FEAR does funny things to people.

It puts self-preservation at the forefront of every decision, often at the expense of logic.

We’ve seen this play out during the coronavirus pandemic.

Helped, it must be said, by a hyped-up media, the potential catastrophe of COVID-19 has frightened the hell out of many Australians.

This fear has been a gift for our governments who now have their constituents turning to their fearless leaders to keep them safe from the evil virus.

Gifted this new power, many have adopted it with relish, their popularity soaring with every hardline measure imposed on their petrified citizens.

In Victoria, the Government has enforced a curfew that locks its residents down between 8pm and 5am.

When it was revealed this week that this decision was not based on advice from either the Chief Health Officer or the police, Premier Daniel Andrews was at pains to point out it was the government that made the calls and its discretion could go beyond — or fall short of — the official advice.

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Yet in Queensland that same discretion appeared unavailable to Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who said it was the Chief Health Officer’s call to ban a young woman from the COVID-free ACT from attending her father’s funeral.

Drunk on their new-found power, some state leaders appear to have lost the ability to act with any compassion or humanity.

The Queensland Government was eventually generous enough to let the young woman view her father’s dead body.

The sight of that woman — escorted by police from her hotel quarantine wearing full personal protective equipment and a face shield — would have been humorous if it weren’t so desperately tragic.

The extent of the hard-line stance being taken by state leaders appears inversely proportionate to their distance from an election.

Ms Palaszczuk — who goes to the polls next month — has no doubt been buoyed by last month’s Northern Territory election, where the Gunner Government campaigned solely on its handling of the coronavirus crisis, in particular its border closures, and was returned.

West Australians will head to the polls early next year.

There, Premier Mark McGowan is refusing to even consider the Prime Minister’s request that states look to open their borders by Christmas.

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While there are currently no active cases in either the NT or South Australia, people from these jurisdictions are banned from crossing an imaginary line placed at 129 degrees of longitude almost 200 years ago, lest one of us triggers a mass West Australian COVID outbreak.

In normal times these decisions wouldn’t pass the pub test.

Yet our fear of the coronavirus — perhaps the fear it could shut our pubs again — has allowed these decisions to pass almost without scrutiny.

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But as our fears about the virus slowly ease and logical thinking returns, we’re beginning to question if some of our leaders have been taking us for a ride.

Some of the early decisions to close borders made sense, particularly here in the NT where an outbreak in a remote community could be devastating.

And to be fair, despite their tough-talking hard border rhetoric during the election campaign, the NT Government has adopted the nation’s most sensible approach to borders, opening them up but forcing travellers from hot spots into quarantine.

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In other states they remain slammed shut.

You have to wonder if the motivation for these decisions is to save the lives of Australians, or the jobs of the people who rule them.