Patrick Carlyon: No government accountability for Melbourne’s nonsensical curfew
Daniel Andrews has lost the confidence of the people. We have rules in Melbourne where no rules are needed, and we suffer for a government that insists on sledgehammers to swat wasps, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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Melbourne is not at war. Its sharpest debates often involve football. The city is not being bombed or razed. There has been no looting or cars set alight.
And yet we cannot go out at night. Melbourne is now Canberra. It resembles the night-time black hole of North Korea’s Pyongyang, as viewed from space.
There are no medical grounds for a Melbourne curfew. Its implementation invites a thesaurus load of adjectives, from clumsy to panicked to draconian.
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton conceded no health imperatives on Tuesday, weeks after the curfew was introduced in Melbourne, in a pandemic control to match those hotbeds of freedom, Albania and Bulgaria.
We have a curfew because, as Daniel Andrews puts it, it eases the work of Victoria Police. What’s a few civil liberties when they impede the pursuit of martial law? Castro would be pleased.
Sutton says he never recommended a curfew. We don’t know who mooted a curfew or justified its imposition. The police say Sutton must have. Andrews says he doesn’t know, but helpfully adds no one can do anything interesting after dark, anyway.
Here is a Yes Minister script, to be rejected as too absurd. Victoria has been failed by systemic buck-passing.
Whether it’s hotel quarantine or curfews, no one person or body is to blame because every crazy arse policy goes through so many faceless departments. We have rules where no rules are needed, and we suffer for a government that insists on sledgehammers to swat wasps.
Have we reached the tipping point? Has this Daniel thrown himself into the lion’s den, doomed to a fate that conflicts with the Bible story of the “blameless” man?
Six hundred doctors have signed an open letter against the “disproportionately enormous“ harm of the lockdown.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has said the curfew should end at once. He could have added that the announcement should double as an apology.
Instead, we watch footage of two elderly women being heavied by a posse of police officers. They were sitting on a park bench, and that’s a no-no.
We hear of 3831 fines issued for being out too late, even though we now know there is no health reason for depriving people a late night walk or drive. Those fines ought to be rescinded, again with an apology.
Epidemiologists have described a closed shop approach to the Victorian pandemic. They say a cabal of decision-makers has overlooked the growing weight of evidence since the pandemic began.
And so the mistakes multiply, their inevitable exposure delayed by Andrews’ unwillingness to concede fault.
Andrews has lost the confidence of the people. He is surrendering his mandate to govern. He has forfeited the trust of the crowd. Strength and conviction have yielded to belligerence and obfuscation.
His “road map” diverges from the overwhelming consensus. He has muddled the response, again and again, and he has wilfully misled Victorians when he has cited health outcomes for extreme restrictions.
We haven’t received the details of modelling data that condemns us to home until November. We are entitled to them, and airy declarations of a “super computer” offer no comfort when the validity of the data is cloaked from view.
Andrews’ approach heaves with dogma and prescriptiveness. He says he will take accountability. But there is no accountability. Errors, such as glaring deficiencies in hotel quarantine and the chaos of Victoria’s contact tracing system, were not remedied before the damage was done.
Andrews is hostile to advice. Business leaders rail and scoff about notions of consultation, and supermarkets fret about filling shelves without enough distribution staff. The reliance on spin appears to have trumped the nature of facts.
CSL chairman Brian McNamee speaks of a Victorian “map for misery”. He and other industry experts have not been consulted about the response.
“They would rather use a blunt instrument that suits their political purposes than actually deal with the reality of the data in front of them…” he told the Herald Sun.
Prof Catherine Bennett, from Deakin University, identifies fear in decision-making.
“It’s strange to me as an epidemiologist because we now should be in a much better position to be very targeted, very competent in what we need to do and to get on with it,” she has said.
“Going to blanket restrictions is always what you do when you don’t know where the virus is.”
The dictator tag has been loosely applied to Andrews’ singular approach over the years. It goes to his rejection of inconvenient questions.
Now he faces inconvenient answers. To borrow from the language of police assistant commissioner Luke Cornelius, the curfew policy, along with the political obstinacy for the failings of this state’s contact tracing, has been “bat-shit crazy”.
#StandWithDan, if you like, but bring your tinfoil hat.
PATRICK CARLYON IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST