Andrew Gardiner says Scott Morrison’s support of hotel quarantine was responsible for Victoria’s latest COVID outbreak.

Victorians suffering an awful sense of lockdown deja vu shouldn’t be surprised at the state’s backsliding (however briefly) into another COVID-induced coma. After all, their government has its fair share of crackpots, and couldn’t manage its way out of a wet paper bag, much less a once-in-a-century pandemic.

No, no, I’m not referring to the Victorian State Government. I’m talking about the clowns in Canberra.

Consider just one element of this debacle: Canberra’s dragging its feet on JobKeeper-style wage subsidies and small-business assistance to Victorians who can’t work during the shutdown. This despite Victoria facing the first statewide lockdown since JobKeeper ended in March.

Pre-election budget profligacy notwithstanding, the Morrison Government’s stated belief is in limited government, lower taxes and even less spending. It’s an ideological impairment which often delays or nixes the investment needed to prop up our economy in perilous times – especially when a Labor state is asking, it seems.

“(The initial refusal of help) would be an incredibly poor reflection on the Federal Government and their support for Victorian businesses and Victorian workers (who) are crying out for support”, Acting Premier James Merlino said.

Unimpaired by right-wing ideology, Merlino was right out of the gate with a support package for operators in hospitality, retail, events and creative industries (up to $5000 for businesses impacted for the full two weeks of the shutdown); it took Canberra until Thursday afternoon to cough up temporary COVID disaster payments of up to $500 to people who have lost work (greater Melbourne only).

Let’s be clear: the latest lockdown happened because the Federal Government – so recently eager to arrest scary brown people returning from India – continues to support hotel-based quarantine programs which saw a man with the Indian strain of the virus housed in Adelaide lodgings that weren’t fit for purpose. The virus infected another hotel guest (who travelled on to Victoria) because ventilation systems there weren’t up to the task of stopping the spread.

Then there’s the botched vaccine rollout in which Canberra placed its orders late, leaving fewer than two per cent of Australians fully immunised at time of writing, compared to Israel (57 per cent), the US (40 per cent) and the UK (35 per cent). More immunised Victorians means fewer COVID transmissions.

Yes, there were problems with contact tracing, a Victorian State Government responsibility. But other states would have likely struggled to contain the spread too had this Adelaide hotel guest – who had not arrived with the virus, had completed his 14-day international quarantine and was deemed okay to travel – flown on to Sydney, or Brisbane.

As with the mega-fires of 2019, there was a failure of national leadership in Canberra’s COVID response. They have been sluggish, reactive instead of proactive, and more interested in image management (hey, it’s Scott Morrison) or attacking Labor states than in the critical tasks at hand.

A national crisis requires strong, decisive and – importantly – collective action. Co-operation with state agencies and acceptance of expert scientific advice is critical, no matter how pre-disposed your party is to believing in smaller, non-interventionist government, blame-shifting onto Spring Street or even rejecting scientific consensus on lockdowns and even vaccines.

Yes, readers, you read that last part correctly. The LNP includes many who frown upon lockdowns due to their impact on commerce and ‘freedom’, are sympathetic to the notion of ‘herd immunity’ (allowing a large number of infections so survivors of COVID – who are assumed to be immune – won’t further the spread) and actual anti-vaxxers who reject scientifically-proven jabs “because, y’know, Bill Gates”.

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Take maverick independent MP Craig Kelly, a long-time Liberal who remains linked with the LNP’s far right. Kelly is not planning on getting vaccinated, associates with and re-tweets anti-vaxxers, and has promoted quack COVID cures and misinformation, Trump-style, earning him a rare, permanent ban from Facebook.

You’d be forgiven for thinking such insanity would garner instant rebuke from Prime Minister Morrison, followed by banishment from the LNP. Yet for weeks it did not, Kelly’s LNP fellow travelers fighting a rearguard action on his behalf until the maverick MP left of his own accord.

Then there’s minister Dan Tehan, who thought the 2020 lockdown shouldn’t have covered Victoria’s schools and protected children and teachers, or Federal backbencher Tim Wilson who accused ‘Chairman Dan’ Andrews of “enjoying the (2020 shutdown) too much in terms of the authority and power it’s given him (but he’s) not as enthusiastic to roll it back”.

Evidently, Wilson believes the widely-disseminated, batshit theory that Premier Andrews’ decision-making is driven by a hidden Maoist agenda rather than, y’know, the need to keep Victorians alive.

The hold that right wing zealots and assorted cranks exert over today’s LNP is robust, and it’s not confined to Canberra. Victorian shadow minister Tim Smith comically called for native bats to be removed from his Kew electorate after theories linked COVID-19 to their 50th cousins in far-flung China, while his leader Michael O’Brien seemed to see some bizarre link between COVID-19 and safe injecting rooms.

Three Victorian LNP backbenchers addressed a group of anti-vaxxers and lockdown protesters at an online rally in February, with one, Upper House MP Bernie Finn, insisting the 2020 lockdown had nothing to do with a virus. “Hardline socialists don’t like small businesses … maybe, just maybe, it is all about that,” Finn said.

Josh Roose, a Deakin University academic who specialises in extremism, is alarmed by what he sees as overlap between conspiracy theorists, lockdown protesters and elements of the LNP. “It’s starting to creep in on the fringes,” Dr Roose told the ABC.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Australia has weathered the economic and somatic impacts of COVID-19 better than other countries. We are, after all, surrounded by the colossal “moat” sometimes referred to as the Indian and Pacific oceans, meaning it was a bit of a cinch to shut off or isolate the incoming flow of untested humanity.

Well, it should have been a cinch. Quarantining visitors in hotels that aren’t fit for purpose usually works, but it took just one instance of unanticipated transmission within a hotel’s confines, like the one we saw in Adelaide, to produce scores of new cases and wreak untold damage on our second largest economy, Victoria.

Then there’s the failure to prioritise vaccinating aged care workers (with all its appalling implications) and the vaccine rollout, where we’re ranked a dismal 93rd in the world. In short, when it comes to areas where our oceans don’t give us cover, the Morrison Government has been a bit of a catastrophe.

Australia will undoubtedly face further crises in the years ahead, whether they’re more mega-fires (climate change), looming trade wars (hello, China) or another COVID-19 flare-up. Do you really want to entrust their management to a government impaled by ideology on fossil-fuel dependence, China antagonism (hello, Peter Dutton) or even anti-vaxxer insanity?

We can do better.