#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the nation. /1

With the finishing line of population-level immunity via vaccination in sight, only months away, the economic dries in the NSW Cabinet decided to use Delta as a Trojan Horse to ram through the ‘live with the virus’ strategy it had always wanted. /2

Put this in perspective. Tax cuts mostly to the wealthy that the federal government spent much of 2020 organising (when thy could have been ordering vaccines and fixing quarantine), are going to cost more than TWICE as much as JobKeeper. /3 https://t.co/0FSLS0HKmW

In 2021 the big Delta outbreaks in NSW and Vic are mostly the result of massive reductions in federal government support to business, to allow people to not go to work. They absolutely refused to continue with JobKeeper, seeing it as too expensive. /4

Always remember that $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy coming in the next few years, in that context. Only a few more months of JobKeeper, even better targeted, would have seen the whole nation vaccinated with minimal infection. /end