We were never meant to be in this mess. For most of 2021, in most of Australia, life was mostly normal. So normal we lost any sense of urgency about the vaccine rollout. Still, we assumed we’d figured out how to keep the virus at bay until enough of the population was vaccinated.
Then along came Delta, the beastly, fast-moving, more infectious variant. Delta is harder to stop because people who get it have higher viral loads sooner after being infectious. They shed more virus sooner, and are infectious for longer. That’s left us with a strain up to 60% more infectious than previous variants.
And once it got out into Australia’s largest cities, it was always going to leave governments and health authorities playing catch-up. Now half the country is in lockdown, and the Morrison government is scrambling. Within a matter of days, Delta has forced it to throw promises out the window. It’s rewriting the rules about good pandemic management in real time. And it leaves Australia facing a winter of discontent, where we’re even more divided and uncertain about how we manage the next phase of the pandemic.
The end of the gold standard?
Once hailed as the “gold standard” of pandemic management, New South Wales’ success has become a casualty of Delta.
Sure the “gold standard” stuff was annoying. But until a few weeks ago, by any reasonable objective metric NSW handled the pandemic better than Victoria. It reined in outbreaks without needing to put citizens into lockdown (including outbreaks that spread from Melbourne). Its fine-tuned “test, trace and isolate” system was so effective Victorian officials flew to Sydney to study it.
Far fewer people died in NSW. Far fewer lives were disrupted. By 2021 it seemed that while NSW recognised the terribleness of lockdowns, Victorian officials, chastened by moving too slowly last winter, were far more risk-averse, putting people into constant limbo. All this while taking more foreign arrivals than any other state.
Delta changed things. It outpaced the NSW contact tracers and seeded in working-class communities while they weren’t looking. When faced with a Delta outbreak, the light-touch approach failed to rein in cases, and failed to stop an indefinite lockdown. The state government is still being criticised for not locking down quickly enough.
Meanwhile, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is adamant a highly restrictive five-day lockdown is the way to go. If Victoria snuffs out the outbreak, a risk-averse world of rolling short lockdowns will become standard across the country.
Still, Australian National University infectious diseases expert Peter Collignon questions the efficacy of continuous five-day lockdowns. He says five days implies contact tracers are behind the curve and need the time to catch up. If there are undetected cases in the community, you need seven or 14 days.
“I do think you have to restrict people’s movement as much as possible,” he said. “But what are we going to do for the next four to five months? Are we going to lockdown over one or two cases?”
The end of the new deal
Prime Minister Scott Morrison certainly didn’t want states locking down for a handful of cases. Just two weeks ago, national cabinet agreed lockdowns would be a last resort. That does not seem to be the case in Victoria. That decision was part of the first phase of Morrison’s vague, four-phase new deal for Australia, which hinted at a plan for a post-pandemic future. Now phase one has already broken down.
“They should be a last resort but sometimes, with the Delta variant, you come to that position a lot more quickly than you used to,” Morrison said yesterday.
“Australians understand that dealing with COVID-19 doesn’t come with a rule book. And as much as we’d like the certainty that affects so many other areas of things that we have to deal with, that doesn’t apply with this.”
Delta has completely shredded Morrison’s rule book, and makes it seem like the government is making it all up on the fly. In early June, it reluctantly put together an income support package that would kick in when a state entered its second week of lockdown — after an outbreak in Victoria. As the Sydney lockdown extended, it slowly changed the rules to make support more generous, to the fury of the Victorian government. When Victoria entered lockdown last night, it got federal income support immediately, the third change to the rules in six weeks.
The government is resigned to a future in which lockdowns continue, despite assuming they wouldn’t in its May budget. Such is the destructive power of Delta. Coupled with a slow vaccine rollout, it’s consigned Australia to a year that looks a lot like the last.
Such is the destructive power of Delta.
Or such is the short-sighted incompetence of the Morrison government?
They go together like a horse and carriage
Morrison showed more urgency in campaigning for Mathias Cormann to become secretary-general of the OECD. At that time he made 50 phone calls to other world leaders; he made not one to the head of Pfizer.
Sorry but I think this article has the hallmarks of NSW-ism. “by any reasonable objective metric NSW handled the pandemic better than Victoria.” Complete rubbish – it was pure luck that it didn’t get into the federal-responsibility aged care homes in NSW as it did in Vic. And the Ruby Princess debacle that arguably set things off is studiously avoided by the Berejiklian-applauders. Maybe by “handled better” you mean that NSW allowed it to get through to other states efficiently – that much is true!
NSW’s COVID performance has reeked more of arse than class.
Yep they got lucky!
My thoughts exactly.
NSW’s performance has been tarnished for decades. Little Scovid Morrisin a chip off the old evangelical fundamentalist block. A read of this explains it all.
https://archiearchive.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/the-public-life-of-scott-morrison/
Before joining Crikey in 2018, Kishor was an editor at Honi Soit, Sydney uni paper, an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald, and a legal reporter for Justinian. One out of three.
