So, with Scott Morrison pulling the new AUKUS pact out of his hat, will we be off to a khaki election? It would hardly be the first election conservative governments have won by promising to save us from the threat to our north.
But that’s why I doubt it. For an issue to dominate an election campaign, it has to be in contention. National security is an issue that always favours the conservatives, so Labor won’t be offering any objection to AUKUS or nuclear subs.
Similarly, an issue that should figure large in the campaign is whether the Coalition is too conflicted over climate change to be worthy of re-election. But that issue naturally favours Labor, so Morrison won’t want to take up that fight.
Which leaves? The economy, stupid. Until the end of June, the economy was looking in great shape, better than it had been even before the pandemic. But the arrival of the Delta variant means that, right now, more than half the national economy is back in lockdown, and looking mighty sick.
Does it surprise you that Morrison’s so keen to see the south-eastern mainland states out of lockdown and the others opening their borders, and is pressing the premiers accordingly? He desperately needs the economy back looking trim and terrific by March – May at the latest.
Add to this the business community’s pressure to get back to business – “don’t bother me with all the COVID details” – and the public’s impatience to get life back to normal. Sydneysiders have had enough of lockdowns; Melburnians have had more than enough – something even “Dictator” Dan Andrews can see.
So Gladys Berejiklian and Andrews have added their separate modelling by the Burnet Institute to Morrison’s National Plan modelling by the Doherty Institute – not to mention the independent modelling by the Kirby Institute – and announced their “road maps” for opening up their economies progressively once vaccination rates have reached 70 per cent and 80 per cent of the eligible population, expected in mid-to-late October and early November.
NSW is projected to be only about a week ahead of Victoria, and the gap between 70 and 80 per cent only about two weeks.
Everyone’s so pleased to be getting on with it that we risk losing sight of the high risks the two premiers are running. If all goes to plan, we’ll be back to a new (still-masked) normal by early next year, and the economy will be humming in time for a March election.
But models, based on a host of unmentioned explicit and implicit assumptions, inevitably give politicians and punters a false sense of certainty. No model can accurately predict something as mercurial as human behaviour. And, as we’ve learnt, a new coronavirus knows nothing of models and is a law unto itself.
The risk Andrews and Berejiklian face is that so many unvaccinated people contract the virus that our hospital system is overwhelmed, with people dying because they were turned away, leading to a number of deaths the public finds unacceptable. Whether they press on or turn back, the premiers would be in deep trouble.
The first risk comes from an ambulance and hospital system that, 18 months after the crisis began, is already at full stretch. The premiers tell us our wonderful health workers are coping; the message from ambos, doctors and nurses on the ground says they’re close to collapse.
The next risk comes from the inconvenient truth that our vaccination targets of 70 and 80 per cent of people 16 and older turn out to be just 56 and 64 per cent of the full population. That’s a huge proportion of unvaccinated friends and relations.
Remember, too, that these are statewide averages. They conceal less-vaccinated pockets of particularly vulnerable groups – the disabled, the Indigenous, for instance – and a city-country gap that leaves many rural towns hugely exposed, together with their limited hospital capacity.
Even the decision to move as soon as the 70 and 80 per cent targets are reached, rather than wait another fortnight for vaccines to become fully effective, carries a risk of higher infection.
Both the Burnet and revised Doherty modelling say starting to open up at 70 per cent rather than 80 per cent is likely to involve significantly higher infections, hospitalisations and deaths. Why take that risk just to avoid waiting another fortnight or so?
Morrison’s national plan called for all states to open up together once all had reached the 70 and 80 per cent targets, but now NSW and Victoria are going first. This increases the risk that, despite the other states’ closed borders, the virus will spread to them – where the lesser threat of catching the virus has caused vaccination rates to be much lower.
The risk for Berejiklian and Andrews is that they could be moving the Delta outbreak from the city to the country. The risk for Morrison is that, by pressing those two to open up early, he could be moving the outbreak from one half of the economy to the other.
