Peta Credlin: We are sick of the rolling lockdown ‘stop-start' life

Victoria has essentially been subject to one long lockdown since February with a few weeks of freedom in between. And the other states aren’t faring much better, Peta Credlin writes.

Let’s start by dealing with the Covid reality facing this country. More than 15 million Australians locked in their homes, businesses on their knees, and young people going out of their collective minds.

In NSW, 319 cases on Saturday, more dead, more hospitalised and no end in sight. In Victoria, forget this lie that the state is in its sixth lockdown; Victoria has been subject to one long lockdown since February with only a few weeks of freedom in between.

It was only last Wednesday that we saw the bragging social media posts of the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews – “ZERO” – he crowed. And then by late afternoon the next day, he “regretfully” announced another lockdown, effective at 8pm.

If you think people are just resigned to this stop-start life, think again. I had a good read through Daniel Andrews’ Facebook page over the past few days and it is full of comments from ordinary people as angry as I’ve ever seen them; spirits now crushed, as much as household incomes.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews sent his state into a sixth lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Sarah Matray

It’s all right if you have a middle-class job that starts when you open up a laptop, but what about those that work with their hands and can’t leave home to get there?

If you have decent Wi-Fi your kids can study but I know plenty of families where they don’t have enough devices to go around and the internet connection is spasmodic.

Pity our elderly and those that live alone; for them it’s the pall of loneliness that comes with visitors to their home again forbidden.

But in yet another sign of official madness, if they got on Tinder and found some random intimate partner, that would meet Brett Sutton’s idiotic rules.

Why are we standing for this nonsense? Worse than that, what about all these people breaking the rules and infecting dozens, shutting down the lives and livelihoods of a whole state – like the removalists from Victoria’s lockdown five, like the illegal gatherings said to be linked to this latest outbreak?

“We’ll throw the book at them” said Victorian officials, but the reality: Off Scot-free. What a joke! And when questioned about this in media conferences, there’s contorted language from the politicians and officials amounting to excuses all around.

Sorry, get out of your ivory tower, the community is angry and instead of appropriately punishing those that break the rules on gatherings and border travel, the whole state is punished and we’re back in this interminable cycle of lockdown hell.

I listened carefully to the Prime Minister as he exited his 50th national cabinet on Friday and took to the lectern to affirm that lockdowns had just been re-endorsed and would be with us for some time to come.

Where’s the leadership?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks after the national cabinet meeting on Friday. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison has allowed his self-created national cabinet to bring him down to the level of state premiers, to neuter his standing as our one national leader and to silence his ability to hold state governments to account, where that’s needed for the good of the country.

Abrogating leadership is the death knell for any government and that’s where we are today. Australians are living under a health dictatorship with every piece of ‘advice’ from these so-called ‘experts’ (no matter how contradictory) just rubber-stamped by the people we elect to lead. We have officials brawling over the safe use of AstraZeneca, such as Queensland’s Dr Jeannette Young at odds with the Commonwealth’s immunisation committee.

We have Victorian officials closing down the whole state on the basis of Covid readings that turned out to be false in a regional centre’s wastewater (but the regions remain
locked up).

This Victorian Premier has lost any moral standing to keep locking us up.

This has gone on too long and there have been too many mistakes, too much misinformation and not enough transparency to take this government on trust anymore.

At a minimum, the secrecy has to end. At every point when a lockdown occurs or is extended, the health advice must be made public; not so much that we might contest it (although experts may), but as part of the compact between voters and leaders who, after all, are supposed to work for us, govern with our agreement and not treat us like mugs.

From the PM down, our politicians keep failing to grasp that we most definitely are not “all in this together”.

People in public sector jobs who can work from home and have had pay rises are not suffering like those who normally do casual work dealing with the public and have been stood down intermittently for 18 months.

Don’t the official talkers understand how much it clangs every time manically busy people
tell everyone else to do absolutely nothing in order to protect the community? Or that premiers keep earning their $8000 a week when many small business owners are still waiting for their meagre support payments from two lockdowns ago.

It’s easy enough to grasp what’s going on here. Ministers and officials are revelling in the chance to exercise power and shut down their opponents.

The media is revelling in the chance to dramatise a crisis.

At one level who can blame them – because this is the biggest collective challenge anyone has lived through.

Yet unlike a war, say, where everyone would have a role to play demanding from each of us grit and sacrifice and courage; other than the officials giving the orders, the health staff giving the vaccinations and the tests, and the relatively small number of doctors and nurses treating Covid patients, the rest of us have become bit players in our own lives that others’ decisions have put on hold for us.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm