Three reports. One utterly demented and cruel. One plain stupid. One deadly, sadly, serious. Each provides grounds for more people to lose faith in health bureaucrats and governments. Trust goes two ways. When public servants and governments don’t trust us, how can we trust them?
The cruel one comes from Queensland. On Monday the state’s chief public health officer, Jeannette Young, refused to grant an exemption to a couple to leave quarantine to see their newborn baby, born premature on June 1 after complications presented during their lockup. First-time parents Moe and Sarah Haider returned from Qatar on May 26 fully vaccinated. Both have tested negative to Covid-19. When Sarah delivered her baby by caesarean section, her husband was banned from being with her. Neither has seen their baby since it was whisked away.
Young’s full health advice to justify this callous decision should be released immediately. Does it even exist? If not, we won’t just lose trust in these unaccountable officials. We will look with horror at the hysterical health fascism unfolding across this country. As Moe told the media, “I’m told the vaccine means nothing”, but the Premier can travel to Tokyo for the Olympics because she’s vaccinated. “How on Earth does this make sense?”
It doesn’t. And neither does this stupid report from South Australia’s chief public health officer, Nicola Spurrier. Last week she directed the first two rows at Adelaide Oval to be left empty during the Crows v Collingwood clash on the weekend. And if the ball comes your way, “duck … do not touch that ball”; sweaty men have handled it, she sniffed.
Maybe Spurrier doesn’t like sweaty men. Each to their own. It seems she doesn’t like sweaty dogs either, since walking your dog was banned during SA’s November lockdown. The problem each time is the gap in reliable, accurate information. Where is the full health advice for these dumb directions?
Spurrier’s new footy rules were in response to the latest Victorian lockdown. Where is the full risk assessment of lockdown 4.0? Someone in power, making life-wrecking decisions, must have a detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of a fourth lockdown. Release it. It’s our information,
Notice that no “health advice” has been released to back up the deeply flawed elimination model that premiers and the Prime Minister have adopted, de facto style. Just congratulatory mentions, another from Scott Morrison on Monday, that Australia is the envy of the world.
Not for much longer. The PM’s measurement of success – zero cases of community transmission – cannot be maintained unless he plans to lock up the country, and premiers plan to lock down states, for many years to come. Last week, the Prime Minister said “resilience, strength, character, determination, that is what beats a virus, not fear”. In fact, a faster vaccine rollout, backed up with transparency, will beat the virus, not facile political pillow talk.
During Covid, state and federal governments have catered to mushrooms. Never mind that we pay the wages and stump up for all the perks of bureaucrats and politicians. We have never, not even once, been trusted with the full, unadulterated risk assessments of costs and benefits to justify rules that fundamentally alter the way we live. In the case of the Morrison government, “health advice” continues to lock 25 million Australians inside their own country, unable to leave without government fiat.
Where are these risk assessments, the full reports relied on to lock Australians up? Do they even exist? If so, why are they treated as secret government business? Without more information, we should wonder whether these are necessary health directions or crude political commands.
The second story is shameful. Heads should roll, but none will. They never do, even as people suffer terribly; in this case, kids. The Australian reported on Friday that a confidential report sitting with the Andrews government reveals shocking levels of increased self-harm, suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among children and teenagers, just some of the very human costs of Victoria’s long lockdowns. The report puts numbers to what frontline medical experts have known since lockdowns began.
The Victorian Agency for Health Information report – Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Services in Victoria – found that in the six-week period to March 28, average weekly emergency department presentations for children aged up to 17 reached 319, a 27 per cent jump on the 251 cases for the same period last year. There was a 51 per cent increase in the number of teenagers rushed to hospital after self-harming and suffering suicidal thoughts. The number needing resuscitation and emergency care jumped 44.9 per cent. The 2020 weekly average of 19.8 jumped to 28.7 in 2021.
The VAHI report is marked “confidential”. Doctors have been advised that if they receive the report in error, they should “destroy it”. How can that be? This data is ours, not theirs. It fills in details about damage done to young lives, to families, during lockdowns. This secrecy is wicked, unethical.
When I raised with a senior government minister what kind of risk assessment had been done to map potential increased mental health risks as the country went into lockdown in March 2020, he ended the interview. This is not good enough.
Reports of kids suffering serious mental trauma from lockdowns kept secret. Risk assessments not released. Maybe not done at all. Daily mentions of “health advice” but no public reports setting out the reasons in full. None of this is good enough.
When Covid-19 hit, it led to a massive transfer of power, without corresponding accountability, to a group of unelected health bureaucrats. The abrogation of responsibility by elected politicians has also become their shroud of secrecy, allowing them to impose rules, lock up citizens, lock down states on “health advice” that we never see. Never before have the lives of Australians been so closely controlled, monitored and restricted by governments on the basis of so little publicly available information.
When politicians fail to provide real information that could hold them to account, they should expect questions about competence and motives. More people may move from trusting their government during a pandemic to distrusting them. The Prime Minister is counting on sufficient trust levels holding until after the election. But the only iron rule in politics is that you’re in front until you’re not. If you can hold on, you’re a clever political schemer. But you’re not necessarily a leader who deserves re-election, let alone our trust.
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