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

JENNIFER HEWITT

Thanks Aaron and thanks Gerard.

It’s too early to write off the Morrison Government. Voters do think about future risks, but I must say, one of the big selling points of the Morrison Government has been competence and ability to deliver. They keep saying “under promise and over delivery” is their catchphrase. The lingering memories of this are actually going to be very damaging. The next few months will be very testing indeed for the Morrison Government and community perceptions of them.

Labor is not making that much of an impact, really. They’re not particularly on their game at all. It’s quite hard to get credibility, but the fact is that the vaccine issue has been going so badly, it does give them a lot more space to try and present an alternative. I’ve been making a very bad joke today that I felt I was suffering from “Long Covid Columnitis”, because I have had to write so much about it over the last 18 months, but particularly over the last month.

Obviously, the columns, in a sense, write themselves day after day, even though we seem to be going around in ever smaller Covid circles. What is obvious, is that the politics of 2020 and success are very differently marked in 2021. Our success in holding the virus at bay and keeping the death rate low last year engendered a great sense of complacency about the need to rush vaccines or, really, even get vaccinated at all. The economic success of the bounce back, until just very recently, has only persuaded much of the community and state governments that Australia, of course, backed by lots of federal government spending, can always recover the economic costs of lockdown pretty quickly. Now, that assumption will be tested over time, but it’s certainly the dominant sentiment now. And it’s one that no politician is really going to question at the moment.

I spend my time divided by Melbourne and Sydney, so I spent a lot of time in Melbourne in lockdown last year. It was often criticised, including by me, because of its extended time. Many people thought it an unnecessarily harsh lockdown regime, particularly after repeated quarantine and contact tracing failures in Victoria, as well as a refusal to accept any responsibility for that. New South Wales, instead, became the national exemplar of an alternative approach that could work effectively to control outbreaks without shutting down the economy and almost all movement, which happened in Victoria, in particular. But, of course, as we know, now there is the advent of Delta, accelerated by NSW’s own egregious quarantine failure with the limousine driver and not insisting on driver vaccinations. Obviously, you can be unlucky but, clearly, they’ve got a whole lot of holes in the system.

It suddenly changed thinking about the smart response this year. So today, Daniel Andrews extended the lockdown that was supposed to end after five days. The mood is going to be miserable as it is lockdown number five. But, instead of looking at what’s happening in the rest of the world, people are looking at NSW. The political fall out is as helpful to Daniel Andrews as it is damaging for Gladys Berejiklian. Ironically, last year Andrews was often derided as “Dictator Dan”, with Berejiklian our heroine, but now community patience for that is running out.

The smaller states, of course, are always extremely cautious and Western Australia, naturally, is in a world of its own, completely isolated from the rest of the country and the world, happy to stay that way, and doing extremely well financially. So, I don’t think the “I told you so” from the rest of the country and even much of the NSW population will change, even as case numbers slowly – very slowly, it seems – reduce over some indefinite period in NSW. The celebration of NSW carefree Covid normal has turned to a growing resentment about how it has gone so wrong and when it finally may be possible to get out of Covid quicksand. Another example of that is the fact that we’ve now got empty construction sites all over Sydney, with restrictions that are much tougher even than they were in Victoria at the height of the lockdown last year.

This is another example of how the political management of Covid-19, despite the repeated claims by premiers and prime minister alike that it’s always the best scientific advice, is actually about political judgement and political risk. It’s not just that health advice always varies from expert to expert, state to state and country to country, rather than being somehow mysteriously bound by immutable, unarguable scientific facts. Governments do choose, and sometimes with unanticipated results. For example, the government did choose to follow ATAGI, the expert medical committee’s excessively cautious advice, demonising the risks of AstraZeneca for those under 60. That’s a very obvious example. Less obvious was something that came up today. A doctor in south west Sydney was saying, “Why wouldn’t you just concentrate all of that Pfizer on supplying and vaccinating anyone of any age in south west Sydney, as the most effective way to quickly stop the greater spread of the virus?”

