Patrick Carlyon: The restrictions that should be lifted as case numbers fall
Victoria’s case numbers are dropping to levels that even a second-world health bureaucracy can manage. If we would allow common sense to guide us, these are the restrictions that should be lifted immediately, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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My dog can’t see, even though she has perfect eyesight. She floats across the floor like a blonde afro wig until the inevitable collision with a chair leg or fridge.
She is a victim of restrictions, an unkempt canine hippie. She risks an eye injury each time her owner tries to trim her.
Her owner, too, is unshaved and untrimmed, just another wild man of Borneo, Melbourne, who recounts trips to the barber with the nostalgic warmth of a wartime romance.
It’s good news for the dog. From Monday night, she can get a haircut, though the dog groomer waiting lists will doom her to more Jimi Hendrix-like calamities, at least for a few more weeks.
Her owner, meanwhile, wonders about attacking his hair with shears. His car looks like a discarded bomb.
Car washes are a no-no, even the automatic ones, and it doesn’t matter that this particular customer always gets bathed in virus-stemming soap suds.
Car washes, barbers and dog groomers. Minor issues all, alongside small business closures and escalating unemployment.
But their instant restoration would be little morale boosts, given Victoria’s case numbers are dropping to levels that even a second-world health bureaucracy, as we boast here in Victoria, can manage.
“Common sense will guide us,” Premier Dan Andrews said the other day.
Presumably, this demands the immediate lifting of other wanton restrictions, such as these:
CURFEW: Has so far saved no lives, has no grounding in health, and endangers thousands of householders trapped each night with a violent person. The same can be said of other regions that enacted curfews, such as our kin in Albania.
An impost imposed not because it should be, but because it could be.
5KM LIMITS: It has never been explained why the rule is 5km, not three, 10 or 20. True, we no longer expect to be furnished with facts, what with the faceless minions of government busily arse-covering for bungled programs.
The 5km limit has so far prevented no infections, but has stopped all those naughty visits to your favourite butcher 5.3km from home.
REAL ESTATE INSPECTIONS: No houses are being bought or sold because no one can see them. The ban has unnecessarily crippled an industry that relies on face-to-face contact, and has stranded many Melburnians in the process of changing residences.
If five people can today meet on a building site, doesn’t common sense allow a single person to visit a prospective residence?
OUTSIDE GATHERINGS: No evidence exists that anyone, in a face mask and distancing, has contracted COVID-19 outside.
Tales suggest that the entire population of Melbourne has come to bend these rules after collectively deciding that the biggest parkland health hazard is an outbreak of police officers.
GARDENERS: Banned because, well, just because. The highest risk posed by gardeners, virus or not, is their cutting the azaleas instead of the camellias.
Gratuitous restrictions similarly apply to golf and fishing, little things that become big things in the absence of anything else to do.
SMALL BUSINESS BANS: Nonsensical standards that close some shops but not others. At Camberwell, two florists do not allow customers into the store, while shoppers at the nearby supermarket unwittingly gather at the flower display.
At Dandenong Market, 130 businesses have been closed for 20 weeks since March. Some of them provide the same products and services as businesses allowed to remain open elsewhere. What drives the market’s continuing closures, along with so many other retail linchpins across the wider city, bar blind adherence to random rules?
SCHOOLS: Every student should go to school at the start of term four instead of a foreshadowed gradual return.
Little evidence shows that schools spread the virus, but accumulated wisdom suggests that parents and homeschooling are as incompatible as the Andrews government and the truth.
FACTS: A judicial inquiry has hosted a succession of important officials who ostensibly bear responsibility for catastrophic choices.
Yet not one of them is to blame, apparently, especially Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, who says she was unaware of the farcical hotel quarantine arrangements.
Her Sergeant Schultz strategy (“I know nothing”) was trailblazed by Victoria Police at the Lawyer X royal commission. It equates to a football coach who says he was moving his car when his team was smashed by 20 goals.
Or my dog, blinded by circumstance, when she runs into a brick wall.
The only “commonsense” conclusion? That the biggest “cowboy” operator, as tendered in inquiry evidence about security firms, boasts a “Victoria State Government” insignia.
Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist