While state premiers across the country revel in popularity ratings they could only have experienced in feverish dreams pre-pandemic, one stands out. Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan with an approval rating in the eighty percentile, shut down the longest border in the country last Thursday evening when Sydney’s northern beaches cluster had just two confirmed cases of Covid infection. Two.
McGowan’s call meant anyone from Coonabarabran, Bourke, Bermagui, Broken Hill, Boggabri, Cooma, Cowra or Cootamundra – people who had not been within a bull’s roar of the Avalon Bowlo were forbidden from entering Western Australia to spend time with family or friends over the Christmas period.
The hard border remains in place at the Premier’s discretion. According to the WA Premier’s own website, “Travel from New South Wales into WA is now classified as ‘medium risk’. As a result, travel from NSW is no longer be permitted (sic), unless you are an exempt traveller. This also applies to anyone who may have been in NSW since December 11 and hasn’t completed 14 days in a lower risk state or territory.”
The panicked response was so hurried there was no time to conjugate verbs apparently.
Incidentally, the McGowan government considers South Australians to be “low risk.” As of today, its neighbouring state has no new Covid cases, no one in hospital let alone ICU, and just three active cases yet travellers from SA to WA are required to self-quarantine on arrival for 14 days. Go figure.
There are lots of ‘p’ words we could use besides panic. Peremptory, pessimistic, presumptuous. But of that alliterative set the one I’d settle on is populist.
On Sunday, I joked that McGowan’s insistence the people of New South Wales wear bells around their necks and henceforth be known in the third person only as the unclean was met with some dismal Western Australian barracking of the “I’m all right, Jack, bugger everyone else” type.
Given the size of the Sydney outbreak and recent advice from this afternoon’s AHPCC meeting, our Acting Chief Health Officer has recommended that New South Wales now move from being a ‘low risk’ state to a ‘medium risk’ state.
— Mark McGowan (@MarkMcGowanMP) December 19, 2020
This change will apply from midnight tonight. pic.twitter.com/HfJ6a2nPk1
As so often occurs on Twitter, any japery at the expense of the Left is generally met with alarm and/or outrage while others of a passive-aggressive bent will urge the writer to be more objective. It is the season for giving and at this time it would be remiss of me not to offer a life lesson. In the event of an argument where you find your opponent urging you to be more objective you can happily identify him or her as a trout-mouthed know-all. Try it and you’ll see. It works every time.
The pernicious commentary invariably came from parts west of Eucla. The premier was merely acting on the best scientific advice, it was said. I was accused of offering a Sydney-centric view of the country. This is a pandemic after all. You need to be more objective.
While I do have some respect for the Keatingism that Australians either live in Sydney or are merely camping out, my ultimate reply, and it is one that seems to have slipped more than a few memories, is that Premier McGowan and his party go to the people in a little over three months.
There is nothing more certain than a crushing win on March 13, 2021 for McGowan and Labor in WA. Punditry in politics is often vexed but this one is a lock. I haven’t checked the betting markets but if McGowan is anything more than $1.10 to win the next election, I suggest you take it. It’s better than bank interest.
Indeed, the only thing that could render that bet with even the slightest semblance of risk is a nasty little outbreak of COVID-19 in Western Australia.
The scientific advice (of which none has been made public) McGowan nods to established parameters of low risk states defined as having less than five cases on a 14-day rolling average with states having any more than five veering into medium risk. Advice scientific or otherwise can only follow a principle and that appears to be eradication, a process that must include hard borders, restraint of economic activity and tough policing of transgressors with police powers at levels that should make us all uncomfortable.
Meanwhile in Victoria, Dan stans (a portmanteau of ‘stalker’ and ‘fan’) lie in bed at night hoping, almost willing on higher infections in New South Wales.
If only we were so parochial when it came to the Sheffield Shield.
I travelled to Victoria a week ago and found that lessons of their COVID-19 outbreak have been hard learned. Mask wearing remains mandatory in shopping centres, public transport and indoor spaces where people congregate. By my count about half of those walking around outdoors wore a mask.
The argument goes that Sydney which has no mandated mask wearing policy and thus no associated draconian police powers has become complacent. Melburnians clearly have learned the hard way, a 102-day hard lockdown way to stomp on a widespread COVID-19 infection emanating from government failures both in preventing foreseeable quarantine breaches and then failing to create effective contact tracing, due mainly to decades long cuts to public health bureaucracy which also led to the centralisation of it.
The situation in New South Wales is different. Premier Berejiklian is right to be pragmatic, to avoid mandating mask-wearing, to instead engage the community to do the right thing and to avoid at all costs the misery of a city or statewide lockdowns.
Despite what the Dan stans grimly wish for, I am convinced a similar spread of COVID-19 which cruelled Melbourne won’t happen in Sydney primarily because New South Wales has a functioning, regionalised, responsive, efficient and effective public health bureaucracy.
NSW Health administered 38,000 tests yesterday with results known and sent by SMS to participants within 24 hours. That is nothing like either the scale of testing or the speed of response in Melbourne in late June when COVID-19 was running out of control.
At the time, Victoria’s contact tracers had systems and resources that were battling to trace a handful of infections rather than the hundreds that had come their way.
Forget the rare metals allusions. It’s not parochialism. It’s not party political. NSW Health’s contact tracing is as good as it gets. Anywhere in the world.
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The great paradox in politics in Australia is that the most popular premier in the country is also the quickest to pop on the jackboot under pressure.