Daniel Andrews is using Scott Morrison as a human and political shield.
Who would have thought this possible?
The Victorian Premier has drawn on the Prime Minister’s new language on lockdowns to justify shutdown 6.0.
The guts of Victoria’s decision is based on the potential damage being caused by a small number of mystery cases.
The numbers are seriously low but Andrews is making clear that he’s not prepared to risk a repeat of 2020.
It is a year this week since Victoria was plunged fully into a pandemic crisis that lasted months, caused in large part because the government failed to lock down soon enough.
Andrews is not prepared to make the same mistake, which was potentially politically disastrous.
In many ways it’s a minor miracle that Andrews survived the fallout from the hundreds of deaths and economic disruption.
“We all wish this was over,” Andrews lamented at his late afternoon press conference.
On the spectre of a months long shutdown, Andrews added: “We don’t want to go back to that.”
Lockdown 6.0 is upon Victoria in part because of the slow vaccine rollout, so it is reasonable to assume that until starkly more people are inoculated then stand by for Lockdown 7.0 and maybe more.
The effect of this is just terrible for affected businesses, debilitating for schoolchildren and generally depressing.
But Victorian Labor now knows it is locking down with the effective support of the Prime Minister, with Canberra having woken to the reality that the best way of stopping the viral spread is to shut down movement.
NSW’s rising caseload will no doubt be firmly in the minds of both the health teams and the politicians.
The calculation is that it’s better to wreck business slowly by short, sharp lockdowns than to torture it with a long term closure akin to what Sydney is facing.
Moving out of the pandemic is proving much more complicated for the Lucky Country than anyone could have imagined.
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