Can we manage a sane conversation about our society right now?

It is dark and quiet on the Boeing Dreamliner, 11 hours into the flight. The seat-back map shows us just south of Sri Lanka. Local time, 1am. I look out the window at a black void, pockmarked with stars.Just in front of my face, just beyond my reflection in the plastic window, a frozen hurricane roars silently past the fuselage.

I’ll be seeing my family at last. Grandparents, in-laws, nieces. My four-year-old twins will visit a snowy Santa with their beloved abuela. It’s been half of their life since she hugged them. Two interminable years. I choke up and sip stale aeroplane tea.

Families are reunited at Sydney airport after international border restrictions were eased in November.Credit: Jessica Hromas

A few weeks ago, another Australian was flying to see her family. It didn’t go so well. Instead of a family reunion, she found herself pleading to be released from a windowless hotel room in which she’d been trapped for six days. Her name was Sarah Rollings and along with her husband, their 10-month-old and their eight-year-old, she’d had the misfortune to be on a flight from Melbourne to Adelaide with someone who later returned a positive test for COVID-19.

It’s worth noting that coronavirus doesn’t spread well on a plane. Air filters keep clean air flowing better than in a room. In the United States and Europe, people have been flying in large numbers for months with no spike among frequent flyers; no clusters in areas with high business travel; no down-tick of cases in rural areas where folks don’t fly.

Still, someone on Sarah’s plane had the dreaded lurgy, the system got pinged, and The Procedures lurched into gear. When Sarah was notified by SA Health, she believed she could leave the state immediately. She scrambled to get the family on the next plane. But at the airport, she was intercepted by armed police who led them to a holding room. They were transferred to a quarantine hotel with no explanation of how long they would be there. There followed a long, infuriating ordeal, which Rollings told me about on my ABC radio show. It ended with a police car escorting her family 300 kilometres from Adelaide to the border. The cops dumped them into Victoria, where the children could finally step out into the sunshine to play.

Meanwhile, Instagram videos are going viral of Howard Springs inmates who say they’re COVID-negative Territorians, held against their will for being close contacts. I’ve asked NT Health a simple question: “Has any resident who was willing and able to isolate at home been placed into Howard Springs?” The territory responds with ambiguous press releases about how successful its “strategy” has been.

The purpose-built Howard Springs quarantine facility in Darwin.Credit: Getty

What’s going on? Quarantine was wildly successful at keeping the virus out while Australians were sitting ducks: unvaccinated, unprepared, clueless about treatments. But now we’re as well-prepared as anyone. Vaccines are fantastic at keeping you out of an intensive care ward, but they’re not great at stopping you from testing positive to a coronavirus test. The virus will find its way into every population in the world. And yet Australians seem oddly uninterested in whether we’re being rounded up by armed officers of the state to contain COVID-19. Can we have a sane conversation about this? Can we, as a country, manage that?

This is not a partisan problem. South Australia has a Liberal government, the Northern Territory a Labor one, and we’ve seen this pattern all over the country. This is a problem of our own reluctance, of my own reluctance – as the media, as Australians – to honestly grapple with the human rights trade-offs of this moment. I don’t have the answers. But we ought to be asking the questions.

I once heard a Soviet dissident describe the Russian state as a “face-eating machine”. If you get in its way, it mindlessly chomps through your face. It doesn’t hate you. It just has to do what it has to do for the greater good, and your face isn’t complying. Surely, you understand. You’re not opposed to the greater good, are you?

If we were serious about reducing community transmission without bullying people, we’d innovate. Could we encourage families to take antigen tests at home every three days? Mail out free test packs to every household? Issue Dine-and-Discover-style vouchers redeemable for N95 masks to replace our tatty old cloth ones? Subsidise better office ventilation? Install HEPA air filters on trains. Uphold free movement between the states. Could we commit, as a principle of a free country, not to lock up people who are willing and able to isolate for themselves?

This has become a tricky topic to talk about given that the conversation has been co-opted by two opposing sides: wild-eyed protesters who demonise public health advocates as authoritarian boot-lickers, versus parochial mole-rats who demonise human rights as luxuries that might kill grandma. Sustaining an open society barely comes into it.

Protesters rally against lockdowns in Melbourne in August. Credit: Justin McManus

We are a country of travellers. We don’t deserve our plans to be derailed by the face-eating machinery of the state. It’s time to refresh the national conversation; to justify from first principles what we want from state borders and quarantine.

Out the aeroplane window, the world is still black. The plane is now past India, over the Arabian Sea. I can smell rubbery omelettes heating up in the galley. I’m so grateful to be in the sky again, to be seeing family again, to be slicing through a frigid torrent of air, 10,000 metres above the slumbering Indian fish.

Australians crave this sort of freedom. We want to hug our families in Perth. We want to be treated like grown-ups. We want rules that make sense; that are proportionate to the risk and informed by intelligent debate that considers the interests of free citizens as well as of public health data wonks. We want a flourishing liberal democracy that’s resilient enough to withstand a health crisis without bullying people. We want to fly from Melbourne to Adelaide, fully vaccinated, COVID-negative, without being locked up.

Can we, as a country, manage that?

Afternoons with Josh Szeps starts on January 17 on ABC Radio Sydney.