The pandemic has a habit of making Scott Morrison’s pronouncements age poorly. “It’s not a race” is already turning out to be one of the great political albatrosses of our time.
The prime minister’s repeated praise for how his home state of New South Wales handled the pandemic now looks similarly awkward, with Sydney’s lockdown set to continue possibly well into spring.
But as cases spiked in Sydney over recent days, Morrison’s tone changed. Accused for so long of displaying favouritism for NSW, the prime minister is now increasingly at odds with Gladys Berejiklian, refusing the state government’s requests for more Pfizer vaccine doses and a return of the JobKeeper wage subsidy.
Beneath the gold standard
Last year, Morrison started calling NSW the “gold standard,” a reference to the state’s test-and-trace strategy which successfully managed sizeable outbreaks while avoiding lockdowns. And it was a trope he returned to just hours before Sydney started going into lockdown.
“My fellow Sydneysiders can feel very confident that if anyone can get on top of this without shutting the city down it is the NSW government,” Morrison told Sky News.
“NSW, I have no doubt, has the gold standard contact tracing system, not just in Australia, but in the world.”
That phrase always evoked ripples of anger south of the border, where it became viewed as shorthand for the Morrison government’s perceived indifference toward Victoria’s struggle, and blatant favouring of a Liberal-run state.
Accusations of favouritism peaked two weeks ago, when the Victorian government wrongly accused the Commonwealth of providing NSW more income support during lockdown than their state received. Morrison couldn’t wear off being tagged as “the prime minister for NSW”.
But the relationship between the state government and Canberra has always been more complicated than the constant praise might suggest. Throughout the last few months, long before Sydney’s Delta outbreak, there’s been tension bubbling away, largely around the vaccine rollout.
Back in March, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said he was “extremely angry” at the Commonwealth about the distribution of vaccines. In April, Berejiklian was calling on the federal government to display more urgency around the rollout and increase supply. Throughout the outbreak in Sydney, the premier has barely restrained her frustration at the state’s inability to provide more vaccines. Privately, state Liberals sound a lot like federal Labor in their assessment of the rollout.
The prime minister for NSW no more
Friday’s national cabinet meeting was a hammer-blow to any sense of national togetherness. It also signalled the end of any dregs of pro-NSW bias from the feds. Berejiklian’s request for extra doses of Pfizer to be reallocated from other states toward western Sydney was flatly rejected, even though the state government believes it could hasten the city’s return to some kind of normal. Instead, Morrison believes lockdowns, not vaccines, are Sydney’s way out.
“There is not an alternative to the lockdown in NSW for bringing this under control,” he said yesterday.
Just days earlier, Morrison had tried to talk up the need for more people to get vaccinated, blaming the Australian Technical Advisory Committee on Immunisation for causing uncertainty around the AstraZeneca vaccine. Now, he wants Sydney to strap-in for a long lockdown.
Meanwhile, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet’s pleas for JobKeeper to be reinstated have so far been ignored, with the Morrison government arguing the current form of emergency income support is sufficient.
Both boosting vaccine supply, and ensuring people are paid to stay at home would be critical in stopping an outbreak that has now become entrenched in essential workplaces, where the virus is resistant to any further shock-and-awe tightening of restrictions.
Morrison has rejected both. Once the favoured state, Morrison now refuses to give NSW what it needs.
Morrison has never been the PM for all of NSW, not even for all of Sydney. As Dr Chant has repeatedly pointed out, the virus is largely spread by young people living in particular geographic areas – western and south-western areas. This is where the warehouses that supply the city are concentrated. Its residents run the supply chains that keep the city going, They have to move across the city for their other jobs in hospitality, care giving & other essential services. Many domestic workers and cleaners are paid cash in hand.
By denying them proper assistance Morrison is damning the city, the state & ultimately the country to long term pain. The reason he doesn’t care is that these regions are not only Labor Party heartland, they also have nothing to do with his core support base – the Pentecostalists & religious fundamentalists of the Shire (south) and the Hills (North-west).
He really is a grub.
These are largely the migrant areas, and the Coalition love to exploit migrants and foreign labour; in fact it’s why the Rodent increased migration 3 fold, to dovetail with his killing off of unions and Work Choices. In all nations that exploit migrants the virus has run riot in these communities, due to such exploitation.
That alignment is pretty clear isn’t it?
The cause of the US death toll is only different in that, apart from exploiting migrants, the underclass is general is no better treated.
The surge in cases in the red, non vaccinated states may prove to be a Darwinian experiment of which Mengele could only have dreamed.
What’s the point in perpetuating this lie that NSW “successfully managed sizeable outbreaks while avoiding lockdowns”?
To use the Crossroads outbreak as an example, if you think an outbreak that went on and on (causing the rest of the country to lock them out for months) and where they never identified the cause is, “successful[…] manage[ment]” then we have very different ideas of what ‘success’ means. My definition, for example, does not redefine failure as success. My definition does not burden people with ridonkulous testing requirements, either.
First one, crossroads, northern beaches and now this. That makes 4 by my count. We’re catching up.
It’s a challenging exercise to recall any pronouncement by Morrison which has aged well. Certainly not the one about 4 Million doses of vaccine being administered by the end of March – unless he meant March 2022?
The NSW government has failed & failed spectacularly. Morrison’s cutting them loose because he doesn’t want to be associated with failure. He’ll be back to take the credit when things improve. Meanwhile, he’s always believed in lockdowns.
Maybe NSW wasn’t provided with more actual income support, but waiving the need to have low assets was favoritism wasn’t it?
The per capita figure was indeed higher in NSW, though the gross figure higher in VIC