Victoria’s Chief Health officer Brett Sutton has offered some vaguely reassuring words on the state of Victoria’s lockdown, saying that “for now” there is no plan to extend it beyond the original timeframe of five days.
Earlier today, a legal academic from Monash Uni pointed out that, by the wording of the current lockdown direction, the period for which the stay safe order applies is actually two weeks, ending on February 26.
When questioned on this today, Brett Sutton said that just because the current period of emergency is slated to end on the 26th, there is no need to “read into” this and assume the lockdown will last for longer than five days. He said:
“All directions have always been written until the end of the emergency period, whenever that relevant state of emergency period has been extended … That applies to all directions across all periods. So they will be revoked at any point where we think the settings need to be changed… [and] that has applied previously when we have already had a flagged date of easing of restrictions.”
He continued:
“That has always been the way legal have approached it. Nothing should be read into it as having an intention to extend beyond … when we think they need to be in place. For now, that is five days, absolutely.”
So there you have it, I guess. The planned lockdown period is still five days “for now”, so we’ll see where things are at on Wednesday.
