If you missed our Guardian Essential poll at the start of this week, there were two key insights. The first is Australians are in a complicated headspace about Covid. The second is Anthony Albanese’s post-election honeymoon has moderated.
By complicated, I mean contradictory. More than half the voters surveyed want to treat Covid like the flu and just get on with normal life. But we don’t like high death rates. We also worry about pressure on hospitals.
When it comes to the shelf life of honeymoons, the jury is still out. In the first poll taken after the election, voters came off the fence about Albanese, giving the prime minister an extraordinary boost in his approval rating. In the latest poll, there was a three-point dip in voter approval of the prime minister and a six-point increase in disapproval. Ebullience (or perhaps it was relief) had receded. Some necessary context: Albanese’s approval remains in positive territory (56%).
These two insights – Covid and its complications was back as a front of mind issue for voters, and the prospect that Labor’s two-month post-election honeymoon might have maxed out – framed the political week.
Most of the cabinet was overseas. Albanese and Penny Wong were in Suva, Jim Chalmers in Bali, Richard Marles and Tony Burke in the United States, Murray Watt in Indonesia.
Back home Mark Butler, the health minister, found himself alone on centre stage, the designated public face of Labor’s efforts to defend a cut in pandemic assistance.
Ending pandemic leave was the big issue but before we unpack that, some scene setting. On 25 March, the Friday before the budget that was the springboard for the May election, the then health minister, Greg Hunt, signalled he would not be renewing the emergency declaration that underpinned Australia’s extraordinary public health response to the pandemic.
Hunt said because we were “living with Covid” the declaration would lapse on 17 April, a week into an election campaign that Scott Morrison would lose. This was a significant leap in the direction of Covid-normal, but because of the timing, the tearing rush towards the polls, it didn’t get a lot of attention. By the time Labor was sworn in, the demise of the emergency declaration meant the dismantling of some public health controls was effectively baked in.
When Butler arrived as health minister, the chief medical officer pointed out some of the restrictions imposed at the height of the emergency could be unlawful in the absence of the biosecurity declaration. The CMO advised the new minister to remove vaccination requirements for incoming passengers. Because some of the state emergency declarations are lifting too, some of the arrangements in relation to aged care facilities will automatically lift, and the commonwealth will have to step up given infection rates in aged care continue to climb.
Also baked in: an end to pandemic leave payments on 30 June, which is the issue which has exploded this week. Pandemic leave has blown up in the context of a significant winter outbreak, with 4,000 people currently in hospital and hundreds of people dying each week, including about 100 deaths a week in aged care facilities.
On Wednesday, Butler warned that millions of Australians could be infected with Covid over the coming weeks – obviously a mind-focusing observation.
At the same time as issuing this warning, Butler was the public face of ending the provision of free rapid tests for concession card holders, and winding up pandemic leave. For a government that had just won an election telling voters no one would be held back and no one left behind, this felt like cognitive dissonance to put it mildly.
While we are canvassing pandemic leave, please indulge one small rave. Australian employers were given billions in taxpayer support during the pandemic – support to endure lockdowns. Given that happened, it’s a pity these characters can’t put their hands in their pockets and pay their casuals sick leave during a pandemic. It seems only decent.
But some employers have no interest in being decent, and some lack the requisite resources, and workers with no sick leave will work if it’s a choice between eating and isolating while Covid-positive. So we fall back on the basic public policy rationale. If governments need infected workers to isolate to curb exponential spread of a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus, then governments have a responsibility to fund the public health response.
If we accept that’s the rationale for the payment (and it has been to date), conceptually there are only two options. End the mandatory isolation period, which removes the necessity for taxpayer funded pandemic leave, or keep the rule and keep funding the leave.
We are now in a period of transition, and there are important debates to be had about what level of government intervention should happen in the transit zone between pandemic and endemic. If the community becomes fatigued by endless rules, then public health strategies and the supports underpinning them become counterproductive.
I’m certain this conceptual thinking is going on behind the scenes, but thus far, Butler and his colleagues haven’t staged that public seminar about options, they just signalled they’ll end the payment at the time Morrison scheduled. The stated rationale for ending the payment has been money doesn’t grow on trees.
The prime driver of this decision has been budget pressure. I also think there’s an unofficial mantra inside the Albanese government – if we need to do something hard (and removing benefits from needy people is certainty the working definition of hard), do it quickly. Preferably during the first six months of the government.
But when we think about budget pressure, a clear irony emerges. The new government is trying to stabilise the budget not as an abstract talisman but to create room for its own priorities, which include delivering the social supports and services that voters expect Labor governments to deliver.
Stabilising the budget will require a substantial mindset shift in Australia. During the pandemic, the community has grown very accustomed to high levels of public expenditure. The answer to most questions since about March 2022 has been spend to save lives and livelihoods.
If Albanese and his colleagues can’t reboot those expectations, funding exigencies will crowd out their agenda, leaving voters asking what was the point of changing the government. That’s the risk. But ending pandemic leave, a lifeline for workers, when the pandemic persists, is not only risky in a public health sense, it also looks and sounds like a departure from core Labor values.
Understanding that precise point of political vulnerability, the horizon filled with bandwagons. The Labor backbench – nervous because of a constituent backlash. The opposition roused itself from a post-election coma and argued against its own sunsetting of pandemic leave. The Greens declared Labor would be able to afford all the things forever if it dumped Morrison’s fiscally reckless stage-three tax cuts, and the independents said public health imperatives must trump other considerations.
The premiers, who have come in peace during the opening two months of the new regime, over the course of Friday very obviously executed a pincer movement ahead of an emergency national cabinet meeting on Monday. By Friday night, the emergency Monday meeting had been yanked forward to Saturday, and Albanese was set to propose a temporary extension for workers who needed the support.
While there is a clear case to extend pandemic leave as a policy lever to suppress rampant infections during the winter, the problem the government faces is that the politics of pivoting away from emergency support won’t get any easier.
By extending the payment through the winter, Albanese fixes one problem, and creates a new cliff. He will likely be winding back pandemic support at the same time as having to deal with the worst of Morrison’s poison pills – ending the temporary cut in fuel excise.
While Butler was busy battling Covid contradictions this week, Chris Bowen was attempting to subdue a range of feelings about his draft legislation giving effect to Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target – demonstrating that ending the climate wars is easier said than done.
Albanese has had a successful couple of months rebooting critical relationships on the world stage – carrying out important and necessary work in the national interest, and winning plaudits for extracting Australia from the naughty corner on climate action.
But things are always harder at home.
