If you tuned in to the news on Friday you would have noticed the federation was in a mood. The reasons are multi-factorial but we can begin with Scott Morrison’s captain’s call.
On Thursday the prime minister told reporters his cabinet had just elected to open Australia’s vaccination program to an extra 8.6 million people. All Australians aged over 16 would be eligible for a Covid-19 vaccination from 30 August. This newsflash was delivered in the spirit of sound the trumpet, enter the all-conquering hero.
Given that the states are actually delivering the jabs in arms, you’d think a heads-up would be warranted. But the first the premiers heard of this development was when the words rolled out of Morrison’s mouth.
Normally, when capital I ideas like this crest unexpectedly in the prime ministerial suite, there is a hurried heads-up to the national cabinet colleagues through an efficient group communication. But not on Thursday, and there was one obvious problem.
At this point there isn’t available supply to contemplate any such an expansion (although Team Morrison, by all accounts, continues to scour the globe for opportunities like the acquisition of Pfizer jabs from Poland – picture Australian emissaries creeping quietly in camouflage, peering through field glasses, so as not to startle any tut-tut merchants from the EU).
When Morrison popped 16-year-olds in the queue, anxious parents started hitting the phones to state vaccination clinics. But there were no appointments to book because there weren’t jabs to administer.
Roll forward to Friday, and the regular national cabinet meeting. The general Morrison has charged with transforming his botched vaccine strollout to rollout briefed the premiers about the developments. When Lt Gen Frewen arrived at the point of informing the premiers about Morrison’s captain’s call – that the program would now be opened for 16- to 39-year-olds – he noted that the announcement had been about opening the program for future bookings, not for actual vaccinations.
It’s fair to say that a number of state and territory leaders don’t really have the patience at the moment to appear as cameos in an episode of The Hollowmen, so the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, got stuck in (in a measured way, people insist – despite what you imagine, leaders don’t shout at national cabinet, most of the shouting happens on the way in or immediately afterwards, so the meetings are generally orderly).
Andrews noted that the prime minister’s signalling on Thursday had real-world consequences.
It would very likely undermine the take-up of AstraZeneca among young people, he said. This would be a significant problem in the middle of a Delta outbreak, given that there wasn’t enough Pfizer to give them, at least not yet, and building up public confidence in AstraZeneca had taken some time, given, well … everything.
Nobody disagreed with this homily from Andrews, who had steamed into the virtual meeting straight after warning Victorians straight down the barrel of a television camera that Melbourne would be Sydney in the blink of an eye if people didn’t stay home this weekend. Andrews had thundered (correctly on current information) that Victoria was “right on the edge” of its Delta outbreak “getting away from us”.
The discussion in national cabinet then bumped from vaccines that weren’t there to modelling from the Doherty Institute that had been configured around a very different scenario to the one now playing out in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. This Doherty modelling – which has achieved cult status in political discourse as the roadmap out of our privations – underpins a national strategy piloting Australia to whatever Covid-normal looks like.
But some state and territory leaders think a substantive revision is now in order in light of evolving circumstances. There’s not a handful of active cases, as the expert modellers originally envisaged – in New South Wales cases are now surging at 600-plus.
The chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Barr, had set up a discussion about the various nuances of the Doherty work in an interview before Friday’s meeting. With that advance warning, presumably knowing there was some discomfort incoming, Morrison declared before the meeting that if premiers and chief ministers failed to ease restrictions when 70% and 80% vaccination targets were met (which is broadly what Doherty portends), they risked breaching a “deal with the Australian people” and losing economic supports.
All very hairy chested.
But in the room, Morrison’s message was apparently more nuanced. The prime minister told the premiers Doherty wasn’t a set-and-forget exercise, there would be an ongoing adjustment of inputs to the model. More work would be done. But from what I can gather, the commonwealth certainly isn’t countenancing any fundamental renegotiation of the terms of the national plan.
And what is that national plan? Well, it depends on who you ask.
Morrison, right now, is driving towards a vision he has of vaccines safely in arms, and families gathering at their beach houses for Christmas dinner, hugging each other with gay abandon and running around in an endless evening without a curfew or a police helicopter hovering overhead.
The happy Christmas that glows like a beacon in Morrison’s incessant strategising looms as a pleasant pit stop on the road to a federal election in the first half of next year. In this post-Christmas election of the prime minister’s imaginings, the voters of Australia will be somehow generous enough to forgive and forget the absolute, mind-boggling, clustercuss of 2021.
Morrison has set the timetable for the back half of this year to track relentlessly towards that outcome. What remains unclear is whether the pandemic knows how to bend to the prime minister’s immediate political needs.
Now bear with me as I loop back to the anxious parents. One of the reasons tensions are ratcheting up once again among the tiers of the federation reflects the fact we are at a pivot point in how Australians experience the pandemic.
Just as the Doherty modelling lags some specifics of our present reality, our understanding of the virus and the challenges it presents lags events in the real world.
The first and second waves of the pandemic belted elderly people. That’s why we vaccinated them first. Now Delta is infecting a lot of young people, both because it’s a new strain and because young people in Australia aren’t vaccinated. As many people have now correctly observed, coronavirus is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
The Labor senator Katy Gallagher spoke for all parents in Australia this week after her teenage daughter became infected in a high school cluster in Canberra’s outbreak. Gallagher fretted that the terms of the public health battle had shifted and that somehow we’d failed to protect children.
The audible fretting of Australian parents leads us back to where I started – with Morrison’s captain’s call.
That’s why Morrison rushed out an announcement about expanding vaccinations to cover more teenagers on Thursday and why there will be a god almighty rush to set up the vaccination of schoolchildren, pronto, even though the co-chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, Prof Allen Cheng, said only a few days ago that advice on opening up the program to 12- to-15-year-olds would be delivered “in coming months”. The audible fretting of parents.
What we are seeing now is a clash of two objectives. Morrison is pushing towards his Christmas miracle – that Doherty-backed reopening. But while everybody in the country craves Covid-normal, nobody wants that gear shift to come at the expense of the health and wellbeing of their children.
Barr put the conflicting desires best before Friday’s national cabinet. “We’ve talked about the risk of a pandemic amongst the unvaccinated but part of that was on the assumption people have the choice to be vaccinated but didn’t, and there’s only so much a government can do,” he told me.
“But my view is Australian parents will just not tolerate the country opening up with their kids being exposed, because that is where the virus is going to go.
“What we’ve experienced in the ACT in the last week gives a pretty clear indication that the vaccines are working to protect people because we are not having many cases in the older parts of the population who are vaccinated.
“But [relaxing public health restrictions pre-emptively] puts kids at risk. And that is going to be very concerning to millions of Australians.”
