Minutes after Seller praised the discipline and good sense of the Australian pandemic response, a bunch of us shared drinks and nibbles in a restaurant. Earlier in the day our family was in a crowd of 23,000 at the SCG to watch the Sydney Swans triumph over my beloved Adelaide Crows, and earlier still, I coached our son’s under-8 cricket team in their last game of the season.
Life cannot get much better than all this in a global pandemic. So why are premiers like Annastacia Palaszczuk, Steven Marshall, Daniel Andrews and Mark McGowan determined to deny so many people the fruits of this success?
If Hamilton were showing in Brisbane now it would be finished. Already Queensland’s AFL and NRL teams have flown the coop, playing, training and living interstate until their home state eases lockdowns and other states have no border restrictions.
If Melbourne or Adelaide were staging this hit stage show, interstate tourists would be too fearful to book tickets lest lockdowns and border closures caught them out. NSW is the only state in the federation that has displayed a heavy bias towards keeping its society and borders open while dealing with COVID-19.
To say the response in other states is absurd is to repeat a theme I have been harping on about for a year now. The overreaction of the other states and their premiers is appalling and callous – South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria, and now Queensland twice, have imposed lockdowns, restrictions and border closures that epidemiologists point out have delivered no additional benefit over normal contact tracing and isolation measures.
The lockdowns and border restrictions do, of course, inflict enormous social and economic harm, as well as incalculable hidden health problems through missed appointments, delayed screenings and mental stress. Even now, with only an additional eight cases of community transmission in Queensland today, all from known contacts, the Sunshine State is in crisis, and holiday plans ruined in the shadows of Easter.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her largely unheralded chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, have had the competency, courage and work ethic to deal with vastly more incoming infections over the past year, containing many complex outbreaks, and do it all with the lightest impact on the social lives and economic prospects of their citizens. It is the very model of calm, efficient public health management.
In the rest of the country the fear mongering of the politicians and the media has seen half the population thinking about this disease like it is ebola. And such is the weak nature of modern, meme-driven politicians that the while the premiers have been panicked and overbearing, their oppositions have been too timid to call them out.
When politicians fail to argue what is right because they are too worried about what is popular in the opinion polls, they rightly get blown away. Just ask Zac Kirkup or Deb Frecklington (I am not saying they could have won during this health crisis but if they had the conviction to argue for a more pragmatic response they would have had a point of difference and performed much better).
Instead, more than a year into the pandemic, we watch the macabre spectacle of daily media calls by premiers, chief health officers and police commissioners clamping down on the rights of their citizens, taking away freedoms as if they are tinpot dictators, and receiving applause for doing so. Media report each infection of coronavirus as if it is a tragedy, yet fail to tell us if anyone is actually getting sick (because mostly they are not).
The truth is that once most of our elderly are vaccinated, we ought to open up. We ought also open our international borders to anyone who has been vaccinated and tests negative.
The experts tell us people will be getting infected with this virus for years to come. Not long ago I would have thought that the idea our pathetic premiers will still be locking down like this in years to come was absurd – but now, nothing would surprise me.
Still, surely it is more likely voters will wake up. They only need look to NSW for the alternative approach.
We have been protected by our vast saline moat. Yet outside of NSW, too many Australians are encouraged by media and politicians to sit behind that moat, nervous and shivering, too nervous to travel, and too frightened to live.
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