‘Secret weapon’: unflappable Kerry Chant faces toughest challenge yet as NSW Covid outbreak grows
Dr Chant #DrChant
Not many chief health officers enjoy longevity. Often they become the scapegoat when an issue blows up politically, like algae in the water supply or an outbreak at a hospital.
Kerry Chant is the exception. Gladys Berejiklian’s regular sidekick at the daily Covid-19 press conferences, Chant has been in the role in New South Wales since 2008.
Each day she and Berejiklian meet early at NSW Health headquarters in St Leonards. There is often an emergency cabinet meeting, followed by more briefings.
Then Chant and the premier face an increasingly hostile media at 11am to announce the latest case numbers and answer questions about Sydney’s third lockdown, which is becoming more prolonged.
Berejiklian provides the headline numbers and the message of the day – “stay home” or “don’t visit extended family” – before Chant gives a detailed briefing on exposure sites and emerging trends.
Armed with pages of notes and (sometimes unreliable) glasses, Chant is the expert to back up the premier’s political message.
Related: Sydney lockdown extended for at least two weeks as NSW reports 97 new cases
She’s no polished presenter. Just the facts, sometimes delivered in such depth that it seems deliberately designed to anaesthetise.
The former health minister Jillian Skinner confesses that she used to call Chant her “secret weapon” who could be called upon in estimates to cool the temperature of the proceedings with a blizzard of facts.
At one press conference during this recent lockdown, Chant attempted to prop a pair of broken and grubby reading glasses on her face. “Don’t be distracted by my broken glasses,” she instructed the media pack as she rattled off a long list of new infection sites.
It was classic Chant: immersed in the facts; oblivious to the optics. For a politician, broken glasses would have been a disaster, a potentially horrible visual metaphor to be avoided at all costs.
But Chant didn’t seem to care.
More than a year into the pandemic, Chant remains strangely unflappable.
“Utterly without ego,” the former health minister Frank Sartor says. “I think she’s honest,” Sartor adds. “She’s not agenda driven. She’s realistic.”
“Almost shy. She doesn’t have tickets on herself,” said another serving bureaucrat.
Richard Matthews, a former colleague at the department, says Chant is “a really hard worker”.
“At one stage she drove a load of PPE [personal protective equipment] to an aged care home herself because they needed it.”
Berejiklian has said publicly and repeatedly she’s taking her decisions based on health advice – Chant’s advice. But within Berejiklian’s cabinet there are others who are less enamoured and believe the economic impacts of a lockdown should take priority.
The treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, said this week he had “no recollection” of suggesting at one meeting that Chant should take a 5% pay cut if she insisted on recommending an extension to the northern beaches lockdown over Christmas and New Year. Chant also could not recollect what sounds like a feisty exchange – if it occurred.
Guiding the response
So far there has not been a slither of difference between Berejiklian and Chant in their messages, which suggests the two are seeing eye to eye on the health advice to date, or that Chant is a pragmatist.
“As a government you don’t want to have decisions made by the health nazis,” says Sartor. “You want state cabinets to get advice and then have discussions. It’s about the government’s risk appetite, so you want someone who is willing to compromise,” he says.
Others commented that Chant seemed utterly uninterested in politics, which might also explain her longevity in the role and the fact she’s survived both Labor and Coalition administrations.
She’s not funny, but she’s good company
Former NSW health minister Jillian Skinner
It’s difficult to find anyone to say anything bad about Chant.
“She’s not funny, but she’s good company,” says Skinner, who got to know Chant better when they travelled on a health mission to China in 2016.
Chant was there because she was the state’s expert on medical devices. In the brief moments between the packed schedule of meetings with Chinese officials, the pair sought respite in silk shops, discovering companionship in shopping.
Skinner says she realised Chant’s abilities during the HIV crisis. Chant was instrumental in drawing up the state’s 2012 HIV strategy, which focussed on testing to reduce the pool of undiagnosed HIV cases, detect new infections early and link people to care.
Anti-retroviral drugs were rolled out widely and the disease was destigmatised to encourage people to come forward. Lauded around the world, NSW now has one of the lowest rates of HIV infection and high survival rates.
Chant was also in the hot seat doing the planning for potential outbreaks of Sars, swine flu and Ebola. The first two arrived but did not take hold in Australia; the third was mercifully avoided.
It gave Chant and her team time to hone their tools for dealing with a pandemic.
“We established a bunker with a team of contact tracers. They cut their teeth on those epidemics,” says Matthews, a retired deputy director general of NSW Health. He says the state has put considerable resources into public health.
NSW entered the pandemic with a strong contact tracing system, which other states have now emulated. How it will be assessed at the end of this second lockdown depends on how swiftly the current outbreak can be resolved.
Local knowledge
In the meantime, Berejiklian insists the measures she has put in place are being guided by the health advice. And by that she means Chant, who brings the added benefit of a deep knowledge of south-west Sydney, where the Delta strain is concentrated.
Chant grew up in Punchbowl and worked in the south-west local area health service during the early part of her career. She’s recently used her experience to try to build a bridge to the people of Liverpool and Fairfield.
“I’ve had the privilege of working in that neck of the woods for a long time, a lot of my working life. It was an amazing place to work and live,” she said on Friday as she again urged people to stay home on the weekend.
Related: Gladys Berejiklian faces instability within as a Covid storm brews outside
Chant attended the Danebank Anglican School for Girls in Hurstville. She graduated in 1980 and worked in retail jobs and a pharmacy before deciding to study medicine. She graduated from the University of NSW before going on to do master’s degrees in health administration and public health.
She is married with three post-teenage children, who have no doubt not seen a lot of their mother in recent months.
It’s not surprising that when Guardian Australia approached NSW Health for an interview with Chant, they said she was too busy.
Being chief health officer is not usually a path to the top job of director general of the health department, nor usually as high profile. But it does have its excitement.
In 2013, Chant was threatened after advocating for the fluoridation of the water supply at a public meeting in Lismore.
Chant and several health professionals were heckled during the heated debate by a gallery packed with anti-fluoride protestors. As she left the meeting she was approached by a protester who said: “We know your face, I have friends in Syria, do you know of Sarin gas?”
But Covid is the biggest challenge Chant has confronted. Mostly she’s received praise, but there have been low points.
Related: Ruby Princess: NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian apologises ‘unreservedly’ for cruise ship debacle
There were criticisms of NSW Health’s performance by commissioner Bret Walker, who looked into how the cruise ship Ruby Princess had been classified “low risk” by state authorities and allowed to disembark despite the presence of flu-like illness aboard. More than 850 passengers and crew contracted the virus and the ship’s passengers led to clusters around the nation.
Walker found multiple “serious”, “inexplicable” and “basic” errors but declined to call for any resignations or single out individuals.
Sartor says he’s critical of Chant for “stupid things” like allowing limo drivers transporting international air crews to work while unvaccinated and not wearing a mask. But he sees bigger problems with the rollout of the vaccination program – a commonwealth responsibility.
Chant was named the state’s Woman of the Year in March and used the occasion to warn that coronavirus will not be eliminated from the globe.
“As we take the edge off the severity of Covid we will need to figure out what public health measures we’ll need in place,” she said.
It sounds like she has a job for life.