David Penberthy: The mass outbreak of state-based paranoia is a combined effort by governments, oppositions and voters.
The PM has been left emasculated and impotent by state leaders doing their own thing, oppositions egging them on and a public mood awash with parochial paranoia, writes David Penberthy.
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Australia today looks less like a country than a group of tribes led by local strongmen and women whose principal interest is their own clan.
In the early days of the pandemic much was made of the national cabinet system whereby Scott Morrison sat down with state and territory leaders to work maturely and collaboratively for the greater good.
It has of late felt increasingly as if national cabinet is a casual, non-binding get-together where everyone has a bit of a chinwag and then sets back about doing whatever the hell they like.
The Prime Minister has looked emasculated, if not impotent, as state leaders continue to act as they wish, arguably in an unconstitutional fashion, outsourcing responsibility to non-elected officials to make decisions that directly affect people’s lives.
It is bizarre the states have made such fanfare about the need to maintain sound mental health during the lockdown yet have acted in a manner which for many communities maximises the mental anguish they must endure.
By mental anguish I don’t mean the trifling inconvenience of staying on the couch for a while. I mean shutting your business, sacking your staff, pulling your kids out of school, moving into a caravan on the right side of your farm, all because you’ve been deemed to be living in the wrong part of Australia on the basis of some arbitrary line that a cartographer drew a couple of hundred years ago.
As a South Australian I am hard-wired to feel a level of animus, born from inadequacy, towards the state of Victoria. Proving anything is possible in 2020, I now feel nothing but sympathy for the manner in which the people of that state have become lepers in their own land.
It is at the borders where this treatment is at its most appalling and illogical, where in some districts that are the size of European nations, with barely any (if any) coronavirus cases, the shutters have been drawn up to keep the infected Victorian hordes at bay.
All this in small Victorian rural towns, where the residents would no sooner travel to Melbourne than Mogadishu. The exact same situation is happening along Victoria’s northern border with NSW.
In Queensland, with one eye firmly on her re-election, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk merely shrugged her shoulders last week when Qantas boss Alan Joyce rightly identified border closures as a key driver of the loss of 6000 jobs and $2.7bn at the national carrier this year.
Out west, Premier Mark McGowan is picking up where Prince Leonard of the Hutt River Province left off, effectively declaring WA a stand-alone municipality. In a memorable front page, Tassie’s Hobart Mercury declared “WE’VE GOT A MOAT” in cheering the announcement a hard border closure early in the pandemic.
Canberra has no cases but its residents are still locked up. And, in Darwin, the latest suggestion is the tourism-dependent Territory will be closed to travellers from COVID hotspots for another 18 months.
In a qualified defence of the premiers, none of this madness would be happening if it wasn’t in keeping with the public mood, and urged on by opportunistic oppositions which, desperate to muscle their way on to the dance floor at a time of acute irrelevance, are often trying to out-flank the incumbents by making even more outrageous demands for tougher closures and tighter restrictions.
To this end, we really are all in this together. The mass outbreak of state-based paranoia is a combined effort by governments, oppositions and voters.
It is country people who are suffering the most as a result of all this. The handling of the pandemic has probably proved the long-held suspicion of rural folks that decisions in this country are made by city-based politicians and bureaucrats who have no understanding whatsoever of how their lives operate, and probably not that much interest, either, as elections are won and lost in the cities.
Over the past few weeks I have ended up on speed-dial with a whole bunch of families along the SA/Victorian border. To say they are at their wit’s end is an understatement.
In a dramatic escalation of the rules, SA banned all Victorian children except those in Years 11 and 12 from continuing to attend SA schools and barred all “non-urgent” medical travel, and narrowed the definition of essential work to exclude a whole raft of small businesses.
They include Pinnaroo business owner Guy Badman who shut his coffee shop indefinitely on Friday when the border exemptions were scrapped. His next-door neighbour on Pinnaroo’s high street, retailer Bec Oakley, did the same, and was busily packing away stock for storage as she contemplated the indefinite closure of the homewares and fashion store she opened almost two years ago.
Mr Badman’s wife Bronwyn teaches at Pinnaroo Primary School and is working on plans to create a “cell” of half a dozen five-year-olds who, as Victorians, will no longer be able to travel a few kilometres over the SA border to continue attend their new school and must now be taught off-site on the Victorian side.
Ms Oakley also works at the primary school, one day a week in its library, but has been told that, as a Victorian, she won’t be allowed back into SA from Friday to work.
The Badmans and their three children live 4km over the border in Victoria, while Bec Oakley and her farmer husband Trent and their two children live on a property that straddles the SA and Victorian border in an area known as Panitya, just 2km east of SA, but because their house is on the Victorian side of their property they’re classified as Victorians.
“What sort of government are we living under that does this to Australian citizens?” Guy Badman said when I spoke to him last week.
It’s a fair question. To rework our de facto anthem: I am, you are, we are (insert name of relevant state here).