This pandemic was always going to be a character test – but, as yet, it hasn’t been the pandemic itself but the policy response to it that has put us under most stress.
No doubt we’ve saved tens of thousands of lives by shutting our borders and locking down our cities at the first sign of infection, but in the process of saving some we’ve damaged many more and split the country into two antagonistic camps: those still terrified of catching Covid versus those convinced there’s little point in stopping living to prevent dying.
Scott Morrison has declared that, but for lockdowns, at least 30,000 Australians would have died (rather than the 1000 deaths we’ve had) and he’s probably right. But this was never a straightforward question of life versus death. The cost of protecting the mostly very old and the very sick has meant a stop-start life for everyone else. At first, maybe that was a small price to pay; but as this pandemic purgatory grinds on, the inevitable question is posing itself: to what extent is life for some worth a half-life for everyone else?
My guess is most Australians are still in the “safety first” camp. Just. But that doesn’t excuse the extraordinary callousness routinely displayed to citizens who want no more than to cross a state border to help or to farewell someone they love.
There was the Canberra woman denied the chance to travel to Queensland to see her dying father who eventually was permitted to view his body but only under guard and in full personal protective equipment, even though there was no active Covid in the ACT at the time.
There was the Australian who flew back from the US to say goodbye to a dying parent who eventually was let into Queensland early but only after chartering a private plane lest anyone be put at risk.
There was the NSW mother who lost her baby after being denied treatment in Brisbane because Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.
On my Sky News program this week I spoke with Katrina Anderson, a fully vaccinated Sydney grandmother who was happy to quarantine in Victoria for the fortnight but was denied a permit to go to Melbourne to help care for her grandchildren while her daughter battled advanced breast cancer. Despite an appeal from the NSW Health Minister and an online petition with more than 14,000 signatures, the Victorian government still is hiding behind “health advice” that pits a very low Covid risk from this NSW resident against the very high mental and physical health harm inflicted on her Victorian daughter.
Denying a mother’s right to nurse her seriously ill daughter is just the latest example of how virus mania has warped our sensibilities. It has always been possible for special arrangements to be made for billionaires and celebrities flying into the country to quarantine at home or in five-star resorts; and sporting codes routinely are given advance notice of lockdowns to avoid having fixtures disrupted, while also getting special dispensation from normal quarantine rules for their star players and officials.
Not so everyday Australians, trying to operate inside the rules, who get knocked back repeatedly when all they ask for is a little compassion from the officials whose salaries their taxes pay.
None of us elected these health authoritarians yet they have control over our lives that’s unprecedented even in wartime. By hiding behind them, our elected representatives shame us by the way they preference the powerful while denying ordinary people the simplest human dignities we once took for granted.
Frankly it stinks. There is no “we’re all in this together” and there never was. With the partial exception of NSW, where the government at least has tried to reconcile public safety with some modicum of human decency, there has been this constant brutish insistence that health rules must remain inviolate. Whatever happened to the old adage “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools”?
Then there’s the sheer impracticality, perversity and officiousness of so many of the rules. Why was it necessary earlier in the year to wear a mask even while driving alone in Brisbane? Why is it currently necessary to wear a mask at all times while outdoors in parts of Sydney and Melbourne, even while exercising, and no matter how far away from anyone else, given that there’s no evidence of any outdoor transmission? Why are heavily armed police expected to move people on who are committing “dangerous sunbaking” or sitting alone or in a household group on a park bench?
Granted, given still lowish vaccination rates, this remains a dangerous and highly infectious disease. It was never just a cold with muscles or a bad flu season, and won’t be until herd immunity is achieved through surviving infection or vaccination. But why are we still awaiting daily briefings from premiers and chief health officers to hear of new infections, cases in intensive care units and Covid deaths – but not the deaths from other causes, the suicides, and the jobs lost and businesses closed from trying to achieve Covid zero?
And Covid zero itself – are we kidding?
Victoria got there on Wednesday last week, marked by a braying post from Premier Daniel Andrews, only for him to lock down the state from 8pm the next day. Indeed, forget the count of four lockdowns this year in Melbourne, it has been one long lockdown punctuated by brief interludes of freedom.
It’s as if nothing else counts in our fixation on one illness, albeit a serious one: not the young people largely denied a second year of normal school or university; not the parents forced to work and homeschool simultaneously; not the businesses forced on to taxpayer-life support rather than being able to support themselves through their own effort; not the families forced to farewell loved ones on Zoom; and not the millions glumly contemplating not being able to do anything, go anywhere, see anyone or plan anything for the foreseeable future.
What’s desperately needed is not just some light at the end of a long tunnel but official acknowledgment that it’s time to restore due process and democratic accountability, and to wind back the ability of chief health officers and police commissioners to run our lives by unchallengeable diktat, without any of the health advice published and open to scrutiny, even though it differs from month to month and from state to state.
Not only has the Liberal Party always been the small government party, it also has been the freedom party. That was the “livelihoods” part of the Prime Minister’s original “lives and livelihoods” mantra. Morrison and the premiers can glibly thank us every day for our submissiveness and tell us how well the country is doing compared with everywhere else, but 18 months in we’re sick of being patronised and want our lives back. Never has this country been more over-governed yet so starved of leadership.
Peta Credlin is host of Credlin on Sky News, 6pm weeknights.
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