This was his original bio/CV/disclaimer – spot the difference.
Kishor Napier-Raman
Reporter
Before joining Crikey in 2018, Kishor was an editor of the University of Sydney’s student paper Honi Soit, an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald on the state news beat, a casual legal reporter for Justinian and the Gazette of Law and Journalism, and a research assistant at the Australian Human Rights Commission. In his spare time, he is completing a law degree at the University of Sydney. Kishor will be covering issues with respect to immigration, race and religion.
Brush up
https://archiearchive.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/the-public-life-of-scott-morrison/
Morrison praised Berejiklian for not going into a full lockdown two days before she capitulated to reality.
The Prime Minister for NSW is always in election mode, it’s why he’s refused to bother with his two responsibilities, quarantine and vaccine. And now Nine and Murdoch are getting ready for the sales pitch and the Kill Bill style campaign
One of Scott Morrison’s closest political advisors is Nine Entertainment Chairman and former federal Treasurer Peter Costello and one of Scott Morrison’s biggest critics is former federal Liberal Party leader John Hewson who was sacked this week as a columnist by the Nine Entertainment owned papers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Yeah, I am pretty sure the Ruby Princess berthed in Sydney and its infected passengers were allowed to spread far and wide across the wide browned off land. Gold star effort from Pollyanna and the BioHazzard – with an assist from Dutts.
Norm Swan put it best a couple of weeks ago (The Dum?) when he said NSW was lucky that it hadn’t had the incidents that Victoria had.
It’s not as though there wasn’t a portent – for those willing to take a look. The laissez-faire unloaded with the Ruby Princess? Look what the rag-tag team of Schemo and Shredderjiklian did with that.
Pride came before the fall when Shredder (like all conservative economically driven governments) put the economy before health. And what a fumble.
Prime Minister of New South Wales Scovid Morrisin and Berjiklian, NSW had no hope of ever avoiding a melt down from Indian variant Delta.
How Morrison acquired the seat of Cook
2007 Cook Campaign
MICHAEL TOWKE was pre-selected for the seat of Cook as Bruce Baird was retiring.
He was then 34. He is Michael Towkea Lebanese Christian and comes from the same part of the world as does Australia’s current treasurer. .. he won preselection with 82 votes while Morrison received just 8.
What followed was, as had happened in the past when Morrison was thwarted, not pretty.
On October 26th, 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article headlined
“Nasty saga you nearly missed”
and prefaced with the comment,
‘News Limited was willing to pay dearly for this story not to be published. It first offered a $110,000 payment, plus a private apology, to avoid going to court. But the price it demanded was that the matter be kept confidential. The company was told to take a jump. See you in court.“
The article [Murdoch didn’t want published] contained the following;
“Towke is also a long-serving member of the Liberal Party. In July 2007 he won preselection for the then safe federal Liberal seat of Cook. He was set to replace the outgoing member, Bruce Baird.
The contest attracted a large field, including Paul Fletcher, who recently won Liberal preselection for Bradfield (vacated by the former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson), and a former state director of the NSW Liberal party, Scott Morrison.
Towke won easily.
On the first ballot, he polled 10 times as many votes as Morrison, 82 votes to 8, who was eliminated in the first round.
His victory meant that a Lebanese Australian would represent the Liberal Party in the seat where the Cronulla riot and revenge raids had taken place 18 months earlier, in December 2005.”
The campaign against me started four days after preselection,” Towke said.
Two senior people within the Liberal Party, whose identity is known to a widening circle within the party, went through Towke’s nomination papers to find every possible discrepancy and weakness.
Then they started calling selected journalists to tell them Towke was a liar.
The first story appeared in The Daily Telegraph on July 18, 2007, under the headline,
“Liberal ballot scandal in Howard’s backyard.”
Three days later, on July 21, a second story appeared in the Telegraph:
“Towke future on hold.”
The next day, in The Sunday Telegraph, a third story:
“Party split as Liberal candidate faces jail.”
Towke told me: “That was the story that sent my mother to hospital,”
Sheahan concludes,
“Two years later, Towke’s honour has been restored. His name has been cleared, his standing in the party rehabilitated, and his ties to the electorate broadened. Justice will be served when the two assassins within the party are politically terminated. That process has begun.
I am also interested in finding out the names of the “Two Assassins”!
John Howard objected to Michael Towke and he still apparently controls many of the Liberal Party branches in the Shire.
“Scovid Moribund”?
The absolute bashing that most of the Media has handed out to Daniel Andrews and the Victorian Government during this Pandemic has been incredible.
However, throughout the Pandemic, and despite the Ruby Princess fiasco and other smaller failings that seemed to be quickly wiped under the table, NSW have been subject to a much less critical response from the Media and the Federal Government.
