Coronavirus: Annastacia Palaszczuk puts selfish political goals above wellbeing of others

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: Dan Peled

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s attempt to create a territorial biosphere is playing to a dangerous and cynical “provincial nationalism”.

It risks rapidly eroding the very principles of the national cabinet that all the premiers and chief ministers so eagerly signed up to. And more importantly, it has taken the humanity out of a human crisis.

The Labor leader’s justification and recalcitrance in recent days has exposed her to understandable accusations that she has now politicised the pandemic for her government’s own purposes ahead of the October state election.

This is supported by the polling that Labor is understood to have engaged in border communities on the Queensland side, which appear to be now guiding policy ahead of the emergency medical needs of Australian citizens she believes are not her state’s responsibility.

In partitioning the Queensland-NSW border, the Labor leader has erected the equivalent of the Berlin Wall through communities that do not live their lives in recognition of anachronistic political divisions.

It is almost unthinkable, if it wasn’t actually occurring, that in a modern and mobile Australia, a premier would invoke an anachronism that suggests Australians truly define themselves by what state they live in.

It is even more alarming that a leader would believe they had no responsibility for the wellbeing of a person who happens to live on the other side of an invisible geopolitical boundary that was established more than a century ago.

Palaszczuk has sought to abdicate responsibility by delegating decisions on medical emergencies back to her health officials.

Scott Morrison is clearly unimpressed. He has been forced to intervene at least once to sort out a similar border case for a family on the Victorian-South Australian border.

This dilemma is a creation purely of the premiers’ political whims, with no medical or infection-control justification.

But Palaszczuk’s claim that NSW has its hospitals, and Queensland will treat only its own “people” in its hospitals is the most bizarre and disturbing of statements.

It is probably without precedent since Queenslanders, with a deep reluctance, voted only with the narrowest of margins in 1899 to join the federation in the first place.