Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Image: AAP/David Gray)

Scott Morrison wants Australia to come out of its cave. Yesterday, the first of a new sitting fortnight, the prime minister repeatedly hammered a message of returning to freedom, of living with the virus once 70%-80% of adults are vaccinated. 

“The national plan we have developed and agreed is our pathway to living with this virus. That is our goal, to live with this virus, not to live in fear of it,” he said.

He wants Australia to shift its thinking, cast aside the fixation with case numbers and doughnut days and start viewing hospitalisations and deaths as the key metrics for COVID success. In other words “COVID zero” is dead, at least as far as Canberra is concerned.

 

Morrison is right to start preparing us for the future. Australia has to open up at some point. Once it does wind back some restrictions, case numbers will inevitably rise. Vaccines will protect many from death and serious illness. Pushback from some premiers who have maintained that lockdowns will be used even when vaccine targets are met is a clear sign of how messy the shift in our thinking is already proving.

But like so much of what Morrison touches — from the vaccine rollout to the Afghanistan evacuation — his attempt to prepare Australia for a post-vaccinated world suffers from a case of too little, too late.

We’ve known for months that Australians would need to fundamentally readjust their expectations around case numbers and, one day, living with the virus. Articulating what that means, and guiding the country through such a shift, requires a kind of vision and leadership Morrison lacks. As a prime minister he tends to be reactive rather than proactive. His messaging on this has seemed lost ever since Sydney went into a lockdown he’d encouraged the NSW government to delay.

In early July, his first announcement of a plan to have a plan to return to normal — marked by a promise that lockdowns were now a matter of last resort — was overtaken by history before it even started. As the case numbers in NSW skyrocketed over the past few weeks, Morrison appeared to push for an extended lockdown as the state’s only way forward. 

“The lockdown in Sydney has to work for it to be lifted. It has to work,” he said last week. 

Now, he seems adamant that once we hit the targets in the Doherty Institute’s modelling, lockdowns must end, no matter the case numbers. Morrison’s hard embrace of reopening isn’t so much a disorienting tonal shift as another reflection of his prime ministership’s defining characteristic: the tendency to see everything as a political problem. 

Suspecting, correctly, that Australians are at a collective breaking point with restrictions, and that by 2022 tough measures to eliminate the virus won’t be the vote winners they were even 12 months earlier, Morrison is trying to draw battlelines for a freedom election.

It’s the Coalition — the party committed to removing restrictions and saving Christmas — pitted against Labor, the party of lockdowns. 

“Those opposite may seek to undermine the national plan, they may seek to run down the national plan, they may seek to steal the hope of Australians and hope for the worst,” Morrison said in question time yesterday. 

Morrison suspects Labor is a little wedged here. The opposition has appeared to equivocate on just how open Australia should be at 70% or 80% vaccination. Labor’s caution, however, doesn’t mean it opposes reopening. Nor does it mean the next election will be a battle between lockdowns and freedom. 

But Morrison, a politician who loves blunt, reductive messaging, is already trying to frame it that way. And it means his push to end COVID zero isn’t an act of bold policy vision, but another attempt to own Labor.