Patrick Carlyon: It’s time Victoria got back to normal

Victorians have endured what few other Australians have. So if we’ve really made it, and stemmed the virus, we shouldn’t be constrained a moment longer.

Let’s assume the best. Everyone seems to be, anyway.

People are shaking hands again. We have lost track of the rules. We are applying common sense rather than slavish adherence to decrees.

Already, we are speaking of “Remember when …” as if August and 700-plus COVID-19 cases a day was long ago.

For the truth is in, finally. Barring a big surprise, Victoria has “eliminated” the virus after
28 days of no new cases.

It follows a year unlived. In early November, it kind of felt like April. We have been institutionalised in our homes, where showers and shaving have become optional extras, and the remote control has been the only defence from the vortex of loved ones.

“Karen of Brighton” was right. Your suburb gets boring when it’s your entire existence.

Some lucky ones escaped, such as the “essential workers” at the Melbourne Cup, who wondered at a winning jockey waving at a crowd which wasn’t there.

Victorians have endured what few other Australians have. Curfews and roadblocks. Setbacks and frustrations. If we’ve made it, and really have stemmed the virus, we shouldn’t be constrained a moment longer.

Welcome back signs are displayed outside the Queen Victoria Market

It’s time to embrace the norms of pre-COVID. To throw away the grotty masks. To admit that Zoom isn’t a way of the future but a reminder of a twilight past.

We should all return to work. Book holidays, even if ringing an airline this week has doubled as an instrument of torture.

We should exploit once lost freedoms – while we have them.

Yet the celebration should be tempered with judgment. There have been many lessons from this year. We may be the world’s envy, but only after muddles avoided by the international exemplar, New Zealand.

The mistakes should be held to the light, if only because the virus has not gone for good. From December 7, Melbourne will once again accept international arrivals. Some of the 160 arrivals a day will be infected.

The handling of incoming passengers earlier this year was woeful. We suffered for a hotel quarantine program which was ill-conceived and poorly executed.

Tales from South Australia in recent days offer wisdom. There, they will use police officers to supervise returning travellers.

As Victoria should have from March, in a choice that still defies logic or accountability.

Premier Daniel Andrews, without a hint of irony, on Thursday spoke of national unity on hotel quarantine, but did not point out that his government rejected the offer of a national approach in March. Hundreds of people died for the decision.

This lack of transparency has fomented resentment. Opinion polls have consistently showed solid support for Premier Dan Andrews. What the raw numbers do not reflect is the depth of division in the electorate.

The mention of Andrews’ name conjures visceral responses. Otherwise sweet grandmothers spit stridence. Those who didn’t much like Andrews now detest him.

Yet if Victorians grumbled, we also acquiesced. We were trapped for months in ways that Europeans or Americans refused to be.

The mention of Andrews’ name conjures visceral responses from Victorians.

We tried to do the right thing.
We were encouraged to dob on one another, and many Victorians exercised the option.

Yet individuals were not the big problem. We were felled by institutional failures. Contact tracing in Victoria was poor. Other states did it better and it’s galling, in retrospect, that we were being told otherwise at the time.

We used paper and faxes in a throwback to an era when the smart phone now carried by almost every person would have been treated as a super computer.

Victoria’s health department did not grow or adapt despite warnings and errors. Excuses masqueraded as solutions. We have now learned that 200 cases a day was the absolute limit for reliable contact tracing in this state.

The good news is that the processes have been digitised, belatedly. The tracing program,
it’s claimed, can now cope with 500 cases a day.

The health department’s pandemic response was challenged by Australian Medical Association Victorian boss Julian Rait last week.

“I guess that’s what’s very frustrating with the department — there isn’t that sense of humility and that willingness to learn or admit perhaps that things could be done better,” he said.

In his assessment, Dr Rait tapped the bigger issue. The truth was the first casualty of 2020. Legal inquiries appear incapable of providing clarity. What happened, and what we were told had happened, do not match.

What’s obvious now is that the truth should trump the other considerations. This is the great lesson of the pandemic.

The infected must be able to speak candidly in the knowledge that any wrongdoing will not be prosecuted. Punishing an individual matters less than protecting the masses.

And governments must be more candid with their people. If we now have a victory in Victoria, we have also paid an unfairly high price, and still no one in charge wants to tell us why.

Victorians ought to be optimistic about the coming days. Yet many of us carry scars from the journey there.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist

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