We are witnessing a colossal government failure

The appearance of administration continues. It hasn't dissolved into anarchy yet. At the borders, however, immigration officers enforce restrictions that no longer make sense, while in the streets ambulances carry people to short-staffed and overworked hospitals without room for patients. Thousands of others shuffle slowly forward in queues, following earlier medical advice and concerned about symptoms, as snails race past. Politicians, who once encouraged people to "test, test, test", now want people to go home.

Slowly at first, although with increasing rapidity as normal services collapse under pressure, the motivation behind decision-making is altering. Individuals place their own interests first as society comes second. It's a logical answer when government demonstrates it can't provide the leadership to cope.

The changing public health advice is eroding trust and breeding a broader scepticism towards the capacity of authority.

The irony is that this medical advice is designed to be dynamic. If the risk of getting disease is low, it makes sense to restrict boosters and prioritise best practice, because this ensures everybody has the best chance of minimising infections and disruption. When the system breaks down, however, as the virus escapes to penetrate the containment lines of hotel quarantine and spread through our contact networks, the advice is meant to change. To audiences used to hearing the term "best medical practice", however, such altered instructions ring hollow. After being told to wait six months for a booster, the sudden news that shots are now being offered earlier sounds worrying.

The best practice hasn't changed, but the situation in which it's being dispensed has. This is why, like the virus, the idea of best practice is mutating. Unfortunately this has a corrosive effect, because it looks as if the health advice that we were earlier told was "gold standard" was actually fool's gold, right for the time but right no longer. Scepticism grows, ratcheted higher by rumour, and capped by an underlying suspicion that maybe our politicians don't actually know what they're talking about after all. Trust begins to erode.

It's not as if everybody has suddenly turned. Government still sets and enforces the framework inside which we live our lives. What is disappearing, though, is the deep reservoir of trust that we normally accord to the institutions that run our lives.

Our government had two years to streamline a response to COVID. Originally Australia managed (although often by chance, rather than by intelligent design) to erect relatively effective protections. After an initial "she'll be right" attitude that saw the virus explode from cruise liners to nursing homes in NSW, and a targeted then chaotically scatter-gun approach to lockdowns in Victoria, it began to look as if everything would be OK. Delta arrived but it was brought under control as well, despite a couple of significant policy failures that witnessed the further, unnecessary spread of disease. It seemed, nonetheless, as if we could beat the world after all.

But then the weakest link snapped. With Gladys Berejiklian out of the way, Dominic Perrottet took his hands off the wheel, pushed the accelerator, and let the virus rip.

Complacency had enveloped both politicians and bureaucrats who mistook good fortune for effective policy. Perrottet wanted to try a new way, and nothing would stop his ideological determination to push through and wreck the system. Like most politicians, he thought he knew better.

The initial response of leaders frightened at the prospect of being blamed for the spread of disease was to push health officials before the microphones at the daily press conferences. Then, as the danger decreased, they strode to the front themselves. Doctors and even (bizarrely) generals were called in, but they quickly dropped back to serve as little more than props for the politicians who pretended they were on a daily basis making finely calibrated changes to settings that were controlling the virus. Then, after a dangerous slip-up where the NSW chief health officer appeared to suggest that her advice might not have been what the Premier wanted to hear, this flummery of nodding officials was increasingly dispensed with.

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The worst culprits were Perrottet and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Both possess that most vital attribute for politicians: the ability speak with complete confidence about things they know absolutely nothing about. On Wednesday and Thursday last week the Prime Minister outdid himself by adopting, on successive days, completely contradictory positions about whether tennis star Novak Djokovic would be banned from entering the country or not.

Morrison is far more capable of applying spin than any mere tennis player, but he'd be wise to stay away from sports contests for a while yet. The jeering that accompanied his jaunt to Bathurst to see the car racing is likely to be far more prolonged the next time he leaves the carefully controlled environment of a prepared set piece and staged photo opportunity.

Initially, as a society, our first response to COVID was to close ranks around leaders who seemed to have the answers and to be able to protect us. We wanted movement restrictions, vaccines, and, perhaps most critically, information - all of which are critical to combating the spread of the virus. Politicians seemed to offer this, and we in the media supinely accepted this monopolisation of the spin while the measures were working. Today, they're not.

It's true that Omicron is different, but this is not an excuse for the current failure.

We always knew the virus would mutate, but it's now clear that our politicians are not up to dealing with this outbreak. The country's senior bureaucrats are equally proving themselves either incapable of proffering sensible advice or convincing government to adopt it if they do. Unsurprisingly, this is leading to a rapid collapse of the deeper reservoir of trust that enables democratic states to function effectively.

I had doubted Anthony Albanese's ability to grasp victory at the next election. Sometimes, however, a government is just so bad it demands to be kicked out.