Joe Hildebrand: Welcome to the two Australias

Hard-line fanatics are creating two very different Australias – the pure and the impure, the clean and unclean, writes Joe Hildebrand.

OPINION

Welcome to the two Australias.

For the first time in more than a century the federation is crumbling. We are no longer a single country but once more a rabble of bitter and bickering states. We are back in the days of fighting over the correct width of railway tracks.

This sounds both outrageous and absurd — and it is. The problem is that it is also quite literally the state of the nation right now.

We have a situation in which the two geographically largest states, Queensland and WA, are openly rejecting the plan for national unity to which they themselves committed just weeks ago. Half of mainland Australia has effectively declared it no longer wants to be part of a single nation.

And now our foundational and most populous state of NSW has declared that it will open up its borders to the rest of the world while the hermit states declare they will not even open theirs to the rest of the country.

Police and the ADF man the NSW-Queensland border at Coolangatta. Picture: Nigel Hallett

In short, we have a scenario in which foreign citizens will be able to fly from Singapore to Sydney but Australian citizens won’t be able to drive from Ballina to Brisbane.

Not since the Berlin airlift, in which international planes flew into the free west of the city while domestic trains were blockaded by the communist east, has there been such an utterly idiotic state of affairs.

Why? Because we are two Australias. Hell, maybe more.

We initially managed to stop the spread of Covid-19 through geographical good fortune. We were an island nation that shut its borders, something we have become adept at.

But soon after we became a loose coalition of states and territories that shut down both their own borders and themselves and did whatever else seemed politically expedient to their leaders.

For the more remote sparsely populated states this was arguably a reasonable option but for Australia’s only two truly international metropolises the story was catastrophically different.

Cassie Potts, stuck in NSW, gives her dad Bob Potts a hug over the border. Picture: Glenn Hampson

Melbourne tried to eliminate the virus and failed. Again and again and again and again and again and again.

Indeed, such was the diehard devotion of the lockdown brigade that one self-proclaimed health expert declared to me — without any apparent trace of irony — that the only reason Lockdown 6 didn’t work was because Lockdown 5 wasn’t long and hard enough.

It is hard to follow such logic without inducing a migraine, suffice to say that apparently the only reason Covid is with us at all is because not enough people have been bricked up in their basement walls.

To his credit, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews this week conceded that his short and sharp/hard and fast lockdown strategy had no chance of constraining the Delta variant. Hard and fast it may have been but short and sharp it certainly was not.

This fact was of course already well known in NSW, where even our once-unbeatable contact tracing system was beaten by the Delta variant, and in New Zealand, which pursued an even harder and faster lockdown strategy than Victoria and was still overrun.

Queensland and Western Australia are openly rejecting the plan for national unity. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Parents must now check in at Melbourne playgrounds. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

But unfortunately Andrews’ army of online apparatchiks didn’t seem to get the memo. Instead they started attacking Victorians themselves for not being obedient enough.

One particularly notorious account which purports to be close to the Andrews government even made this extraordinary statement on Twitter: “The underpinning theme in Victoria is noncompliance. People working against us by not following the rules, or promoting noncompliance. I called these people traitors and I have absolutely no regrets.”

This is the sort of line Joe Stalin himself might have sketched on the back of a beer coaster. Another commenter called the same people “sickening wretches”.

The problem is that if you look at the areas where the virus is spreading most widely and where the noncompliance is occurring these people are overwhelmingly in struggling communities, migrant communities, lower socio-economic communities and — needless to say — Labor electorates.

If you ever needed any more proof that the new puritanical left actively hates poor people you need look no further than that tweet.

A sign in Canterbury displays a warning ahead of a curfew introduction. Picture: Dylan Coker/NCA NewsWire

Once more these hard-line fanatics are creating two Australias: The pure and the impure, the clean and unclean. It is verging on the language of genocide.

Compare this to the approach of NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns, whose response to the same type of communities in south west and western Sydney was to ensure all local Labor MPs were reaching out to their constituents and ensure they were getting vaccinated.

Meanwhile, when it comes to breaking the rules at a macro level that’s apparently no problem.

Queensland and WA are now openly rejecting the very rules that they themselves agreed to, holding millions of lives and livelihoods to ransom while conducting completely unfounded scare campaigns about the impact of Covid-19 on children.

Once more the extremism and violence of the language is both shameful and chilling. And these are supposed to be the touchy-feely tolerant ones.

So welcome to the two Australias – one hard-line and humourless, the other happy and human.

I know which one I’d rather be living in.