It’s more complex than that, Scott Morrison

Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Picture: Dan Peled

After a week of verballing the ­respected Doherty Institute and its detailed modelling of various ­vaccination scenarios, Scott ­Morrison has finally started to be honest about what that modelling says.

But only in targeted radio appearances and only in the low Covid-19 states of Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. He is deliberately letting his false hope stand in other markets, especially Sydney.

Nowhere does the Doherty modelling say there is a magic number at which we can “open up”, “leave our cave like that girl in The Croods” or “live with the virus”.

It’s much more complicated than that.

Covid vaccines are a new and powerful tool to help control the virus and reduce hospitalisation and deaths. They come on top of the other public health tools that are available.

The effectiveness of each tool depends on compliance.

A lockdown will be more effective if 80 per cent comply than 70 per cent. Masks will be more effective if 80 per cent of people wear them than 70 per cent.

Vaccines are more effective when 80 per cent of people are vaccinated than 70 per cent.

Because vaccines are new, we will need fewer of the other tools. That is what the Doherty Modelling says.

From there, we need to make a collective decision about how much pressure we want to put on our hospitals, how many people’s lives we risk and how we protect those who cannot be vaccinated, think children, transplant recipients and cancer patients.

Decide how many people should die and work back from there – what level of vaccination you need and what other public health measures need to stay in place.

That is the complex, difficult, life-and-death decision that Scott Morrison tried to simplify down to a simple number and three-word slogan.

I think that even with his background in marketing, people will see it’s not that simple.

Especially as they watch the case numbers climb in NSW. As they see hospitals fill up and turn away patients with other conditions because intensive care units are full and there are not enough ICU-trained health professionals to open more.

His simple message of false hope might have been welcome in Sydney, where residents are holed up in their caves for a tenth straight week.

But not in Queensland, where masks and a tough border with NSW have so far kept the virus out and let us lead a relatively normal life outside our caves while we rush to reach our vaccination targets.

Up here, it looked more like a prime minister desperate to avoid responsibility after demanding the delay in lockdown which led to the Sydney outbreak.

A prime minister who has somehow spent the Sydney Covid-19 crisis talking about Queensland and WA.

His focus group research might have said Australians were ready to let the virus rip through their children, but that is not what Queenslanders have been telling me.

Steven Miles is the Deputy Premier of Queensland