Dan’s roadmap out of lockdown set to be a mystery tour of dead ends

Premier Daniel Andrews thinks what we need most are picnics. But his freedom roadmap promises to be more like a tour of dead ends than a day in the park.

Using Google maps to find your way around Melbourne can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t got the latest version of the app.

Whole freeways can be missing and new housing estates in some instances don’t even exist. Google can take you down a dead end and sometimes the long way around, but if you’re patient you usually get there.

Before Google existed, you would normally flip open your glovebox, if travelling around Victoria or interstate and pull out a dog-eared map, or, if in the suburbs, The Melway Street Directory.

On Sunday, Premier Daniel Andrews is going to appear at a media conference with his promised “roadmap” out of lockdown.

His map, he tells us, will be aligned to something called the “national plan”.

Premier Daniel Andrews is set to provide Victorians with a roadmap out of lockdown. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

I fear though, that this symbolic roadmap is more likely to take us on a magical mystery tour of dead ends and dashed hopes.

Think of it as one of those old-fashioned car rallies where you used to tear off strips of clues to get to an end point before the other team of drivers, in order to win a prize.

Explaining the rules and what we can look forward to on Sunday, Premier Andrews on Thursday gave us the entree — a little taste of what’s to come.

There was, from midnight Friday, a minor tweaking of lockdown six that began as a one- week hard, sharp bid to get to zero Covid. It’s ended up being a mini version of last year’s crushing 111-day super shutdown.

Time and time again this past week, the Premier and his sidekick, Professor Brett Sutton, using their roadmap promise, instead turned it into a game of Snakes and Ladders.

Up one day and down the next.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high, because this will be a minor tweaking of what already exists.”

The lockdown rules are to largely stay in place.

Using phrases such as “modest but meaningful” and “outdoor social interaction”, the biggest freedom bestowed upon us by our leader is giving in to some strange notion that Melburnians are craving picnics.

No matter that the weekend weather (indeed until the middle of the week) is set for rain and cool temperatures, it seems picnics are what we want.

Indeed, the Premier told us that while the changes were not “significant,” it was what we “craved for a long time”.

He’s kidding surely if he thinks school kids locked out of classrooms, families unable to visit aged care facilities and small businesses that are going broke want to go on a picnic.

And forget about using Dan’s “picnic road to recovery” as a chance to rally your vaccinated staff.

Picnic attendance limits – I can’t believe such a thing even exists – stipulate two people with unclear vaccination status can get together or five adults, plus dependants, from two households if the adults have had two doses of the Covid vaccine.

To be clear (because their media release is not) double-vaccinated adults from two houses are allowed with kids to have a picnic in the rain, as long as it doesn’t go for more than four hours and is within 10km of home.

Oh, the joy of that!

The Premier and his sidekick, Professor Brett Sutton, have turned their roadmap promise into a game of Snakes and Ladders. Picture: David Crosling

One can only hope, beyond all hope, that this pair – Andrews and Sutton — are deliberately under-promising and intending to over-deliver. It’s an old trick which has been used by politicians forever: Throw some crumbs out to the peasants and then deliver a cake.

How else could you explain the language being used this week about what will happen when Victorians hit the 70 per cent single dose vaccination mark?

Premier Andrews stood before the Victorian public this week and promised if we reached that mark we would be allowed to travel 10km from home instead of the current five.

Exercise time would be extended to four hours, up from two.

If that’s all the start of the roadmap tells me, then I reckon most people wouldn’t even read it.

Mr Andrews must drive to and from work, in the dark, with his head in his so-called map if he thinks anyone is staying within 5km limit now.

As for allowing exercise for four hours a day, what does he think we are trying to do? Make the Paris Olympics?

This one-size-fits-all notion — that we would be grateful if he lets us get to an Aldi supermarket 7km from home because we are bored with the Woolies at 4km — is laughable.

In NSW — where they reached the 70 per cent single dose number two weeks ago — their roadmap is more than clear.

Fully vaccinated Sydneysiders, when they reach the double dose at 70 per cent, will be able to have five people visit at home, 20 visitors outside, pubs and clubs will re-open, as will retailers, including hairdressers and nail salons.

People will be able to attend gyms, and community pools will be back operating.

Racecourses and stadiums will be able to have crowds of 5000, and you will be able to go to the movies, a concert or visit a museum.

Golf, by the way, never stopped.

There’s more, but that’s what I call a proper roadmap. That’s what I call giving people, small businesses and children hope.

NSW already has staggered dates for schools returning for term 4, while Victoria has some mumbled suggestion that “maybe” school might go back this year.

Is it any wonder then that NSW has smashed its vaccination rates while Victoria is battling to catch up?

If not getting seriously sick from Covid isn’t motivation enough – and clearly in many cases it isn’t – then you must allow people to dream to plan and to hope that all those things we used to take for granted will come back one day soon.

The idea that next Saturday night — in what shapes up as one of the classic Victorian grand finals, with the boys from the battling west taking on the toffs from the MCG — will be watched by people having a picnic in a park, as suggested by one health expert, is beyond ridiculous.

So far as I can see, this roadmap seems to again be taking Victorians on a well-travelled path to an all-too-familiar dead end.

Daniel Andrews is proposing a ‘picnic road to recovery’.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong and I’d love to think the national plan that gave life to this so-called roadmap to freedom was being read the same way by all those on the trip.

Right about now, though, I get the feeling the navigator is about as good at reading maps as my dear old mum was. We would always get lost along the way and it always took longer to get there than it needed to.

LIKES

• The all-Victorian grand final, with two desperate clubs and a crowd

• Qantas releasing December flights to overseas destinations, allowing some travel dreams

• Mobile dog groomers allowed back on the road, but it’s a pity about human hairdressers

• Victoria’s Ombudsman investigating the disgraceful abandonment of elderly Victorians trying to get home from across the NSW border

DISLIKES

• The ad hoc, so-called National Covid agreement, which means different things to each Premier

• A state government willing to lock down individual regional towns, such as Ballarat, but not suburbs with big Covid numbers

• Dobbers snitching on ex-PM Tony Abbott for not having his mask on at the beach

• Like everyone else but the AFL, a weekend drought of footy before the grand final

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