Dan’s roadmap delay driven by politics

Victoria’s reopening plans could have been announced weeks ago, but we’re forced to wait until Sunday so Dan Andrews can have his hyped media event.

So, Sunday is the day.
When your future will be presented to you in a list of bullet points.

When you discover if and when you can visit family interstate, or if and when your child will return to school, or if and when you can have a beer at your mate’s house without fear of military-style sanction.

Like the rest of the world, Victoria has been captive to Covid. But unlike most places, Victoria has also been captive to that Covid tagline – an “overabundance of caution”.

Sunday’s belated “road map”, which will speak to October, November and the new year, could dim that peculiarly Victorian sense of pessimism.

But will it?

Daniel Andrews will deliver a belated road map on Sunday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Sydney and NSW set a bar some time ago. The everyday news from Sydney has been bleaker than the case numbers here.

But people there have relished a prospect of something better, because it’s been explained to Sydneysiders how and when restrictions will ease.

Here, instead, we remain snagged in the day-to-day. We get basted in the language of “lawful” and “justified”, as though every choice we make stands to be corrected.

We aren’t told we can have a picnic Saturday but from “11.59pm” Friday.

The “modest and “meaningful” easing of rules on Thursday was welcome. But some of the changes didn’t make sense. Why are skate parks suddenly safer than a week ago, when case numbers were lower and concrete bollards were installed at a Glen Iris skate park?

This Victorian sense of oppression, the fixation with marginal changes according to oddly shifting health advice, has been amplified by the belated timing of Sunday’s announcements. There have been few blue-sky scenarios to distract us from the tedium of today.

Victorians were granted “modest and “meaningful” easing of rules on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

The official reason is the wait for epidemiological modelling. But it feels as if political, as opposed to health, imperatives have driven the delay.

Bundling all the intersecting questions of the Covid challenge makes for centralised control, a hallmark of this Victorian political era. It has also, again and again, postponed the immediate addressing of urgent needs.

Vulnerable Victorians have been overlooked and neglected, as if we are must save the forest at the cost of the trees.

Such as year 12 kids, for whom every day of uncertainty hurts. They and their teachers could have been prioritised weeks, if not months, ago. As they were elsewhere.

Two weeks ago, Daniel Andrews spoke of “finishing touches” for school plans in term 4.

Since, when every day of homeschooling has felt like a week, parents have waited for that sniff of hope. Mounting tales of mental distress and kids’ depression have not hastened any announcements.

Our timetable, it seems, must yield to that of the Andrews government.

Golfers are waiting to find out when Melbourne’s courses can reopen. Picture: William WEST / AFP

What of all the business owners who, understandably, have given up, not because they were closed but because they have waited too long to find out when they may open?

Victoria’s challenges have already been confronted – and largely overcome – elsewhere.

Sydney flagged the chronic nature of Covid presence, the learning-to-live-with-it approach.

It has dated a return to the kinds of socialising that London and New York now enjoy.

Victoria is not a special case, not unless cruising in the slipstream of trailblazing policies elsewhere counts as exceptional.

The myopic approach of elimination over suppression held us back, and shaped a residual fear, a kind of collective Stockholm syndrome, that gets mocked north of the border. Meaningless restrictions, such as curfews, could have been dropped at any time.

The Premier might have bowed weeks ago to the science which shows the likelihood of outside transmission, with sensible precautions, is two-fifths of bugger all. He could have opened golf courses and tennis courts, confident in the knowledge not a single case has been avoided by their closure.

Andrews could have made life easier by throwing us crumbs of freedom as and when they became available.

Instead, we must wait for Sunday, which feels as much like a hyped media event than a judicious watershed in progress.

There will be no reinventing of the wheel. The Andrews government doesn’t need to innovate – others have already done that for us. We await a hotchpotch of guidelines steered by countless examples set in other cities.

These will be announcements that could have been made, at least broadly, weeks ago.

Many Victorians would have suffered less if they had been. The delay has made many Victorians more scared and less hopeful.

The only choice here in Victoria has been to follow the leader. And what best suits the leader hasn’t always helped those who have needed the most help.