POLITICS NOW – COVID AND THE ECONOMY

As Sydney’s lockdown due to riding cases of the Delta strain of COVID took their toll, The Sydney Institute began another round of Zoom meetings for its members.  First in the series was a discussion with Jennifer Hewett, National Affairs Columnist for The Australian Financial Review and Aaron Patrick, Senior Correspondent for The Australian Financial Review on the political situation confronting Australia’s leaders, both political and those determining health and safety regulations during the time of pandemic. The Zoom meeting was held on 19 July 2021.

POLITICS NOW – COVID AND THE ECONOMY

AARON PATRICK

Thanks Gerard, thanks for the nice introduction. I’m going to try and talk tonight about the prospects for the re-election of the Morrison Government, because I think all of us who are deeply immersed in politics are probably thinking about that a lot. Clearly, that’s what the government is obsessed about.

Obviously, we had the Newspoll this morning with the Labor Party ahead 53-47. This this was the biggest gap there’s been in Newspoll numbers since before the 2019 election. Now, the methodology of Newspolls has changed since then. So it could be an errant number – the margin of error for these polls is 2-3 per cent – but it still continues a trend which is that the Labor Party has been ahead in Newspoll since 31 January 2021. This is a pretty big gap for Newspoll.

The big question is, why is the Coalition, in the middle of a crisis and incredibly strong economic growth, doing so badly in the polls? The obvious reason is, as we all know, because the vaccine rollout is perceived to have failed and the Federal Government and Scott Morrison are taking the blame for this. It also shows that after some misstarts last year for opposition leader Anthony Albanese, they are now quite effective. The opposition is on its game and has prosecuted the vaccine issue pretty strongly from the start. In fact, they were ahead of public opinion in criticising the rollout, or pace of the rollout, of the vaccines.

What I’m interested in, in particular, is whether the reality of the situation matches the perceptions of federal government failure? I would argue it doesn’t. I would argue Australia is actually doing reasonably well with the vaccine rollout. I looked at the figures today and we’re ranked about 110^th in the world, only five places below New Zealand, in terms of covering our population with the vaccines. Sixty per cent of those over 50 have already been vaccinated at least once and three quarters of people over 70 have already been vaccinated once. The total number is about 10.1 million, which is pretty solid.

The real measure of how we’re doing during the pandemic, at this point, should not be – if you’re thinking about it objectively – is not how many people are vaccinated, but how many people have died. We are obviously in the bottom 20 per cent of deaths per capita in the world. The total number at the moment is around 914 people in Australia who have died, which is about the same number of people who died from the flu in 2019.

There remain two political problems with the vaccines. One is that the federal government set expectations too high initially. They said we were at the front of the queue and people believed them, because Australians are used to being told that they are world leaders and the world is jealous of us. So, Australians believed the Prime Minister when he said that. We may have been at the head of the queue at the time, but clearly we weren’t to stay there.

I do think vaccine problems have been accidental. The University of Queensland vaccine sounded like it would have been very effective, but no one realised it was based on the HIV virus, and when you’ve got a false positive reading for HIV, they just decided the population wouldn’t take it. They were probably right. Then, we ran into problems with AstraZeneca, in part because some doctors talked up, unfairly, the potential harm that the AstraZeneca could do. So, that vaccine was partially discredited, which hurt the vaccine take-up.

However, the big underlying problem is that voters have adjusted their expectations in Australia. As the Prime Minister said, “We’re prisoners of our success.” So, voters want no COVID and their freedoms. This expectation means that even anti lockdown governments like NSW have to take measures to try and eliminate the disease, even though elimination has been always agreed, at National Cabinet, as not Australia’s objective. Gladys Berejiklian was using the word “quash” today. It seems to me, clearly, that we have an undeclared elimination approach in Australia.

At the same time, we’ve got state governments which are really good at shifting blame for any problems, to the federal government. Whenever they do so, those messages get amplified, because political journalism loves conflicts. So, that leaves the Morrison Government in this terribly tricky situation of being held responsible for factors which are partly, but not entirely, out of its control. These are issues of the vaccine and the issue of quarantine and quarantine failures.

