Vikki Campion: Stop pushing Aussies around with arbitrary, illogical rules

When you stop the chippies from going to work, stop kids from seeing grandma with an arbitrary boundary, you lose the people who have given us the lowest Covid death rate in the world, Vikki Campion writes.

If you want to lose the country that has been so disciplined that we have had the lowest Covid death rate in the world, start pushing them around.

The reason we have been so successful compared to any other OECD country – if we had followed that average some 35,000 people would have died – is not because of any government order but because Australians are disciplined and egalitarian.

You win them with logic.

People know if they have a virulent case of the flu, not to give it to anyone else. Anyone with a brain can work that out.

But when you stop the chippies from going to work on a construction site overnight, stop kids from seeing grandma with an arbitrary boundary and no logical explanation, you lose the people who have given us the lowest death rate in the world.

Supporting our vulnerable should be celebrated but, instead, the teenage grandson of an octogenarian in Earlwood copped a $1000 fine for straying past an arbitrary boundary to check Nonna was OK.

When you start fining a kid to see his grandmother, that is illogical and authoritarian.

Compassion is in our DNA, along with getting angry about being ordered around. Thanks to our history of colonisation, blackbirding, fleeing war, starvation, communism, dictatorships or imprisoned as convicts, we don’t like being pushed around.

Mounted police officers patrol the streets of Bankstown, one of the Covid hot zones. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Drafting all-encompassing stay-at-home orders for Western Sydney may be easy when your whole life has been lived with a view of Fort Denison and only talking to
others who also have that view of Fort Denison.

But you need to take a trip down Parramatta Rd where many rely on their physical strength to earn an income and many of their grandmothers rely on them for
fresh sheets.

When we hear then, of how we must stay locked in houses for protection, lives on hold indefinitely, the only support being from Centrelink, you empathise with why thousands of people marched.

You can be opposed to people breaking the law without establishing a strike force to hunt them down.

Now we are sending politicians to empathy training for sexual harassment, which in a world of massive deficits and debts, is like thinking about replacing the wallpaper as the house burns down.

If you want a real shot at empathy – probably the biggest unreported casualty of Covid – then Premiers should include the following statistics in their daily Covid sermon: Small businesses shutting down; suicides; post-natal depression cases as new mothers, sleepless and shaking, face another teary day with no hands allowed to offer help; number of Nonnas staring at the ceiling craving fresh sheets.

The Black Lives Matter marches were technically illegal but I agree broadly with the objective for equality and no overnight strike force came waving $1000 fines at them.

Now when people arc up, rather than trying to understand them, the government hunts them down and slaps them with another whopping bill they can’t afford.

If you have never been in the boots of a Western Sydney tradie, or the trainers of a grandson with a sick Nonna, now is the time to imagine how they would fit.

Voluntary care work, the fabric that knits our society together, is another unreported casualty.

Zoom won’t wash the bedding. Netflix won’t cook a hot meal for the sick. FaceTime won’t change your tyre when you are stranded by the side of the road. Skype won’t hold the baby so you can have a shower.

This work, often done by family, friends and kind strangers, is not considered at all by those with a view of Fort Denison, surrounded by spreadsheets and polling, catered for by food delivery services that they can happily afford. They have not been weakened by age, disability, birth or mental ill-health.

The attitude of empathy in Australia is the person who stops to change your tyre.

They do the right thing because it is logical and compassionate.

CEOs on multimillion-dollar pay packets send government relations advisers on six-figures to ask the taxpayer for more money to fund their impacted business, while the Western Sydney tradies who cannot afford PR wizards are given no notice that the construction industry is being shut down overnight.

In Earlwood, a group of nonnas went door to door to raise money to pay the $1000 fine for the 18-year-old boy who went to see his grandmother.

My friend, who spends his days in a suit with polling and statistics, who has never cleaned his kitchen let alone someone else’s, hands over $100.

Empathy training came to his door in the guise of two old ladies and a tray of baklava.

Theirs is a story of heart and beauty through this epoch of bare hotel rooms and quarantine dinners, watching your grandkids grow up on dodgy internet connection, of missing baby kisses and first words and, for some, last words and the stories that once bored you but you probably won’t ever hear again.

Empathy is to look through their eyes, see Parramatta Rd, not Fort Denison, stop ordering people and start explaining.