Western Australia’s reopening plan must avoid Victoria’s mistakes

As Western Australia’s border reopens, the state can learn a lot from avoiding Victoria’s silly rules that don’t protect anyone.

Hello Western Australia. Welcome to the real world.

Where elimination is a folly, not a target. And residual restrictions aimed at curbing the virus have enraged more than protected.

You have bathed yourselves in isolation for years, much to the frustration of the wider country and in defiance of the inevitable. We did so here for a long time, under draconian regulations.

The lesson? It’s the extent of the response – rather than the threat – which will be measured years from now.

Yes, you avoided the rush of nastier strains. Yet Covid was always going to seep through your borders. That was the fundamental misunderstanding, as served in fear and fearmongering, both here and there.

But perceptions have shifted. In Victoria, parents who have not caught the virus are waiting until they do. In nodding to “measles parties” of old, some family members are even seeking infection from positive loved ones so as to shorten the duration of staying at home.

WA Premier Mark McGowan’s restrictions have frustrated the wider country. Picture: Matt Jelonek

Covid is everywhere. The health system has not collapsed. Healthy people have generally suffered the equivalent of the flu or less.

Yet there are other lessons from the Victorian response. Pernickety adherence to the rules has not protected us from the virus swirl.

You have introduced stage two restrictions, and some of them seem sensible enough.

Yet masking grade 3 and older primary school kids is more of a nuisance than a saviour. And it draws ire: why can nine year olds go elsewhere, maskless, except in settings which have not generated great virus spread?

Victoria feels like it is coming out of the crisis, at daily case numbers about five times more than yours. (Those Victorian case numbers, by the way, are a nonsense. Many, many Victorians have caught the virus and have felt no need to report it.)

Yet peak-hour traffic this morning was a b---h. Maskless people queued for coffee. They were talking about an entirely different, and potentially bigger crisis, on the other side of the world.

There is an acceptance here that the virus is coming if it hasn’t already knocked on your door.

Over there, you can do it better than here. You can avoid the “transitional anomalies”, as they were called here, such as when parents were expected to drop one kid at school while homeschooling the other.

Western Australia, your vaccination rates are high. Anecdotally, in Victoria, the vaccinated seem just as susceptible to infection as the unvaccinated.

Try to avoid silly rules that do not protect anyone. Don’t let politics supersede public health so that odd edicts are defended as “commonsense” rather than epidemiological of intent.

You face strange times, where the virus is no longer something that happens to statistics in the news, but to your kids, siblings, and parents.

But your future is bright.

After almost two years in a defensive crouch, life with the virus seems far more enriching than life avoiding it.