Gladys Berejiklian’s telling ‘lockdown’ omission

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian looks on during a press conference in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Joel Carrett

The outbreak of COVID-19 coursing through Sydney’s eastern suburbs was caused by a monumental failure of government policy concerning airport workers, but it is the people of NSW who are now being sacrificed to pay for it.

Starting tonight, about a million people who live or work in the City of Sydney, Woollahra, Waverley and Randwick will once again be confined to their homes much like they were forced to do during the pandemic’s peak in April 2020.

These restrictions will continue until next Friday, we are told, with no guarantee they will not be extended further, as they were in the Northern Beaches in January, or in Victoria last year.

Gladys Berejiklian used clever language to deliver this unpalatable measure. She refused to use the word “lockdown”, instead selling this as an anodyne restriction on “four local government areas”, as though the City of Sydney, with its galleries, restaurants, department stores and a casino, was just another suburban LGA, like Randwick or Waverley.

The enormity of this decision cannot be unstated, yet this is how Ms Berejiklian typically delivers bad news to the public. She rarely tells an outright lie, but has shown a propensity to occasionally conceal the truth.

Drive through Covid-19 testing at Bondi Beach during the growing Covid-19 outbreak in Sydney. Picture by Damian Shaw

Worth noting, too, that throughout the pandemic she has always been quick to assume the seraphic hero role while seizing every opportunity to trash other states for closing borders and choosing lockdowns.

At least in those instances, in Victoria and elsewhere, unlinked case numbers somewhat justified drastic responses, whereas in NSW the decision appears more precautionary than necessary. Unlinked cases of the virus remain low in metropolitan Sydney, in the single digits; restricting peoples’ movements, so the thinking goes, will make tracing efforts easier.

“I appreciate this is a blow for businesses in those communities, but we’ve been able to limit it to those four local government areas,” Ms Berejiklian told reporters. “This is so we don’t have rumbling cases of transmission going on for weeks and weeks. Our aim is to be proportionate.”

As a state, we have more than licenced the Berejiklian government to take exceptional measures in the name of public safety. This is ultimately why we elect governments in the first place – to ensure the healthy functioning of society.

Today’s announcement, however, is verging on an abuse of that social contract. Lockdowns, with their galactic number of consequences for lives and livelihoods, postponed medical treatments and mental health, were only ever to be used as a measure of last resort, not precaution. Or so we were told.

One need only to visit the Sydney CBD or take a drive down the arterial roads of the eastern suburbs to know that residents are already limiting their movements, cancelling their travel plans, and generally applying caution. Sensible measures were already in place while government ministers continued to harp on about complacency.

Ironically, the real complacency, the greatest displays of arrogance, have been led by the state’s politicians, those who wrote the deficient Public Health Orders that led to this mess, those who have been quick to blame deficiencies on human error, and those who spent Tuesday night kicking up their heels with a mass gathering in parliament.

This while residents of the Eastern Suburbs waited in limbo to learn if their school holiday plans needed to be cancelled.