on Saturday, the festival of self-congratulation known as the Liberal Party conference in Canberra was nauseating.
No sign of an apology between backslaps and Bob Menzies worshipping, no promise to do better in future, and no offer to help.
The Morrison government had three jobs in the pandemic: Quarantine, vaccination and money.
It ducked out of the first, messed up the second and stopped doing the third too early.
As a result, Australia’s shell of virus freedom is brittle.
Not only is Victoria in lockdown because of aquarantine failurein South Australia, vaccination and testing in Melbourne is in complete chaos.
At the heart of this sudden outbreak of official incompetence is the fact that Australia’s elimination strategy happened by accident.
There was no discussion about it, no study and report, no announcement, just state premiers deciding to do hard lockdowns and closing state borders, and the federal government closing international borders.
And so here we are, or at least there we were: No community transmission of COVID-19. Elimination.
But if you planned to completely eliminate a very infectious pandemic virus and keep it that way, you obviously wouldn’t use hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals, because it’s not 100 per cent effective, and you would make sure vaccination achieved herd immunity for the local population as quickly as possible.
And just in case, you would build a national testing and tracing infrastructure that could respond quickly to any outbreak, anywhere, perhaps using a national system of QR codes.
But elimination has never been national policy. In fact, there has never been any sign of any clear national policy at all.
When even John Hewson and Alan Kohler are criticising Morrison for all the same things I, and quite a few others here have been saying for months, you really should consider that its not lefties saying it....
