The committee and the Prime Minister are now having to seem tougher here. It's at odds with his economic agenda, which has already buckled as other nations have thrown everything at the financial crisis caused by the virus. It has been useful to hide unpopular decisions, framing them as being forced by medical advice. Increasingly, it is hard to conceal that politics is wagging the medical-advice dog.
Morrison's irritation has been accentuated by the fast unravelling of a united front from a "national cabinet" of which he was the undoubted leader. Now "politics" has intruded. No one defers to his opinion, or to that of his advisers. Victoria - over school closures - and other states have indicated their willingness to go it alone on particular measures. The Northern Territory and Tasmania have local needs and views. States are closing borders. Some players - state and federal - are leaking, to the detriment of the appearance of unity.
The feds have hardly helped themselves with the appalling fiasco of letting infected passengers from cruise ships go unchecked into the community. Nor with the evidence of a biosecurity collapse at airports. There are serious deficiencies in Commonwealth emergency management, and in how Border Force and federal quarantine authorities have dropped the ball. State incompetence has also been manifest. But, when the matter at issue is the entry of people into Australia, the buck ought to stop with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and his grand vizier, Mike Pezzullo.
It is being increasingly alleged by insiders that the various state and federal committees, whether in health departments or in the master one co-ordinated from within Prime Minister and Cabinet - were all too slow in preparing for an obvious deluge ahead. They seem to have failed to develop educational and advertising materials. They failed to secure stocks of vital medical supplies. Central office bureaucrats may have had good data on issues such as the availability of ventilators and acute care beds, and the "surge" capacity of different hospitals. But it seems clear that they were slow to engage with the health workers who would be dealing with cases on the ground. And even more obvious that the communications "strategies" were nearly all top-down rather than focused on interchanges with outside experts, professionals at the coalface, and the public generally. This will handicap treatment, and may cause more deaths.
