James Morrow: Tips to survive with freedom intact in a post-Covid world

With Covid on the ropes, NSW and the nation need to think hard about what comes next. Here are James Morrow’s five suggestions.

The novel coronavirus may never be completely defeated, but it’s certainly on the ropes.

Which means that NSW and the nation need to be thinking hard about what comes next. Because otherwise we risk winning the war against Covid but losing the peace.

Herewith, five suggestions for what NSW and the nation need to do next.

Demob the army. Over the past two years Australia – and indeed much of the rest of the world – has been in thrall to battalions of scientists, health officials, celebrity experts and lofty sounding “institutes”, all of whom have sought to transform us into a sort of health-ocracy where doctors always have the final say.

To say that their record has been mixed is to give a bad name to blenders.

From the World Health Organisation’s toadying to Beijing at the start of the pandemic to local Chief Health Officers giving such helpful advice as don’t touch the football (South Australia) to don’t have an Anzac Day flyover (Queensland) to don’t smile at people (NSW), let’s just say the so-called expert class hasn’t been sending their best.

And that’s before we get to the Norman Swans and the Burnet Institutes of the world, with their predictions of mass death and destruction if we didn’t at least consider welding peoples’ front doors shut, as they did during Wuhan’s quite literal lockdown.

Those still out there bleating about needing to wear masks forever should be ignored, or gently informed that the war is over and told to put down their Twitter accounts.

People doing a Covid-19 check-in in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Crack the codes. Data-hungry governments absolutely love the idea of tracking our every move, but it’s nobody’s damn business when I went to the grocery store or the pub.

You don’t need to be a crank to imagine that the same sort of infrastructure that’s been used to trace and track Covid could be used for more sinister purposes.

And if you think that if you’ve done nothing wrong you don’t have anything to worry about, how hard is it to imagine QR codes being used to regulate our personal carbon outputs or alcohol consumption or tying in to our online lives, creating a sort of Australian social credit system?

After all, local councils have used our metadata to track down litterbugs, when it was supposed to be harvested only to stop terrorists and paedophiles.

NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello should be made to stick to his promise to turn these things off at the earliest opportunity.

At some point, Australians are going to have to start mixing again, regardless of vaccination status. Picture: Damian Shaw

End segregation. This is another biggie, and one that will be uncomfortable for many: Australia, if we are to get out of this with our liberties intact, will have to at some point soon stop being a two-tier society of the jabbed and un-jabbed.

Australians have done an admirable job getting vaccinated, and that’s a large part of the reason NSW is doing so well at the moment.

But for whatever reasons, though, some people won’t – and if we are to trust the vaccines then outside certain settings like health care, the vaccinated should not worry too much about others’ status.

Otherwise, there is no difference between Gladys Berejiklian saying, when she was premier, that she wouldn’t want to be next to an unvaccinated person, and Mark McGowan saying he won’t open the borders of his hermit kingdom even to the vaccinated.

Worse, all this sends a message to the anti-vaxxers, who see it as a sign that the vaccinated don’t actually trust the jabs they advocate.

Premier Dominic Perrottet was smacked down by the prime minister over international borders. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

Open the door. While we’re on the subject of vaccines, can someone please explain how two jabs of Pfizer or AstraZeneca have different levels of effectiveness depending on whether they are coursing through the veins of an Australian versus a Canadian, Brit, or Portuguese?

The prime minister’s smackdown of Dom Perrottet’s plan to allow vaccinated international travellers, not just Australians, into NSW without quarantine would seem to suggest there is.

Claims that the dispute was about prioritising getting Australians home sooner look shaky given the push to approve questionable Chinese vaccines to get international students back in the country.

GGF – go get freedom. This may be the hardest word for many, especially in a country where no small number look askance at “liberty” as some sort of American cowboy happy talk.

But out on the streets of Sydney, people who’ve been locked up and in many cases unable to work for four months seem to have a new appreciation for the concept.

More than that, they don’t appreciate health bureaucrats, Twitter scolds, and well-paid Zoomerati telling them that their liberties are something that can be turned on and off like a switch depending on how well behaved they are, as if they were naughty teens.

But if freedom doesn’t come without responsibility, it also doesn’t come without risk.

Australians, or at least those of us in NSW, have largely woken up to the fact that every argument used by the Covid Zero lockdown brigade could be applied to just about anything – “Oh, you drive your car to the shops? Do you think your convenience is worth 1,200 people dying every year on our roads?”

Given how quickly we gave up so much liberty, perhaps it’s also time for a broader rethink about just how we think about freedom and how much risk we are willing to accept to enjoy it.