When it comes to responding to pandemics, have you ever thought we could be regressing? Last week the South Australian government instructed residents in home quarantine to install an official sign at the front of their houses to warn off the public. “Nothing personal,” the bureaucrats probably say when they check the lepers are complying with regulations. “Just letting anyone and everyone know that you are unclean.”
This latest directive was announced by SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens, a man emulating the 17th century Mayor of London Sir John Lawrence. In 1665, when plague was felling Londoners en masse, he decreed “That every house visited [by the disease] be marked with a red cross of a foot long in the middle of the door, evident to be seen, and with these usual printed words, that is to say, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us,’ to be set close over the same cross, there to continue until lawful opening of the same house.”
It is perhaps befitting for Adelaide, otherwise known as the City of Churches. Their current restrictions remind me of John Wyndham’s classic book ‘The Chrysalids’, a post-apocalyptic depiction of an ultra-religious and superstitious society terrified of outliers and fringe-dwellers. Remaining within the state and observing Covid restrictions do not necessarily guarantee one’s liberty. Only last month South Australians at two exposure sites, including a restaurant, were herded into hotel quarantine, despite having returned negative tests.
But thankfully health officials there base their decisions on science. For example, telling the population that pizza boxes and footballs are bad juju. Bizarre I know, although by no means the weirdest thing to happen in Adelaide. As for the arbitrary decision to brand the residences of those in home quarantine, no thought appears to have been given to winning hearts and minds for this measure. They could have emphasised to the residents concerned the positives of displaying this sign. No charity collectors, no Jehovah’s Witnesses, no Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young knocking on your door. The only hassle for officials would be having to wrest the sign from householders at the end of the quarantine mandate.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say some commentators regard the virus as a vengeful and jealous god that must be appeased. Only through great suffering and quivering in fear before it can we hope to be spared. As Nine’s political editor Chris Uhlmann observed last week, the media has not so much acquiesced in Australia’s “supine acceptance of rank authoritarianism”. Rather it “has become a cheer squad for the blunt instrument of lockdowns”.
Last week The Project co-host and Sydney resident Lisa Wilkinson castigated the NSW government for its management of the pandemic. “Gladys Berejiklian makes no restrictions, she’s doing nothing, the soft lockdown continues,” Wilkinson fulminated. “She’s stuffed this”.
New South Wales has again set a grim daily record, with 681 new COVID cases.
— The Project (@theprojecttv) August 19, 2021
It’s got everyone wondering, what more needs to be done to get in front of this outbreak? #TheProjectTVpic.twitter.com/ikovHO5AoH
It was a theatrical performance, delivered with Wilkinson’s trademark look of imperious disdain. “If Gladys Berejiklian isn’t up to the job, then she needs to step aside,” she declared, adding “I think I speak on behalf of just about everybody that is watching these press conferences … they are almost unwatchable. The whole situation is completely farcical”.
Indeed, I cannot think of anyone better qualified than Wilkinson to speak on behalf of all of us. Who could forget her sanctimonious open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the night of the 2019 federal election? “Prime Minister, you may have noticed we’re all feeling just a little broken right now — broken-hearted in fact, at how toxic the Australian body politic has become — and a return to basic civility in public discourse would be a great start to that healing,” she wrote. You know, informed and civil public discourse such as saying on national television “she’s stuffed this”.
Greater Sydney has been in lockdown for the last two months. Businesses have been destroyed, residents have been confined to homes, families have been separated from loved ones, and thousands are without income as they are not allowed to attend their workplace. Apparently, this constitutes in Wilkinson’s mind a “soft lockdown”.
But it may be Wilkinson possesses far more resilience than your average Sydney resident. You do not hear her complain, for example, of being cooped up in her palatial North Shore home. She does not publicly lament the closure of her up-market local gym. Being the trooper she is, she probably copes with these privations by doing pilates in her leafy and spacious garden overlooking Sydney Harbour. Hell, I bet she has even had to make do without the domestic hired help.
Swap these luxurious digs for a dingy one-bedroom Liverpool flat in Sydney’s far west and your attitude would soon change. Imagine for example, an out of work migrant couple with two young children being confined there for months on end. Try telling them this is lockdown-lite. I do not recommend they aggravate their fragile mental state by watching The Project, but if they did, they would have a few choice words to say about the pampered white woman who purports to speak for them.
Commentators demanding last year’s lockdowns in response to today’s Delta variant are virology’s equivalent of the saying “Generals always fight the last war” It is a fact lost on many. “Victoria keeps proving every time that the minute you get an outbreak there you stamp on it, and you get back to normal life again,” Wilkinson told her fellow panellists earlier this month. “It’s just a pity it’s happening to you for the sixth time now,” she added, totally devoid of any self-awareness.
The elimination model is to Covid what the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company was to influenza – its claims are all puff. Announcing a nation-wide hard lockdown last week based on a single case, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern smugly gestured in Australia’s direction and told journalists she wanted to avoid Sydney’s “light and long” lockdown. So much for that. Today, New Zealand recorded 68 new cases, bringing the total to 277 across six sub-clusters. On Sunday, the country’s Covid response minister, Chris Hipkins, all but admitted the strategy of elimination had failed.
“Once the source of admiring headlines, we are now the subject of mocking incredulity,” observed New Zealand journalist Andrea Vance this week. And while Australia’s vaccination rate could be a lot better, New Zealand’s is worse. Only 24 per cent of Kiwis are fully vaccinated, compared to 32 per cent of Australians.
“It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment so many of us started to fall in love with New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern,” wrote Wilkinson for 10 Daily just two years ago, calling for her to “adopt us”. What are the chances of her telling viewers in her next televised editorial that Ardern has “stuffed this”? Probably around the same as us eliminating Covid.
Journalism, for the most part, has served Australians poorly during the pandemic. Far from speaking truth to power, it now speaks for power. Its so-called progressive members deride those questioning the need for lockdowns. They regard with adulation officious and egotistical chief health officers, and they duly parrot loaded and authoritarian political terminology such as “ring of steel”.
Think of Michael Palin’s institutionalised dungeon character in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. “Terrific race, the Romans,” he says adoringly of his captors, grateful for the privilege of being suspended on the wall. “Terrific.” That is your average journalist and commentator reflecting on Covid restrictions.
You were supposed to question and force governments to justify every so-called health measure that impeded our civil liberties. Instead, you did the opposite and became complicit.
You have well and truly stuffed this.
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