(1) The vast bulk of the Covid Deaths in Victoria, (just under 700 or 80%), were in the Federally run Aged care centers. Remember that the troubled Federal Aged Care Sector has been the subject of multiple Inquiries, including a Royal Commission, and with a high number of recommendations that have not been accepted and acted upon. But but that did not stop the PM & the Federal Government in joining the over the top criticism of Victoria.
(2) The failings of Hotel Quarantine in Victoria was another example of Victoria being heavily criticized, despite the fact that similar failings in hotel quarantine happened in NSW, and other States, just perhaps in smaller numbers. Quarantine is a Federal Government responsibility but Scott Morrison preferred the idea of Hotel Quarantine managed by the individual States, as he seemed ill prepared to use existing quarantine centers, or build new ones.
(3) The supposed failings of Victoria’s Contact Tracing was next, as the Case numbers escalated, so did the heavy handed criticism of Victoria, and the PM’s announcement that the NSW Contact Centre was “Gold Standard”. If some of the Journalists had bothered to check the overseas experience around Contact Tracing they would have found that the Task becomes a mammoth and next to impossible Task once Case numbers start to rise to about a couple of Hundred. The current outbreak in NSW has shown that their “Gold Standard” Contact Tracing is struggling to keep up.
There is no question that during this Pandemic there have been a myriad of mistakes or miscalculations made by various State Government, but most especially by our Federal Government, who have either abrogated their responsibility or blamed everyone else, around Quarantine, Aged Care, and Vaccine acquisition and Rollout.
What PeterM said.
And Victoria has had fewer Quarantine leaks than NSW, albeit with fewer numbers going through. The one which caused the large outbreak was when transmission was not clearly understood, workers were doing several jobs and it went into the Western/Northern suburbs with large families many doing a series of casual jobs. I’m sick of the press harking back to then – how about we look at the more recent outbreaks and how well they were handled.
Well as Paul Bongiorno writes in TSP today about Berjiklian only doing a lockdown lite in the face of the terrifying Indian Delta variant:
”The most compelling explanation for this blind spot is that the premier is finding it very hard to eat the humble pie the virus has forced on her. In May she boasted at the Liberal Party’s Federal Council, to warm applause, that she “had made sure we had the systems in place to be able to weather whatever came our way, so that we wouldn’t ever go into lockdown again”.
Even after the wake up call of the Ruby Princess and two or three other cruise ships within a day or two, there were “lucky” stuff ups at the Sydney airport shortly after. Additionally much later, the NSW government had the audacity to blame Jetstar for not doing their job on arrival in Sydney with a plane full of people from Melbourne (whether or not Jetstar did something wrong, the NSW Government should have had enforcement at the airport whenever it was being used, and shows an ongoing lack of dilligence on their part).
New South Wales got the QR code system right long before Victoria did, and then made it mandatory on entrance to ALL shops well after Victoria (last Monday), and even now there is absolutely no enforcement of that rule in regional areas of NSW.
New South Wales luck ran out, and it looks like they have also seeded the worst outbreak in Victoria since last July.
and even now there is absolutely no enforcement of that rule in regional areas of NSW.
Criminal negligence
The Federal Government’s lethal bungling of the aged care covid response killed more Australians (685) than were killed by the Imperial Japanese Army on the Kokoda track and in a much shorter time too.
And Murdoch and Costello and Stokes blamed Labor!!
The writer is gilding the Gladys lily a bit here. Other writers have pointed out the role of sheer luck in NSW, principally how it was able to close off the northern beaches break-out because of Sydney’s urban layout, something which couldn’t have been done in any other large city. I’ll point out, too, that despite the success of containment measures at the time, someone probably brought the virus to Melbourne from those Sydney suburbs, causing another break-out just after Christmas. Lastly, while Glad continued, only a couple of weeks ago, to scoff at Victoria’s long 2020 lockdown, she and her government had clearly learnt absolutely nothing from it. And still haven’t.
Yep, we learned nothing, but we were stupid enough to think that our. Luck was based on skill.
NSW was very very lucky. It has had more hotel escapes than the Vics, but none was in a really bad place. The last big one was in the Northern Beaches, easier to isolate than anywhere in Melbourne. The present issue stems from a complacent premier and fool of a health minister who did not mandate PPE for the private sector in a very high risk situation. They then compounded it by sitting on their arse and spruiking the gold standard tracing. They could easily have locked the Eastern Suburbs up, but they forgot that the people who work there can’t afford to live there. I supppose we could deprive the Potts Pointers from their boutiques either. WE are still seeing vast amounts of non essential retail in the locations of concern. NOt only has the ineptness of the NSW crew put 10 million into lockdown, they can’t even organise their own lockdown. Pathetic.
Agreed OGO, but locking down just a few Sydney LGAs was a mistake, and almost certainly was not ‘based on medical advice’.