The mandate win for police and the Defence Force should not be underestimated.

The fact it doesn’t cover that many people, a handful of hundreds in both organisations is not the point. The point is the government lost. They overreached. It is not fair that you have to lose your job because of a vaccine.

The flow-on effect is what makes this significant. If it applies to police, does it, or can it, apply to teachers? Can it apply to medical workers? What about anyone mandated?

It also once again looks bad for the Government. The first nine days of lockdown proved unlawful. This, unless the Government appeal, which they will have to, looks like overreach. It looks like a government that wants to control your life.

And it comes against the backdrop of Omicron, which is not Delta, but a cold. Not always, but mainly, and sacking people for a cold is not a good look.

It's also against the backdrop of a country that is largely over the whole thing, broadly and specifically. Broadly, because it's dragged on and dragged on longer than it needed to as we can see from any number of other countries that are moving on more rapidly than us.

And, specifically, because there have been an astonishing series of rules and instructions that were not only too complicated to understand and follow, but also didn’t actually work because the people who invented them have been found to be badly incompetent.

Phase 1, 2, and 3 have been the latest examples of theories that had no real practical effect in the real world.

We had a family member on the phone to the health service Friday being bored witless for over half an hour answering endless questions about his Omicron, .when he knew, but the operator didn’t, that locations of interest and contact tracing was over, and that operator was about to lose their job.

14,000 cases and they were still asking where he had been. That's theory versus reality. Every day that passes the groundswell of discontent grows.

Self-isolation for offshore arrivals, madness. Phase 3 rules, pointless. And now a court case they come out on the wrong side of.

The case for the approach they have taken is being eaten away badly.