Two COVID timelines weigh heavily on Scott Morrison, as states split on opening up and Christmas gets closer
If you're feeling the daily outpouring of information about COVID outbreaks, Doherty modelling and timetables for re-opening have descended into a wall of incomprehensible epidemiological figures and political sidesteps, you would not be alone.
Perhaps never has so much information that doesn't really help anyone, misleads many, and fails to answer basic questions been thrown around with such gay abandon by our political leaders.
Let's reduce it to a few different timelines to see if that helps.
The first one is the next eight weeks: September and October. It seems to be one of the few things that our federal, state and territory leaders agree on (though some more explicitly than others), is that things are going to get really, really bad in this period.
"Bad", however, has lots of different meanings. In NSW, and to a lesser degree in Victoria, it's going to mean not just case numbers, but hospitalisation rates and deaths reaching daily levels that we have just not seen in Australia so far in this pandemic.
That's just a function of the maths: the rate at which infections are increasing is that much faster than the rate at which governments, let alone people, can even hope to be fully vaccinated.
That has "bad", alarming implications for the health system. It has "bad", big degrees of difficulty for both political leaders and communities who are already fraying at the edges as a result of the pressures that lockdowns have put on them to date — psychologically and economically for starters.
Morrison's 'look over there' tool
There is also "bad" in the fact that there is no longer clear national agreement on what the ambition or strategy is for dealing with COVID, let alone an ambition or strategy for how we come out of it. It's also "bad" that there is so much politics now being engaged in all this.
It is even "bad" to see the breakdown of the false ideas that there is a binary choice between "lockdown or let it rip", or that "everything will be fine at 70 or 80 per cent vaccination", since people are left in just as confusing a nether world of what happens next.
Things that were definitely ruled out a couple of weeks ago because #freedom — like mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports — are now being increasingly mentioned or adopted. In the name of freedom.
Which brings us to a second timeline... or perhaps just a time: Christmas. The Prime Minister was going on a couple of weeks ago about wanting to be in a position to ensure families could get together around the Christmas table.
His failure to lead his own government to deliver on its own responsibilities (for example, quarantine and a national vaccine rollout) or even various stated goals and targets, had him trying to shift the blame to the states for failing to open up. And the imagery of Christmas was perhaps his most "look over there" tool to hand.
But he's not the only one. State and territory leaders also know the political pressure they are under to ensure their constituents will be able to spend Christmas together — whether in the same city, or across state or international borders — and face their own balancing act on the politics of recognising those pressures and keeping their communities safe.
That doesn't mean everything will be opened up by Christmas, just that there is an inexorable pressure to get as many people vaccinated and/or given some travel rights by the beginning of the Christmas school holidays, whatever the rhetoric is from each state just now about keeping closed or trying to open.
National cabinet spin and transparency
The tussle will continue within national cabinet, and in the way the national cabinet discussion is framed. That is, with the continuing message that the Prime Minister is trying to wrangle wayward states along one similar road, and with the states just exasperated at having to explain the realities on the ground to a prime minister they believe has no idea about the practicalities of vaccination rollouts, tracing regimes or pressures on health systems.
Of course, the main thing we now get from national cabinet is the spin, and occasionally some modelling that gets furiously debated by people who haven't read it. And we won't be getting much else either, after the Prime Minister moved legislation this week to ensure that all of the documentation of national cabinet is subject to cabinet-in-confidence rules.
But transparency has never really been the Prime Minister's thing. Or quite delivering on what you promise. Or getting the timing right on actually doing stuff so you don't have to then rush it all at the last moment in a cack-handed way.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-04/covid-timelines-states-split-as-christmas-gets-closer/100433208
Home 
