Mike O’Connor: Queensland Covid hypocrisy at its worst

As a local business is shut down over a Covid breach, the Premier is gearing up to sit in a packed Suncorp Stadium for the next State of Origin match. What a crock, writes Mike O’Connor.

I called a friend of mine last week and asked how he was and in between coughing fits he gasped that he was “as crook as a dog.”

“I went to the football at Suncorp and there were people coughing and sneezing all over the place. I should have stayed home,” he moaned.

He could have stayed home but he loves his rugby and wanted to see the Queensland Reds play. There could easily have been someone infected with Covid-19 among the tens of thousands of fans at the game but you pay your money and you take your chances.

It’s a very different matter however, if your passion runs to music rather than sport as patrons of the NightQuarter club on the Sunshine Coast discovered last week when Queensland Health officials and police raided the venue and closed it down.

According to chief health officer and provider of secret health advice to the government, Dr Jeannette Young, the club had failed to implement adequate crowd control measures, ensure dance floor density limits and ensure patrons stayed in their assigned seats at a Spacey Jane concert last weekend.

What a crock! Suncorp Stadium will be packed with rugby league fans yelling themselves hoarse for the next State of Origin match and I’m betting that among them, clutching a free ticket, will be the Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.

I sincerely hope neither she nor anyone else attending gets the ‘flu or contracts anything more serious but there’s always that chance.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk during Game 1 of the 2021 State of Origin Series at Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville. Picture: Adam Head

Will Dr Young and her zealous officials, backed up by squads of police with nothing better to do, be at the stadium to ensure that everyone stays in their assigned seats and observes crowd density limits?

If they fail to do so and instead stand shoulder to shoulder in the grandstands and head to head in the food and beverage queues, will the good doctor run onto the field, blow her whistle, shut down the game and order the stadium to be emptied?

If she’s fair dinkum she should but it would never happen and if it did, her job would be advertised the next morning.

Double standards rule when it comes to Covid crowd limits. The government loves to be seen to be “keeping Queenslanders safe” so it stages a dramatic raid on a music venue while spending $8 million so people could pack into the North Queensland Stadium in Townsville and watch the embarrassment that was the State of Origin match. There is no logic here, just dumb, stupid politics.

The people cannot be denied their football. It keeps them amused and stops them wondering why the workings of state government are shrouded in secrecy, why its decision making processes are beholden to the unions and why well before Covid-19, it was hopelessly in debt.

If anyone jumps out of their assigned seat at a concert, however, the fun police storm through the doors.

The crowd during the Spacey Jane concert at NightQuarter.

I am unfamiliar with Ms Spacey Janes’ music and will most likely ever remain so but I have been to enough concerts to know that the only way that you can get a crowd of young fans to stay in their seats is to glue them to them.

The music industry’s sin has been to criticise the government and expose, quite loudly and publicly, the idiocy of the crippling crowd limits that it has imposed on venues.

The owner of NightQuarter, Mr Ian Van der Woude, has been a critic of the government’s approach, saying his club has strived to go over and above what Queensland Health has requested.

“Rather than working with us to refine our plan further, the health bureaucrats are taking a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach to our business,” he said.

You can’t have it both ways. Give the music industry a fair go. The government hails it when it suits, politicians falling over each other in the rush to be photographed with any local performer who makes good, but then belts it to score a political point.

Governments, both state and federal, are like rabbits transfixed by the spotlight that is the virus. There will be more infections. That’s a reality with which we all have to live but having embarked on a policy of eradication and the instillation of fear into the general populace, governments are left with no room to move.

We have all suffered since the advent of Covid and our young people have borne their share of the burden. If the masses are to have their football, let the young people have their music.

They’ve little enough faith in the workings of government as it is. Don’t give them more reason to distrust it by indulging in blatant displays of hypocrisy.