David Penberthy: The thing that grates is some of the tasteless grandstanding
Victoria is in the middle of a deadly crisis and its neighbours are hovering like vultures ready to swipe everything from the AFL grand final to the Melbourne Cup, writes David Penberthy.
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The Ben Lee tune We’re All in This Together might be the unofficial anthem of the pandemic but right now it feels like Australia’s states are all singing from a different song sheet.
The most telling example is the manner in which poor old Victoria is being picked away at, as if by vultures on a carcass, with Queensland and NSW hovering around trying to pinch everything from the AFL grand final to even the Melbourne Cup.
While I’m no Dan Andrews fan, it must be galling for the Victorian Premier to spend his morning holding press conferences tallying up the hundreds of coronavirus cases his state has recorded for the day, then the afternoon making sure none of his fellow premiers have pinched any major events off him.
When the pandemic began to hit back in March, much was made of the success of the national cabinet model and the streamlined manner in which decisions were being made in the national interest.
Despite having an ideological mix of leaders, with left-wing and right-wing Labor leaders, moderate and conservative Liberal premiers and overseen by a conservative PM, the cabinet model has broadly speaking been such a success there are plans to keep it, in the happy event that this pandemic is ever declared over.
But beyond the discipline of national cabinet there are plenty of signs the states are taking more of a local view than a national view.
The one area where the Prime Minister has never been able to stake his authority is on the question of borders remaining open.
The fact remains that at no stage has there been any official national health advice saying border closures are necessary on safety grounds.
It has always been the Commonwealth’s view social distancing and the observation of rules on crowd numbers are the key to fighting the virus, rather than keeping people locked in their home states and prevented from crossing borders.
That soberminded assessment has been mugged by the crudest political reality – that politics is about survival, and no state premier is going to want to be responsible for allowing an influx of visitors from another high-infection part of Australia, resulting in a spike in cases in their own neck of the woods.
You can’t blame the politicians for that, as they are simply responding to overwhelming public sentiment. Indeed the premier who has been the most hostile to any borders reopening – WA’s Mark McGowan – is enjoying uncharted approval ratings of more than 90 per cent. In my home state of SA, where Premier Steven Marshall is rating in the 80s, there has been no public backlash whatsoever against his decision to scrap his promised July 20 reopening of the NSW border after the Crossroads Hotel outbreak, nor his decision maintain a hard border with Victoria, one backed up troops from the ADF.
As popular as decisions like this are within those states, they do have the effect of cutting Victoria and to a lesser extent NSW off from the rest of the nation. Harshly, the response to that right now is, so be it.
This type of self-preservation might be understandable but the thing that grates is some of the tasteless grandstanding we are seeing at the expense of the state that is struggling the most, namely Victoria.
NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro, in a successful bid for a headline, told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph this week that NSW was making “a bold pitch” to hold the Melbourne Cup held at Randwick, AFL grand final at ANZ Stadium, Bledisloe Cup matches played at Bankwest, and for regional NSW to play host to a revived Melbourne Comedy Festival.
“This is NSW reaching out to do everything we can to help,” Mr Barilaro told The Daily Telegraph, in one of the more disingenuous remarks he’s probably made in a while.
Andrews saw the comments for what they were.
“I haven’t got time for those really silly games. That’s what they are,” he said. “We’re all in this together. They’re doing a lot of contact tracing up in Sydney. They’ve got an issue. We’ve got a much bigger issue and we’re focused on dealing with that.”
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Further north, Queensland is now mounting its case that on account of having saved the AFL season by creating and widening its hub so teams from Victoria can be based there, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is also angling to host the AFL grand final.
There’s a difference between offering to host it in the event Melbourne can’t, and using it out as a quid pro quo where Queensland demands it as some precondition for saving the season. It looks like the Queensland Premier is doing the latter, and there’s something a bit craven and opportunistic about it.
I wrote at the start of this pandemic about how the cruel thing about this virus was that it strikes at our status as social beings. Going to restaurants, going to church, going to watch sport, see bands, have counter meals at the pub with mates or big barbies with our extended families … these were the first casualties as the lockdown began.
It is unpleasant enough for the people of Victoria that they have been thrust back into that world a second time.
The last thing they need is other states willing them to be stripped of the few remaining events that are so central to Melbourne’s identity and character.
There’s a likelihood they will have to be moved anyway, at which point the other states would be helping.
Right now, all these other states are doing is posturing for a local audience, which is an unpleasant symptom of a fragmented federation.