(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Ever since NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian undermined the national reopening plan by letting the Delta variant escape across Sydney, (then New South Wales, then Victoria, the ACT and, as a wee gift to our Kiwi cousins, New Zealand), Scott Morrison has had few good options to try to recover his position. It’s been gold standard political sabotage from the NSW government towards its federal friends.

There are two issues: the immediate threat to the reopening plan from states taking the view that they’ll be damned if they reopen borders to NSW while it’s one giant petri dish of COVID, and the longer-term issue of how Morrison shifts the politics of the pandemic away from territory that helps Labor. It’s been in that zone since the prime minister repeated “it’s not a race” over and over while the vaccination rollout fell apart.

Morrison’s position on sticking to the vaccination-driven reopening schedule even if NSW is racking up hundreds of cases a day — a position that took several days to emerge — is that it makes no difference. One way or another, with exponential growth we will hit a huge number of cases very quickly once we start reopening, whether we start from zero or from 840.

Yesterday the prime minister’s office — which routinely completely ignores requests for information from the media — took the unusual step of sending out a mass background brief to journalists explaining all this, evidently worried that Albanese and Labor premiers were cutting through with the argument that the reopening plan was predicated on very low levels of community transmission.

It also suggested that Morrison’s public communications strategy around the reopening plan, and the Doherty Institute modelling underpinning it, had failed.

And the argument, if you think about it, is basically: “starting with high levels of community transmission just means we’re buggered a little bit earlier than we would otherwise be, but we’re buggered just the same.”

To help that process along, yesterday Morrison released an article called “Time to shift focus from case numbers to hospitalisations” — with gallery journalists having been briefed in advance that he would be aiming to shift the mindset of voters. We now have to ignore the case numbers and concentrate on how quickly Australians are getting vaccinated and how severe the impact is on our health system.

That of course suits the interests of the Berejiklian and Morrison governments, who are jointly responsible for the NSW outbreak through Berejiklian’s lockdown hesitancy, Morrison’s rollout debacle and their joint failure on quarantine. A focus on the case numbers serves up a reminder every day of a staggering failure of government that has left thousands sick and scores dead.

But the call for a “shift of focus” away from the source of embarrassment to new measurements and a new approach lacks credibility when the two governments involved can’t be trusted.

Can anyone trust that Berejiklian will make decisions based on hard evidence, rather than the Liberal Party’s business base pressing for reopening? Does anyone trust that this isn’t just another Morrison announcement designed to get him out of political trouble?

Does anyone trust that either government has actually learnt from the debacle of this year?

Answering that question in the affirmative is difficult when both governments are so hostile to accountability and resistant to transparency. Morrison has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even a pro forma acknowledgment that he might have badly botched the rollout. Other Morrison failures — quarantine, the COVIDSafe app, supporting Clive Palmer’s effort to prevent Western Australia from isolating itself — are presumably supposed to be forgotten.

The message to voters from Sydney and Canberra is that no one should hold them accountable for this disaster, and we should all move along to “living with COVID” — with the attendant hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of deaths — earlier than expected, without any evidence that either government recognises its failings or has learnt from them.

A genuine leader wouldn’t merely apologise — although that would be an important step — but would provide a proper explanation for the bad calls that led us to 800+ cases a day in Australia’s biggest state and seeding outbreaks elsewhere. That might start to give voters some faith that “shifting focus” isn’t just another moment of political spin.