Having spent months assuring not just her citizens, but the rest of the country, that she had the right settings in place, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is no longer even reporting what proportion of her daily cases are "unlinked". Having first informed us last week that the origin of more than 800 of her 1000 new cases were unknown, she has simply stopped reporting this data.

NSW's surrender is a huge threat to the ACT and, indeed, to the rest of the country. As Chief Minister Andrew Barr said on Saturday, "we can quash this outbreak successfully ... but we are still exposed to a new spark, another wave of the virus coming into the ACT". Of course, just like with this outbreak, NSW is the most likely source of that spark - and, if it cannot get its testing, tracing, isolation and quarantine (TTIQ) systems operating effectively again, then not only will there be far more active cases of COVID-19 in NSW, but here in the ACT we will have far less warning regarding the direction of its travel.

Whether he knows it or not, Prime Minister Scott Morrison's plan to begin reopening Australia when vaccination levels hit 70 per cent is based on the assumption that the NSW government will succeed in getting its case numbers back down. While it is true that the Doherty Institute modelling on which this plan is based is not highly sensitive to the number of cases we have when we hit 70 per cent, it is also true that the modelling explicitly assumes the TTIQ system will be working very well. And with thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of unlinked cases circulating in NSW come October, it will be simply impossible to pretend the TTIQ system is working well.

While much has been written about the importance of contract tracers, few people understand either how many lives they have already saved in Australia or how much emphasis the Doherty modelling places on their ongoing effectiveness. Consider the following.

When the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney and released 2700 people - hundreds of them with COVID-19 - into the community, no one in Australia was vaccinated. Not a single soul. The only thing that stopped the disease that has so far killed over 640,000 people in the US and 132,000 in the UK from killing tens of thousands of Australians was the ability of our contract tracers to quickly find people with the disease and keep them away from everyone else. We weren't even wearing masks back then.

The only reason Canberra's hospitals weren't overrun last year was rapid contract tracing and isolation. Likewise, the only reason that Perth might hold the AFL grand final in front of a crowd of 60,000 people who don't have Covid is that last year's contact tracing was so effective there are zero cases in WA today.

Of course, we need to vaccinate people as quickly as possible. Doing so will save lives, slow the spread, and as a result, make contact tracing even more effective. We don't need to choose between vaccination and contact tracing - we need both. But we simply cannot have good contact tracing when premiers let new cases hit over 1000 per day.

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You don't have to take my word for it. According to the Doherty modelling that the Prime Minister is basing his whole plan on, our ability to "test, trace, isolate and quarantine" as well as NSW did back in 2020 is as good at suppressing COVID-19 as vaccinating 60 percent of the population. Indeed, according to the Doherty modelling, a population that is 70 per cent vaccinated and has "optimal TTIQ" effectiveness would see around five Australians die each day, while a population with 80 per cent vaccination and "partially effective TTIQ" would see around 50 Australians die each day.

While the authors of the Doherty modelling make clear that the effectiveness of TTIQ systems decline as case numbers rise, the modelling is also based on the assumption that the effectiveness of TTIQ systems won't fall below the level of Melbourne's second wave. That assumption may have made some sense in June, when the modelling was completed, but it is dangerously misleading when we can see NSW already has no idea where 80 per cent of its new cases are coming from.

Unless NSW can get its outbreak under control, the PM's plan to reopen Australia's internal borders will be as meaningless as his plan to stamp out violence against women, or his roadmap for low emissions. The Doherty modelling doesn't show that it is safe for the ACT or any other state to open their borders to NSW if the virus is still running rampant. It simply assumes such a situation would never have been allowed to develop.