At a meeting of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), the prime minister of the state of New South Wales, Dominic Perrottet, declared that “there was no science behind” the measures taken by the government to control the pandemic, for example, such as the massive testing of Covid-19.
Dominic Perrottet participated in a debate organized by CEDA, in which some questions were asked by the public who attended the event in person and online.
In response to one of the questions, the prime minister of the state of New South Wales, Australia, advanced with statements about the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, assuming that many measures were taken just to calm the population.
Concerted measures to limit fearmongering by the media
Perrottet acknowledged that he aligned himself with Victoria’s Prime Minister Daniel Andrews to reduce “the media’s ability to criticize and instill fear in the community, based on the approach we had.”
This “strategic decision” to accurately reproduce each other’s measurements has been successful.
He admits, however, the lack of scientific basis for many of these policies.
QR codes
The politician confesses that the introduction of QR codes was one of the measures adopted with the sole purpose of containing the loss of trust caused by the media.
“The decision to use QR codes was the most ironic, as we ended up bringing back QR codes when we weren’t even tracking. There was no science behind it, but there was a massive campaign and when these massive campaigns are carried out, it drains the confidence of our people. And the kind of news we’ve seen over this period has the same effect.”
As in Portugal, QR codes were used to read the Covid Digital Certificate (in paper or digital format) when pointing to the cell phone camera.
Opening of schools
The action of the media was also mentioned by the politician, as an act of manipulation and an attempt to scare people.
“When the return of schools was announced, the media rushed to find the scariest epidemiologist walking around saying that every child in New South Wales would die. The problem is that we had the task of instilling trust in people and so we agreed to do all these rapid antigen tests, which was a huge feat”, says Dominic Perrottet.
Massive testing
The decision to massively test people to bring confidence to the population was made against the health entities themselves.
“Before classes started, we distributed rapid antigen tests to 3.000 schools across our state and 5.000 childcare and early childhood education centers.
But there is another interesting thing about the pandemic – health entities completely disagreed with this approach, they did not identify any interest in having surveillance tests. However, the education sector wanted tests to be carried out because it was necessary to build trust between teachers and parents and ensure that children would be safe in school”, described the Australian politician.
Throughout the speech, Dominic Perrottet highlighted the decisions that were taken together with the prime minister of the state of Vitória, Daniel Andrews, during the first years of the pandemic, even though they were two states with different leadership policies.
“Once again a liberal state and a labor state, with exactly the same policy”, concluded Perrottet.
Watch the speech, here.
