James Morrow: Australia’s travel bans are looking less and less sustainable as the world opens up
Australians are increasingly prisoners of the government’s success fighting coronavirus, but it looks like we don’t have an exit strategy to get us mixing with the world and each other, writes James Morrow.
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Australia needs a coronavirus exit strategy – literally.
One of the most remarkable things about this whole coronavirus pandemic has been how one of the most extroverted nations in the world became, virtually overnight, a fortress.
Not only are foreign visitors (and returning Australians) forced to spend 14 days in dreary hotel quarantine at their own expense - reasonable, perhaps - but we Australians also have to apply, like naughty students looking for a hall pass, to leave the country.
Even if we are planning on staying away for months, or years, or hold a second passport of another nation.
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It’s a bit like trying to get papers to get out of town in the movie Casablanca, except that everyone would have to scan a QR code to enter Rick’s Cafe Americain, and singing La Marseillaise would be banned because it might spread viral droplets.
(And no, I’m not comparing Australia to the collaborationist Vichy regime, but rather pointing out the absurdity of having to apply to leave your own country, and risking a 75 per cent chance of rejection if you do).
But at some point we are going to have to get back to some degree of normal, with or without a vaccine.
And that will mean being allowed to get back on a plane and go not just to Perth or Port Douglas, but LA or London or anyplace else that will have us. Which is an increasing number of countries, if only we were allowed to go.
But, I hear you saying, there’s a pandemic on, haven’t you heard? And we all need to do our part to stop the spread.
Yes, sure, except, of course, the higher education sector.
In a few weeks, 300 foreign students from Asia will be flown in via Singapore to Adelaide to test how universities might begin to cover the $3bn in losses they are expected to suffer for allowing themselves to become so dependent on overseas students in the first place.
It’s a sort of pragmatic authoritarianism that demands ordinary Australians give up their rights for the greater good (“keeping us safe”) and then bends the rules for others when there’s a quid to be made.
All this while countless Australians remain stranded overseas, in many cases paying well over the odds for business class tickets to improve their chances of getting on a flight.
And that’s before we talk about the absurdity of many of the state border restrictions, which have resulted in countless petty, bureaucratic cruelties.
The NT has decided to shut up shop for 18 months, while Queensland’s premier said Monday she would not relax borders until there was zero community transmission in NSW or Victoria. Seriously.
Yet in the face of all this Scott Morrison seems to be loathe to do anything about it.
Particularly with his polls sky high, why risk a fight with the states, or cop the panicky criticism he would receive from the “lockdown until elimination” camp for re-asserting Australians’ freedom to travel?
But here it’s worth noting what epidemiologist Donald Henderson had to say on the subject.
Henderson, who died in 2016, is probably best known for essentially ridding the world of smallpox – which makes him about as good an authority you can get on this sort of thing.
In 2006, at the age of 78, Henderson swung into action when he heard about a program initiated by the George W. Bush administration which put together computer modellers with public health officials to work out how to lock down and quarantine society in the event of a future deadly influenza or SARS-like pandemic.
Henderson’s work was resurrected recently by Edward Stringham at the American Institute for Economic Research, who points out the great doctor spent his life “devoted to implementing the great discovery of modern virus theory that we need not flee but rather build immunity through science, either by natural immunities or via vaccines.”
“If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second and third order effects could be devastating socially and economically”, Henderson wrote, before concluding “experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”.
Ain’t that the truth.
Travel, both inbound and out, is a huge part of the Australian identity, and represents a massive benefit to the nation in terms of tourism and commerce.
Yet the disruption imposed on us by the reaction to the coronavirus has created a “new normal” that is anything but.
It’s time our leaders started to explain what the end game is here, particularly if there is never a vaccine. Australia’s a wonderful place, but we can’t stay trapped here - not just in our own country, but our own state - forever.