on Q&A and shared a grim prognosis: “So, the prediction at the moment, if this hockey stick doesn’t change that much, is that we’ll be out of ICU beds in NSW – Victoria will be behind that – by April 10th. And in that case, ICU physicians will be faced with some very difficult decisions.” Thankfully, the nation did not get within a bull’s roar of Swan’s bracing forecast.
Even now, with Delta strain outbreaks in the two largest states, only a fraction of the available ICU beds have been used for Covid-19 patients. For most of this week there have been about 300 patients in intensive care, and back at the start of the nation’s pandemic response the national total of 2400 ICU beds was boosted to a surge capacity of more than 7000.
Also in March last year, Swan warned on Twitter that Australia’s Covid-19 infections were only “14 to 20 days behind Italy”, predicting cases would hit “70-80,000” within a week or so. Yet by the end of the year, nine months later, the total number of cases had not reached 30,000.
In the same month, Swan was quoted on Yahoo!News as saying face masks should be forgone by the public in favour of healthcare workers, and that they could give people a dangerously false sense of security because the chances of masks protecting people were “very small”. Yet during an outbreak in Victoria in June this year, Swan told Channel 10’s The Project that “we would have benefited from mandating masks maybe two or three weeks ago”.
In December last year, when NSW was grappling with the Northern Beaches outbreak, the Berejiklian government locked down that area but resisted calls from Swan and others to lock down all of Sydney. “So the precautionary principle would be locking down Greater Sydney and really holding that for about two weeks,” Swan told ABC television, suggesting NSW adopt a “Victorian” approach or see the outbreak escape. He also demanded mandatory mask orders and the barring of crowds from the Sydney Cricket Test. The outbreak was quelled without locking Sydney down.
Fast forward to this year and Swan has been feverish when assessing Sydney’s Delta outbreak, claiming on ABC Breakfast television in July that it could run “out of control”, that it was “really serious”, and urging a stage four lockdown. He said the NSW restrictions were “not a proper lockdown” and again compared them unfavourably to Victoria, saying the proper epidemiological response was “not happening in NSW and it did in Victoria a few weeks ago”.
When NSW came out of lockdown last spring, leaving Victoria still locked down, Swan told breakfast television that, “NSW isn’t the gold standard, NSW is lucky”. But then last week when Victoria’s Delta outbreak was outstripping NSW despite an early, hard lockdown, Swan told ABC radio that “in Victoria they were unlucky”.
Having urged NSW to lock down like Victoria and then having seen Victoria lock down early with that Delta strain in August, Swan has been nonchalant about the prospect of the Andrews government losing control. On August 9, he told ABC radio: “In NSW, where we’re broadcasting from, we’re facing an indefinite lockdown which is going to be hard to see when we come out of it. And while in Victoria yesterday there were cases who were out in the community and not in quarantine, it’s a small number of cases and contact tracing should get on top of those.”
On ABC TV’s The Drum on August 12, Swan was urging tougher action in Sydney – “the only thing that works is lockdown” – and he pushed for the “ring of steel” that Andrews had promoted. “Be under no illusion,” said Swan, “we would be out of this in NSW now if they (restrictions) had come in earlier.”
You get the picture: NSW bad, Victoria good; Sydney outbreak a worry, Melbourne under control.
But I hardly need to remind you, or Swan, that since then Melbourne has broken the world record for the number of days in lockdown and it has smashed the national record for most new cases in a day (then topped it again just yesterday). This week, Victoria has averaged about 1500 cases a day, while NSW has averaged closer to 600.
In May, Swan told Radio National Breakfast that the vaccine rollout had always been a “race” and that the federal government had “lost the race”. He said the required strategy had been clear since “late last year”. Yet in December last year he said on ABC TV’s 7.30 that waiting for vaccine approvals would allow Australia to watch and learn lessons from the UK and US rollouts. “We’ll learn a lot just by waiting eight or nine weeks,” he said.
Even on the origins of the virus, Swan, by his own reckoning, has been wrong. In May last year, he spoke to ABC Breakfast TV about claims Covid-19 might have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology: “I’ve looked into this, and other journalists have looked into this as well as scientists, and there really is very little evidence. It’s on the outer bounds of possibility but really, so unlikely that you can say definitely, that it’s not the case.”
Almost exactly a year later, on the same program, the ABC health reporter had this to say: “There’s indications that virologists in the Wuhan Institute got sick in November with an illness. There are increasing signs that the Institute of Virology may well be the source.”
Incredibly, despite all this, ABC audiences have never been given the benefit of a “second opinion”.
There have no attempts to correct or audit all this misinformation, and neither MediaWatch nor other current affairs programs – that normally delight in pointing out inconsistencies or erroneous forecasts – have held Swan to account.
On the contrary, Swan has been the subject of multiple ABC puff pieces but no accountability. On Radio National, he has been introduced as “one of the most trusted voices in this long pandemic” and the ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose, has described him as a “treasure”.
Those who consume news and current affairs only via the ABC might attribute all Swan’s errors to evolving facts, but let me assure them all the way along, across all these issues, there were experts and commentators assessing these issues correctly and contemporaneously.
They were just seldom heard on the ABC.
There are so many variables during the pandemic, and so much flux, that no one could get all this right, all the time. But an “expert” and a national broadcaster ought to do better and be upfront about correcting previous errors. Surely Swan was having a lend of us on July 13 when he appeared yet again on ABC TV Breakfast.
“In this whole pandemic,” he said, “I just want to be proved wrong, and I would love to be proved wrong.”
Native title gets a fresh lease of life
This week’s High Court decision in the case brought by Dr Yunupingu is a victory for traditional owners’ rights. While the issue may now be clear in law, the ramifications will be complex.’
Justice extends past our own backyard
The same principle that smashed native title could apply to any property rights.
If the difference in pandemic response between NSW and the other states has taught us anything, it has reinforced the value of a second opinion. We could all be living in the constant torment of Victoria, or stuck in a moment forever like Western Australia, if not for the determination of Gladys Berejiklian and now Dominic Perrottet to forge ahead with the inevitability of living with the virus.