IT IS NOT ABOUT ZERO CORONAVIRUS.

Australia is an island with drastic quarantines in effect in response to relatively few infections or deaths, and that's not restrictive enough for some people.

Any strategy short of elimination will be a disaster for both the health and economic stability of Australians. According to the government’s own modeling, if we open up when 70 percent of those over seventeen (56 percent of the population as a whole) are vaccinated, it will result in two thousand preventable deaths within six months. Recent modeling suggests that if Sydney exits lockdown on August 26 — even with an adult vaccination rate of 70 percent — it will lead to 100,000 cumulative hospitalizations, 10,000 patients in intensive care, and thousands of deaths.

Here we go again with the modelling, the same sort of foolish extrapolations that anticipated twelve of the last two inches of rain in DeKalb during July.

But it's got nothing to do with the modelling, or even with the mitigations.

Giving all workers paid pandemic and vaccine leave would dramatically reduce the spread of the virus in poor communities where workers cannot afford to lose income by taking time off to be tested or vaccinated. These measures would also undermine anti-vaccination sentiment. Additionally, we need to overhaul the vaccine rollout to prioritize all frontline workers. This will halt the spread of the virus in Australia’s developing underclass of young workers in essential jobs who are disproportionately migrants.

That's right, dear reader, it's about zero commerce.  It's Cloward-Piven with mask mandates and boffins in lab coats.

Labor’s commitment to neoliberalism has stopped it from advocating serious redistributive measures and the reconstruction of our health and social-welfare systems. The Left must put forward a far stronger alternative. We must fight for an elimination strategy.

That does mean lockdowns and border closures. But more importantly, it means fighting to put working-class people first with a broad pandemic management strategy that breaks with the pro-business logic of neoliberalism. To be COVID-free, in addition to vaccines, we need better quarantine, better income support and welfare, and an overhaul of our health system.

Put another way, we need an Australia with all the redeeming features of Poland circa 1985.