David Penberthy: Sooner or later, law-abiding people say, ‘stuff this, I’m out’

I’ve abided by even the most laughable rules and edicts but one moment in Adelaide last week tells me health authorities have lost the plot, writes David Penberthy.

I have never been to prison - the charges didn’t stick - but I would imagine that upon exchanging pleasantries with one’s new cellmate a suitable ice-breaker would be to ask: “So, what are you in for?”

If I had a choice, I’d like to be locked up with the two blokes who have been found guilty of going to the footy.

Now, I know we are all meant to hate these guys. Clearly they did the wrong thing. They knowingly broke the law.

Mad Melbourne supporters Hayden Burbank, 49, and Mark Babbage, 39, have been handed a 10-month jail term by the Perth Magistrates Court after they lied their way into Western Australia to see their beloved Dees triumph in last month’s AFL Grand Final.

A 57-year premiership drought will make a man do strange things, I guess.

They falsified documents and lied about their movements, claiming they were entering WA from Darwin without revealing they had actually come from Victoria. Once at the game they had a hell of a time, somewhat guilelessly documenting every joyful moment on social media, the photographs coming back to haunt them after their con was exposed upon their arrest.

Both men pleaded guilty to three charges of breaching WA’s COVID laws and one charge of fraud.

Hayden Burbank and Mark Babbage celebrating the Melbourne football club’s premiership.

They had a few defences at their disposal – maybe not defences, but a few counter-arguments that lessened their crime.

Rafferty had not been in Melbourne but Mount Hotham, which at that stage was not in lockdown, and Babbage had been doubly vaccinated and also took the trouble of having a Covid test in Darwin to make sure he was negative before entering WA.

None of this cut them much slack with the court. While seven of the 10 months of their sentence was suspended, and backdated to the day of their arrest, they will still be spending three months in the clink.

This case shows how much Australia has changed over the past 18 months.

There was a time when conduct of this nature might be considered larrikinism.

Now, both government, the law, the police and many in the public regard it as one of the crimes of this century.

As I said, they did the wrong thing, but there are still aspects to this case that I struggle with, such as the breathless assertion that they placed us all in danger.

How much danger did they actually place us in? And since when has it been the business of the criminal justice system to jail people on the basis of something which could have happened, as opposed to what has happened?

But they could have caused a Covid outbreak! These dirty Vics could have brought their virulent Melbourne strain into freedom-loving Perth and turned Mark McGowan’s pristine utopia into a giant, pestilent petri dish! Yeah, well, they didn’t.

WA Premier Mark McGowan speaks during a media opportunity ahead of the 2021 AFL Grand Final at Optus Stadium. Picture: Will Russell

And here’s where their prison sentence really annoys me. There are truly evil people walking around as free as a bird who have been found guilty of things that actually did happen.

Things like accessing the vilest images of children, belting random strangers or their wives, robbing the elderly, where the courts will entertain and accept all sorts of sob-stories that allegedly explain or even excuse their behaviour.

The idea that these two blokes pose any ongoing threat at all to the public is absurd. They could have (and indeed were) made examples enough through the media coverage they endured.

They could have been clobbered with a massive fine. At the very least sentenced to home detention - you know, in the same way many actual paedophiles are.

But no, they’re in the big house until Christmas.

I can’t help but feel that this case represents the formalised escalation of state power under Covid, where the authorities have been quite happy to increase and then implement powers without parallel in our lifetimes.

I wrote a few weeks back about how the past 18 months has been a good time for graphs - vax rates by LGA, state and nation, numbers of single doses vs double dose, exponential growth of cases locally and abroad.

The one graph that hasn’t been designed yet is the “stuff this for a joke” graph where otherwise law-abiding people get to the point where they say: “I’m out.”

These blokes - wrongly - got to that point by going to the football.

Participants take off from the 12km start line of the Bay-City fun run at Colley Tce, Glenelg. picture: Bianca De Marchi

I feel like I am at it too. I have followed every rule, been double-vaxxed with enthusiasm, I use the QR codes, wear a mask, and will swallow every edict even if deep down some of them make me raise an eyebrow or laugh out loud.

But there was one the other day in my home town that for me represented the formal suspension of logic and common sense by the health authorities.

It was the cancellation of a fun-run for around 12,000 people, a fully outdoor event where everyone would have checked in, and where it could also have been limited to vaccinated participants.

In the same city where the recent local footy final was attended by almost 30,000 people, the axing of Adelaide’s City-Bay Fun Run was patently absurd, especially in a state where just four people – four – have sadly lost their lives through the entirety of the pandemic, and there have been no local Covid cases for months.

The time-worn explanation from the health bureaucracy for this decision was, of course, accompanied by all the usual cliches about how all this is done with the heaviest of hearts and it’s tough on everyone.

It’s not actually tough on everyone in the same measure though. There is a difference between being a fully-paid public servant who spends the day closing things down, and a clinically depressed, domestically stressed and financially ruined person in the private sector, smashed by the fact that they keep closing them.