(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Gotcha moments are generally tedious things, but being caught out breaching your own public health orders mid-COVID on your first day as state premier, then mounting a defence which is completely legally wrong is a bit more serious than mere tabloid embarrassment.

So it was that Dominic Perrottet gleefully posted a selfie to his Facebook page yesterday, mid-lunchtime run, with the Harbour Bridge behind him.

Problem: Perrottet lives in Beecroft, 24km from where he was exercising. The public health order, in place until next Monday, still applies a restriction on exercise to your own local government area, or 5km from your home.

Not a problem at all, said Perrottet’s spokesman: those rules do not apply if you are an authorised worker and “the premier, as an authorised worker, was permitted to go about his normal business, including leaving the office to obtain food or to exercise while he was in the city”.

Actually, still a problem: Perrottet is not an authorised worker. The public health order applies specific rules to authorised workers allowing them to travel outside their areas for work, but only with respect to people who live in “areas of concern”: the local government areas subjected to more stringent lockdown rules than everywhere else. Perottet does not appear to live in an area of concern and cannot, by definition, be an authorised worker.

Even if he was, the public health order says nothing about being able to exercise near his place of work instead of his home. That has never been part of the regime, authorised worker or not, through all the various changes to the rules.

In fact Perrottet, as a resident of a “stay at home area”, is subject to the rule that he must not leave home except when he has a reasonable excuse. One of these is for work, if it is not reasonably practicable for him to work at home.

The exercise excuse is explicit — it only applies within the local government area of the person’s residence, or 5km from their residence. Not their place of work.

Questioned by reporters, Perrottet dropped the “authorised worker” defence and said that he had cleared his run with his department’s lawyers, who told him that it is “within the public health orders if your work is outside your LGA, you can go for a walk. You can also buy lunch for yourself if you like, and you can also go on a run.”

That’s not what the public health order says. It doesn’t say anything like that.

Technical, petty even, but we didn’t write the rules. He did. Reasonable to expect him to know what they are and comply.