Berejiklian trashing the reopening plan is giving Morrison a nasty headache

Gladys Berejiklian’s debacle in New South Wales has already inflicted considerable political damage on Scott Morrison and threatens to present him with a messy political problem for which there are no easy solutions.

The Berejiklian problem is pretty simple: the reopening plan agreed to by national cabinet didn’t envisage COVID running rampant when vaccination rates hit 70%. On current form, NSW is likely to still have hundreds of cases a day, and a steady stream of deaths, when that milestone is reached.

In fact, the NSW premier has given up on getting cases to zero, with the inevitable mathematical logic that easing lockdown restrictions while the virus is circulating in the community will see numbers soar. But she wants to stick to the plan of easing come 70%, as does Morrison. Berejiklian, if she’s still premier by then, feels she needs to offer people in Sydney something other than six months in lockdown.

Other first ministers aren’t convinced and don’t fancy reopening when potentially thousands of cases are moving about freely over the border.

Morrison says the states signed up to the agreement and he’ll insist they stick by it. The only lever he has is fiscal — warning he won’t provide any financial assistance if they lock down after 70%. Trouble is, we’ve heard that from him before and it’s taken just a couple of days of pointed commentary from state politicians mid-lockdown before he caved.

According to press gallery journalists, Morrison just needs to change the mindset of Australians away from the number of cases to the number of hospitalisations and deaths. This seems to be more of the same cluelessness that led to political journalists missing how popular state border closures were and how foolish Morrison was being in opposing them. Remember Christian Porter and Morrison teaming up with Clive Palmer to fight Western Australia’s Premier Mark McGowan’s border closure?

Voters, they seem to think, will turn on a dime and embrace open borders even though there are thousands of infected people waiting to come from interstate. And then rejoice in not having lockdowns as the cases numbers soar and the deaths mount. The “Dictator Dans” and “Marshal McGowans” will be vanquished.

Let’s believe that when we see it. The experience of the past 12 months is that lockdown-loving, border-blocking Labor premiers are much more in tune with voter sentiment than the let-it-rip obsessives of business and The Australian Financial Review.

The issue is causing tensions in national cabinet well in advance of vaccination rates nearing 70%. Case numbers in NSW are in the 600s. If we’re lucky, those numbers are peaking and will start coming down in time for the reopening plan to play out successfully.

If we’re not lucky, the cases will mount into the thousands, making it impossible for any other state leader to publicly contemplate reopening. The worst-case scenario is that Victoria, too, is unable to get on top of the Delta variant and the problem is doubled.

This is the mess Berejiklian has caused. Not merely has she seeded outbreaks in Victoria, the ACT and New Zealand, she’s put at serious risk the reopening plan, and is likely to have created an awful dilemma for Morrison.

He has his own responsibility for what’s happened in NSW, of course, and he’s continuing to contribute to it by opposing business vaccine mandates. But with an election needed by May at the latest, the idea that he’s going to refuse to support premiers locking down and closing borders in four months is an interesting one, to say the least.