Mike O’Connor: Forced into home quarantine and now I’m siding with the Greens

Forced into home quarantine after being a ‘close contact’ I had the uneasy feeling that QH was making the rules up as they went along. Now I’m siding with the Greens, writes Mike O’Connor.

We were in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong lift.

It began with an email saying a Covid-positive person had been in our apartment complex five days previously but as a close contact was defined as someone who had spent 15 minutes or more with a positive case, Queensland Health had advised that there was no need for anyone to take any action.

Seven hours later, someone at Queensland Health had a re-think or perhaps pushed the large red button marked PANIC!

We had now been identified from CCTV footage as having entered the lift 10 minutes after th`e Covid-positive person had exited it, were classed as close contacts and hereby sentenced to 14 days confinement.

I had the uneasy feeling that someone at QH was making the rules up as they went along but under our draconian public health legislation you don’t have much wriggle room so two hours later a contact tracer rang confirming that we had to self-quarantine. I asked why we would have to do 14 days, given that five days had now elapsed since we were in the lift for what must have been all of 15 seconds. Shouldn’t that be nine days, I asked.

There was a lengthy silence while this mathematical complexity was digested. Agreed, she said. Nine days it is.

She then said we would have to get tested. I asked if they’d send someone around but no, she said, they didn’t do that. We’d have to go out and get it done. So we had to stay in but we also had to go out.

“We shop daily,” I said while wondering how we would manage to stay in and go out at the same time. “What about food?”

“You could get Uber Eats,” she suggested. She then told us that an official Queensland Health directive would be emailed to us that evening. When it failed to arrive, I began to wonder if I had been speaking with someone from Queensland Health or Uber Eats.

So we went out the next day and got tested, getting back into the lift in which we had allegedly been exposed and returned a negative result about 12 hours later. Five days after the phone conversation, the health directive finally landed in my in-box.

Then I got a phone call from a very serious person from Queensland Health asking me if I was at home. I was tempted to say “No. I’m having a coldie at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo” but I said yes, which allowed her to tick the right box.

On the eighth day there was a knock on the door. I was hoping it was the nice man from Dan Murphy’s but it was two nurses in full PPE. “We’re here to test you,” they said.

So we did a second test standing in our front doorway which was negative and I went back to cleaning the fridge which is one of the things you do when you are truly bored.

It was our second taste of quarantine, the other being when we re–turned from overseas last year and we survived but the experience gives you plenty of time to consider how vast the powers are which have been given to politicians and bureaucrats.

The legislation which enables it in Queensland will expire in September and the government intends extending it to April next year.

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young will have settled into Government House by then and these powers will be passed to an as yet unnamed bureaucrat with Premier Anastacia Palaszczuk saying she will not influence the selection process.

I wonder, for the opportunity exists to install a government-friendly CHO only too willing to be the Premier’s puppet, one too ready to dance to the government’s tune.

Come April next year, will the government surrender the powers with which it has become so enamoured?

Dr Young has already said the health powers would “remain until a large proportion – at least 80 per cent – of the Queensland population has been vaccinated.”

What if 80 per cent is never reached? Will the government use this as excuse to keep these extraordinary powers which seriously curtail our freedoms and democratic rights in perpetuity?

The Greens have proposed a parliamentary committee to oversee the use of these powers, chaired by a crossbencher or a member of the opposition.

“To continue granting these powers without genuine, independent parliamentary oversight is short sighted and undemocratic,” said MP Michael Berkman.

It’s not often I find myself on the same side of an argument as the Greens but they are on the money with this one.