Susie O’Brien: No hope for Melburnians still stuck in Covid lockdown

Why would anyone want to stay in Victoria? We’re the home of billion-dollar bungles and have been given no hope, guidelines or targets.

One more excruciating week of lockdown and no trips to the country for the Queen’s Birthday long weekend.

Victorians continue to pay a harsh price for inadequate hotel quarantine, lack of statewide QR codes and lack of progress in vaccinations.

It’s becoming increasingly clear there are five good reasons in Victoria to leave home: Moving to SA, moving to NT, moving to NSW, moving to WA and moving to Queensland.

Who’d want to stay here in Victoria – the home of billion-dollar bungles?

Businesses are still losing millions, students are still going backwards and families are still under stress.

At Wednesday’s press conference we saw a return of Acting Premier James Merlino, but where’s Dictator Dan? Wasn’t he meant to be back in June?

Acting Premier James Merlino fronted up yet another press conference. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

Instead, a roll call of state officials and politicians talked up how deadly the virus is, even though we haven’t had any deaths in this country for months.

Anxious Victorians tuned in to find out that we will be subject to another round of complicated, nonsensical restrictions that are not based on expert medical science.

In the city, the 5km limit has given way to 10km without adequate explanation. Such arbitrary limits are pointless, frustrating and annoying.

A boy who died on a school camp was denied the dignity of a proper funeral, but tow-truck drivers can remove cars from empty roads still subject to irrelevant peak hour restrictions.

We can’t visit our loved ones in hospitals but performing arts studios, high-performance sports, feature films and prison transfers are allowed.

And we can’t leave our homes to visit friends or loved ones — let alone go interstate — but Collingwood players can fly to Adelaide to play football.

Given the huge number of businesses bleeding money, it doesn’t make sense to allow those who are doing letterboxing or installing solar panels to be allowed to work but not thousands of others.

It’s also great that kids in grades 11 and 12 in Melbourne are allowed back at school, but why not the younger kids who were allowed to return last year?

Why not let all kids go back to school given the low infection rates of children and the relative safety of school campuses?

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said it was because he didn’t want year 11 and 12s to fall behind, but this sells other anxious and desperate kids short.

We also heard QR code will finally be made mandatory in shops using the Service Victoria QR code check-in. Finally, our state is catching up – but this should be mandatory for all businesses.

Again, we see a lack of road map out of lockdown and a lack of information showing what decisions are being based on.

Melbourne will spend at least a fortnight in lockdown. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images

Merlino says it’s a day-by-day assessment and we “expect to be in a position to ease restrictions in seven days’ time”.

But he offers no guidelines, no targets and no hope this is going to happen.

Sutton also tells us the best way to stop the spread of the virus is through vaccination. And yet the phone lines are still crashing, lines can stretch for six hours and people are waiting weeks for appointments – that’s if they are lucky enough to get through.

A year on and the state and federal governments are also still squabbling over support packages for businesses and supplies of the vaccine.

It’s just not good enough.

It’s great that regional areas are being opened up, especially those hundreds of kilometres from any cases, but again the restrictions seem nonsensical and arbitrary.

Businesses in regional areas are still struggling, but they are still being denied the one thing they desperately need – an influx of city customers for the long weekend.

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