James Morrow: Australians are over Covid, but politicians aren’t

Australians want to start living with Covid but if Labor had its way, the pandemic would go on forever, writes James Morrow.

Talking to people around a still-Covid restricted Australia is a bit like what it must have felt like in East Berlin just before the wall came down.

Get them going one-on-one and you increasingly hear them say that Omicron is something we just have to live with, that the rules are now pretty much all just for show, and that the grim-faced health apparatchiks warning us of the dangers of singing or dancing at the pub are rapidly losing their grip on power.

As soon as voters realise that they are not alone in their thinking, the politics of health and borders – which have for two years been an easy win for anyone pushing rules and restrictions – will change very quickly.

The cracks are showing in Mark McGowan's fortressed state.

Political scientists call it a preference cascade, a term which refers to what happens when people feel they have to say one thing in public (“of course we need rules and restrictions”) but then suddenly realise that everyone else agrees with how they actually feel in private (“let’s get on with our lives”).

Whichever side of politics gets out in front of this first will reap the rewards come election day.

Because while NSW may face another month of rules and regs and WA remains cut off, the fact that many of the rules imposed in cities like Sydney are more about appearances than reality is now more than obvious.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet admitted as much on Tuesday when he told reporters that the ritual of checking in with your phone when you go to the shops was nothing more than, well, a ritual.

“We’re not tracking and tracing, we made that very clear”, the Premier said when asked why we still have QR codes when pretty much everyone was coming into contact with a positive case every day.

Instead, he said, “it’s effective on confidence … the reality is people feel confident checking in.”

Glad we cleared that up.

Premier Dominic Perrottet said checking in on your phone now was pretty much just a ritual. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

One has to wonder what else, in this time of a variant that is both very transmissible and very manageable in a highly vaccinated population, is just a show by health authorities who want us to genuflect to the seriousness of the pandemic and the authority it gives them.

Cloth face rags, anybody?

But never mind the worriers. The fact is that not just in Sydney but around the country Australians are giving up their fear of Omicron and moving on with their lives.

Mobility data shows that in both Sydney and Melbourne, people are now happily getting out and about again.

Even out in the Hermit Kingdom of Western Australia, polling this week found that half the state thought Generalissimo Mark McGowan should have done more to prepare for his now-abandoned February 5 reopening.

And in an indication that the dam may well and truly be breaking, the Australian Medical Association – which has backed in so many Labor policies it may as well be called the CFMEU with stethoscopes – slammed Premier McGowan’s last minute border backflip.

WA Premier Mark McGowan is under fire for his border backflip. Picture: Matt Jelonek/Getty Images

“No doubt public hospitals and general practice in WA do not feel ready for Omicron but also little confidence that anything will change in coming weeks and months,” AMA chief Dr Omar Khorshid tweeted after the announcement.

“This decision should be acknowledged as a failure by the WA government to prepare and a broken promise,” he said. Indeed.

Particularly for Labor, which had an easy run these past two years backing in “the health advice”, the sudden shift presents a dilemma.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese at first reflexively backed in WA’s reversal – “Mark McGowan has always made the right call based upon health advice and I support Mark McGowan’s decision” – but has since been forced to backtrack.

At the National Press Club Tuesday, Mr Albanese was put on the spot and asked if he still supported Mr McGowan’s state border closure given the polls now running against him.

After some ducking and weaving, the best Mr Albanese could do was a somewhat more lukewarm: “What I agree with is that Mark McGowan has done an outstanding job as the Premier of Western Australia.”

While the conventional wisdom is that Mr McGowan’s border games will help Labor, the possible four months between now and election day is a long time in politics.

Covid check-ins could be on the way out.

The WA government has played up the state’s insularity and convinced voters that their free-range lockdown is all about keeping them “safe” from an infected east coast and Coalition politicians determined to, as the tired saying goes, “put the economy before health”.

Now, though, that formula is beginning to lose power.

Labor’s blind support for “health advice”, often delivered by individuals and groups with a shared interest in evicting the Coalition, may soon become a bug and not a feature in the minds of voters.

For most of this pandemic Prime Minister Scott Morrison has let the states go mostly their own way, seeing the politics of forcing open borders to be just too much of a risk – a cynical, but understandable, calculation.

But as Australians come into 2022 wanting to put two years of pandemic life behind them, the government has a chance to get out in front of this issue and make Labor look like the party stuck in the past.