India Covid-19 crisis: Premier Mark McGowan’s paranoia infects Scott Morrison

Scott Morrison has announced a pause in flights allowed into Australia from India. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

A country that should be proud of how it has handled the pandemic is now descending into a kind of xenophobia that we thought was left behind more than a century ago. The paranoia and buck-passing of Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan has now infected Canberra’s response.

Infection rates in India are yet to reach rates that were seen last year in the US and Europe. The rates will probably go higher soon, as a developing nation struggles with an intolerable load, but the point remains that we didn’t turn our backs on Australians in the US or Europe last year when infection rates were higher, and the number of prospective retuning citizens from those parts of the world was higher by a factor of 10 or more.

Why have we turned our backs on Australians in India? We banned flights early in the pandemic from China, Iran and Italy because we did not have our hotel quarantine system in place – that was fair enough.

We did, however, immediately put on charter flights, even from Wuhan itself, to repatriate Australians via quarantine on Christmas Island. Despite calls of racism, I argued this was reasonable and fair at the time and the people who benefited from it later expressed their gratitude.

But why the stiff-arm applied to Australians in India now? We have a well-established hotel quarantine system in place; it is the prime reason we have kept our country almost COVID-free.

There have been some cross-infections from hotel quarantine – this is inevitable with such a virulent disease – but apart from the Melbourne shambles, these outbreaks have been minor and easily contained. New South Wales has hosted the bulk of those returning from overseas and despite some community outbreaks has handled it all without locking down cities or closing state borders.

Relatives and family members collect the remains after performing the last rites of patients who died of the Covid-19 at a site of a mass cremation in Allahabad, India. Picture: AFP

Epidemiologists confirm that the lockdowns since November in South Australia, Melbourne, Brisbane (twice) and Perth (twice) were unnecessary. In each case the outbreaks were contained not by the damaging and superfluous lockdowns but by the contact tracing and isolation of close contacts.

Yet McGowan yesterday blamed his lockdown on Australians returning from overseas – specifically, Australians returning from India. That is using innocent people as a scapegoat for his irrational overreaction.

The only person to blame for Perth’s two unnecessary lockdowns is Premier McGowan. And in order to continue to shift the blame and try for a total elimination of the virus, he has pushed for more Australians to be locked out of their country, and sadly Scott Morrison has agreed.

Instead of sticking with is own “flatten the curve” strategy or emulating the rational, pragmatic, empathetic and courageous management of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Morrison is now following the panicked, authoritarian (and politically popular) elimination mindset of McGowan.

We have become such a frightened and obsessive nation that we not only want to keep the virus out of our nation, but we want to avoid the virus going into a quarantine system that is specifically designed to identify and isolate infections.

This is absurd.

Even as two million of the most vulnerable Australians are vaccinated, and we have seen from a year of implementation that our hotel quarantine system is an outstanding success, we are denying our fellow citizens their fundamental right to return to their own country.

Australians in India apparently have fewer rights and are owed less regard than Australians in the UK or US. I don’t know why, and I am afraid to discover the answer.