NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian mask
Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Gladys Berejiklian has consistently refused to be held accountable for her crucial errors in managing what should have been a minor risk of quarantine breach but which has led to tens of thousands of infections (a record 1290 today), scores of deaths, a hospital system nearing crisis point and a horrific threat to NSW Indigenous communities left behind in the vaccine strollout.

Although she refuses to acknowledge it, her business-friendly approach to managing outbreaks compounded the initial failure of regulation around safe transport of aircrews, which provided the seed for the current outbreak. Her reluctance to place Sydney in lockdown, and the mild lockdown she imposed when she did, not merely added to the current NSW crisis but to seeding the outbreaks in Victoria, the ACT and New Zealand, and what is increasingly looking like a return to recession for Australia.

By normal political standards, even the debased standards that characterise modern politics, that should be more than enough to resign over.

But Berejiklian’s management of the pandemic has delivered NSW into the worst of both worlds. It remains locked down, with businesses crippled, workers left idle, Australia’s largest economy frozen, its citizens prevented from travelling, enduring draconian restrictions on their lives, and prevented from participating in the most basic rituals of everyday life.

At the same time, NSW “lives with COVID”. Case numbers have topped 1000 a day. Ignore the case numbers, Berejiklian says, and focus on vaccinations. But the NSW hospital system is showing signs of severe strain. In the past seven days, hospitalisations from COVID have increased 46%. Patients in ICU have increased 34% in a week. If this is “living with COVID”, the Berejiklian government offers a salutary lesson for business and anti-lockdown spruikers: the impact on the health system is colossal.

Moreover, Berejiklian can offer no end in sight. She is anxious to end lockdowns, but that will only send a much bigger surge of COVID patients into hospital and into ICU — the majority of them unvaccinated, many older but vaccinated people, and younger people too.

Having created this outbreak through her own misjudgments, Berejiklian has mismanaged it as well, inflicting outbreaks on other states and countries, and leaving her state in a limbo of living with COVID while being locked down.

The NSW premier doesn’t have many reserves of goodwill to draw on. Her relationship with disgraced former MP Daryl Maguire displayed — in the most generous possible interpretation — truly spectacular misjudgment, however much she might like to wish it away as romantic naivety. Her tolerance of pork-barrelling and rorting and her own office’s efforts to cover them up are a disgrace. Her resistance to accountability and basic scrutiny is the last thing citizens need at a time of crisis.

NSW needs a different approach, and a different leader — one who can offer its citizens something other than the worst of both worlds, a leader who, if they want to “live with COVID”, understands what that will require of the NSW government. A leader who can instil some confidence in an economy that will struggle to rebound even if lockdown was lifted today. Berejiklian isn’t working. Her time is up.