David Penberthy: South Australia border closure has exposed Dan Andrews’ petty side
If the Victorian Premier wants to make it as a stand-up comedian he needs to check his facts before coming for South Australia, writes David Penberthy.
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There are many things Victoria has that South Australia doesn’t.
It’s got more ex-Cabinet ministers, more hidden cameras, and on latest count, about 150,000 more members of the Australian Labor Party, thanks to the enthusiastic recruitment efforts of the shady Adem Somyurek, who brought the Victorian Government into deserved disrepute this week.
It’s also got heaps more cases of coronavirus.
They really trounced everyone in the past couple of days, recording 33 new cases. In contrast, we’ve had just two cases in the past six weeks. And we can’t even generate them on our own but have to go to the trouble of importing infected people from Victoria.
And while SA puts the foot down with the lifting of many restrictions, the Victorian Government, or what’s left of it, is busy doing what it does best – closing schools, as COVID-19 clusters continue to spring up over our eastern border.
Of all the weeks to lead with his chin, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews deserves credit for chutzpah in taking time out from his continuing crises to engage in some ill-placed trash-talking against our fair state.
“I don’t want to be offensive to South Australians but why would you want to go there?” he said at a Wednesday media conference when asked about SA’s lifting of border restrictions.
Umm, I don’t know Dan. To play golf? To watch football at an oval? To live in a city where the laneways aren’t clogged with hipsters? A city unsullied by the constant sound of Eddie McGuire?
The nation’s most authoritarian interpretation of the lockdown has come courtesy of the man known by his detractors as Comrade Dan, who when not busy trying to sell off vital infrastructure to China, has been keeping Victorians on a tight leash.
As such, it is only appropriate that he is now telling his citizens where they should holiday, and that there is no need for them travel beyond their own borders.
Make Victorian motherland glorious! Fidel Castro had a similar rule when he was in charge of Cuba, which is why one of the most popular sports under his extended reign was amateur boating. To Florida.
The criticisms of Premier Steven Marshall’s border position by the Vics was absurd, especially given the problems that state continues to have with outbreaks.
And these aren’t all from overseas either, but many cases of unexplained community transmission, three of them protesters from the Black Lives Matter rally.
Despite the juvenile teasing above – which I would defend in an equally juvenile fashion by saying that Mr Andrews deserves to be teased, because he started it – no one should be willing any state to fail in this.
Nor should we ignore the reality that it is easier to manage a pandemic in a less populous, less crowded city such as Adelaide than in a big, congested place like Melbourne.
But when it comes to telling us how we should and shouldn’t conduct ourselves with our borders, Victoria has got more front than Grace Brothers, to find a suitably Melburnian analogy.
Our Premier was the first of any state leader where border bans are in place to start lifting those bans. He is also the only premier from the smaller states who is on the record as saying he supports a full border reopening on July 20.
Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia are still holding firm with the closures.
SA is the only state that has moved, and it’s moved considerably, even though the border closures are only one-way, and despite the unworkable weirdness of us now being open to visitors from Tasmania even though there are no direct flights.
In an economic sense, you can see why NSW and Victoria have resisted border closures all along, as the states’ burgeoning business sector rely on back-and-forth travel for so much of the states’ economic activity.
And they’ve certainly had the national chief medical officers on side, with the deputy chief medical officer Paul Kelly saying all along that there had never been any actual health reason why the borders should be closed.
In an ideal world, you would open every state border tomorrow. The issue is, politics is vastly different from the ideal world.
Mr Marshall’s trepidation is informed by an accurate reading of public sentiment.
So, too, is Opposition leader Peter Malinauskas’s silence. Back in March, it was the Opposition leader who beat the Premier to the jump by a day or so, with what was a fairly easy and obvious call for the closure of the state borders.
No such calls from the Opposition now for their blanket reopening.
In a political sense, the eastern border reopening will be one of the trickiest manoeuvres of the lockdown for Mr Marshall.
It still feels like there is a majority sense in SA that we should now move swiftly to lift as many local restrictions as possible, but not rush at all into reopening the Victorian border.
The only people I know who are strongly demanding the immediate reopening are families who have been driven apart by kids working interstate, and business leaders with a valid commercial interest in the resumption of tourism, business and hospitality, so they can make a quid and hold on to their staff.
But the mainstream view seems to be: Victoria? What’s the rush?
And this week, with SA recording another new case courtesy of our Victorian friends, and their Premier failing in his first outing as a comedian, public opinion in SA will, if anything, have firmed on this question.