Extract from The Guardian
Is the prime minister focused on managing the crisis at hand – or is he preoccupied with managing the blame game?
At the moment, if you ask the wrong question, Scott Morrison says you are being too binary. The ABC Breakfast presenter Michael Rowland found himself dispatched to binary corner on Wednesday morning after pursuing the prime minister on aged care.
It’s worth sharing the exchange.
Question: Prime minister, Daniel Andrews the Victorian premier, says the buck stops with him when it comes to the hotel quarantine bungle. So does the buck stop with you as prime minister for the litany of aged care failures?
Morrison: Well, there are shared responsibilities for, well public health is a matter for the Victorian government, and the federal government regulates aged care …
Question: It’s a federal responsibility. It is fundamentally a federal responsibility.
Morrison: Well public health, we regulate aged care, but when there is a public health pandemic, then public health, which, whether it gets into aged care, shopping centres, schools or anywhere else, then they are things that are matters for Victoria. So I don’t think that it is as binary as you suggest.
Morrison was picked up on this observation later in the morning by the Sky News journalist Andrew Clennell.
Question: Is there an element here of you being happy to own the successes when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, but not the failures?
Morrison: I think that’s an unkind assessment, Andrew, that doesn’t bear out the facts.
Given facts have been invoked (hooray), let’s step those through.
Morrison is correct to point out that aged care is connected to the public health system and vice versa. That’s a more than reasonable point.
But the prime minister’s persistent effort to sidestep accountability is also utterly transparent.
Before we get into responsibilities in the federation, just a basic point of logic. If it is fair to argue that Covid-19 got into aged care facilities because Daniel Andrews failed to stop community transmission, then it is also fair to argue about whether the commonwealth did enough to fortify residential aged care facilities against the incoming threat.
If Australia’s health systems are connected, as the prime minister correctly suggests, then the performance of every tier of government is in focus during a pandemic.
Accountability isn’t selective. It doesn’t stop at the Victorian border. It goes all the way to Canberra. If Andrews is responsible, then so is Morrison. You can’t invent a world where someone else is responsible and you aren’t.
Just for the record, the federal government funds and regulates aged care. This is a commonwealth responsibility.
The Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus, released in February, draws the lines clearly, and it documents the desired interactions between the tiers of government during the pandemic.
That document says the Australian government is responsible for residential aged care facilities “working with other healthcare providers to set standards to promote the safety and security of people in aged care and other institutional settings; and establishing and maintaining infection control guidelines, healthcare safety and quality standards”.
So Canberra has primary responsibility. It sets the safety systems and ensures they are maintained – self-evidently a hands-on role. State and territory governments look after public health responses, which include “establishing systems to promote the safety and security of people in aged care”. The states also support the investigation of outbreaks.
These are the facts.
A couple of weeks ago, Morrison sent me to binary corner when I asked him whether we were still all in this crisis together – which is a mainstay of the government’s talking points – or whether “all in this together” had morphed during the second wave to blaming Andrews. My question was “binary” and “a little simplistic, with great respect”.
On Wednesday, Morrison told reporters governments were “working together, not against each other – [that] is the way we manage these impacts”.
But binary or not, this remains one of the critical questions about this phase of the pandemic: is the prime minister focused, as he should be exclusively, on managing the crisis at hand – or is he preoccupied with managing the blame game?
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