Extract from ABC News
Analysis
The media release from the Prime Minister announcing the resumption of repatriation flights from India to Australia hit journalists' inboxes just before midday on Friday.
And within seven words, it was clear just how "back on track" was the debacle which this week saw Australia not just close its borders to its own citizens, but threatened them with jail if they came home.
"Government chartered repatriation flights to the Centre for National Resilience at Howard Springs for Australians returning from India will resume on May 15," the statement began.
The Centre for National Resilience? Who knew? Most people just thought it was a quarantine centre set up by the federal government.
The important bit of getting this life-and-death piece of policy had been sorted out, it seemed. Getting a jazzy name for it. A bit like that ritzy social media post featuring the defence force contribution to the bushfires that was produced by the PM's office and produced when things were at the most sticky for him over bushfires.
It's about priorities and political opportunity
It's about priorities. And depressingly, the priorities in this episode tell us much about the priorities of this government.
What it tells us is that, whatever the underlying principles or quality of a policy, the government rarely considers telling taxpayers about it from the starting point of "we need to know", but instead see it too often through the prism of a political opportunity, or political badging.
India's COVID-19 pandemic has reached catastrophic levels. COVID in India looks like our worst pandemic nightmares.
Not entirely surprisingly, the number and proportion of Australians coming from India carrying the disease started to rise, given new variants were emerging that seemed even more contagious in one of the most populous countries on earth.
Australian authorities became alarmed at the risks this posed to people here if the virus escaped quarantine, particularly when it seemed some people were only showing signs of infection after the normal 14 day quarantine period had elapsed.
The decision was made to stop direct flights from India and, then, when it became clear that systems were not in place to track people who might fly from India via another hub, to put penalties in place to deter them.
To do this,
Health Minister Greg Hunt made a declaration under the COVID-19 Human
Biosecurity Emergency powers granted in March last year.
Technically, it was the Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) (Emergency Requirements— High Risk Country Travel Pause) Determination 2021.
Section 477 of the Biosecurity Act sets out jail terms and fines for people who breach determinations like this one, which is actually the eighth such determination Hunt has made.
Previous ones – also subject to the terms of this Act — have covered everything from banning cruise ships, to stopping Australians going overseas, to visiting remote Indigenous communities.
It's just that no one has really mentioned the whole "going to jail" thing much before.
Shambolic handling of information
Chief medical officer Paul Kelly wrote to Hunt late on Friday "to provide advice to assist your considerations to make a determination under section 477 of the Biosecurity Act 2015 (the Act) to make it an offence for a person, including Australian citizens and permanent residents, to enter Australia if they have been in India in the preceding 14 days.
"I
note that such a determination, if made, would be the first time that
such a determination has been used to prevent Australian citizens and
permanent residents entering Australia".
The Prime Minister this week tried to defend the government's shambolic handling of information about its actions by arguing that it was the media that was responsible for emphasising the jail terms, not the government.
That would be fine, except for the fact that the whole point of making the determination was presumably to deter people from trying to sneak back into the country via a different travel hub.
And there was also the fact that Hunt mentioned jail terms in his press release, issued at midnight last Friday night.
The information flow from the government from that late night media release onwards has appeared as chaotic as the government's handling of the issue.
Fair enough to impose a ban if you think you need to temporarily pause the arrival of people from a country suffering the worst of the global pandemic because the quarantine system will be overrun.
But given you are dealing with Australian citizens who are being refused the right to come home (which we are told apparently doesn't actually exist by the way), you would think you might outline what you are doing to fix things during the pause.
What are you doing to help people stranded in India, for example? What are you putting in place to facilitate their arrival after the pause? Are you increasing quarantine capacity?
As news of the ban erupted over the weekend amid outrage and increasing questions about the legality of the move, and accusations of racism, the PM was nowhere to be seen. Any of his ministers who did appear looked flummoxed by the questions. The High Commissioner to India Barry O'Farrell also didn't appear for several days.
A really, really bad idea
And it only seemed to become a real emergency when the usual Coalition media cheer squad and the government's own backbench started to say it was in fact a really, really bad idea.
Despite this, government sources were still "briefing out" that the move was running hotly in the government's favour among voters.
Which apparently is a thing when you are trying to shape a policy to deal with a pandemic.
By Friday, the government was announcing repatriation flights would start at the end of the pre-determined pause.
But the Prime Minister was also saying that people testing positive for COVID would be left in India. The protest from the government is that this has always been the policy, whether for Indians or anyone else, and that this is standard practice around the world.
Given the scale of the problem in India, and the sense from events of the past week that the government has abandoned Indian Australians, or at least failed to put systems in place to help them, this will create new pressure points and questions about its capacity to run things.
The federal government only had two jobs: quarantine and vaccines.
It shunted quarantine to the states but in the last week seems to have stuffed it up anyway. And four million of us were not vaccinated by the end of March.
Determining who comes to Australia, and the circumstances in which they come, just doesn't seem to work for the Coalition as it once did.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment