On vaccines, Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt deserve the egg on their faces
Scott Morrison’s cabinet optical illusion and vaccine distraction has backfired badly.
Instead of a patronising, waffly reference to a “prime minister for women”, could we please have a prime minister for a faster, less chaotic, more collaborative vaccine rollout? Tangible outcomes are far better than silly titles.
With CSL’s production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine now under way, a more seamless and ambitious timetable will help boost Scott Morrison’s dipping popularity. So would fewer political own goals.
It is a bad way to start a day when the Prime Minister has to remind Australians that “of course I am the Prime Minister”. It followed his quip that Marise Payne had been promoted to the status of prime minister for women. Apart from the preposterous idea of promoting, even in jest, a minister who has been pretty much irrelevant as Minister for Women, Morrison’s attempt to show action on the women front hasn’t gone as planned.
Morrison’s reshuffle is gesture politics of the worst kind; an optical illusion where a batch of trivial titles mean that “women” appears at least four times in the Morrison ministry portfolios.
It treats Australians as mugs. Every minister is meant to be working to achieve the best outcomes for all Australians — men and women. If they need to be reminded to include “women’s issues” when addressing economic matters or policies around safety, they should be sacked.
In the end, actions speak louder than titles. Will the Prime Minister treat the report into Parliament House’s workplace by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins more seriously than her last one? Jenkins’s previous report, Respect@Work, has been gathering dust in the Attorney-General’s office for the past 12 months.
After the kneejerk reshuffle on Monday, by Wednesday the Morrison government managed to turn the vaccine rollout into an unseemly political brawl. If the orchestrated attack was meant as a distraction, it backfired.
Criticising the states’ rollout of vaccines to quarantine staff and frontline health workers was demented. It jarred with the federal government’s own incompetence, administering only 670,000 doses of the COVID vaccine — which is 3.3 million jabs short of the Prime Minister’s target of four million doses by the end of March. The shortfall includes the country’s most vulnerable people in aged care. By week’s end the Prime Minister and his Health Minister, Greg Hunt, had earned the egg on their faces.
While Morrison denied he was playing politics this week about vaccines, it beggars belief that the pointed attacks by federal ministers was not signed off by the Prime Minister and/or his office. The Weekend Australian has been told that over many months, numerous state health ministers have pleaded with Hunt for the feds to agree to a co-design meeting with the states to better plan and co-ordinate the enormously complicated logistics of a nationwide vaccine rollout by October.
Nothing happened until the regular meeting of state and federal health ministers on March 11 when Hunt was absent, in hospital for a bacterial infection in his leg.
One person who attended that meeting has told The Weekend Australian that in Hunt’s absence, state health ministers from the eastern states — Queensland, the ACT, NSW and Victoria — lobbied federal Health Department head Brendan Murphy for a co-design meeting where state health executives could discuss and help plan rollout logistics with federal bureaucrats — who, after all, have little experience of grassroots service delivery.
“You can’t have the biggest states in the country, Queensland, NSW and Victoria, with the biggest population groups not being involved in the rollout — it’s just insane,” says the source who attended the ministerial meeting.
“Murphy checked with the other chief executives of health departments across the country within the next 24 hours and received unanimous agreement on the need for a co-design meeting to work through logistics. This is the biggest structure outside wartime in the country’s history, and yet the feds were just telling the states: ‘This is what you will do.’
“No discussion on why, let’s work together, how should vaccines be rolled out, and what, in your experience, might be the contingencies and the difficulties that may arise with supply chains, nor discussion about whether frontline services are available in a particular geographical area, or what period do you think it will take to deliver the vaccine doses. They just needed to sit down with us and work through all this.”
It is astonishing that, since the pandemic began, the first vaccine rollout co-design meeting where state and federal health bureaucrats discussed complex logistics took place only on the following Friday, on the afternoon of March 19. Though the meeting was long overdue, The Weekend Australian has been told it was productive, with state bureaucrats responsible for delivering frontline health services to Australians advising federal bureaucrats how the vaccine rollout would work best. Following this critical meeting, state health ministers might have imagined better co-ordination between state and federal jurisdictions about rollout logistics, the planned timetable for dose delivery, expected or likely hiccups in local supply lines and the number of available doses held in reserve by the feds for the second doses.
They were wrong. State health ministers woke on Wednesday morning to a calculated attack by the Morrison government. Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud accused the states of leaving vaccines “in the rack when they could have put them into people’s arms … they have done three-fifths of bugger-all and they are holding this nation back”.
The headline-chasing attack was misleading and deceptive. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk shot back by pointing out that 89 per cent of people in the state’s 1A group have had their vaccines. Echoing common complaints among states, the Premier said the state needed guaranteed supply and guaranteed times of delivery to plan efficiently. She also took aim at the Morrison government’s lack of transparency: “If the states are releasing their figures every day, I think it’s only fair, fair and reasonable, that the federal government releases their figures every day.”
Backed by his Premier Gladys Berejiklian, an angry and disappointed NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard denounced the Morrison government for undermining the rollout by wrongly accusing the states of not administering doses when states were given little notice of how many doses they would receive.
“Let’s get this really clear: the NSW government was asked to roll out 300,000 vaccinations to the groups in 1A and 1B. Of that we have done 100,000,” Hazzard said during a fiery press conference on Wednesday morning.
“The federal government was asked and is responsible for 5.5 million people and they have rolled out 50,000. I think the figures speak for themselves.”
That’s 50,000 doses across aged-care facilities and the commonwealth’s GP network. The same day the feds attacked the states, Hunt crowed that “a massive number of people have now been vaccinated and a global outcome which is looked upon by the rest of the world with a big degree of amazement and envy”. He sounds like a Western version of Comical Ali, the deluded Iraqi politician who was determined to assure his citizens that it’s all plain sailing, when plainly it isn’t.
As one senior leader in state health told The Weekend Australian this week, while the Morrison government points to its 12-week vaccine rollout plan, “the feds haven’t stuck to it”.
Repeating concerns raised by her NSW and Queensland counterparts, ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said: “If you don’t know you’re getting them [doses], you can’t plan to deliver them.”
Until this week, state health ministers have remained quiet about frustrations concerning the haphazard, at times chaotic, rollout of vaccines to states. Without access to the actual numbers of vaccine doses held back by the federal government in reserve, and certainty about supply and delivery dates, the states are working blind. But to maintain public confidence in the rollout, the states raised these concerns only privately with Hunt.
Speaking to The Weekend Australian on Thursday, Hazzard said: “What some in the federal government did this week was a catalyst, bringing everyone together in a white fury at the attempt to drop us into problems of their own making.”
On Wednesday, Berejiklian wrote to Morrison concerned that the commonwealth’s vaccination project would not achieve its objectives of six million people in NSW by October 21 without additional supplementation. The NSW Premier offered to use the NSW health service to administer vaccinations to the public, and asked the commonwealth for greater certainty on timing and supply of vaccines, and lead times for delivery. By Thursday night the Prime Minister had written to the NSW Premier accepting her offer of help.
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