Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Scott Morrison emerged from The Lodge on Thursday to celebrate "the first major milestone for Australians to start getting their lives back": the fact that NSW had passed the "70 per cent double vaccination rate threshold, as set out in the National Plan".
And of course it was great news, particularly if you live in NSW and, in Greater Sydney, which have been locked down for some months.
Unfortunately, not everyone around the country is in quite as good a position. The Prime Minister held out the NSW achievement as a beacon of hope for other states.
As of Friday, the other large states varied in their level of double doses between 50 per cent and 55 per cent (with Tasmania at 63 per cent and the ACT just nudging 70 per cent).
That means most of the rest of the country won't be hitting 70 per cent until very late October or November at the earliest. The 80 per cent double dose level is even more elusive: between mid-November and mid-December for most.
NSW hitting those much higher vaccination rates faster than the rest of the country is partly driven by the reality of the pandemic galvanising people to get vaccinated, and partly by the diversion of Pfizer vaccines from other places before greater supplies arrived in the country.
Pfizer, of course, requires a much shorter gap between doses than AstraZeneca. The difference shows up in a headline way in the fact that Victoria is only 5 percentage points behind NSW in first doses (84 per cent to 89 per cent), yet 15 percentage points behind on second doses (55 per cent to 70 per cent) and will hit the 70 and 80 per cent markers three weeks behind NSW.
The vaccination numbers tell the story of how different the experience of the COVID pandemic — and its fallout — is, and is increasingly becoming, around the country. That only elevates the political pandemic plays.
The PM's pivoting politics
The Prime Minister has spent much of the week trying to pivot the politics of closed state borders and lockdowns, after his announcement last week that international travel would resume next month into states with satisfactory vaccination rates. He is playing hard on the desires of people to see their loved ones at Christmas.
It was true, he told one Perth interviewer, "that people in Sydney and quite possibly Melbourne will be travelling to Bali by Christmas. But no one in WA will".
"I'd love it," he told a Brisbane radio audience, if people "could fly to Brisbane for Christmas".
But while urging people to get vaccinated, and pressuring states to open up as soon as possible, not everything works as fast in the Prime Minister's world.
It seems churlish to mention them, really: a federal integrity commission, doing something about climate change, addressing structural problems in the health system made infinitely worse by the pandemic.
The federal and state governments were fighting again this week about health funding, after state and territory health ministers — all of them — wrote to federal minister Greg Hunt last week.
States and territories, they said, were under "unrelenting strain due to the current COVID-19 demands and the pre-existing trend of increased hospital activity".
The issue had been raised with Hunt as far back as April.
His response this week was that the federal government was already funding 50 per cent of the cost of COVID in hospitals under a special agreement struck last year. The Prime Minister's response was to just say this was an attempted opportunistic political "shakedown" by the states, on the back of COVID, and suggest the states' problems were of their own making.
"The work that needs to be done frankly should've been done for the last 18 months," he said.
The states' point is that key aspects of the underlying funding agreement expired in June — and its provisions remain as crucial for getting the system through as the special deal.
In their letter to Hunt, the health ministers recognised that the special deal last year "afforded immediate relief and recognition of some" of the issues facing the health system, but that the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA)" — that is, the underlying agreement on federal funding — "is not fit for purpose to respond to ongoing funding determinations and operating in a COVID 'steady state' way".
They argued that the impacts of COVID — sometimes contrary impacts - like having to keep beds empty in anticipation of possible COVID cases and thus losing funding — "have altered the validity and reliability of data to inform price and volume projections under the NHRA".
"The potential for increased activity, together with significant price increases, will create an environment that seriously stresses the current growth cap and has immediate implications for the efficient price of care delivery."
A very long to-do list
And this was all happening just as "we are entering into the most critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic response for our hospital systems".
State health ministers say the federal government has not been prepared to address these underlying issues. "They just want to focus on questions of whether there is enough PPE or ventilators," one said this week.
And somehow, this seems of a piece with the general way the government works these days.
A journalist noted at the PM's press conference this week that there were only a few remaining sitting weeks of Parliament left this year, but a very long to-do list.
"You've got the National Integrity Commission, you've got religious discrimination laws," the journalist noted. "Barnaby Joyce added to the to-do list this morning by calling for a crackdown on misinformation on social media. Which of these will you guarantee that the government will deliver before the next election?"
The short version of a very long answer was: None of the above.
The PM has actually been arguing the demise of Gladys Berejiklian was a good argument against a federal integrity commission, at least one like the one in NSW. He implied this week that the only thing standing in the way of the good work the government was doing on a federal body was getting support from other parties in the Parliament (who all happen to think the government's proposal is pathetically weak).
Then of course, there is climate change. We are also told the government is "this close" to having a position — and a policy — for someone (unspecified) to take to the Glasgow climate change summit.
And fair enough, why should there be any hurry? It is, after all, still three weeks away.
Of course, as the Prime Minister said of hospital preparations, "the work that needs to be done frankly should've been done for the last 18 months".
But it hasn't been. It hasn't been done for the past eight years on a credible climate change policy, or for at least three years on a credible integrity policy.
With only months until a federal election, the political shakedown is alive and well in federal politics.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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