Lucy Carne: If Queensland opens the border with anti-vaxxers, why not open to all of NSW?
The safeguarding of Queensland’s COVID-19 protection has been placed in the unsanitised hands of Australia’s anti-vaxxer capital once borders open to northern NSW. What could possibly go wrong, asks Lucy Carne.
Opinion
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Putting your faith in predicting human behaviour is fraught with uncertainty and failure.
Trust me, I know.
Blinded by naivety, or perhaps insanity, I recently thought it wise to take my three small children out to dinner.
We are strict about table manners in our house and it seemed the right time to relax our dining restrictions and expose our offspring to culinary experiences beyond Grill’d and the bowls club.
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Look at us, my husband and I smiled at each other across the table. Look at our sophisticated and compliant children – freshly bathed and quietly practising their chopstick skills.
They were behaving exactly as hoped: perfectly.
My predicted modelling of toddler behaviour was a smug success.
And then my children derailed the sushi train.
As I tried to catch flying plates of inari and my husband prised screaming small bodies off the tracks while stunned diners watched this chaotic lesson in contraception unfold with mouths agape, I realised only I was to blame for this catastrophe.
My reliance on behavioural expectations was flawed and resulted in one of the most expensive seven minutes we have ever spent in a restaurant.
For when you expect people to behave in a certain way, chances are they won’t stick at it for long.
And so, guided most probably by internal election polling over scientific or economic reality, the Queensland government will open its borders on Thursday to, of all places, Northern NSW.
Like expecting modesty from the Kardashians or human rights protection from China, the immunity safeguarding of the Sunshine State has been placed in the unsanitised hands of Australia’s anti-vax capital.
What could possibly go wrong?
Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles attempted to justify the opening to far northern NSW as a “very cautious, but measured approach”.
“It does create a risk – there will be people from Sydney holidaying in Byron Bay at the same time people from Queensland are holidaying in Byron Bay,” he said.
So then why not open to all of NSW rather than just the anti-vax heartland?
A Courier-Mail survey of about 6000 voters found more than 70 per cent wanted the Queensland border open to the entirety of NSW.
But are Sydneysiders really cause for worry? Central Sydney’s COVID-19 testing rate is currently 65 tests per 1000 people and the southeastern and northern Sydney suburbs sit at 64 tests per 1000 people.
Yet Northern NSW has a rate of just 34 tests per 1000 people.
It is also a district where children have died from preventable diseases courtesy of an immunisation rate of 48.4 per cent.
Sure, the Byron area is a great place to holiday and spot whales and Hemsworths.
It is also home to Meryl “COVID-19 is a lie” Dorey, Tom “you cannot catch a virus” Barnett and Isabel “don’t trust vaccinations” Lucas.
And then there is Australia’s answer to Kanye West (without the creative genius, but the laughable political aspirations) – Pete “there is no pandemic” Evans.
As Bertrand Russell wrote in 1933 lamenting the rise of the Nazi movement: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Are these ill-informed people, who are so fixedly confident in their conspiracies, really who Queensland ought to rely upon for complying with expectations of public safety?
Add to that Queensland’s false sense of COVID-19 invincibility (minus that hotspot via the women who brought it back from Melbourne) and it has worrying potential.
Just look at Sweden. Held up as the model of herd immunity. All those young people hugging in parks. Their government trusted them to behave.
A perfect model, just so long as you ignore that they have one of the highest death tolls per capita in Europe and now face a second wave.
Or Britain. Once borders opened and restrictions relaxed, they expected people to proceed with nervous caution. What happened? They got hammered at the pubs. Now they’re on the brink of a terrifying return of COVID-19, with a predicted 50,000 cases per day by October.
That’s after already suffering 41,000 deaths from coronavirus this year.
“Never in our history has our collective destiny and our collective health depended so completely on our individual behaviours,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Britons.
Australia should be watching these countries very closely.
The novelty of singing Happy Birthday twice while washing your hands or downloading an app has worn thin. Nudge theory and voluntary compliance will only work so far.
When governments then make decisions to relax restrictions based on expecting individuals, especially in anti-vax regions, to comply with behaviour patterns, it may only be brief before fatigue and disobedience kick in.
And then we will figuratively derail the sushi train.