The Melbourne curfew marks the death of common sense.
While an extension to Lockdown 6.0 is justifiable on the numbers, the government provided no meaningful evidence at all for an overnight curfew.
The best the chief health officer could say was last year’s curfew was among a “suite” of measures that ultimately worked.
Only working, of course, after the health team let the virus spread so far in Melbourne that it took months to contain.
Not only is the curfew a vast overreach, it misreads community sentiment and will deliver little to no practical benefit.
It will punish the law-abiding for the deeds of a tiny minority, groups that for 18 months have been uncontrollable.
Among them in 2020 were criminal elements and ethnic groups that either ignorantly or deliberately put themselves above the majority.
The curfew will add further psychological pressure to a city that largely has delivered an extraordinarily positive result, with still low levels of the virus circulating among millions.
The decision, based on health advice from the CHO, has the potential to be particularly damaging for the young, who have, in many ways, carried the greatest burden, with draconian shutdowns lasting close to 200 days.
It’s unlikely that any of this will trouble the Victorian Premier.
Daniel Andrews will use the curfew to compare Victoria with NSW; Gladys Berejiklian is drowning in the virus because she went too slow, for too long.
Andrews was right to go hard against the Delta variant when he initially did, largely shutting it down; as unwelcome as Lockdown 6.0 has been, most people can see the sense in restricting the virus’s movement. But the curfew fails the pub test because police, if you believe their union, broadly do not want to enforce it and there does not seem to be available evidence that suggests it will have a sufficient impact to justify the wartime policy measure.
As a result, there is a very real risk that Andrews will start to see the slow unravelling of compliance in Victoria. Rather than pushing for greater restrictions, a compassionate leader should be hunting for ways to take the pressure off his community.
Perhaps a greater emphasis on commonsense decisions, where people, on the edges, get to decide what is going to work and what isn’t. There has been plenty of evidence in recent weeks of excessive public gatherings of people in weird places like South Yarra and Richmond coffee precincts.
No one would object to greater policing of these activities or the demand that large parties in the home are stopped. That’s common sense. The curfew, however, is an inexcusable overreach.
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