The cult of Dan — coming soon to a garbage bag on you

A person from Melbourne’s CBD wears a garbage bag during their transfer to the Pullman Hotel in Albert Park. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

As life returns to something approaching Covid normal in Victoria, I know I’m not the only one to ask, “What the hell was that all about?”

A five-day snap level four lockdown that cost the Victorian economy an estimated $100 million a day and no doubt traumatised many Victorians still a little shaky after their privations last year which ultimately had little or no effect on Covid infection rates. Pretty much everyone besides Dan Andrews now acknowledges the Holiday Inn cluster was stomped out by effective contact tracing.

But the moment when the state dipped deep into a Dalian dystopia took place on Tuesday where some in quarantine made their way uneasily onto buses sporting garbage bags over their heads.

Was this a bit of ad hoc PPE? Certainly not, said Premier Dan pointing a gnarled finger at the media, declaring those sporting bin liners were merely attempting to avoid being identified as they made their way the ten steps from the hotel they were being moved from to a waiting bus.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Getty Images

I have questions, so many questions that I don’t quite know where to begin.

Firstly, the use of black garbage bags was predictable. I get that. Any colour as long as it’s black in Melbourne. That took care of the fashion element.

The privacy issue as stipulated by Andrews and later, COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria chief, Emma Cassar, was taken care of too, but why not cut holes in the bin liners for the eyes of the privacy obsessed? Why allow these unfortunates to stumble about madly bumping into things?

If they were wearing surgical masks then the simple addition of a pair of sunglasses would have made them anonymous at least to prying eyes. After a spectacular prison escape, Russell Cox remained on the lam for 11 years, Australia’s most wanted man, and after his capture he maintained the most effective disguise is a baseball cap and sunglasses.

Besides, anyone who has seen a perp walk knows the old pull your jumper up over your head works a treat.

Instead these people were marched about briefly like John Merrick with an even worse case of fibrous dysplasia.

At very best, it showed the Victorian government’s problem solving skills need a little work.

The total number of infected cases from Victoria’s Holiday Inn cluster is 29, most of whom were already in quarantine with zero in ICU and the same round, blank figure in hospitalisations.

The Holiday Inn cluster was believed to have been started, or perhaps accelerated, by a person or persons in hotel quarantine using a nebuliser for medical reasons.

It’s hard to know precisely because Victoria’s DHHS and Ms Cassar offered differing views almost daily on the vexed question of nebulisers in quarantine.

What we do know is, nebulisers, as well as other vaporising devices, are banned in general hotel quarantine and that’s according to everyone, including Victorian health authorities. The belongings of those in quarantine were not searched and the threat was not effectively communicated to those entering into quarantine.

But, in what amounts to a Covid Catch-22, people with respiratory illness, including asthma, rely on nebulisers but if they are Covid positive the effect of the nebulisers is to extend the range of infection of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.

Look, I don’t want to come over all parochial but it is just one of many gaps in quarantine procedures that will allow a virus, visible only under an electron microscope, to infect others that the State of New South Wales has been able to manage without thumping people about the head and blanket ordering them into their homes for a long weekend.

It is true that hotels are not designed for quarantining against viral infections. How many hotels have you stayed at where you can see a gap under the door, letting the light in from the hallway?

In a perfect world, dedicated quarantine centres with air locked doors should be up in running on the outskirts of all of our major cities but the point of this pandemic like most others is that good behaviours and quarantining will only get you so far. Sooner or later the microorganism will make its way outside quarantine and then governments and bureaucracies need to manage that entirely predictable eventuality without shutting economies and people down.

Still, the man who remains unapologetic for this lockdown or indeed the previous one, Dan Andrews has stuck fast with the idea of locking down the state of Victoria again in the wake of another cluster that the bookies will offer you odds-on happening again at some point over the next twelve months before the long awaited vaccines kick in.

Melbourne’s CBD during its five-day lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

Victoria’s 6.5 million people have been placed in a sort of infectious eternal probation. Kafkaesque be damned. In Victoria, Josef K. would have done a runner. Jumped the Murray and kept on going.

But if all of this were not weird enough, Premier Dan remains protected by a praetorian guard of cultists on social media who get uppity and frankly very rude when journalists’ questions go beyond asking what the Premier’s favourite colour is or why he isn’t wearing his North Face sweat this time.

My mate Leigh Sales copped vile abuse on Monday for having the temerity to ask firm but polite questions of Premier Dan who, credit where it’s due, is the best I’ve seen at the political non answer. The Australian’s Rachel Baxendale has had to bear similar ugly serves for asking pertinent questions and doing her best to insist the Premier who has unleashed the harshest state controls seen anywhere, anytime in Australian history, answers them.

Flinders and Swanston Streets on the final day of the lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

What is going on here? Do we not understand the role of journalism in our society? Well, these are Dan’s disciples, Dan Stans – unpaid hacks for a government who believe that other governments must be subject to scrutiny but not this one.

Last year some commentators referred to these bizarre barrackers as suffering Stockholm Syndrome – the idea that captives form emotional attachments to their captors. The syndrome doesn’t exist of course. It’s a myth.

The best way to understand this behaviour is as a cult. The cult of Dan Andrews.

To those thinking of hopping on board, I can only say this – a political party is not a footy team and the Andrews government, indeed any government, is not your friend.

You’d have to be wandering around Melbourne with a bag over your head to think otherwise.