I’ve yet to see any of the perpetrators – Liberal tribal mythmakers, industry lobby groups and business’ media cheer squad – admit to their part in the humbling of that “gold standard” virus fighter, NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian (a woman I quite like).

All those business people feeling the pain of NSW’s protracted lockdown – which seems not to be getting anywhere, with no end in sight – have no one to blame but the short-sighted, self-centred urgers on their own side.

The great “learning” from our earlier struggles to control the coronavirus – particularly Victorian premier Daniel Andrews’ struggles this time last year – was the wisdom of the medicos’ advice that the exponential nature of pandemics meant the best strategy was to go early, go hard.

The economic modelling Treasury did to accompany the Doherty Institute’s epidemiological modelling confirmed this wisdom. “Continuing to minimise the number of COVID-19 cases, by taking early and strong action in response to outbreaks of the Delta variant, is consistently more [economically] cost-effective than allowing higher levels of community transmission, which ultimately requires longer and more costly lockdowns,” Treasury concluded.

Another relevant “learning” – drawn by Treasury from economic studies overseas – is that, should governments not impose lockdowns, many anxious people will significantly curtail their economic activity of their own accord. The assumption that it’s the government’s lockdown, not the virus’s threat to people’s health, that does all the economic damage is fallacious.

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Yet going early and strong is just what Berejiklian failed to do. Why? Because of all the pressure she was under from her own side to be a true Liberal and control the problem without resorting to lockdowns or border closures.

That pressure started at the top with Scott Morrison and his ministers, but was eagerly pursued by the business lobbies and business’ media cheer squad. In his efforts to score points off Andrews, no one worked harder than Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to propagate the mythology that only Labor premiers were so dictatorial and disregarding of business wellbeing as to lockdown and close state borders at the first sneeze, whereas Liberal premiers knew how to get results with superior testing and contact tracing.

To be fair, it’s clear Labor’s Mark McGowan in Western Australia and Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland, both with state elections coming up, were well aware of the votes to be reaped by gratifying their locals’ xenophobic tendencies towards possibly plague-ridden people from “over East” or “down South”.