David Penberthy: South Australia is set to emerge from COVID-19 as the safest place in the world
South Australia is on track to becoming known as the safest place in the world. And a reputation like that is very good for business, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- State budget delayed as new case ends zero streak
- How to get the most from your Advertiser subscription
One of the great fallacies of the media is that bad news sells. There are times in the immediate aftermath of a horrible event such as September 11 or the Bali bombings where you can’t print enough newspapers.
The truth, though, is that people get very tired very quickly of bad news and look for respite by disengaging from the news cycle and listening to some music or pottering in the garden instead.
It is hard to quantify these things as a journalist, but it has felt for the past couple of weeks that people are starting to come down with a serious case of COVID fatigue.
The problem with this damn story is that it has infected every Ave of our lives, be it sport, eating out, going to the pub or the pictures, how we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, whether we can go to the beach or not.
It is an unavoidable, all-consuming pain in the backside.
All stories have a story arc, where they start, grow in interest and importance, and then tail off and are set aside.
In a bad news story like this one, it is heartening for us as South Australians that we have shifted so surprisingly quickly from being in the bleak and terrifying phase of this event, to the more optimistic and upbeat part where we can start talking about it actually ending, about our lives slowly and cautiously returning to normal.
Our figures are remarkable when you set them against all those chilling projections we were being presented with two months ago.
The most sober prediction was 100,000 deaths nationally. We haven’t cracked the ton yet.
In SA, we have lost four people. While those deaths were obviously tragic, they are a world away from what we were being told to expect.
Two weeks without a new case, until Thursday, just five people infected, only two still in hospital, and a state recovery rate of 99.95 per cent.
Having performed well as a nation, and particularly well as a state, there is a chance for SA to rethink how it goes about its business, and also to scotch the ludicrously negative perception our state has been lumbered with as a dull place with little going for it.
Over the past month or so I have repeated mournful conversations with friends and colleagues in Sydney and Melbourne about how shackled their lives are and how they are crawling up the walls in a much harder version of lockdown. Suddenly, SA’s laid-back lifestyle hasn’t been a source of derision, but envy. Clearly SA can overdo the extent to which it pats its own back in handling the pandemic. We have to admit that we had a big tactical advantage from the get-go with a smaller and therefore less crowded population and fewer visitors from interstate or overseas. But even with that head start we could have still messed it up, as other low population centres have.
It’s a credit to our state’s combined leadership of the Premier, chief medical officer and Police Commissioner that there has been such consistency of purpose. It was a scientifically based approach that placed great store in testing, and it reaped results.
The Opposition sensibly muted its attacks on the Government and has been largely supportive, too.
As such we have had one of the smoothest and least stressful lockdowns anywhere on earth, and counterintuitively, achieved lower rates of infection while enjoying higher levels of freedom.
The economic damage we have suffered as a result of all this will be significant, but there is also a sense in SA that the post-COVID world will present our smaller, more liveable state and more affordable state with new opportunities.
Even factoring in salary differences between the states, the economic hit on SA families with mortgages won’t be as acute here as in the eastern states because few of us have to service loans running to 800k, 900k, $1 million-plus for basic homes.
The ability of so many workers to transition smoothly from office-based work to remote work will force new thinking in the corporate sector.
The Premier is bullish about it. When I interviewed him earlier this week he said he believed the state could be on the cusp of a golden era.
“There is a massive silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud for our state,” he said. “We are the most liveable city in the world but we are now also the safest. The world is taking notice of how well we have done.
MORE NEWS:
AFL, Crows investigate isolated players’ Barossa ‘breach’
Lifting restrictions: 10 questions SA wants answered
Lawyers probe staff posts after council romance
“That will help us to showcase our ambitions in terms of future industries such as defence, space, cyber, blockchain and tech creative industries.
“There’s a golden time for SA going forward because there is a growing recognition now that being successful doesn’t have to involve sitting on the 62nd floor of an office tower in Sydney or Hong Kong or London.
“The SA lifestyle offers different working opportunities with the added bonus that it’s also now one of the safest places in the world.”
Maybe Steven Marshall can go full Donald Trump on all this and propose that we build a wall to keep Victorians at bay and Make South Australia Great Again.
As things currently stand it looks like there is very little chance of catching the coronavirus from community transmission in SA. We set out to suppress it but it looks like we have eliminated it.
As Professor Nicola Spurrier said a couple of days ago the biggest threat to us now is from interstate travel, which is why the ban on unfettered border crossings will be here to stay for some time.
For now we can afford to reflect on our status as a happy little oasis in a deeply troubled world. And that’s a genuinely good news story.