Patrick Carlyon: Why we’re not all in this police state together
The announcement that anyone breaching Melbourne’s “ring of steel” would be stung with a $5000 fine has largely passed by without comment, as we now seem gripped in a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, trapped by boneheaded stridency and poor policy, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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In the currency of lockdown, $5000 is a lot of online shopping.
Deprived of stimulation and joy, the daily thud in the driveway to mark the delivery of this or that item serves as a comfort in the absence of family, pubs and companionship.
These days, $5000 is measured as 50 overpriced jumpers or 100 non-stick frying pans.
It’s also the new penalty, tripling the old one, for venturing off the reservation and attempting to breach Melbourne’s “ring of steel”.
Wednesday’s announcement of this inflated fine has largely gone unremarked. Resigned compliance appears to be a reflexive response to lengthy privations.
We are gripped in a kind of collective Stockholm syndrome,
to be trapped by overreach and poor policy.
To borrow from a Mental as Anything classic, the sticks are getting bigger.
What is the messaging here? That conspiracy theorists who run the gauntlet of a $1652 fine (or about 20 Uber Eats dinners) will baulk at a penalty worth 60 Uber Eats dinners?
We are all in this together, we are told, but the authorities trust us less than they did a week ago.
Good onya for doing the right thing, it goes, but here’s a family-holiday’s worth of financial punishment if you do not comply with the hardline directives.
Wagging the finger at the great unwashed went further. Both Premier Daniel Andrews and police encouraged regional folk to dob in those Melbourne fiends who try to book a restaurant or have a beer in their patch.
Police will patrol caravan parks and boat ramps, in images that conjure dragnets and sniffer dogs.
We live in a police state. A punitive state. When penalties get raised, no one bothers to ask why anymore, even though Melbourne’s lockdown is now longer and more extreme than that in Wuhan, where authorities took to welding shut doors.
Melbourne suffers for similarly egregious examples of overreach. The recent scene of two old ducks on a park bench being heavied by cops embarrassed all Victorians.
Images, such as handcuffing a pregnant woman in her home for a social media post, or stomping on someone’s head in a (non-COVID-related) arrest, beggar explanations and apologies. But explanations are not lockdown currency. These scenes continue and no one appears to be held to account.
It doesn’t matter that a Roy Morgan poll, published on Thursday, found one in four Victorians rated the ethics and honesty of Victoria Police as poor and half of all Victorians believe Melburnians should be able to travel more than 5km from their homes.
In Victoria, the supply lines of logic, care or understanding are as bottle-necked as supermarket distribution centres.
We are treated like children to be dispatched to our bedrooms, under threat of our piggy banks being raided should we peek out the door.
No reasonable judge could question a blue line separating Melbourne from the rest of the world. But the optics of checkpoints and document demands throw back to police states more notorious than the “disappearings” of today’s China.
Victoria’s response has been the unfettered pursuit of punishment rather than education.
We are blanketed by rules, rather than steered by suggestions, and it doesn’t matter almost everyone has tried to comply with regulations shown to defy good health policy or simple common sense.
Victoria’s response has lacked the nuance or lessons of other places.
We have a curfew that serves no health benefit. Real estate agents cannot hold inspections, in a policy error that merits scandalised headlines. Victoria’s response stinks of boneheaded stridency.
We suffer for leaders who lack candour or care in their caps on freedom and liberty.
Even the reducing of restrictions, such as on singles, played as mealy-mouthed.
Why torture the lonely by forcing them to wait an extra week to see a friend?
The rhetoric for increased fines invites confusion and anxiety.
What of the Melburnians who want to check their vacant holiday or rural property, but wonder if an overdue inspection qualifies as “emergency maintenance”?
What of those who seek to leave the Melbourne borders to visit an intimate partner (as they can)?
Must they explain at a roadblock that loneliness, depression or libido justifies their movement?
Should they produce a saucy text message to bolster their case?
“We’ve got to be inflexible on this,” Andrews said of his “ring of steel”, though he could have been addressing any of a dozen policy decisions in recent months.
It seems we are the little people to be ordered to our rooms, to do what we’re told, even when the punishment seems misplaced.
There, we set new records in online spending, often on things we do not need, as a distraction for the inflicted miseries of being a Melburnian.
Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist