"Other masters": Lisa Wilkinson's bizarre Gladys theory
Lisa Wilkinson has berated the New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian after the state recorded 124 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday.
It is the highest number of positive cases in the current outbreak despite Sydney having been in lockdown for a month.
Talking on The Project from Sydney, Wilkinson told her co-hosts that Ms Berejiklian likely now “regrets being disparaging about (Victorian Premier) Dan Andrews and how he handled things”.
She also theorised that Ms Berejiklian might have “other masters” she is obeying, who are preventing her from making the lockdown even tougher.
Over the course of an entire month, the state has repeatedly recorded several days of cases below 100 before shooting up into three digits again.
The state has been unable to reduce the number of people who are out in the community when they were likely very infectious.
With cases seeping out from the epicentre in Fairfield in the city’s south west, the suburb has been put on a strict lockdown.
Sadly, Ms Berejiklian has warned that the worst may be yet to come, and that “case numbers will continue to go up”.
She urged people to avoid any non-essential contact with other people, even family members.
“It’s cruel how contagious it is. It is spreading like we’ve never seen before.”
Wilkinson couldn’t help but question why the Premier didn’t enter a hard lockdown sooner, on Thursday night’s episode.
“Gladys has been telling us for days there is all the green shoots, but we watched them wither on the vine today with her predicting that it is only going to get worse,” she told fellow hosts Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar.
“I’m wondering if she regrets being disparaging about Dan Andrews and how he handled things.
“In New South Wales, we’re looking at Victoria and how quickly you went into lockdown and how tight the numbers are staying and thinking ‘that’s what we should have done.’”
Bickmore said that Victorians who are currently in lockdown five were now used to “doing the right thing”.
She went on to say Victorian authorities had made the effort to visit 436 homes, to check people were isolating, only to find them all indeed at home obeying the rules.
“That’s pretty extraordinary. That everybody is just going, ‘I’ll do what I’ve got to do’”.
Later in the program, Wilkinson again said the “numbers were going in the wrong direction”.
The host stated she “didn’t understand” why the state government wasn’t bringing in tougher rules, and hinted that there may be political motives behind the decision.
“(Ms Berejiklian) says she is following the health advice; a lot of people think if that’s the health advice that she has been following from the beginning then either the health advice is flawed or she has got some other masters that we don’t know about.
“Because there is plenty of people who would like to see some of these rules reigned in so we can knock this thing on the head and get down to the zero (cases) that she keeps saying is her objective.”