Tory Shepherd: No one wants to die to save Virgin or Flight Centre

Corporations want to dictate when Australia re-opens but callous calls to hurry up at any cost have been proven wrong already, writes Tory Shepherd.

After a long day on the phone to epidemiologists, discussing the pandemic, I bought a trolley-load of Spam. Spiced ham in a can.

It was 2009, a good decade before I realised that toilet paper was the go-to panic buy.

Swine flu (influenza A (H1N1)) had hit Australia. It turned out to be milder than first feared, but still deadly to some.

In fact, it’s still deadly to some. At the end of the 2019 flu season (before all our COVID-19 habits crushed all flu infections to an all-time low), about 30 people had died from H1N1. A small but significant proportion of the 812 people who had died from flu overall.

It’s true to say that we’ll have to learn to live with COVID-19 – unless we magically eradicate it from the entire globe or become a proper little hermit kingdom.

It’s also true to say that people will die from it. Again, unless there’s some yet-to-be-seen global cure.

Flight Centre chief Graham “Skroo” Turner at Noosa Beach. Picture: Annette Dew

These statements may be true but they’re also cruel, and only being wheeled out in pursuit of political or commercial gain.

And they’re more than just a bit “insensitive”, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison labelled it.

This week, Flight Centre chief Graham “Skroo” Turner backed Virgin Australia boss Jayne Hrdlicka’s position that international borders should open even if people die.

“It will make us sick but won’t put us into hospital,” she said, before immediately contradicting herself. “Some people may die but it will be way smaller than the flu.”

(The words are from a speech she gave at Queensland University of Technology, and a press release from the university included “once vaccinated” in brackets).

That “didn’t sound callous”, Mr Turner said.

“I thought it was quite well said. People will die (from COVID), people will just have to accept that.”

That may seem all very hands-off-I’m-just-telling-it-like-it-is, but the fact is that corporates are pushing for the international borders to open when approximately diddlysquat Australians have been vaccinated. When the virus is still raging around the world. When we don’t have enough quarantine spots to even bring stranded Australians home.

Mr Morrison said he found it “very difficult to have any truck” with the statements.

“A total of 910 Australians have lost their lives. Every single one of those lives was a terrible tragedy, and it doesn’t matter how old they were.

“Some were younger, some were older. They were someone’s mum, someone’s dad, someone’s aunty, someone’s cousin, brother, sister, friend … so, no, I find it very difficult to have any truck with what was said there,” he said.

It was “insensitive”, he said. It was. And it was worse than that.

Of course, we eventually will open back up to the world. And it would be handy to have some signposts along the way: Do we let people in once most of us are vaccinated; once the vulnerable are vaccinated?

These are serious and nuanced conversations that shouldn’t be sidetracked or influenced by the powerful bosses of big companies.

As Greens senator Jordon Steele-John told the ABC: “When we talk about changing policy settings and accepting that people may die because it will boost the bottom line of a corporation like Virgin, we need to be very clear who we are talking about.

“If you look at the cohorts that are most at risk of COVID-19, it’s older people, it’s First Nations people, it’s disabled people. We are human Venn diagrams of risk when it comes to COVID-19.”

Earlier in the pandemic, there were plenty of neoliberals who talked in terms of sacrifice, who argued it was better to risk deaths than risk the economy. Remember them?

They were roundly proven wrong (just ask Sweden). This pandemic showed there’s no false binary, no “choice” between health and wealth.

Keeping Australians (relatively) healthy is what has kept our economy from destruction.

We should dismiss those who want to act with indecent haste. The only hurry-ups should be for the vaccine rollout and enough quarantining facilities to bring Australians home, safely.