Rita Panahi: Why do we need to wait until Friday for restrictions to be eased?

Every single day of unnecessary restrictions is a heavy burden for battered Victorian businesses, so why do we need to wait until Friday for an announcement?

Victorian children have paid a high price for the gross incompetence of the Dan Andrews government.

They have missed more school than their counterparts in the rest of the country and not only has their academic progress taken a battering, so has their emotional and mental development.

Kids aren’t meant to be locked up for months with little to no face-to-face contact with friends and family.

Even today kids in high schools across Victoria are required to be masked at all times when indoors and even when outdoors and not socially distanced.

The Victorian restrictions are, as we’ve come to expect, unnecessarily onerous and inconsistent.

According to the official guidelines children “aged 12 years and older must wear a face mask in public indoor settings including schools, early childhood education centres and places of study” but “children who are aged 12 and over who are attending primary school do not need to wear a face mask at school.”

Melbourne businesses have been decimated by restrictions. Picture Ian Currie.

On Friday the premier is expected to ease a raft of restrictions including mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, visitors to households and crucially the cap on people returning to work.

But why do we have to wait until Friday for the announcement?

Why weren’t restrictions lifted last week or Monday once it was clear that the Holiday Inn cluster was contained; it’s difficult to see how they can justify maintaining additional restrictions on millions of people until the 14-day isolation period for close contacts ends on Friday.

Where is the Victorian government’s ‘abundance of caution’ for the lives and livelihoods of people who through no fault of their own find themselves under extreme financial distress?

Every single day of unnecessary restrictions is a heavy burden for battered Victorian businesses.

Premier Dan Andrews can hold a press conference this hour and give long suffering Victorians some good news and remove restrictions that are muzzling the population and hindering the state’s economic recovery.

He can start by removing the cap on people returning to work, currently set at 50 per cent, and remove the mask mandate that is unnecessarily muzzling millions including kids in school.