A nation divided by Covid-19

In a nation split asunder by a raging contagion and a hard border between our two powerhouse states, Scott Morrison struck the right note this week. “We are all Melburnians now … we are all Victorians now because we are all Australians, and that’s where the challenge is right now.”

In contrast, life brightened up in Queensland on Friday as holiday-makers from everywhere but Victoria drove and jetted in for the first time since March 25. The Queensland border reopening, in time for the last week of NSW school holidays, could be the difference between bankruptcy and survival for many small businesses and their staff, especially in tourism hubs such as the Gold and Sunshine coasts, the Whitsundays and Cairns.

For many, the reopening has come too late, as Industry, Science and Technology Minister Karen Andrews, who represents the southern Gold Coast electorate of McPherson, tells Jamie Walker in Inquirer. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland estimates the 15-week border closure cost the state’s small business sector about $16.7m a day. Like the business sector, we argued that the closure was excessive. Its detrimental effects will be felt by the cash-strapped state economy for years.

A far more problematic dynamic, in health terms and economically, is in play in Victoria, which reported a record 288 new cases of coronavirus on Friday. The Victoria-NSW border was last closed in 1919 during the Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed as many as 15,000 Australian lives. It needs to be reopened as soon as possible. But, at the same time, the imperative is to contain the current outbreak to metropolitan Melbourne and the neighbouring Mitchell Shire. The city and the shire are locked down for six weeks, a response that Josh Frydenberg says will cost about $1bn a week.

The effects will be felt nationwide. The ASX 200 lost 2.3 per cent this week, and ANZ Research calculates the lockdown will clip as much as two percentage points from gross domestic product in the September quarter.

In Melbourne, the mood is “downright bleak”, Gideon Haigh writes on Saturday. Five weeks ago, when the first lockdown was relaxed, COVID-19 seemed to be beaten. New cases were in single figures; now the number has surged beyond 1000, mainly from unknown community sources. COVID-19 is volatile. An asymptomatic “super spreader” can be “almost radioactive”. As Haigh writes: “Victorians didn’t respond to a second lockdown last week like Serbians, who torched Belgrade and stormed parliament. But there is bafflement, disappointment and more than a touch of righteous fury with their government.”

After the entirely preventable hotel quarantine fiasco, inadequate COVID-19 contact tracing — exposed by this newspaper — has emerged as the major problem in Victoria this week. The state’s health bureaucracy had too few people able to perform the task.

Reinforcements have been sent from interstate. And Victorian health officials took dangerous shortcuts, not adhering to national guidelines for contact tracing. These specify that close contacts need to be followed up daily for flu-like symptoms. The breakdown led to surging transmission rates of the virus, precipitating the lockdown. The link between 158 cases at the housing commission towers in Melbourne’s inner northwest and the state’s largest Islamic school, Al-Taqwa College, in the city’s outer west, where the count is 113 cases, raises serious questions. It is not known if the virus went from the towers to the school, or the other way.

As the rest of the nation continues to open up, the lesson from Victoria, as the Prime Minister said on Friday, is that there is no room for complacency in managing COVID-19 in any state or territory. Mr Morrison is right to preach national unity, as Paul Kelly writes in Inquirer. But the Andrews government’s failures will be borne by the Morrison government, and all Australians, through a more impaired economy and higher fiscal cost.

The blame game will not help, however. After identifying all that has gone wrong, better systems are needed to manage future outbreaks to avoid the need for a stop-start approach that will kill confidence and jobs.