Dearth of national leadership costly when politicians rely on citizens to fix a crisis

For some time, national cabinet has been a forum for Scott Morrison to be dictated to by state leaders with more competence, more leadership capacity, and more at stake than a prime minister who’s not up to the job. Last Friday’s meeting was no exception.

The “National Plan to transition Australia’s National COVID-19 Response” makes “early, stringent and short lockdowns” the centre of the current phase (“vaccinate, prepare and pilot”, whatever that means). Gone are the days of Morrison hectoring Daniel Andrews for locking down Melbourne and praising the Berejiklian government’s steely determination not to go into lockdown. Indeed, gone are the days when Berejiklian was disinclined to lockdown early. You can bet a substantial proportion of the NSW state domestic product that she now wishes she’d gone a whole lot earlier.

According to the plan, even once 70% of the >16 population has been vaccinated, lockdowns are “less likely but possible”. Even once 80% of the target population is vaccinated, “highly targeted lockdowns” remain on the menu.

That is, lockdowns as far as the eye can see. In Sydney, home of the Damascene conversion to the virtues of confining people to their homes, there’s limited evidence so far that weeks of lockdown have moved the city any closer to an end. The outbreak in south-east Queensland confirms that the latest variation of the virus is brutally effective at finding and exploiting any weak link. Another major economic centre is likely to spend a fortnight in lockdown at least. Only West Australians, protected by the Nullarbor and a premier hell bent on keeping the slightest risk out of his state, can be relatively calm — and even then a quarantine slip-up could send Perth into lockdown.

The transition plan is all well and good — as were the previous Plans and Strategies — but there’s a palpable sense that at the moment the only one actually in charge is the virus itself. The federal government has already sidelined itself; now state premiers, currently charged with running the country’s health and economic security, are at the mercy of a virus that defies all efforts at suppression, and leaving it to the population to save themselves by getting vaccinated. Rarely have governments faced such a crisis with so limited a range of tools, and been so dependent on their own citizens to deliver a resolution.

It’s here that the lack of national leadership is harmful. The responsibility of the Morrison government for vaccination and quarantine failures (along with the states) has been endlessly rehearsed, along with the amuse–bouche of idiocy that was the COVIDSafe app. And in time that should be subjected to proper scrutiny by some form of judicial review. Morrison’s own failings have been on regular display. But perhaps of equal significance is the opportunity cost of not having an effective national leader, one who could give Australians reassurance and a sense that someone was in charge and knew what they were doing; a leader who is trusted, who understands the idea of national unity and can make people believe in the “all in it together” rhetoric that induces cynicism when projected by current leaders. For once, the nostalgia for the golden years of Bob Hawke isn’t misplaced.

In the absence of such leadership, the reliance on Australians to do the right thing and get a jab in a timeframe that will make the “National Plan” anything less than a multi-year endeavour looks problematic. The biggest driver of vaccinations appears to be having a major outbreak and a lockdown that focuses people’s minds on the risk of getting ill. Will we have to go through that in every state before we reach the kind of ambitious vaccination levels spelt out in the transition plan? Are we still going to be doing this next autumn?