Once this pandemic is over, we need to put stupid, cruel rules aside

I’m not an anti-vaxxer and I have never attended a “freedom” rally, writes David Penberthy – but these petty rulemakers need to be reined in.

About 10 years ago I received a family invite to the opening of an arts festival at the Adelaide Town Hall. My two older kids were just little then, around eight and five, and when we got there I took them up to the first floor balcony that from a very modest height overlooks King William St below. I wanted to show the kids the spot where the world’s greatest band, The Beatles, had stood in June 1964 when the whole town turned out to welcome them on the first leg on their Australian tour.

“Sir, this is a balcony!” an officious person in uniform shouted at me.

“Well spotted,” I thought to myself, without saying.

“You can’t bring small children on to the balcony! Take them down right now!”

If not for their intervention, who knows what might have occurred? I mean, there are safety rails, I was holding their hands, and the entire structure stands a towering 3m above the ground. But despite all that, you can’t be too careful, I suppose.

Actually, you can be too careful. You can be careful to the point of being stupid. And you can be careful to the point of being cruel.

Check out the balcony at the Adelaide Town Hall. Thousands of others have. Picture: Jack Fenby | Adelaide City Council

The past two years will stand forever more as a golden era for priggish, rule-loving pains in the arse who get their kicks out of telling other people what they can and cannot do. It’s been a great time to be alive for people like my security guard friend, who thrive both on paranoia and the use of power.

Just to be clear, I didn’t spend the summer attending freedom rallies or holidaying on Kangaroo Island with anti-vax Senator Alex Antic. This isn’t some generalised sledge against the restrictions we have endured for two years now, many of which have been absolutely necessary to keep us all safe.

But the point should be made that some of these restrictions have not been necessary at all. And of that number, some have been among the cruellest and stupidest features of this pandemic. The fact that they continue to be applied suggests there are some people in government and the bureaucracy who have been very happy acting on an ever-expanding remit, encroaching on parts of life that were once regarded as private and even sacrosanct.

When the next pandemic comes along – hopefully after we and our kids and grandkids are all long gone – future societies should reflect on aspects of the great plague of 2020-22 and abandon the worst examples of government impertinence and intrusiveness.

The people who sadden me most over the past two years are those who through the pig-headed application of hard and fast health rules were denied their right to farewell dying loved ones. This rule never made sense. In hindsight, it is regrettable we all didn’t fire about it more.

Most of the ailing people who were denied the holding of a hand as they slipped away were at the point where they were definitely going to die. Can someone explain what health risk there is from Covid towards someone who is going to be dead within a few hours anyway? Were they going to be even more dead?

Conversely, if the dying person did not have Covid, what risk did they pose to their grief-stricken loved ones? And even if the dying person did have Covid, you could still argue that their fully-vaccinated, PPE-protected partner or child should have been allowed in to see them anyway. Like many of you reading, I know people who were robbed of this important moment over the past two years and remain cut up by it. In psychological terms, in mental health terms, I am not sure what is worse – the slim risk of contracting Covid in such a setting, or the eternal pall of knowing you never kissed Mum or Dad goodbye.

It was my home town which this week provided a pandemic moment that takes line honours for government overreach in the name of public safety.

The Lyell McEwin Hospital tried to keep dads away from tee birthing suite.

In response to the Omicron outbreak, one of Adelaide’s biggest hospitals decreed that expectant mothers would no longer be allowed to have their husbands or birth partners by their side for the duration of their labour.

In absurd and putrid detail, the bureaucrats managing the Lyell McEwin Hospital decreed that dads and other partners would only be allowed into the birthing suite when their partner was in “active labour” – and they actually went on to define this as being when the mother’s cervix was 4cm dilated. They would also have to leave four hours after the birth and could not re-enter the hospital at any stage, even if the mum had a troubled birth and was stuck there for days.

Yep. That was the actual rule, in black and white.

In this rule-loving, Covid-addled world, the application of this rule invites many questions. Were they going to whip out the tape measure to make sure that Mum had hit the magic 4cm mark, and then buzz Dad in from pacing around outside in the carpark?

More importantly – what makes these people think they have the right to make such rulings?

In this Kafkaesque world, there is no one, identifiable human who owns the decision. The decision is made by “the committee” and defended by “the spokeswoman”.

“These restrictions are to protect the health and safety of parents and new babies in our care, particularly while the northern suburbs has relatively low vaccination rates and high incidence of Covid-19,” the spokeswoman for the Northern Area Local Health Management Network committee said.

That’s what the spokeswoman said until Thursday afternoon, when sanity finally prevailed after 22,000 people, many of them expectant mothers, joined a Facebook campaign forcing the SA Premier to intervene and force a review which had these stupid rules scrapped.

More power to them.

To borrow a birth-related metaphor, there is a lesson from this for all of us. We need to push a lot harder to make sure these unelected busybodies don’t keep lording it over us all, just because it’s become a habit brought about by the times.