good morning from unceded Darug lands☀️today on #Insiders are ABC Indigenous Affairs editor Bridget Brennan, ABC western Sydney reporter Kathleen Calderwood, 9fax international editor Peter Hartcher and podcaster Mark Kenny.
The interview is with NSW health minister Brad Hazzard.
The interview is with NSW health minister Brad Hazzard.
opening spiel is Sydney struggles, QLD snap lockdowns, and the twelveteenth announcement that political “leaders” have a plan. #Insiders
montage is Premiers plus the PM on various lockdowns and the latest iteration of Morrison’s lockdown-vaccine-vaccine-lockdown blame-shifting rhetoric. Leaders bickering over credit for the federal disaster payment. Soundtrack is the Police (King of Pain) #Insiders
#MakingNews schools cases in Qld. Federal health minister promoting AZ. Call for a royal commission into pandemic handling. #Insiders
#TheCurve no indication of a long term flattening trend yet. Indicators of NSW Health becoming overwhelmed. Increasing numbers of unknown source cases every day. #Insiders
the rules are a patchwork and what we are seeing is the NSW government stepping up enforcement what we are not seeing is targeted measures eg the freight industry, says Briggs. #Insiders
vaccinations will in the end drive the case numbers down, says Briggs. Asked how hard the vax target announcement will be to achieve, Briggs maps out first and second dose timelines for 70% by state and territory #Insiders
he says the 70% adult target equates to a 56% of total population target. Malta, Israel and UK, US and Canada are moving toward that 56% level. Just .15% of Australians have had SarsCov2, he says. #Insiders
lmao hope. Drink. #Insiders
early lockdowns are essential to beating the delta strain, Speers concedes as most of the political class herd has finally done #Insiders
the western Sydney cross opens with NSW gov comms on large families infecting household members. Remember to grow a bigger house and have a smaller family, western Sydney👍🏼#Insiders
complicated rules, diversity and multicultural area, reliance on [precarious] income. Not said: it is employers, not casual staff, who decide how precarious our income is. #Insiders
the army announcement has gone down like a lead balloon, says Calderwood. Many refugees will be traumatised by the presence of military on the streets. Police and army as a show of force will not ameliorate “feelings” of fear. #Insiders
apparently Fuller did not consult with community leaders and he put out a statement clarifying the role of the army yesterday. Hampers? Lol. Speers says most of us know the army delivers hampers [paraphrased] and it is a matter of getting that message out. #Insiders
panel. Harper. Q on Berejiklian government failures carefully couched in the hindsight framing. Harper says the late lockdown does not compare well to OS governments. #Insiders
after a clip of Berejiklian saying there is no rulebook (yeah, there is - see Vic) we get a clip of Morrison on hindsight and “humbly learning”. Brennan says Morrison has changed his tune. She says there are large Indigenous communities in regional NSW #Insiders
the “protestors”. Professor* Kenny says yes there are crackpots and then runs an economic anxiety line. Nobody mentions the business owners and white supremacists. #Insiders
it is a national emergency, says Kenny, and cites vaccine supply. Calderwood says it has been a bad week in western Sydney, abysmal, she says. The police presence is highlighting anxieties outbreak is making inequalities visible (to?) #Insiders
good news story is a Muslim women run pop up clinic in Lakemba vaxxed 700 people. Self-determination works. #Insiders
interview. If we are all in this together why don’t you apply consistent rules on masks across the city? Hazzard says the northern beaches is different because western Sydney migrants “have not built up trust in government”. #Insiders
outdoor mask wearing and 5 km zones do not apply in the eastern suburbs, says Speers. Does CHO Chant agree with this differential approach? Yes. It is nuanced. #Insiders
freight hubs. Hazzard says smaller facilities do not comply as well as bigger facilities. Recall there was a case at Michinbury which supplies millions of Sydneysiders #Insiders
did Chant recommend locking down before you did it? I don’t think that’s true, says Hazzard. Not that he remembers. So that’s a yes. #Insiders
there is a health team and an economic team, says Hazzard. He says Kathleen’s comments are spot on in terms of sensitivities. They are a very difficult community in terms of health advice, says Hazzard about their western Sydney comms #Insiders
invited to apologise for failing to lock down sooner, Hazzard declines. Asked about dead on arrival covid cases, Hazzard says they have very big families and suffered in their home countries. #Insiders
will the lockdown end in 4 weeks? Hazzard says modellers told him there would be 25,000 deaths in NSW and that did not happen. He says mixed messages on vaccines has been a big problem. #Insiders
is there modelling showing that will be over in 4 week? That depends entirely on the community, says Hazzard, who is the health minister. #Insiders
what will happen if the curve is not flattened in 4 weeks? Well there was Eid, says Hazzard. #Insiders
vaccine take up? Hazzard says low take up in NSW claims are rubbish. He cites raw numbers instead of proportion of population, because we have the most people. #Insiders
there were 9,000 doses administered at the Olympic hub one day last week, says Hazzard. He repeats the advice to get AZ. Everybody knows there is a flood of AZ, he says, and the [federal] mixed messages have not helped. #Insiders
he then mounts a defence of botched federal vaccine procurement. #Insiders
the ATAGI advice has changed because the infection rate has changed (skyrocketed) but nobody says that. #Insiders
the 70% figure and international borders. Hazzard says one premier effectively claimed they will run their own race and he does not agree with that. #Insiders
there is no deadline for the 70-80% target, says Soeers, but now it is a race. He plays another clip of Scott Morrison, this time with his lympic sloganeering #Insiders
how significant is the umpteenth announcement [paraphrased]? Hartcher says it is the beginning of clearing up the mixed messaging and there is still excessive performative parochialism. He means the states, not the head bogan. #Insiders
can some states run their own race? Kenny says national unity is “flimsy at both ends” and the states “remain sovereign in their own spheres”. Nobody points out that some states are less integrated with the federation than others. #Insiders
disaster payments. Brennan says the feds could hardly ignore calls from [NSW Treasurer] Perottet and ACOSS and others. She says we will not see a fifth iteration and tries to express concern for people on JSP but Speers interrupts. #Insiders
the interruption is for Speers to again display his recent discovery that some people have such low paid insecure employment they are eligible for centrelink top ups, and that those people were initially excluded from disaster payments. #Insiders
opposition tax policy. Kenny says it is hard to get Australians to change the government. He says Howard won the GST election. Only just, says Speers. Not said: 1998 was also the bucketloads of extinguishment race election. #Insiders
productivity commission CtG report. Last year we had so much focus on incarceration rates, says Speers. What about #RaiseTheAge? Brennan says it is a year since the AGs rejected the proposals. #Insiders
governments do not listen to blackfullas on justice, says Brennan. We know that when Black kids enter the [carceral] system, they stay there. Hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children under 14 in detention, says Brennan. #Insiders
any commitments? asks Soeers. Only the ACT gov has committed to #RaiseTheAge. These reports get put on the shelf, says Brennan. Speers says that even with covid some things are too important to ignore #Insiders
#FinalObservations 1 is Hartcher on the lympic spirit. #Insiders
#FinalObservations 2 is Kenny saying that Hazzard defending federal vax procurement is at odds with what he has been told about the procurement debacle [paraphrased] #Insiders
#FinalObservations 3 is Brennan on Indigenous vaccination rates at almost half the general rate (20% to 40% on first doses I think she said). She says we need a huge push to ensure Indigenous people can get vaccinated #Insiders
we go out with another one of those awkward zoom moments. No, people are not tuning in to watch committee livestreams in great numbers. Olympics, yes; committees no. #Insiders
this has been another edition of watching #Insiders so you don’t have to👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼
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