Covid rules: Unchecked leaders lock us into states of mental desperation

Cartoon: Johannes Leak

On Friday, Daniel Andrews inserted a sunset clause into the growing list of restrictions he has imposed under the emergency powers he now enjoys. It was not the one we’d been hoping for.

“There’s a bunch of people down (at) the Rye Beach last night who thought the best thing to do was to watch the sunset,” said the Victorian Premier. “I’m sure it was a beautiful sunset. But that’s not in the spirit or in the letter of these rules.”

On Saturday morning he announced the regulations would be extended to regional Victoria from lunchtime, giving golf clubs less than two hours to close their greens. Afternoon visits to children’s playgrounds and footy games would need to be called off, and the setting of the sun over the 12 Apostles would be invisible to the human eye.

These, and countless other ways of retaining sanity in crazy times, are now forbidden under Victoria’s Public Health and Wellbeing Act. The irony might have been brought to the Premier’s attention had the measures been tested by parliament. He might have been asked for evidence that outdoor mask-wearing or night-time curfews would work. But it never got as far as cabinet. To all appearances, it just came out of Andrews’ head.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

“It is not for me to prove the efficacy of any one measure,” he said last week. “No one has ever maintained that any one measure is the way out of this, so therefore it is not for me to provide hard data that establishes that.”

Sunset watching is still permitted in NSW, in so far as its shoreline’s eastern aspect will allow. Yet other restrictions on everyday freedoms are compounded almost daily. A poignant piece by Jordan Baker in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald describes the tears, disbelief and anger in the red zone on Friday upon hearing that the screws had been tightened further. “Police drive up our streets, cycle along walking tracks and check on us from helicopters,” Baker wrote. “It’s difficult to avoid a sense of panic when a squad car slows down to check on me as I watch my kids scootering up the lane.”

The claim by Police Minister David Elliott that “these are the darkest days the people of NSW have had to face in nearly a century” is open to dispute. It is, after all, less than 80 years since Town Hall station was being converted into an air-raid shelter and Japanese submarines were firing torpedoes in Sydney Harbour.

Yet in some ways the public health campaign that presently consumes us is not dissimilar to the total wars of last century. The emergency powers evoked by today’s governments are harsher in some respects. Once again our liberties are under threat, this time not from a hostile enemy but from what we are doing to ourselves.

The challenge of dealing with a novel virus as infectious as this one that preys particularly upon the elderly and sick, the people towards whom we have a duty of care, is considerable. Our leaders have been called upon to make snap decisions with limited information. A frightened public demands reassurance.

Yet there are other plausible strategies that could have been pursued that would have jarred less with our liberal principles. Countries such as Taiwan and South Korea have managed to tame the virus without trespassing so deeply into the private realm, do not require draconian policing or the army to be deployed on the streets.

A police force that enforces arbitrary state regulation to control human behaviour may be part of daily life in some countries, but it is not the way we do things here. Social order in Australia is maintained with a force more powerful than coercion. In a tolerant liberal democracy like ours, the rules are willingly obeyed by most people, most of the time.

Consent is the binding force of Australia’s social fabric and the rule under which our police should operate. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating at the government’s command, but citizens in uniform who secure the willing co-operation of the public. They must refrain from usurping the powers of the judiciary, recognising it is not their job to judge guilt or to punish the guilty. These conventions are part of our precious inheritance of liberalism. We should not lightly disregard them, even at times like these.

The desire to protect everyone’s health as best as we can in a pandemic will, of course, require some freedoms to be temporarily curtailed. Yet the mantra that falls so often from the lips of premiers, that nothing is more important than avoiding infection, simply isn’t true. One person’s right to good health must be balanced against the freedom of another to earn a living or operate a business. It should be balanced against the freedom to worship or the freedom of teenagers to mingle with their peers to alleviate adolescent distress.

A heavy Victoria Police presence is seen as anti lockdown protesters take to the streets in Melbourne. Picture: Getty Images

As a student at the University of Melbourne, Robert Menzies wrote a prize-winning essay on the World War I emergency measures. Some infringements of liberty may be justified in an emergency, he wrote, but they were not sufficient in themselves to abandon the rule of law.

“Should the almost arbitrary power of the executive prove to be anything else but temporary, a very great disaster would have befallen the English Constitution,” he wrote.

Josh Frydenberg’s insistence on Friday that attempts at eradication will not succeed signalled a shift in strategy in Canberra. Perhaps some state leaders, too, may be starting to realise that exchanging liberty for health and safety is a bad bargain. How could they not? They, too, must be receiving the reports of the number of teenagers presenting to emergency wards for self-harm, of home-schooling parents in cramped homes at their wits’ end and the volume of calls to Lifeline. They, too, must be doubting if the potential anguish avoided by the measures is still greater than the sum of anguish caused.

Perhaps they, too, are learning to worry less about loopholes in the lockdown regulations, and worry more about the gaps in the education curriculum that have robbed us of the understanding of civics that Australians of Menzies’ generation possessed.

Ultimately, the rule of law, common law and the separation of powers provide the most important protection any people, anywhere, could desire.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.