It is déjà vu all over again, albeit a century later. Just as it was during the Spanish influenza pandemic, Covid-19 contagion has states thumbing their noses at the federal government and going it alone. Draconian laws abound. Movement is controlled. Borders remain shut.
On September 4 Scott Morrison, who fancies himself as a bus driver, urged all state and territory leaders to get on board and open up their borders. WA Premier Mark McGowan emphatically told him he would not be buying a ticket or taking a seat.
The following day the front page of the West Australian had a cartoon image of McGowan wearing a top hat featuring the state’s black swan logo declaring “Our Westralia Day”, pandering to the much beloved myth of Western Australian secession from the Commonwealth among the state’s people. Two months ago, McGowan had an approval rating of 85 per cent. It might have hit totality by now.
While Morrison played the emotive card with the Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk over the decision to prohibit a Canberra nurse from attending her father’s funeral last week, no one in the federal government has mounted a solid argument as to why Australians can’t travel overseas. If there is a sound medical basis for this restriction on almost all Australians, provided they follow quarantine requirements at their point of entry and do likewise when they return home, I’d like to hear it.
Of course, it is in Victoria where the greatest damage is being done. Too often, Dan Andrews’ detractors have been hell bent on making economic arguments to remove the level four lockdown in Melbourne, often leading to absurd arguments about the financial prosperity or otherwise of the local café. Or in Melbourne’s case perhaps ten or more local cafés. It’s not just an esoteric argument, it fails to properly identify the real problem.
Human beings cannot live in isolation. I can point to all manner of studies that reveal the enduring psychological harm that comes with solitary confinement in prisons. I’ve written about it. It is especially harmful for young people whose brains are in development. The US has largely stopped the practice among minors because state and federal prison authorities have been made aware of their legal liabilities and the potential for massive damages claims coming their way.
It is a clinically diagnosable condition. MRI scans reveal a shrinking of the hippocampus, the region of the brain linked to memory, learning and spatial awareness. Young people placed in solitary confinement for extended periods become vegetative.
The practice continues in Australia and one of the worst offenders is Victoria who at any given time have as many as 20 kids in adult prisons who, for their own ‘protection,’ are placed in solitary confinement.
Now, I know there’s a big difference between people banged up alone in their own homes for what is now 22 hours a day and a detainee in a three metre cell who has perhaps one hour of exercise on his own, but we are dealing with the same fundamental preconditions for psychological harm.
When Dan Andrews announced the pathway out of stage four, he eased the restrictions on single people living alone almost immediately. After suffering alone for a month, these people could, Andrews said, host one guest. The only problem is the single person can only have as their sole houseguest another single person. At best, it’s a grim lonely-hearts club.
Most single people I know count married couples and people with partners as their friends. But social contact between a single person and one in a relationship continues at least technically to be criminalised in Victoria under stage four lockdown.
Consider a person living alone in a one bedroom flat in suburban Melbourne. Besides the inevitable Zoom or Skype connection with the outside world, there is nothing. Little or no social contact, no human face with a smile or a grimace or a twinkle in the eye to provide comfort and connection.
Then consider adolescent children, battling with the challenges of online learning. I remember my adolescence clearly. I didn’t want to spend any time with my parents. Who does at 13 or 14? So, they battle on with education, missing out there and will spend hours and hours alone.
In homes where there is family breakdown, disconnection or domestic violence, people are suffering alone. It’s a time bomb and it ticks louder by the day.
Who cares whether the fourteenth café to open its doors in a Melbourne strip mall survives or puts the shutters up?
It is not for economic reasons but for basic human ones that Melbourne needs to end its lockdown and ease the restrictions on human movement and contact. There is an economic corollary to opening up but it is not a panacea. What the economic rationalists fail to accept is the virus itself is an economic constraint, that while it explodes around the world, people will not invest, big spending is delayed. People will save money where they can.
Yes, the social, political and economic consequences of a third wave of Covid-19 infection in Melbourne would be devastating but surely, even a government whose failures to control a second wave of Covid-19 infection are well known, should have the confidence that it can control the spread of infection which as of yesterday amounted to 35 new cases and just over a thousand active cases in the entire state?
This is not an economic issue. It is fundamentally a human one. And the consequences are being kicked down the road with little care or consideration for the health and wellbeing of Melburnians.
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