Coronavirus: Bromance over as Scott Morrison dumps Daniel Andrews

The Scott Morrison-Daniel Andrews bromance has ended.

Principally because Morrison, and anyone with any weight around him, is filthy with the way Victoria has mismanaged its coronavirus response.

The Prime Minister and his cabinet have no interest in taking on the dead weight of arguably Australia’s worst public health disaster.

After Morrison and Andrews forged a strong, mutually beneficial relationship, the Victorian Premier has now been cut loose. The plan is to pressure him to reopen the economy as quickly as possible, within the constraints of medical evidence.

“The plan that was outlined yesterday, I hope, is a worst-case scenario,” Morrison said on Monday.

In other words, the hope is that Andrews can be convinced to get his skates on and get Victorians back to work earlier than the current roadmap timelines.

Andrews’s critics say he doesn’t listen and won’t bend in the face of evidence about issues such as flawed contact tracing.

The looming financial repair task in Victoria is akin to a medical Dresden and each day the state is shut throws more businesses face down into the Yarra. The Premier badly misjudged the business backlash against his roadmap strategy and faces greater accountability before receiving federal financial assistance.

Victoria has, after all, been awash with windfall revenue streams for years.

It is significant that Andrews on Monday flagged for the first time that restrictions may be lifted earlier if the virus numbers drop fast enough.

There were 41 new cases reported on Monday, a marked improvement. “There is a chance that if there’s a significant shift, if we saw things change dramatically, then we would obviously remodel the whole thing,” Andrews told 3AW.

This is probably the most significant concession we have heard from him in weeks and reflects the venom being spat at the government after the lengthy timeline for opening up Victoria for business.

The issue is not around the need to keep the reins on the virus, which is what the bulk of the evidence suggests needs to happen, but around the failure of government to properly prepare the private sector for what was ahead and to offer hope to a fatigued community.

There was very little flexibility in the Andrews roadmap or reward for industries that have proven their ability to adapt to the virus threat.

Andrews’s response to business was cute. It wasn’t that he hadn’t consulted, he said, it’s just that the private sector didn’t get what they were looking for.

“Now that’s not to say that business received the news that they wanted but that’s a different thing to not being listened to,” he said on Monday.

Canberra is also uncertain about the ability of Victoria to respond to any inevitable further virus outbreaks once the caseload eases further.

This is why Morrison hammered the contact tracing issue, which has been a weeping sore for Andrews.

Questions remain about the Victorian technology, the number of skilled staff and the pace with which coronavirus victims were contacted and dealt with. It will have irked Andrews the extent to which Morrison on Monday praised the NSW contact tracing system.

The PM claimed that Sydney didn’t need to be under curfew because they had the tracing capability to deal with outbreaks.

He did not miss. Gentlemen, return to your corners.