Peta Credlin: We must look at the human cost of COVID despots
Some Premiers are acting like pandemic dictators while anger mounts and innocent people suffer, writes Peta Credlin. It’s time to question whether the restrictions have gone way over the top.
Opinion
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At the outset of this pandemic, I said it would be a test of character — for us and the nation.
Having been in government, I also knew a large-scale outbreak like we’re living through now was more a case of “when” not “if” — given the experience of SARS and the rapid global movement of people that’s the hallmark of modern life.
When I interviewed the Prime Minister for Sky News in late January, while the rest of the media was still trying to beat him up over his holiday to Hawaii during our summer of bushfires, I was more focused on a spike in virus cases out of a city called Wuhan and what was being done to protect Australians.
That was then and this is now. Seven months on, it’s almost impossible to overstate how much this crisis has changed life as we knew it.
I’ve never been in the camp that says this virus is just a nasty cold, or something that we should ignore because it mostly kills old people in nursing homes. A decent society can never be callous towards those who have built it.
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But even though this pandemic by its very nature is extraordinary and has required an extraordinary response, we’re right to question whether the restrictions have gone way over the top in an attempt to save everyone from everything.
Around the world, in countries hit far worse than us, they’re learning to live with the virus in order to get lives and livelihoods back on track — and it’s time Australia did the same.
Take Victoria, where the Premier has a plan for another 12 months of his unprecedented state of emergency laws but no plan to restart the economy.
With an infection rate that was up around 700 a day at one stage, most Victorians supported a hard and sharp reintroduction of restrictions, but haven’t forgotten that it was the fault of his bungled hotel quarantine that dragged them back into their homes and shut up the state.
With just over two weeks to go before stage 4 restrictions are supposed to end, there’s palpable anger that the community is not even given the courtesy of knowing what comes next, nor evidence of a strategy to restart lives and livelihoods.
NSW has shown it is possible to adapt and live with the virus as the world waits for a vaccine, helped in great measure by its crack contract tracing teams that put other states to shame.
In Queensland, a Premier desperately trying to resurrect her political fortunes ahead of the October election is using the cheap populism of border closures as some sort of lifebuoy, with her inhumanity exposed last week with two shocking examples of bureaucratic pigheadedness that should shame us all.
On Tuesday night, I interviewed a Sunshine Coast woman, Jayne Brown, who had just undergone lifesaving brain surgery by Dr Charlie Teo, in Sydney.
Rather than allow her to return home to her rural Queensland property to recover, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s border bans forced her into a grubby COVID hotel with nothing more than Panadol and a wheat-pack for pain relief.
She has not tested positive for the virus, her only “crime” was having been interstate; indeed, if she’d actually contracted the virus in Queensland, she would now be self-isolating at home. But even as you read this, she’s got another week of forced lockup to endure before power-hungry Palaszczuk lets her back into her own home.
On Friday, we heard the harrowing story of a Ballina woman who has now lost one of her unborn twins because she needed to get to neonatal hospital urgently and her doctors agreed the wait for the paperwork and approvals from Queensland authorities to cross the border would put her babies at risk.
Instead, it was a 16-hour wait for an air-ambulance to Sydney with the result heartbreaking.
Did Palaszczuk regret her “Queensland hospitals are for Queenslanders” statement from two weeks ago? When asked about this on Friday, after being told of the loss of the twin, she said “no”.
No, she did not regret it.
Honestly, is this really what we’ve allowed this virus, as Australians, to accept from our elected leaders? In a democracy, we hire and fire, and we the people must ensure that our governments reflect our values.
It’s time this era of COVID dictatorships comes to an end.
CHINESE PACT A BIG RISK
If the Morrison government really is going to overrule the Victorian government’s secret debt deal with China, it’s very good news and not before time. That they’re going to legislate to unwind any bad deal that’s been made by states, universities or others with foreign powers deserves strong support.
Quite apart from the fact that Daniel Andrews’ pact under China’s Belt and Road Initiative puts Victoria at genuine risk of undue Chinese influence, it makes a mockery of the constitution if states can run their own foreign policy irrespective of the Commonwealth.
Under the constitution, foreign affairs are specified to be the role of the national parliament and government. That doesn’t mean that a state can’t ever do a deal with any foreign government, but it does mean that the Commonwealth is in charge if it chooses to exercise its authority.
Overseas, the Belt and Road program has been used as a form of debt-trap-diplomacy, where weak and impoverished governments take loans to build, or to buy assets, that then revert to Chinese ownership when the borrower can’t repay — in Sri Lanka for example, the Chinese government has repossessed a port.
We saw last week China’s deputy ambassador to Australia refuse to rule out that China’s “collaborations” with Australian universities under the “Thousand Talents” program amount to espionage.
Trade is all good and well, but treason is unforgivable.
THUMBS UP: UK PM Boris Johnson speaking out against the culture war waged by the BBC over two patriotic songs at the end of the much-loved “Proms” concerts gives hope that leaders are finally finding their spines in this fight against rewriting history.
THUMBS DOWN: The ACT Labor Government for ramming radical gender laws through with very little debate or community consultation. Where was the pre-election mandate?