Coronavirus Australia: Here’s to a Melbourne that is healing, but political lessons will be brutal
Let’s raise a glass to Melburnians and never forget
I have a vision of thirsty men and women banging on pub doors in Melbourne at two minutes to 11 this morning.
If I were still living in Melbourne no doubt, I would have joined them.
Back in those days, pubs opened at 10am, although those with a particular appetite for an early settler, known in drinkers’ parlance as a Lachlan Macquarie, would have a better than passing acquaintance with the early openers. The Waterside Hotel on the corner of Flinders and King Streets in the CBD offered drinkers a port in an otherwise dry storm. Its licence was written especially for dockies working night shifts and other night crawlers but there was space available for thirsty journos having a liquid morning tea.
I’m not sure if the early openers still ply their trade. Many have become gastropubs, a portmanteau so close to gastroenteritis that one might view their blackboard scrawled specials with deep suspicion. As with pubs across all our major cities, the sticky beer-soaked carpets with the down and outer muttering into his beer in the corner have been replaced with Italian marble or exposed floorboards and salmon pink interiors.
Melbourne began to turn to Covid-normal yesterday. On cue, Punt Road became a car park at 5.30pm and with a special nod to nostalgia, a truck became wedged under the low clearance Montague Street Bridge in South Melbourne in defiance of flashing lights, enormous skol-and-crossbone signs and common sense.
Melbourne is healing.
Not their screw up
It’s been a tough ride for Melburnians, and they deserve a knees-up. This second lockdown — 112 days in length has been hard on every single one of them.
It can never be forgotten that this was not their screw up.
The city’s five million inhabitants were placed under virtual house arrest with a nightly curfew that no one in power from Dan Andrews down appears to have recommended.
The Dan stans (a portmanteau of its own blending stalker and fan) are exultant this morning. If the return to Covid normal has been a stunning success, it must be remembered it was born of a dismal failure of government and bureaucracy.
A mate of mine in the property business visited Rydges Hotel in Swanston Street back in June. The hotel is up for sale — or it was — and he and few others were potential buyers. They walked into the underground car park to check out the structure of the building. They came across a security guard who waved them through. So much for quarantine.
They emerged and were headed to the front door where a solitary security guard inside the hotel’s reception area was fiddling on his phone when one member of the party thought better of it. It would be months later when they realised how fortuitous that decision was. The hotel had become a seething mass of Covid transmission, responsible, it is reckoned for 90 per cent of Melbourne’s Covid cases.
Abject failures: Aged care, quarantine, contact tracing
While the federal government has been pointing fingers everywhere but in its own direction, it can likewise never be forgotten that of the 817 Covid deaths in Victoria driven by the abject failures of quarantine and contact tracing, 683 of the deceased had been residents of aged care facilities under Commonwealth jurisdiction.
It is well to remember, too, that putting lockdowns one and two together, Melbourne has been shut for the best part of eight months.
There is a long list of people who have suffered greatly — the elderly who have endured silently in fear and doubt, the young who have missed not just large chunks of the academic year but crucial social interactions with their peers, businesses small, medium and large whose coffers have run dry, and people who have looming serious health issues, including cancer diagnoses that have been stalled and by now may have gone beyond treatment and survival.
Single people in the Great Southern City have done it harder than most. It is difficult to appreciate what they’ve been through. Stuck in their homes, often small apartments without face-to-face social contact with friends and family for weeks on end, allowed out for an hour’s exercise before more recently it became two.
On Friday nights some would have Zoom drinks where lighthearted banter over a drink or two could only turn to despair when the digital chatter stopped, and silence returned.
When Melbourne opened up today, limits remain on who can visit residential homes and guess what, single people have been dudded again. The current restriction says visits are limited to two adults and their dependants once per day. That doesn’t mean single people can’t visit or receive visitors, but it is more likely that families will host or visit other families.
It is as if politicians regard people without spouses and/or children at their feet as anomalies or just plain invisible.
There is plenty of blame to go around. To the Andrews government firstly for the quarantine breaches and the Department of Health and Human Services who were so under-resourced and poorly organised they could barely contact trace ten Covid cases let alone the hundreds that were out there, the federal government’s wilful blindness to the terrible state of aged care across the country and to a state opposition obsessed with pathetic if not creepy stunts.
The political price is yet to be paid but it will come and when it does it will be brutal.
While we raise a glass to friends and family in Melbourne today, the lesson for the politicians is this must never happen again.
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