Three words Aussies need to hear

OPINION

It takes guts for a politician to admit he was wrong.

I’m not entirely sure why. It should be the easiest thing for a politician to do because, despite the humiliation of being fallible, it proves they are human like the rest of us.

Peter Beattie made an art form of confessing mistakes as Queensland premier and it worked a treat, because acknowledging a problem is the first step towards fixing it.

Former NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet deserves praise for publicly acknowledging that the vaccine mandates he imposed upon his citizens were wrong.

Yes, it is easy to say these things on the way out – Mr Perrottet is headed to the United States to work for BHP. But it would have been even easier to say nothing at all.

He said, in his valedictory speech, that “if the impact of vaccines on transmission was limited at best, as is now mostly accepted, the law should have left more room for respect of freedom”.

“Vaccines saved lives but, ultimately, mandates were wrong,” Mr Perrottet said.

“People’s personal choices shouldn’t have cost them their jobs.”

That will, no doubt, be of cold comfort to those who lost their jobs for refusing the jab.

But a lesser man would have let bygones be bygones and scarpered off to his high-paid corporate job without admitting any fault.

He can see, as can anyone with a brain, that Covid vaccines did not stop transmission nor contraction of the disease and so there was no scientific basis for them being mandated.

Not having the jab did not, ultimately, affect anyone else’s health.

Now that Perrottet has acknowledged his fault, so must every other premier and political leader who instituted and supported vaccine mandates.

He said that his government acted with the right intentions but ultimately took the wrong course of action.

That is a line to which every other pandemic premier could easily subscribe.

You can argue, as I did throughout the pandemic, that premiers handed too much power to unelected health bureaucrats who are only meant to provide advice to the politicians we elect to make decisions.

They will argue that it was an unprecedented time and they didn’t feel qualified to make decisions. So be it.

But in those situations, you are more prone to mistakes than usual. So just admit it.

Unless, of course, they do not regret imposing vaccine mandates and they still – despite the lack of scientific basis in stopping the spread of the virus and the adverse reactions suffered by some who received the vaccine – believe it was the right thing to do.

That kind of belligerence cannot be changed.

And it just proves that their decisions throughout the pandemic were not really about public health – they were about politics.

Vaccine mandates, and particularly their attachment to the lifting of lockdowns and restrictions as was the case in Victoria, pitted Australians against each other.

That wasn’t good for health but it was good for politicians desperate to look strong at a time of instability.

You’d have to think that any leader who does not make an imminent apology falls into that category.