It’s interesting to note that the current outbreak was, apparently, caused not by failure of hotel quarantine, but by a professional driver who was exposed to an American aircrew, who were actually flying a cargo plane. Nonetheless, I think there’s a perception in the community that the federal government, because they didn’t set up quarantine centres out in the countryside, out in the bush, a long way from populations, therefore must share a lot of the blame for what is perceived to be a failure of hotel quarantine. Although, I would argue, given the huge number of people who’ve come through hotel quarantine and the relatively small number of leaks, it’s actually been really successful.

A reader of The Australian today summed up the public mood. It was from a gentleman called Miles Long who wrote, “I want the Morrison Government to give us a firm roadmap out of this mess. I’d like the fully vaccinated to receive more freedoms, which would really encourage others to get vaccinated. Singapore has done this and provides a good example.” In a way, that sums up a lot of the public mood. People are over this and they want to get released. And they want some leadership from the government. Meanwhile, the federal government was at one point looking at what happened in the state elections, in Western Australia, in Queensland. They thought that in a lockdown election they would romp it in, because people would be so grateful that the government had stopped their parents and grandparents from dying.

The mood is moving on as this year progresses and people are going to place their freedoms at a higher priority. We’re not there yet, but we’re in a position of transition. Now, does this mean the Morrison Government is going to lose the election? Not necessarily. Once you get going, governments are actually really good at getting things done. It looks like we’re going to have 6 million doses of Pfizer arrive in Australia over the next six weeks. And there’s no reason to think that Pfizer won’t meet the target of 40 million doses by the end of the year, which will mean that within 4-5 months, every Australian who wants to be vaccinated should be able to do so. You’ve even got NSW, today, talking about extending the vaccination coverage to teenagers and children. Planning is clearly underway. You’ll also notice the government’s shifting rhetoric. Today, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said, “What we’re saying to Australians is that there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

When you’re in the middle of a big political controversy, or big public controversy, it often feels like it will never end. But controversy always does end. Three months ago, there was a kerfuffle about a temporary ban on flights from India and it was a huge story for, probably, two or three weeks. The ban was described as racist, the government had threatened to send people to jail, or to fine them $50,000 if they tried to sneak in. All this because a new COVID strain threatened to overwhelm the quarantine centres. That strain was later renamed the Delta strain. It was such a big deal that Senator Kristina Keneally, in parliamentary hearings, questioned DFAT officials aggressively about how many children were stuck in India. She got international coverage. Today, that debate is entirely forgotten. After that, just a few weeks ago, foreign arrivals were halved, stranding tens of thousands of Australians overseas and it was barely debated.

One of the lessons out of this is that these kinds of political debates we have are very rarely, if ever, focused on the future. They’re all about the present. But when it comes to voting, the process people go through is very different. At the time people vote, they think about the future, more than the present controversies. They make a distinction about their self-interest and about the risk of changing government. So, can Morrison win the election? He has upset a lot of his conservative base and we have to be willing to place ourselves in the minds of future voters, once the current government problems are resolved, because he’s not going to go to an election with a situation like this.

In that window we have, between vaccines being available to everyone and presumably most Australians availing themselves of them, a decision has to be made about opening the borders and stopping lockdowns. You’ve got a window there which the government will presumably take advantage of and go to an election on. They’ll have the vaccine situation stabilised, they’ll be able to present a plan for the future, a post vaccine, post lockdown world. They’ll also, very importantly, be able to argue, credibly, “We have saved your jobs.”; “We have saved millions of people from the unemployment queues by the massive stimulus that we’ve given.”; ‘We’ve got you through this.”; “It’s been messy, but not that many people have died and not that many people have lost their jobs.”

Now, obviously, there will be a huge fiscal hangover and a lot of people are worried about that. We should look back at what happened in the GFC when the government borrowed a massive amount of money and that debt remained a decade later. But it took four years, for the political implications of that heavy borrowing on account of the GFC to be felt in the electorate. There was a fairly large gap between being able to borrow a lot of money and having to pay the political price for it.

I know a lot of fiscal conservatives are unhappy with debt heading to a trillion dollars, but I don’t think that will play a big political role in the next election. Incumbency has powerful advantages and it’s far too early to write off the Morrison Government. But I’ve got to say, I think Anthony Albanese has been badly underestimated as a Labor leader.