Victorians need signs there is a road out of endless lockdowns

In NSW they talk of international borders lifting and going to restaurants, while Victorians wait on the possible extension of a 5km limit.

Victorians need hope that there’s life after lockdown coming. Picture: NCA NewsWire

You can’t change facts. But you can change their interpretation.

This week represents the lowest low in the Covid pandemic in Victoria.

The belated shift in the Andrews government strategy – from elimination to suppression – is a plus. But it has been wrapped in grimness.

We face lockdown for weeks, probably months, in what will soon grow to threaten most records for the longest single time spent by an astronaut in space.

There’s an inexorable certainty to our confinement that eclipses the gloom of last year’s tidings.

We’re more fatigued now. Shiny things do not distract us anymore. The quirks of lockdown, such as working all day in a dressing gown, no longer amuse.

So here we are, batty at best, burdened by an inescapable truth. It makes no difference if the daily case numbers drop to 20 or soar to 2000. We are trapped.

That’s how it is in Victoria. There can be no positive spin.

Victorians feel doomed to be told what we cannot do as opposed to what we can do. Picture: Getty Images

In NSW, they talk up the lifting of international borders and the going to restaurants – even amid case numbers roughly 10 times higher than Victoria.

Here, we are promised the possible extension of 5km limits – in three weeks’ time.

In NSW, they have Gladys. She often looks besieged and without answers. Her state now hosts hospital horror stories. She gets curt when journalists chuck out her script, and her voice quavers as if signalling the onset of offstage tears.

Here, in contrast, we have “Karen”. She is the archetypal ogre who calls out our errors and demands better.

Karen tells us there can be no bright side in Victoria. Our compliance is policed with petty caveats. Victoria’s frown will not be turned upside down.

We feel doomed to be told what we cannot do as opposed to what we can do. For Karen is always there, looking to be displeased.

To be fair, Premier Dan Andrews has softened the rhetoric which belongs in a pulpit. He has also dropped the one-upmanship, armed with lower numbers, that prompted daily put-downs of NSW’s handling of the pandemic.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a point. NSW restrictions have always seemed leaky.

But the differences in the states’ approach is critical. It surely explains why Victorians feel so much gloomier. Think jittery plane passengers, waiting in vain for a cockpit announcement to settle our nerves.

In NSW they talk of eating out at restaurants again, while in Victoria we wait to hear of a possible extension to 5km limits. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Berejiklian has expressed a better future. She has detailed how it might work. She has successfully thrown the thinking ahead, to the freedoms to be enjoyed with double shot protection.

She concentrates on what might be as opposed to what is. Hers is a simple message: to do “all the things we’ve all been missing”.

In Victoria, we are rewarded with a return to playgrounds, as if this entirely useless restriction was needed for our protection.

In a particularly Victorian way, playground play will be coupled with a fact sheet (one parent, no mask dropping), just in case we didn’t feel demoralised enough.

Presumably, Karens will be patrolling playgrounds for compliance.

Other marginal restrictions will be lifted in a few weeks’ time. Not picnics – Karen says no – but enough exercise time to embark on a marathon. Yet freedom is not afoot. It is a luxury that will not be indulged, even in the imagining.

Schooling in term four is a blank spot. Younger kids build new worlds, in games such as Roblox and Minecraft, because they are much more interesting than the worlds they inhabit. Year 12s have been urged as a priority to get vaccinated, but they continue to fret that exam dates will be moved.

In Victoria, we are rewarded with a return to playgrounds, as if this entirely useless restriction was needed for our protection. Picture: AAP

Victorian businesses have no idea when they might re-open to vaccinated patrons. An exasperated trader compared the state approaches on Thursday, describing Victoria as a “poor cousin on food scraps”.

We have been denied the promise of the renewed joys that being vaccinated could bring.

Why not announce Christmas shopping plans for the vaccinated? The numbers are in, after all. Victoria should hit the 80 per cent vaccination target by mid-November.

Why not announce a vaccinated crowd allowance for the Melbourne Cup? Or outdoor dining for the vaccinated from December 1?

We are lagging in Victoria, and not only in vaccination rates. We need clues for the exit, some people desperately. But we keep being refused any signposts.

This week’s proclamations ought to have been made in August. It’s progress to speak of living with Covid, as opposed to defeating it. But how the privations will ease still remains unclear.

And this is the problem. Time matters. In the vortex of lockdown, time has never mattered more.

And every day lost feels like another day of being Karened.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist