The other Covid plague that devoured our brains

Former Victorian premier Dan Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

It is curious that a disease that had its birth in China should carry another pathogen as it spread around the world: totalitarianism.

Here, Covid-19 revealed a lot about our character as a nation and as a people. Some of it was good, some deeply disturbing.

The performance of state governments was at first collegiate and worthy, then parochial and despicable as preening premiers split our country into colonies.

The federal government began decisive and strong, then ended confused and weakened by states that controlled schools, hospitals, police forces and internal borders.

The most disgraceful decision during the pandemic was to lock Australians out of their own country. So what is the value of being a citizen of this democracy?

The most cowardly decision in the wake of the worst health crisis in 100 years was not to hold a royal commission to which all levels of government submitted: not to seek retribution but to publicly interrogate every aspect of the response to develop the best possible plan for the next crisis.

The authors of the Covid-19 inquiry have done a good job, but the best disinfectant for this disease would have been a harsh dose of sunlight.

In hiding from scrutiny, our leaders have betrayed not only this generation of Australians but also all those yet to come.

As a people we showed commendable care for the common good, then a drone-like willingness to submit to absurd decrees and narrow ourselves by geography.

Our experts proved themselves to be both gifted and walking proof that we would be better advised by the first 100 people off any train at Central Station than any 100 scholars.

People who develop disease models should be treated with the same regard as astrologers.

Doctors were indispensable and underlined why you should always seek a second opinion. As a class, they should never again be the sole voice in a crisis. The real Long Covid is the tail of iatrogenic harm left by the lockdowns they championed.

The police were tireless, dedicated and disturbing as they cheerfully applied laws that desecrated the idea of democracy.

With some notable exceptions the media proved, yet again, that it is too often an echo chamber of elite opinion when it should always be a sceptic of arbitrary authority.

The initial response to the disease was sensible and defensible. Plagues are in the front rank of human threats. In early 2020 little was known about Covid and the worst was rightly assumed. Australia’s leaders reacted quickly, worked in unison and chose to buy time, to lock down their populations while health systems were fortified, with a timetable set for easing their way out.

Police fire rubber bullets as protesters flee from the Shrine of Remembrance to protest anti-vaccination and lockdowns in Melbourne, in 2021. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

But by mid-2020 there was more than enough evidence to show that the disease mostly killed the elderly, especially if they had an existing chronic disease. That was not an argument to let them die but it should have guided government responses.

Through history societies have thrived by preferring the survival of the young over the old. There is method in the old chivalry of “women and children first”. During Covid we reversed that order.

On this front there is a memory that lingers like a stain.

In June 2020 the usually sensible Labor frontbencher Mark Butler rose to ask Scott Morrison a question: “Does the prime minister agree with The Australian economics editor Adam Creighton, who says that the government’s response to Covid-19 is an act of hysteria because the virus has only led to the deaths of ‘quite unwell elderly people’? If not, why is the minister for energy co-hosting a boardroom dinner with Mr Creighton to raise money for the Liberal Party’s Eden-Monaro campaign?”

Creighton is one of a handful of journalists and commentators – like Sky News’ Peta Credlin – who can hold their head high for consistently taking an iconoclastic attitude to the ruling dogma.

At the time Butler asked his question, the figures showed the death of anyone under 50 was so vanishingly rare among Australia’s body count as to be close to zero. If you were a woman under 50, it was zero. There was a far greater statistical chance that someone under 60 would die in a car accident.

In the long run, despite constant scare campaigns about the latest variant, the profile of the disease did not change. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports: “In all four waves, the highest proportion of deaths occurred in those aged 80-89. The median age of death was … lowest during the Delta wave – 79 compared with 86 for Omicron.”

The same institute records that the average age of death in Australia is 83.

That Butler should suggest Creighton be shunned for doing his job shows how milk dish thin the political commitment to free speech is in Australia. It’s bad when politicians parade their disdain for debate, but it is unforgivable when journalists do it.

As death looms ever closer, I occasionally ponder what I would like emblazoned on my gravestone. At the moment I’m going with “Banned from the pages of The Age”.

In late 2020 I wrote a column that was to have appeared in both The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on the same day. It began: “Soon enough there will be a global reckoning on whether the coronavirus defences did more damage than the disease.”

It went on to say: “Here the Victorian solution and internal border closures should be counted among those judged as doing much more harm than good.”

When the day of publication dawned the piece ran in The Sydney Morning Herald but not The Age. This aroused the curiosity of Guardian Australia, which took up the story: “Age sources say the column was rejected by editors who do not subscribe to the ‘Dictator Dan’ view of the world embraced by its competitor, the Herald Sun, and they believed Age readers wouldn’t like it.”

The last bit is true enough but the fact “the editors” censored the piece screams of a profession that has lost its way.

Let’s finish with a taste of what they found so distasteful.

“As a nation we seem comfortable with authoritarianism and too many relish the role of prefect.

“And nowhere in this often-opaque democracy has a less transparent court system, bureaucracy, police force or government than Victoria. The people there have been badly served, even as some revelled in the servitude. Its systems of power have combined to deliver the wanton destruction of its vibrant society. Its government has condemned its people to a poorer future, to higher unemployment, more poverty and less opportunity.

“Rejoice. Dan Andrews has destroyed the village to save it.”