Locked-down and out in Daniel Andrews’ penal pandemic paradise

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

My hometown, Melbourne, is about to surpass Buenos Aires as the most locked-down city in the world during this pandemic.

It’s a fact my friends in Washington, where I lived until earlier this year, cannot comprehend. “How could that happen?” they ask me. “Why do Australians still put up with such restrictions?”

I explain that Australia is six months behind the rest of the world on vaccinations because our federal government didn’t fight hard enough last year to secure global supplies. But things are improving, I say; in another month or so Australia will be about 70 per cent double vaxxed. By that time almost everyone who wants a vaccine will have had the opportunity to have one.

“Wow, that’s great, so you guys in Melbourne will finally be free then,” they say.

“Um, well, not real­ly,” I reply. “Even at 70 per cent, fully vaccinated people in Melbourne still won’t be allowed to eat inside a restaurant or drink at a bar, or go to the movies, or send their kids back to school full time or have a single visitor in our house.”

There is silence on the phone from my friends, who are living freely despite the US being only 55 per cent fully vaxxed. “You’re kidding me, right?” they say.

I’ve been back in Melbourne for about six months, and it is easy to forget how abnormally cautious our so-called road map out of lockdown seems to the rest of the world. In the US, Britain and Europe, life and freedoms have returned to something close to normal despite having fewer than 70 per cent of their populations fully vaccinated. People still catch the virus and many still die. But unlike last year, when there were no vaccines, this is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Those getting ill and dying overwhelmingly are those who chose not to get the jab when they could have.

Yet even when Australia finally reaches those Doherty Institute milestones of 70 and 80 per cent, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is choosing to sleepwalk his way out of the pandemic. His road map to freedom released this week is so cautious, it has been dubbed a “road map of roadblocks”. His government has used the same Burnet Institute modelling as NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, yet at 70 per cent double vaxxed people in Melbourne will receive substantially fewer freedoms than their counterparts in Sydney. At 80 per cent they also will receive fewer freedoms.

This tells you why Melbourne is the rightful heir to the embarrassing title of the most locked-down city. That sad prize will be seen by many of Andrews’ supporters as proof of how he has protected his people. Instead, it is a reflection of the pro-lockdown mindset that continues to infect the Andrews government.

Andrews, assisted by the ultra-cautious advice of chief health officer Brett Sutton, believes the health risks posed by Covid when 70 per cent of people are double vaxxed are more dangerous than the damage indefinite lockdown is causing to children’s education, mental health and jobs.

Melbourne is barely recognisable as the city I left for Washington more than four years ago. It is beaten down by perpetual Covid-19 lockdowns. The physical scars of these – the hundreds of closed businesses and the emptiest CBD in the country – are easy to see. Less easy to spot is the devastation it has caused to children’s education, to mental health and to the psyche of the city. Melbourne has lost its mojo. I bet Buenos Aires looks equally shabby.

No matter what your view is of Andrews’ four-month lockdown of Melbourne last year, his eventual triumph over the (pre-Delta) virus at that time instilled in him a bias towards lockdowns that he is finding difficult to shake. He has abandoned his previous Covid-zero targets now only because Delta has got away from him.

I lived in the US during the worst of its Covid crisis last year and saw how it mismanaged the pandemic compared with Australia. But the tables are reversed now, with the US being awash in vaccines and opening up, while in Australia 60 per cent of us remain locked down amid a bumpy vaccine rollout.

“What has gone wrong Down Under? You guys were doing so well last year,” my American mates ask me.

When Melbourne finally emerges from its lockdown – in very minor ways – on October 26, the city will have been locked down for a staggering 267 days.

As the city’s Herald Sun puts it, that is “a shameful indictment on a government that has failed the people of Melbourne and Victoria at almost every turn over the past 18 months”.

One wonders how the exhausted people of Melbourne will feel as they watch Sydneysiders regain many of their freedoms at 70 and 80 per cent vaxxed while the Andrews government robs them of similar rewards.

On October 4, Melbourne will win the lockdown world cup – straight to Dan’s pool room – when it surpasses the 245 days of lockdown experienced by Buenos Aires. Yet Victoria’s Premier still will refuse to reward his battered city with at least the same freedoms as Sydneysiders. As my American mates would say, “Goddamn it.”