The Great Southern City is again in lockdown, this time for seven days but there are no promises of a return to near normality next Thursday.
Again, we must turn our minds to the inexplicable and ponder the mentality of toilet paper hoarding. Hoarding during a lockdown is predictable human behaviour but one might imagine this is restricted to foodstuffs, goods that can be stored for a week or longer for a quick whip up of an evening meal. I know pasta for example has been swept off the shelves, canned goods, flour etc., but why toilet paper? It is not as if Covid-19 symptoms pertain to the, shall we say … egestive. So why do people prepare for a lockdown as if the city was expecting an epidemic of amoebic dysentery, a sweeping torrent of poo that can only be mopped up by vigorously hoarded 16 packs of three-ply?
It’s a conundrum for sure. And I don’t have an answer other than to make the point that humans are amusingly weird and under pressure sometimes behave oddly.
And Melburnians are under pressure. Of all Australians, they have borne the brunt of what is loosely called pandemic management. They have suffered due to government failures in quarantine and contact tracing. Those failures were the subject of a judicial inquiry that predictably found no one specifically was to blame and besides the resignation of a Health Minister, a Premier who is on a long period of leave after suffering a nasty fall, and a Chief Commissioner of Police who had already announced his early retirement, everyone who has played a role in those failures is more or less engaged in the pandemic management business yet again.
Melbourne is the city of my birth and lockdowns notwithstanding, I have made regular visits to the city to see family, including my mother who is currently in hospital after a fall last weekend. I worry about her obviously, but she is probably in the best place she can be during a lockdown.
Cameron Stewart wrote a piece in The Australian on Friday that speaks of a city traumatised and fearful. As a visitor, I have noticed similar anxieties, similar fears. The sense of dread is palpable. Mask wearing remained prominent in the outdoors, and even more so in shopping centres before it was mandated again for all Victorians as of midnight Thursday.
When I visited in November with the city emerging from lockdown, people were especially jittery. That apprehension may have eased over time, but the city’s population remains psychologically scarred by its 102-day lockdown and holds the threat of further government intervention sharply in mind.
The general view of epidemiologists and medical specialists is that this seven-day lockdown is necessary with several factors justifying it. The first is the infectious rate of the Covid-19 variant. Much of this is unfolding. In the early days of the outbreak and with data still coming in, health authorities are concerned at the rapid rate of infections. There is a view that incubation of the variant may be less than a day whereas last year it was three to four days.
The second is that this is not a localised spread of infection like for example, the Northern Beaches cluster in Sydney prior to Christmas. There is a rapid rise in exposure and an equally sharp increase in the number of exposure sites.
What is strange is that government failures have led to an increased reliance on government. There is little sense of outrage or backlash. And this is not peculiar to Melburnians or Victorians. Across the country, people have relied on government as a sort of pandemic security blanket.
Arbitrary state border closures have been met with cheers and in the case of Queensland, Western Australia and arguably Tasmania too, support has come in the form of votes at the ballot box. Big swings to incumbent state governments in Queensland and Western Australia provide proof that Australians are happy to rely on government and support heavy handed state interventions.
The Australian sense of self, dripping in anti-authoritarian larrikinism is a myth. It has probably always been grounded in irony. In truth in a pandemic era, national consciousness revolves around a deep dependency on government, a strident belief that only government can solve our problems.
While this might be understandable in other states where the pandemic has had a lighter touch, polling in Victoria taken in the immediate aftermath of Melbourne’s long lockdown, revealed the Andrews government leads the state Opposition by 58-42. Sometimes referred to by the commentariat as Stockholm syndrome (another myth, a non-existent phenomenon), it speaks more of a sense of political sadomasochism in Victoria, a population treated mean and kept keen.
The other side of that coin is that those who reject the heavy hand of the state and take to the streets are not quite the anti-Establishment heroes we might imagine.
The anti-lockdown folk are just nuts. Followers refer to Covid-19 vaccines as ‘the experiment’. It would be a lot easier to be sympathetic to their cause if they didn’t babble about scam-or-plandemics and parade around defying police with sovereign citizen nonsense. If they stick to protests about increased police powers and the state’s drastic reach on its citizens, they might find a broader audience.
According to a statement online yesterday, a group that calls itself Health Rights Alliance will hold a ‘Millions March’ rally at Flagstaff Gardens in the Melbourne CBD at midday this Saturday. The unnamed organisers say the rally will go ahead despite the lockdown. They claim to have had discussions with police.
If it does go ahead on a typically chilly Melbourne afternoon in late May, we can safely say there won’t be millions in attendance (why must they adopt American protest rally nomenclature?) but perhaps several hundred achingly cold people clinging to delusions about the pandemic and a police force more than ready to take them on.
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