Extract from ABC News
Analysis
It seems to have been a bit hard for the federal government to find anything useful to say this week as things have gone so pear-shaped in NSW.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian, her Health Minister Brad Hazzard and Treasurer Dominic Perrottet have daily floundered between pleading with people to comply with restrictions, pleading for them to get vaccinated, trying to insist the strategy is working in the face of a relentlessly rising trend line, and pleading with the federal government for more vaccines and economic help.
There was the belated offer of financial assistance from the Morrison Government — once they were sure Victoria and South Australia were not also going to succumb to major COVID outbreaks — and the rapid move by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to make sure things had been positioned so that if the national economy does once again slip into recession, everyone will know it's NSW's fault.
There were some more of the "look into my eyes, not at my hands" announcements from the Prime Minister about extra vaccine doses for NSW from a national stockpile which may or may not exist, depending on the day of the week.
And from the man who repeatedly insisted the vaccination rollout was "not a race", there was the urging of Australians to "go for gold" on "getting those vaccination rates where we need to go".
Retreating behind more modelling
Having contributed so splendidly to undermining the credibility of AstraZeneca, and confusing people about whether they are or aren't able to — or should — access vaccines which may or may not be available, the government has retreated behind the barriers of more modelling than you can wave a laser pointer at, as it prepared for a national cabinet meeting on Friday.
Not only is expert scientific advice coming from the Doherty Institute, with modelling showing what vaccination rates will enable society to reopen, we were breathlessly told that there will be "tempering" advice from the Treasury about the economic cost of maintaining restrictions.
"It's a big departure from relying solely on the health advice," a federal government source was quoted as telling the AFR, as if this was some major advance in sophisticated policy making.
With all that talk about lockdowns being a thing of the past seemingly being a thing of the past, and replaced with talk about lockdowns being a thing, at least until early next year, there was a sense that all this modelling and advice of themselves could provide us all with a reassuring sign of the same import as the Miracle of the Juniper Bush in Monty Python's The Life of Brian.
Meanwhile, on the other side of politics, Labor was quietly and finally dumping signature policies — from changes to negative gearing, to a reduced discount on the capital gains tax, and its resistance to tax cuts due to start in 2024, which will benefit higher income earners.
Hard to believe, true, but Labor was quite open about the fact that it didn't really want to talk much about the decisions this week. Decisions that were quite openly designed to remove any reasons for voters to not vote for Labor at the next election, and to just keep the focus on the government and its handling of the pandemic. And decisions which even further remove any obvious policy difference, or ambition, between the major political parties.
COVID is drawing attention to deficiencies
The pandemic, of course, dominates all in our lives at the moment, even as it draws attention to the inadequacies or deficiencies of governments (various) and our institutions and health and support systems.
One of the curious things about this pandemic is that it feels a bit like it has turned a lot of the complaints about all those systems on their heads.
We've all heard it for years: the incapacities to achieve reform, the problems in the way the country works, have all been the fault of, among things, the federation, the Senate, a bloated public sector.
Yet as the pandemic has gone on, it has been increasingly and repeatedly the states that have had to save the federal government from its own incapacities and incompetence.
This isn't a partisan observation about the incompetence of the federal government. Voters can have their own say on that.
But it is a comment on the fact that the dismantling of much of the post-world war administrative capacity and infrastructure of the federal government has found it repeatedly unable to run quarantine systems, vaccination rollouts or perhaps even public health responses more broadly.
It is an interesting point in time to consider why we were finding it so difficult to achieve change in the past few decades.
It's not a matter of whether some of the oft-discussed "reforms" are a good idea, just reflecting on why they were so mechanically difficult.
What's missing?
John Daley has led the non-aligned policy think tank, the Grattan Institute, for the past decade. And for his swansong piece of research he has gone back and looked at what factors blocked reforms promoted by both Grattan and the OECD between 2009 and 2019.
More than two-thirds of the suggested reforms have not been adopted. And his findings are that it has not been budgetary cost, parliamentary obstacles, federalism, or even vested interests that have been predominantly responsible. It has been popularity.
"Unpopularity
has become an insuperable obstacle to reform, a significant change from
the past when political leaders implemented many reforms even if they
were unpopular, doing their best to explain why they were in the public
interest," he says.
There are other factors, of course. But Daley's analysis of reforms from 2009 to 2019 "reveals clear patterns of both success and failure".
Of the 23 reforms that were substantially implemented, none were unpopular, none were actively opposed by powerful vested interests untempered by substantial independent evidence, only one ran counter to a party shibboleth, and only one involved a big budget outlay.
The upper house of parliament only stymied two reforms "that probably would not have been blocked anyway" and federalism was "probably only significant for six reforms, and all of these would probably have been blocked anyway by other forces such as partisan shibboleths or powerful vested interests untempered by high-quality public evidence".
The most crucial blocker, Daley says, has been adverse public opinion: "For the past decade, public opposition invariably doomed a proposal for reform."
What's missing? Well, Daley doesn't really say it out loud quite this way, but effective advocacy and leadership. As in, leaders arguing the case for a change and why the inevitable trade-off it represents is worth it for the common good.
A bit like trying to argue just now the merits of science and economics on lockdowns. We are paying the price for an inability to learn from earlier experiences, particularly that of Victoria, from a failure to persuade elsewhere in the country, and from our leaders failure to find anything useful to say.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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