NSW is facing a crisis with some potentially very serious consequences. Over the past weeks, the outlook has continued to turn grim in lockstep with Premier Gladys Berejiklian's face. There are many hanging questions.
The NSW government continues to play the blame game: delta variant, NSW residents, light fines, etc. everything and everybody are at fault. The premier is clean, right, and perfect.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian abruptly stormed out of her Sunday press conference when she noticed questions were gradually shifting to the government's failure in handling the rapidly deteriorating crisis.
Yesterday she tweeted bizarre 7-day state-wide strict lockdown after her daily press conference: "from 5pm tonight, all of regional NSW will go into a seven-day lockdown."
She today backtracked on hopes of restrictions being eased at the end of August, saying "No! No! Can I be very specific about this. We need to keep case numbers as low as possible?".
As revealed today, the tweet confused not only NSW residents but also other state authorities. Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she heard the news on Twitter. “Can I say that when we heard the news on Twitter yesterday, we immediately got together all of our key state agencies and the heads to address what has been happening down at the border,” Annastacia Palaszczuk said this morning.
Gladys Berejiklian defended her bizarre announcement, claiming that advice was not available to her before the daily 11am press conference. (No official statement issued until later afternoon).
Just mess, and more mess.
NSW premier has yet to accept any responsibility for the too-late-too-slow lockdown measures, avoiding questions on this topic.
Well, this is the collapse of the non-existing "gold standard". Remember Berejiklian was taking a savage swipe at Victoria for taking the "easy" decision to lockdown the state before the current crisis?
She was on Sky News with her "gold standard".
“I fear for Victoria and I worry about what their government may do,” she said. “We’ve demonstrated to other states that it is possible to manage an outbreak and not shut down a city.”
Arrogant, reckless, incompetent. pic.twitter.com/mqwVcFqWGN
— marquelawyers (@marquelawyers) August 14, 2021
Now she is facing questions why she couldn't make that "easy" decision on time. Victoria fears for her.
"Any other state govt, had they been confronted with the initial outbreak in Sydney, would have locked down immediately. But because of Murdoch-Morrison-far right political pressure, NSW didn’t. Now it’s out of control across NSW and a threat to the nation," former PM Kevin Rudd twitted.
It seems we will keep seeing her grim face every morning reading numbers. Good distraction from Daryl Maguire-gate?
— Sooz the Rat of Gilead 💉💉 🐀 (@Why_not_fix_it) August 3, 2021
Here it is. Josh Frydenberg playing politics with people's lives during a pandemic. #auspol pic.twitter.com/MFgrHqONjq
— Richard Marles (@RichardMarlesMP) August 12, 2021
Dan Andrews did 120 days straight of press conferences. He stood side by side with Victorians, sharing the pain, from the beginning to the end.
Gladys Berejiklian sent all of NSW into lockdown via tweet. Don't pretend both parties are the same. #auspol #covidnsw #nswlockdown pic.twitter.com/155J2SvCfb
— Stephen (@TheAviator1992) August 14, 2021
I’ll be watching the A team today…Premier Daniel Andrews, the Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and COVID-19 Commander Jeroen Weimar.
I won’t be watching this 👇#GladysFail #GladysClusterfuk pic.twitter.com/r5eXfIgWu7
— Dale 🌦☔️⛈🐾 (@Dale_Elliza) August 9, 2021
