Patrick Carlyon: ‘Health advice’ lockdown mantra must finally be explained

Melburnians have suffered more than any other state through lockdowns and idiotic incursions upon the simplest pleasures. Now it’s time to know why.

The “health advice” is the lockdown mantra of Victoria. It’s been invoked as a wonderfully convenient abdication of political responsibility. And it has been shrouded in secrecy.

That the health advice in this state was often extreme – and frankly, random, petty and sometimes shown to be misplaced – needs to be understood.

We have had the longest lockdown, as we all know, and been sentenced to idiotic incursions upon the simplest pleasures, such as letting the kids go to the playground. It’s no surprise that our renewed version of freedom in the coming days is more limited than comparable cities and states.

We have suffered more than any other state and we need to know why, not only for what has happened, but for what could still happen if case numbers rise after opening up.

The Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner has found that the health briefings relating to the February lockdown must be released in the public interest.

The decision, which may be contested by authorities, ought to be just a start.

The ‘health advice’ in Melbourne was enacted in ways it was not elsewhere. Picture: Getty Images

The advice leading to all six Melbourne lockdowns has to be scrutinised and assessed, lest we surrender to absolute and unaccountable processes of power.

The “health advice” was bucked by Gladys Berejiklian in NSW, and cynically deployed for tin-pot motives and electoral advantage elsewhere.

Victorians have endured the most cosseted (or oppressed) approach. Individual stories of languishing grandparents and grandchildren who could not say goodbye are the lasting theme of the pandemic.

They paid for a misplaced strategy of elimination. We all did.

For the “health advice” here was enacted in ways it was not elsewhere. Subjective judgments dictated the most intimate and precious relationships of every Victorian.

If London or Sydney did this, we added that, just to be sure. More masks. Less exercise. It was carrot and stick, just without the carrot.

The only relief was the apparent Victoria Police decision to soften its enforcement vigour of the early pandemic days.

Almost every Melburnian has broken the law at times, some out of frustration or the inability to cope anymore. Armed with cover stories, ordinary people went to the beach or visited their mother or watched the footy with friends.

Victoria Police decided to soften its enforcement vigour of the early pandemic days. Picture: David Geraghty

The restrictions have been selectively followed in recent months, partly because they became onerous and unhealthy in ways the “health advice” never seemed to address.

The need for the unyielding harshness of Melbourne’s lockdown needs to be queried, given that Victoria’s infection rates have superseded those places where fewer restrictions were enforced.

The fairer-minded could argue that every crisis exacts mistakes, and that caution trumps carelessness. But being told what is good for you is different to knowing why we were served all that horrible medicine, often administered with the hectoring disapproval of a grumpy school principal.

It makes sense that the Andrews government wants to bury evidence of errors and misjudgments. The dreadful decision to employ private security firms for hotel quarantine still goes unexplained.

The most galling aspect of that scandal was not the error itself, but the cover-up. All governments conceal unpalatable truths, but the apparent scarcity of cultural integrity of this government matters more than at any other time. No democratic government has ever wielded such wholesale power.

The dreadful decision to employ private security firms for hotel quarantine still goes unexplained. Picture: AFP

It might be that the key decisions made in Victoria will stand as cautious, if occasionally panicked, testaments to an approach which saved many from lonely, sad deaths. The numbers here have been tiny relative to international tolls. Scrutiny of the “health advice” might in some cases lead to vindication.

Yet the precautions in Victoria have also dwarfed all other approaches. We got the full chemo, even when targeted radiation might have sufficed, and we don’t know why unelected bureaucrats recommended us for the radical treatment.

The balance between preservation and freedom tipped into dogma. Every death had to be avoided at any cost. As others have pointed out, if the same approach was applied to road safety, no one would drive a car.

As pleasing as opening up feels, it brings challenges already faced by places months ahead of us. Take London, where deaths again mount.

The levers for restrictions remain active, and there’s a good chance we will once again be bathed in the catastrophising rhetoric which is so uniquely Victorian.

We need to know why Victoria has lost almost double the people of any other state. And why singles and the young and the elderly wilted because the “health advice” proved to be cruel.

Anything less would be a lesson unlearned. And an unprecedented scandal.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist