WESTERN SYDNEY SUFFERING BECAUSE OF MORRISON’S FAILURES

The consequences of the Scott Morrison’s COVID failures are being felt particularly hard in my part of Sydney right now.

Western Sydney has become the epicentre of this outbreak. People here are genuinely scared about how bad it might get. And as a local MP I’m worried the government doesn’t understand some of the unique dynamics driving transmission here – or have a plan to deal with it.

We all know the vaccine rollout has been a disaster.

But the government has stuffed up the public education campaign too, and that goes double for multicultural communities like mine.

You think the overall messaging has been bad?

Well the messaging for the communities in my electorate that predominately speak Arabic or Mandarin or Bengali or Vietnamese or Korean or Italian or Greek has been worse. The government has simply failed to reach people with reliable information.

And in the absence of a decent public education campaign, conspiracy theories about the vaccines have run rampant.

If the government ever gets around to fixing our vaccine supply issues, I fear vaccine hesitancy will persist in parts of Western Sydney.

Community leaders and local doctors have stepped up and done an admirable job fighting back against the misinformation. But there’s only so much they can do in the absence of an effective government campaign.

We need one. Now.

We also need the government to understand that low-paid insecure work is a significant risk to containment efforts. I’ve been warning about this since the start of the pandemic but the government just doesn’t seem to get it. Eighteen months into this crisis they’ve failed to make any meaningful changes that would help people in low-paid insecure work to take time off to get tested or vaccinated.

People in Western Sydney are more likely to work in these sorts of jobs – many of which simply cannot be done from home.

In my electorate a typical couple might work in aged care and food manufacturing, and their teenaged kids stack shelves at night. These are not jobs that can be done from the laptop at the kitchen table. They need to physically move around the area.

People around here are also more likely to work multiple jobs, adding to the risks.

That’s why the direction that people cannot travel out of their local government areas for work is so devastating. For many people that’s really hard to do, even if there is some modest government support on offer. Unless we’re paying people properly to stay at home I fear some people will take the risk and continue to work.

That means people will go to work, catch the virus, potentially spread it in a second workplace and then bring it home to a household that’s much more likely to have five or more people living in it than in other parts of Sydney.

Across NSW the average household is 2.6 people. In Punchbowl, where I live, it’s 3.4 people. But it’s not unusual to have households of 10 or more. No wonder household transmission has become a key driver of this outbreak.

Most worrying of all are the vulnerable elderly parents who in these suburbs often live with their children and grandchildren. There would be few places in Sydney where you’re more likely to find a household where people who have to go to work every day live under the same roof as people most likely to die if they catch COVID.

Adding to the frustrations are the testing centre queues stretching more than a kilometre and the visible police presence that wasn’t there when the outbreak was centred in more affluent areas of the Sydney.

And every time people here see the images of throngs of maskless people on Sydney beaches it makes what my community is going through an even more bitter pill.

This opinion piece was first published in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, 21 July 2021.