#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but it happens every single day. /1

It's important to first note that from Day 1 of the pandemic, there have been 2 competing political approaches towards it. One the traditional Australian way, of allowing our public health institutions to manage the outbreak. The other the 'live with the virus' idea. /2

As soon as the pandemic began, the PM established a National Cabinet, almost certainly to deal the federal government into the pandemic conversation, where it has very little constitutional role. States manage most public health activity. /3

The federal government's use of National Cabinet has mostly been as a wrecker, a disruptor, playing States off against each other, inserting live with the virus rhetoric into the national conversation, and then using it as a mechanism to close parliament itself. /4

It then also established the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission as early as March 2020, a committee comprised predominantly of representatives of key industry lobby groups. To plot the 'economic' way out of the pandemic, even though it had only just begun. /5

From a political strategy point of view, this was clearly 'never waste a good crisis'. An attempt to use the pandemic as cover for sweeping economic changes. Of course we know the rest, Covid quickly asserted itself and the country swept into national lockdown. /6

But the 'live with the virus' folk never went away. Live with the virus is a slogan used to basically protect the economic status quo. After some brutal battles between the Economy crowd and the traditional public health/State model, particularly over the large 2020 outbreak.../7

...in Victoria, the live with the virus folk finally seemed to surrender to traditional public health thinking, with the July 2020 National Cabinet announcement that Australia was now committed to eliminating community transmission. /8

The PM insisted this be called 'aggressive suppression', an invented term, to save face, but the country now was locked into an elimination strategy. Basic public health. This went fine, until Delta arrived in 2021. /9

We forget that Delta was first spotted in Australia in Sydney, in May 2021. It caused no major problems, the State eliminated it quickly. Victoria did the same in June. It wasn't until late June, the beginning of the current NSW outbreak, that the new Delta story began. /10

NSW immediately adopted a strategy against this new outbreak that had been proven not to work even with less infectious variants, by Victoria in its large 2020 outbreak. It ring-fenced. It tried to localise measures to LGAs and suburbs. Lines on a map, no barrier to spread. /11

As the weeks wore on and the virus continued to spread and cluster, and the State lost control more each day, the NSW Govt launched 'Delta is like nothing we've seen before', a covering-narrative/slogan for its lack of success. Of course most forgot.../12

...that it had in fact beaten Delta just a month or so before. But political strategists love nothing more than to turn defence into offence, and it quickly dawned on them that Delta could be a Trojan Horse for re-introduction of their beloved 'live with the virus' strategy. /13

'Delta is like nothing we've seen before' became a daily mantra from the NSW Premier. Softening up the public for the abandonment of elimination strategies, 'hey., we can't stop this beast, we need to learn to live with it'. Over time, this became explicit, with.../14

...the two appearing shoulder-to-shoulder in the daily press conferences. 'Delta is like nothing we've seen before' was then immediately followed with variations of 'we need to learn to live with this virus'. The genius of the strategists is that the inevitable explosion.../15

...of cases that then followed the lack of commitment to reining them in confirmed in the public's mind how nasty Delta was. Ring-fencing is still employed to this day, a strategy everybody should have remembered had failed in Victoria. But it gets even sneakier. /16

Many point to Victoria's struggle now against Delta as well as evidence that we're dealing with a new invincible viral foe, and NSW has been vindicated etc. So, we need to understand why NSW and Vic now seem powerless to stop Delta, above and beyond NSW's deliberate.../17

...selection of an underpowered ring-fencing strategy. And this is where I think we can see that economics and politics really both generate and prolong pandemics. It's about the money. Australia's great elimination success in 2020 was predominantly about JobKeeper. /18

JobKeeper allowed the majority of the country to isolate at home, buffering their employers from losses. Think back to that national lockdown, and how it turned towns and cities into tumbleweed junctions. It worked, it absolutely smashed Covid. /19

Compare that to current 'lockdowns' in NSW, for example. I live in a stay at home area. It's nothing like last year, there's prodigious amounts of social and work activity going on. Why the change? We need to see what the strategists did with the funding schemes. /20

Treasury nicely summarises the differences in this table. I've put a red box around the key bit. JobKeeper was paid to the *employer*, on *projected* losses. This allowed them to close and send staff home, safe in the knowledge they could still pay them. /21 https://t.co/BNupizQIkZ

The 2021 support measures on the other hand, extracted from the feds like cutting out an ingrown toenail, are paid to the *individual worker*, AFTER they have already lost work. This means businesses need to keep operating, while the virus rages, until.../22

...this smashes their cashflow, forcing them to lay off staff and/or staff hours. Add to this that the business must also already be in a Commonwealth-declared 'hotspot'. In other words the virus must ALREADY have significant inroads into the area, before support kicks in. /23

See how it works? It's genius strategy, support that actually drives infection and viral spread. Forcing businesses to remain open, driving infection in staff who then take it home and infect their families. 'Live with the virus' is back, under cover of a support scheme. /24

This is why Victoria can't defeat Delta now either. Employers can't pay people to stay home and stop getting infected at work. New Zealand, which is having great success against Delta so far, never abandoned its JobKeeper wage subsidy program, based on projected losses. /end