Gladys Berejiklian launches Covid crackdown
Gladys Berejiklian will hand new powers to police in a bid to stop Sydneysiders leaving the city, while more troops are set to patrol the streets.
The NSW government is moving to strengthen police powers and significantly increase the number of army personnel on the streets of Sydney in a bid to curb the growing number of Covid-19 cases.
The new powers — to be handed to police commissioner Mick Fuller — will coincide with a surge of pharmacies in the vaccination program as the government races to reach levels of inoculation that would allow restrictions to ease.
Plans to crack down on people breaching restrictions and stop Sydneysiders from leaving the city using loopholes in the rules have exposed a serious split between health officials and NSW Police, which has worsened as the number of infections rises.
With 344 cases recorded on Wednesday, the second-highest daily number since the outbreak began in June, police officers are privately complaining health bureaucrats are not sharing -important information about rule breaches. The dispute came to a head during a heated meeting of the crisis cabinet in which Health Minister Brad Hazzard clashed with Police Minister David Elliot.
The highly infectious Delta variant also led to a one-week extension of the Melbourne lockdown, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced, after the city recorded 20 new cases.
The NSW centre of Dubbo and the remote western shires covering the towns of Bourke, Coonamble and Walgett — which all have significant Indigenous populations — were also plunged into a snap week-long lockdown as Covid-19 spread into the regions.
The state’s Hunter region is also expected to have its lockdown extended. It had been forecast to be lifted on Thursday.
In Sydney, Premier Gladys Berejiklian indicated the government has all but abandoned the August 28 deadline to end the lockdown, and said there would be “opportunities to live life differently in September and October” if vaccine coverage increased.
A new roadmap being drafted by senior ministers to extricate Sydney from the lockdown is understood to be tied to vaccinations achieved. A previous roadmap — which began to be drafted last month but was scrapped — had been tied only to case numbers.
Mr Fuller has already begun to prepare for a boost to the number of Australian Defence Force personnel on the streets.
Police officers have complained of being hamstrung by the state’s “virtually unworkable” public health orders and their frustrations that health officials refuse to hand over details of compliance breaches out of sympathy with people breaking the rules.
An official briefed on the matter said this was due to an unwillingness on the part of health bureaucrats to see vulnerable people receive fines.
“We still haven’t got the details of the 50 people who went to the Pendle Hill funeral,” the official said, citing the case of a July gathering in southwestern Sydney where the majority of people in attendance contracted the virus.
Police did, however, proceed with charges on Wednesday against a 52-year-old Sydney man from Rose Bay who travelled to the NSW north coast town of Byron Bay and later tested positive to the coronavirus, forcing the region into lockdown.
The crisis cabinet on Wednesday confirmed that Mr Fuller would be placed back in charge of the NSW Covid-19 response in his role as state emergency operations controller. Mr Hazzard, however, will have the final say on redrafting of the health orders. It is the second time the government has turned to Mr Fuller for assistance; the first was after the Ruby Princess outbreak.
As part of the government’s plans to increase vaccinations over the coming weeks, pharmacies authorised to deliver inoculations will be boosted from their present number of 321 sites in NSW to 844 by the end of next week. The state reached a daily record of 106,592 inoculations to midnight on Tuesday.
Across the country, the number of community pharmacies administering vaccines will increase from 676 to 2565 locations.
Ms Berejiklian said health officials would provide advice about “low-risk” activities that could be allowed to resume for those who had been fully vaccinated.
“Please get vaccinated, because there could be opportunities, there will be opportunities in September and October for us to say to the community if you are vaccinated you might be able to do a certain level of activity which you can’t now,” she said. “They are conversations we are starting to have. They will be based on the health advice. Low-risk activities, where people are vaccinated, that they can go out and do, and it is important for us to send a strong message that vaccination prevents hospitalisation, reduces a spread, and gives us the chance for people to live more freely.”
Under the commonwealth’s post-pandemic roadmap, vaccination cover needs to increase to 70 per cent before there is permanent normalisation of some activities. At 80 per cent, other restrictions will begin to ease. Only 23.7 per cent of the eligible population was fully vaccinated as of Tuesday’s data.
NSW currently has 300 ADF personnel working with police in southwestern Sydney. This number is expected to increase.
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