Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk might be cut off from her constituents but being quarantined in the Westin Hotel as the state battles its greatest threat from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, known as COVID-19, has been no impediment for her to demonstrate authority and control.

This is the real deal. It is more serious than anything Queenslanders confronted in the 16 months following the initial big lockdown in late March 2020. If the current spread of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 was to get loose seriously in the community, life here would look like what’s happening in Sydney, especially the Emerald City’s tribal south and middle western suburbs.

A comprehensive failure by New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian to take the emergence of the Delta strain seriously enough has not just shone a bright light on how and why the more interventionist pandemic strategies deployed by other states work, but created a powerful bloc of Labor premiers who could threaten the electoral dreams of Scott Morrison.

Berejiklian’s “don’t worry, I and my gold standard have got this covered” stance has been smashed by the “go early, go hard, go everywhere” approach seen in Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland. The Liberal Government of South Australia’s Stephen Marshall has been a long-serving member of this otherwise ALP club but it is the three Labor states causing Morrison to wake in fright.

NSW failed in three basic ways. They sought to confine the initial response to the escape of the Delta strain from international travel to the old way of doing things. Very practiced and, previously, reliable contact tracing with a solid testing regime were not enough with the virulent and unpredictable variant from India out and about.

Second, when ministers were spurred to act they faltered. They looked only at what they could see – the ballooning numbers in Sydney’s southwest – and ignored what they couldn’t see but what could still be a problem. The bubbling number of infections elsewhere in the capital remains a clear and lasting danger. No wonder Victoria’s Dan Andrews was begging Berejiklian to ring-fence Greater Sydney.

Lastly, NSW showed no signs of learning much from Victoria’s gloomy winter of 2020. They waited too many days to get into the entrenched ethnic communities in Sydney’s west and south. They ignored the problems posed by precariously placed workers and they didn’t tend to the real needs of sometimes isolated communities.

It’s a scandal that, after the glaring mistakes in the Fitzroy and Footscray housing towers in Melbourne, enough material in local languages was not prepared for any outbreak elsewhere in the country. Federal Labor MP from western Sydney Michelle Rowland says she could access material in Icelandic but couldn’t find information in Tamil. Guess which population has greater representation in her electorate?

Queensland had a small warning Delta could slip in and move about the community with greater ease than anything we’d seen since authorities in this state started smartening their responses in July last year.

Now that warning has morphed into a crisis and we are days away from this getting out of control. Every effort is underway to head off such a possibility. A mix of brutal experience from a handful of close calls in the last 12 months and attentive learning from the failures and successes around this country and overseas stand us in reasonable stead.

The lines winding their way along suburban streets yesterday and today, whether on foot or in vehicles, provide hope the community has a big enough investment in succeeding.

These still unknown unknowns aside, one significant uniting feature of how Palaszczuk, Andrews and Western Australia’s Mark McGowan have operated in the past 16 months is their single-minded conviction and consistency. SA’s Marshall and Tasmania’s Peter Gutwein (though Liberal) and the two ALP territorian chief ministers are also in this band but the three Labor premiers tell the real story and threaten Morrison most.

You cannot find examples of Andrews, McGowan or Palaszczuk wavering because they didn’t. They were early adopters of the hardline response to the virus and they have not budged from a consistent single-mindedness, whether it has been on hotel quarantine, accepting overseas returning travellers, what might otherwise be seen as bleeding heart exemptions or some old fashioned competitive federalism on vaccines.

Political science scholars might not agree with how they’ve gone about it all but their constituents have repaid them in spades because of that conviction and consistent commitment.

They have maintained positive approval ratings throughout. McGowan’s have been stratospheric because he has the luxury of distance and a seriously parochial population while Andrews has had to struggle to maintain a slim overall majority in measuring his approval rating but he remains on the upside of 50 percent.

This stands in contrast to Morrison who has suffered from a mix of disappointment (voters think he’s failed on vaccines), a perception of incompetence and consequential character questions.

Morrison’s problem with this trio of Labor premiers is they hold sway over territory which the Prime Minister’s Coalition parties need to protect and foster.

In 2019 the Coalition won a lop-sided majority of seats in WA and Queensland. They also lost a marginal seat in Victoria and went close to losing others.

If popular premiers can pump up the tyres of federal Labor in these states, Morrison’s already tenuous hold on power (he’s in a statistical dead heat on numbers after an unfavourable couple of redistributions) looks even shakier.

As history attests, consistency and conviction will always trump the kind of flim-flam we’ve seen from Morrison in recent months – during which time he’s opposed lockdowns, extending pandemic assistance and purpose-built quarantine facilities before flip-flopping on all three.

These premiers could be more of a threat to Morrison than the putative opposition in Canberra.