Of course, political judgements mean this option is never going to be seriously debated. We also have the NSW government not prepared to concede it made a mistake in not going immediately into hard lockdown when faced with an outbreak of a much more infectious Delta variant in an unvaccinated community. I certainly was hoping they’d succeed, and I thought the gamble was worth it. Of course, I was wrong. And the government was very clearly wrong. Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant makes it clear her role is to provide broad principles and define public health objectives and then leave it to government on how best to implement that. Yet the NSW government simply insists they were following the best health advice at the time.

In relation to the cold turkey for the entire construction industry in NSW over two weeks, even for larger sites that do have Covid management plans, the Government decided staying open was going to spread the virus. Indeed, also because so many tradies, construction workers and site delivery workers come from the highly infected areas of south west Sydney as opposed to what happened in the northern suburbs of Sydney late last year and early this year. The economic cost of a massive disruption to such a key industry is going to be massive. In addition, Berejiklian today was extremely vague on how the new financial assistance for business and payments for individuals of up to $600 a week are going to possibly fill much of the economic hole being dug everyday of this extended lockdown. The signs, of course, always all point in the common direction which is far more federal assistance from Canberra.

Josh Frydenberg is very unhappy about this situation and very reluctant to entertain it at the moment. I do not think this will last. The federal government ceded far too much authority to the states to try to play tough guy now. Morrison understands the politics all too well. It may well be that – I agree with Aaron – the government will be in a much better position when it does actually have to go to an election. But the seats are tight and the Coalition has to pick up some seats, particularly in NSW, and maintain them all in Queensland. There are state rivalries to consider also. Daniel Andrews stood up on Thursday and said, “Well there’s no way Victorians are going to wait for a week, or wait to be eligible for a week” and within hours, Morrison had backed down. Those demands for more federal funds will intensify until vaccination rates are high enough to render lockdowns more or less redundant.

So, just how high is that? We’re going to have more and more arguments about this. At the moment, it is effectively an elimination strategy and has been for a long time, even if the Morrison Government refuses to call it that. It’s called aggressive suppression or quashing the virus, or whatever else they want to say. But we are going to have to face a judgement before long on politics opposed to health. You only have to look at the different assessments being made. Take Singapore or the UK. Obviously the most dramatic example is Freedom Day in the UK with about 50 per cent of people fully vaccinated and rising cases. Where Australia gets to on that is completely unknown in part because we have been so cautious and complacent about our own ability to shut down the virus entirely.

In Australia, there has been no target and we’re waiting for yet more medical advice, supposedly, on what the target should be. Berejiklian has been suggesting for some time – mainly because there was no target coming out of Canberra – that 10 million jabs or 80 per cent of the population, would need to be the trigger for being able to reopen completely and avoid lockdowns. Now, because of the susceptibility of children and teenagers to the Delta variant, she is saying this is equivalent to 62 per cent of all adults.

We all know that in many ways the first half is the easiest to get, because these people tend to be quite keen to get the vaccine. The problem now is the lack of supply and the scare stories about AstraZeneca, but as you get higher into percentages, those other numbers become much more difficult, much more delayed. I don’t think Australia’s even begun to deal with that.

None of this has been helped by what you would call a very clunky roll out, with the federal government insisting that GPs be the mainstay of it, despite the fact that the federal government has never been that good on delivering services. Services are the strength of state governments. So, we’ve yet to see that working particularly well, pharmacies are supposed to be coming on board but they haven’t really in any numbers yet. And the state run mass vaccination hubs, which would be the most efficient, are lacking the rather crucial ingredient of enough vaccines.

It’s going to be a long hard winter for the Morrison Government, and for most of the rest of us as well until we get to summer and, hopefully, a much more highly vaccinated population. I’m not as persuaded as Aaron, despite my doubts about how effectively the Labor Party has explained this, just how quickly government misjudgements and mistakes will be forgiven by the time of the election.