Ben O’Shea: Are States looking to Albanese for answers or looking for someone to blame?

If you’ve watched the latest season of Stranger Things you might be thinking there are similarities between Vecna and various State premiers around Australia.

They all seem to prefer operating in the Upside Down.

Now, I’m not saying New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet is a creepy villain who lives in an alternate reality where it’s OK to suck the life from others, but have you seen the way he looks at our GST revenue?

But even Vecna’s Upside Down makes more sense than the topsy-turvy approach the States are taking to COVID.

And yesterday’s emergency session of National Cabinet was a great example of it.

Since becoming PM, Anthony Albanese has spent about as much time in one spot as Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in Eighty Days.

However, the Prime Minister’s ambitious run of international diplomacy hit pause so he could address the escalating winter COVID crisis that has seen case numbers and hospitalisations spike around the country, including here in WA, which hit a new record for patients admitted to hospital with COVID yesterday.

Speaking on breakfast TV on Thursday, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the National Cabinet meeting was needed to bring some clarity to the situation.

“We’re just getting a bit of mixed messages at the moment. I think the country just wants to know how this wave is going,” she declared.

‘Mixed messages’ is the polite way of describing the current pandemic response, which sits at the intersection of ‘denial’ and ‘looming clusterf…’.

Right now it’s patently obvious Australia is following in the footsteps of the UK, America and other jurisdictions, which are experiencing a new wave of infections driven by the transmissibility and, perhaps more importantly, breakthrough infection potential of the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants.

In those places, more people are being reinfected than ever before, and the time between infections is shorter than ever.

New research from Columbia University in the US suggests BA.4 and BA.5 might be 4.2 times more vaccine-evasive than previous variants, which explains why they are proving particularly effective at finding people who have thus far managed to avoid catching the ’rona.

Amid clear indications we’re starting to see the same thing happening Down Under, Albanese copped criticism for pushing ahead with the former Coalition government’s decision to axe the $750-a-week pandemic leave payments, and scrap free RATs for concession card holders.

At National Cabinet he backflipped on axing the payments, somewhat predictably, but arrived at a deal where the States would pick up 50 per cent of the tab.

Common sense prevailed, but don’t look for logic in the pandemic response at a State level.

More than 819 aged care facilities in Australia currently have a COVID outbreak, yet New South Wales will push ahead with its plan to ditch vaccination requirements in aged care homes as of Monday.

Last week, Victorian Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas admitted the State’s chief health officer had recommended introducing a mask mandate in early education and retail settings to combat growing infection rates.

She rejected it, which typifies the change in attitude from State governments recently, which is best described as a transition from ‘following best health advice’ to ‘YOLO’.

That even seems to be the case here in WA.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, no one could accuse Premier Mark McGowan of downplaying the risks associated with the coronavirus.

Back in January, when the Premier backtracked on a plan to finally open WA’s borders, he took aim at critics who suggested it was time our State learned to live with the virus.

“A lot of people say we should be living with COVID. Well, there are 752 people in the Eastern States no longer living with COVID,” Mr McGowan said, referencing the death toll in Australia for the year at that point.

“You should ask their families whether we should deliberately infect large numbers of West Australians.”

Now the same bloke who was accused of fear-mongering at daily press conferences, and constantly spruiked the importance of fast and decisive action to slow the spread, is saying things like “watch and see”, while pooh-poohing the accuracy of his once-vaunted modelling.

And, for some reason, mask mandates have become the major hot-button issue when it comes to COVID, with considerable hand-wringing over the impact mask-wearing has on the economy.

Surely the real economic threat is unchecked transmission, when thousands of cases happen at once, overloading the health system and putting those same thousands of workers into business-crippling, seven-day isolation?

If masks worn in some settings can reduce transmission to manageable levels over winter, is it really all that smart to leave such an important economic safeguard up to Betty Balga doing the righty?

When you have chief health officers around Australia “strongly encouraging” or “strongly recommending” indoor mask wearing, it’s safe to assume they would be advising mask mandates if they thought it’d be even remotely palatable to their political masters.

But here we are, in the Upside Down, trying to pretend the pandemic is over. Good luck with that.