Thread by @iMusing

Berejiklian opens with double dose at 40% and segues straight to saying not many places around the world has reached 80% double dose and she is confident [she can pull off her political goal of announcing a big first in Australian jurisdiction vax rate].

she gallops past the deaths of people - all three are in west and south western Sydney - to pump up her own tires on vax rates that are contingent on federal distribution strategy and hands off to McAnulty.

new cases are almost 1500 in NSW today but you wouldn’t know it from the triumphalist tone of our Premier for wealthy Sydney LGAs.

https://twitter.com/nswhealth/status/1434320674751873025

McAnulty runs through the vax and co-morbidity status of people who died of covid and the areas where there are sewage traces but no cases. He sounds subdued and factual as opposed to triumphant and political.

asked about her constant “peak” predictions, Berejiklian does that nervous “obviously” snort-chuckle that is so grating and revealing.

what she has her eye on is that 70% double dose that will ensure those freedoms for those of us who are fully vaccinated, says Berejiklian.
We know, Premier. Where are the most double dosed people again?

she then tells journalists why “you” put pandemic plans in place. The shift to second voice when describing - and deflecting - what are HER actual responsibilities is always a tell. She does it a lot.

a positively Morrisonion motor mouth routine. Various restrictions but restrictions is the wrong word. Rules, she says. Remember when Berejiklian refused to authorise legally enforceable restrictions and pretended “common sense” could contain this out-of-control outbreak.

the oh *sigh* eye roll impatience is on full display from Berejiklian today. As she has already said, all she cares about is the day she can announce privileges for the privileged Liberal Party base.

you will be able to get a meal, when you are fully vaccinated, says Berejiklian, and able to attend events. Get. A. Meal. Look at it. She means dining out. People should are MISSING MEALS RIGHT NOW do not register on her radar. They do not exist to her.

stay home and get vaccinated, says Berejiklian, the failed #CovidComms that has landed us at 1500 cases a day in NSW, and at western and south western Sydney hospitals being on emergency code yellow.

wow. Berejiklian is shouting over journalists before they finish the question and talking at double the speed of everyone else in the room. She sounds like she mainlined 10 coffees at 10:59am.

name checks the PM. She is very, very nervous. Extremely jumpy.

a dixer about her own WFH coping strategies. Really. She is at zero risk of catching covid, so any experience she might share is useless and pointless.

she “wants to make this really important point” and repeats every single misleading and dishonest phrase she has made hundreds of times, messages that reflect her government’s failed public health settings, which have not contained the virus.

will hotspot LGAs get the same freedoms? Berejiklian says they are working on whether to lift the regional lockdown. She does not repeat her actual policy setting, which is privileges for double dosed people in low disease burden areas.

the hotel quarantine system is close to reaching its use by date, says Berejiklian. Expect this line to appear more and more, the “hotel” bit will get dropped from the comms, and Morrison will pretend they did do quarantine (they didn’t) and now its [nonexistence] has expired.

she tries the aussies coming home line again. It sounds so ridic.

“most people don’t see boundaries within Australia” says Berejiklian, the exact opposite of the Morrison government re-election plan, not that complete contradictions are any impediment to Liberal Party politicians.

she is saying stuff that was uncovered by Morton this week to be false, I can not keep up with it all. Basically she has carved off HITH in her mind, pretends nobody in HITH is on oxygen, other misleading lines about “people vaccinated with the virus”.

“all health systems have bad days”. I can not. She is out of control.

hands off to McAnulty, thank goodness. His voice is a blessed relief after that million miles an hour jabbering from the Premier.

this journo is getting right to the nub of the NSW government decision to use PCR testing, a diagnostic tool, for screening of workers in heavily policed LGAs instead of a screening tool like rapid antigen testing. And that this decision has overwhelmed testing facilities.

I got called away to something more important than watching one of the worst Berejiklian trainwrecks yet, but my final impression was of the Premier being TOLD how her partisan (pro-donor, anti-worker) decisions cause real world harms, to people and to systems.