PM’s lies come home to roost with Omicron

Australia is trapped in a paralysis of cognitive dissonance. If our country was a person it would be borderline schizophrenic.

The symptoms were clear at the highest levels of government from the earliest days of the Covid-19 outbreak. National cabinet would meet, the Prime Minister and all the premiers would declare a common position of what they were doing and then the states would all go off and do something completely different.

National cabinet’s official position was that Australia would adopt a suppression strategy and then the states simply ignored it and pursued an elimination strategy.

National cabinet’s official advice was that schools were not a high-risk environment for Covid-19 but NSW, Victoria and Queensland simply closed them anyway.

National cabinet’s official plan was that Australia would reopen at 70 and 80 per cent vaccination rates but Western Australia simply decided to stay shut.

And all of this was justified with torturous weasel words that attempted to gaslight the public into believing that they were doing the opposite of what they were actually doing.

After the very first national cabinet meeting on March 15, 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was unequivocal that the nation was pursuing suppression, not elimination:

“We know that the virus cannot be absolutely stopped. Of course not. No one can do that.”

But when it was clear the states were in fact going to attempt to do that the Prime Minister issued a statement a month later on April 16 that tried to pretend this had been the plan all along:

“National cabinet agreed that Australia will continue to progress a successful suppression/elimination strategy for the virus.”

And when this piece of Orwellian doublespeak was deemed plainly ridiculous the PM and premiers lit upon a more Yes Minister-esque solution in July. They simply changed the name of the elimination strategy and called it a “suppression strategy with the goal of no community transition”.

And in order to save face the PM once more pretended this was a reaffirmation of the strategy all along rather than concede that the premiers had abandoned the national plan:

“National cabinet recommitted to the suppression strategy for Covid-19, with the goal of no community transmission…”

Of course this is all pretty bog-standard political obfuscation so why does it matter now?

Well the problem with lies is that they always catch up with you and the problem with this one is that Australia — or at least the more sensible parts of it — is now finally actually doing what we were supposed to be doing more than a year-and-a-half ago.

The goal is now to simply to keep Covid numbers to a level that doesn’t overwhelm our hospital system, just as the original goal had been before it was hijacked by the states on the advice of more nervous epidemiologists.

Again, here is the very first Prime Ministerial statement following the very first national cabinet on 15 March, 2020:

“The job of our plan, the job of working together, is what we call a flattening of the peak… What we’re looking to do is manage the flow so we suppress the demand on our health systems and ensure that we can continue to provide the care that Australians need.”

And that is exactly the plan now as we transition to living with Covid-19. The only fundamental goal is that hospitals and intensive care units are not overwhelmed. That is why the PM, premiers and public health officers are now saying hospitalisations and ICU presentations are the only metric that matters.

Frankly, every Australian should be recognising this policy as a long-lost friend but because it was quietly killed off — and, well, suppressed — it instead has all the familiarity of an alien spaceship.

And so thanks to politicians pursuing an elimination strategy yet calling it “suppression”, actual suppression now looks to a panicky public like “letting it rip”.

Little wonder most premiers have a lot of chicken littles coming home to roost. And little wonder only the newly installed NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet — who wasn’t party to 18 months of Gordian word games — has had the courage to actually call things as they are.

Unfortunately, this may turn out to be “courage” in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word. People have become so indoctrinated by politically expedient Covid mantras that the truth has come as a violent shock.

And the truth is that even in the Omicron epicentre of NSW, where record numbers of cases have been recorded this week, the number of ICU cases is a quarter of what it was under the Delta wave — just 69 yesterday compared to a peak of 264 during lockdown.

Obviously both hospital and ICU numbers will continue to rise but both are still a fraction of the NSW capacity. Moreover the vast majority of ICU admissions — some 70 per cent — are unvaccinated. Proof, were any more needed, of just how well prepared our ultra-vaxxed nation is to combat Covid.

Little wonder national chief medical officer Paul Kelly is not only confident the system will cope but has also backed the further relaxing of contact definitions and testing requirements.

All of this is simply a matter of fact. Whatever the feverish fear and fury, whatever the cognitive dissonance of the nation, there can be only one reality.

The truth is the truth. And the rest will fall at its feet.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: National cabinet lies are coming home to roost with Omicron