Matthew Abraham: The vaccine may inoculate you from COVID but will it protect you from all these layers of bureaucratic crap?

As Easter proved, the vaccine may protect you from COVID, but Matthew Abraham reckons it won’t save you from snap decisions that can up-end your life.

Are we having fun yet? After 12 months living in COVIDsville the short answer to that question is: not a lot.

Last Saturday night we celebrated a friend’s birthday party at the Scenic Hotel at Norton Summit. I got talking to a young couple from Canberra and they marvelled at the fact you can move around Adelaide without seeing any sign of a city fighting a global pandemic. It’s almost become a mantra for visitors.

It was a warm evening so we were outside under the eucalypts, the western sky still daubed orange from the sunset and the lights of Adelaide winking merrily back at us from below, as if they were in on the joke. It’s a joke with very few laughs.

As we saw with the Easter weekend’s shambolic on-again, off-again border shutdown to visitors from a place called “greater Brisbane”, the coronavirus can switch the fun on and off at will. Let’s run through it because it’s a classic example of why trying to make travel plans in the current environment is next to pointless.

On the Monday before Easter our border was snapped shut to travellers from greater Brisbane and Byron Bay on the back of a handful of COVID cases.

Flight QF663 arriving in Adelaide from Brisbane. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

SA Health handled this in its now familiar bungled fashion, with incorrect quarantine information once again creating chaos for Adelaide Airport arrivals. Little wonder they can’t fix ambulance ramping.

On the Thursday before Easter, the transition committee said it wouldn’t meet again to review the lockout until the Tuesday after Easter, even though it was clear Queensland’s contact tracers were well on top of the outbreak.

But the committee changed its mind, held a “snap” virtual meeting on Easter Saturday and reopened the borders immediately.

Well, not quite. Brisbane travellers still needed a COVID test on arrival, to quarantine until getting the all clear and then swabs shoved up the nose on days five and 13.

By last Wednesday we were told all restrictions for Byron Bay travellers would be removed by 12.01am Friday.

Restrictions for Brisbane travellers will be lifted from 12.01am tomorrow. Simples, as the Meerkats say in the TV ad.

With the exception of NSW, state premiers are incredibly trigger-happy with border closures, seeming to have little real appreciation of how badly they’re messing with our heads.

This week, the New Zealand government announced it would allow Australians to visit in the so-called trans-Tasman “travel bubble”.

Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

Air New Zealand took out full-page newspaper ads asking: Are you tired of Australians?

“After a year of closed borders we wouldn’t blame you,” the blurb read.

“Luckily for us all, the trans-Tasman bubble is about to open. So come on over. We’ve missed you lot”.

Bubbles are pretty but fragile.

What’s to say your trans-Tasman holiday of a lifetime won’t see you banged up in a Kiwi quarantine hotel if a COVID outbreak on either side of the ditch sees borders snapped shut?

Australia’s spluttering vaccination roll-out hit the wall Thursday night, with the AstraZeneca vaccine dumped for under-50s, but the feds assure us it’s “steady as she goes”. Now that is funny.

Which brings us to a nagging question. Will life be very much different when we’ve all had our AstraZeneca or Pfizer COVID jabs? What if this is as good as it gets?

It’s an excellent question to ponder right now.

If you are vaccinated, it should make you immune to either catching the virus or dying from it. But will it make you immune from the layer upon layer of bureaucratic nonsense we’ve had piled on us over the past year?

As it stands, COVID restrictions seem to have become a convenient excuse to dispense with the most annoying aspects of democracy – facing up to real people.

They say you can only get money from a bank if you can prove you don’t need it but now you can only get in to see a GP if you can prove you’re not sick.

Will the alienating Perspex screens ever come down at our supermarket check-outs?

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s border closure mania has handed him an election majority that would even make Russian president Vladimir Putin green with envy.

Will McGowan burn any of that precious political capital by allowing vaccinated visitors from other states into WA from a future COVID-outbreak zone? Don’t bet on it.

The same question needs to be answered by SA Premier Steven Marshall. It needs to be answered, eventually, by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, inside the Canberra bubble.

I’m not tired of Australians, just tired of having our bubbles burst.