David Penberthy: The greatest benefit SA has is our temperament
Adelaide’s reliably cool temperament saved the city from months of Sydney-like torment writes David Penberthy. Those “boring” jibes from the east ring like compliments now.
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All the things that South Australia has historically been teased about by eastern states have suddenly become virtues.
Being small and quiet is a blessing in the age of coronavirus. For years, we South Aussies have sheepishly cited our laid-back lifestyle as the chief benefit of living in SA, at risk of being scoffed at by the Sydney and Melbourne crowd, who regard it as a defensive code phrase aimed at masking the truth that we are simply boring.
In our current circumstances, even with the restrictions we have in place, our laid-back lifestyle is the greatest thing we have got going for us.
In Sydney, where high-rises dominate the skyline in suburbs such as Chatswood and Burwood, Pyrmont and Ultimo, families are enduring isolation without backyards and with the local parks and beaches all closed. For thousands of Sydneysiders, the experience of lockdown is not that different from residents of Wuhan, such as my old Adelaide mate Dr Simon Carter, who has just emerged from a relaxing 76 days with his wife and daughter in their 20th-floor apartment in a city of 11 million people.
I spoke this week to former NSW Premier Bob Carr, who was saying that his local beach, Maroubra, is closed off with tape.
Police and council officers are threatening to fine people who attempt to swim or even walk on the sand. And that’s not in groups either, but single, solitary individuals, daring to go for a dip or stroll on their own.
There aren’t many places in the world that feel great right now, or normal, but I still can’t think of anywhere I would rather be than Adelaide.
The greatest benefit we have as a state is our temperament.
The last significant outbreak of public disorder in SA was in 1984, when the Japanese pop band Sandii and the Sunsetz played that concert at Glenelg where drunken ruffians threw beer bottles at each other and up-ended cars.
Since then, we have kept a clean sheet in the civility stakes, save for the occasional idiot getting removed by the constabulary from a Showdown.
The less-onerous restrictions we face in SA are a testament to the wisdom of our leaders. But in a bigger, more important way, they’re a testament to this state’s collective capacity for decency and common sense.
The calm, measured leadership we are seeing from the Premier, the Police Commissioner and Chief Medical Officer is only possible when they’re not lumbered with the task of managing an unruly and rancorous horde.
Talking to Mr Carr on Wednesday, he couldn’t believe that all the safe and simple pleasures he was missing in NSW were still legal here in SA. On the same day we spoke, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens announced that, after consultations with Dr Nicola Spurrier and representations from the wine industry and microbrewers, he had decided to re-open cellar doors and small breweries.
The Commissioner spoke today about how happy he was seeing “open” signs going back up across our wine regions.
Part of the challenge in places like Sydney is that there is a simple algorithm in life that the more people you’ve got, the more drongos you’ll have. I’m not having a crack at Sydney, either. I love the place, it was my home for more than a decade and is truly one of the world’s great cities. But the harsh policing that’s being seen there is a direct result of the carry-on at Bondi a month ago, which was fuelled not just by selfish locals but young backpackers, who – with the admirable stupidity that comes with youth – clearly decided they were bulletproof and that nothing as trifling as a global pandemic was going to wreck their day in the sun.
Here, aside from a couple of isolated breaches of social distancing – which seem to have been inflated by those who get off on dobbing – SA has been a paragon of sensible behaviour.
And here’s the trick – the more we behave as we are told to, the sooner we can get back to behaving as we like.
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There are a whole bunch of things I really want to do right now. Have my parents babysit the kids so my wife and I can have dinner at a restaurant, and then hit up a private room at a karaoke bar to sing stupid songs. Go to a Crows game with my family, to the SANFL with my teenage son, to the zoo with my little kids. Get back to my old role as Dad the Uber driver, and spend a Saturday night dropping my teenage daughter off and retrieving her from parties. Have a full-on family dinner with my parents and my sister and her husband and kids. Go to the pub with my mates.
Every day we don’t do these things brings us another day closer to doing all of them again.
The battle against COVID-19 is a real-time science experiment. In terms of its political management – and by politics I mean the combined powers of the state, executive government, the police and the health chiefs – it is also a real-time experiment in trust.
We are already freer in SA not just because our quiet and small state is more manageable logistically, but because, as South Australians, we are more manageable behaviourally. The trust we enjoy is our greatest collective asset. It’s why the numbers are lower here, the restrictions are lower here, the future is more hopeful here.