I suspect history is not going condemn the Premiers for taking one or two extra weeks longer to open things up than some of you think should be the case.
History will condemn them quite severely for opening up one or two weeks early.
In Victoria it won't be 1-2 weeks' difference. The Premier has sought from parliament and got dictatorial powers until September 30th. He doesn't need to return to parliament for anything until then, having money supply, and being able to do things by regulation rather than legislation - including changes to the justice system. He hasn't sought powers for six months so he can lift restrictions 1-2 weeks or even 1-2 months from now. I expect us to remain at stage 3 for some months yet.
As I have noted before, the lockdown is not without costs in human lives and suffering. We know that each 1% rise in unemployment means a 1% rise in suicides. So from 5 to 10% unemployment would be an extra 150 suicides in Australia, to 15% would be 300. As well, the UK estimates an extra 60,000 (+36%) cancer deaths this year because their health system is overwhelmed; here because of the success of the lockdown in reducing covid rates, we have the opposite problem with empty beds awaiting covid patients we'll never see, but which will have a similar effect - there's been a 25-30% reduction in referrals for cancer diagnosis and treatment. If Australia saw a 36% rise in cancer deaths, that'd be 18,000 people. If it's even one-tenth that then it's 1,800 people. If we'd had 1,800 dead from covid I think the government and media would be hysterical.
As I have said, politics is a giant trolley problem. Whatever course is chosen someone will die. But it's one with less clear outcomes. Thus I think it was reasonable that they defaulted to locking everything down initially, because they just didn't know what would work and what wouldn't.
But now we know. 65% of Australia's infections have been recent arrivals from overseas, and another 20% have been those in their household. Thus, shutting the borders removed most of the possible infections. Allowing the recent arrivals to isolate at home rather than be quarantined meant another 20% got infected. It's only another 10% who were infected secondhand, and another 5% for whom the source is unknown.
Now, since in other countries the clusters of infections have come from large festive occasions where people's faces were close and they shared food and drink, it was also prudent to ban large gatherings like football matches and 500 person weddings.
Thus in Australia's case, the effective courses of action were,
1. shut the borders
2. quarantine Australians and permanent residents returning home
3. ban large festive gatherings
4. while building up medical capacity just in case.
Because we did #1 early, all the other stuff we did like close restaurants and gyms, playgrounds, and ban gatherings of more than 2 people, these are actually causing more harm than good. We didn't know this when we started, but we do now.
Again, it's different in a country where it's already out there and killed tens of thousands of people. But this situation does not obtain in Australia, and the Premiers need to stop pretending that it does. If there are bushfires in Sale there's no need for people in Broadmeadows to pack their bags.
Nonetheless, he is going to keep us locked down for a long time. I think our leaders are like Johnson with Brexit and Trump on election day - they weren't expecting to succeed, so now they don't know what to do. This is particularly so when they'd felt so much danger. One of the reactions people have in a high-adrenaline situation is to keep mindlessly repeating their last action.