Coronavirus Australia: Like a commercial My Lai, we are destroying the village to save it from Covid-19

A person crosses Bourke Street in Melbourne on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Who would plan anything in Australia any more? Who would bother with the hard graft of organising a school camp, a church fete, a sports carnival, a writers festival, a local repertory production, a book launch, even a guest speaker and an audience? Who would get on a committee to serve an unselfish end? Who would volunteer?

We have worried a lot, rightly, about the impact of lockdowns on the lonely and isolated. But what of those who help to bring us together, to enthuse us about a cause or a project, who have been deprived of seeing their efforts fructify in the ways that make them worthwhile – those who make life that little bit richer, who lift us above the level of subsistence?

GIDEON HAIGH ON LOCKDOWNS

No gratitude, no pride, no relief: just quiet seething

As the world’s worst lockdown ‘ends’ (it hasn’t), it’s time Daniel Andrews knew how many of us in Victoria feel as we watch his sickening pivot.

In alienation, anger all we have left in common

Lockdowns prevented us from going to one another’s aid; now we have lost the instinct.

Like a commercial My Lai, we’re destroying the village to save it

We’ve all experienced the stress of last-minute cancellations, the fatigue and apathy that attends any effort not directed at simply getting through a day.

Our children are suffering the most

Something got lost early on in the fight against Covid in the message that our most vulnerable are the elderly rather than our children.

Saving old lives just to ruin young ones

Every day, Daniel Andrews sends proforma condolences to the families of people who have died in their 80s and 90s. But what about the harm to our children?

The past 18 months have burned up social capital like it is going out fashion. Scott Morrison is wrong; he was never right. It always was a race, but not only to address a pandemic; it was a race to preserve that flicker of hope and optimism integral to anyone thinking beyond their immediate needs and wants, to addressing the day after tomorrow. Which is why his government’s stance that it does not hold the syringe, mate, is so enraging. It has rendered the sacrifices of a year and a half pointless. There have been no sunny uplands. There have just been more excuses, more buck passing.

I am still to hear a single politician connect at the level of this very real loss. And hell, why would they? They stand mute at the idea of cutting people off from dying parents; they’re strangers to the stress of penning children up at home when they should be at school with friends and teachers; they are in thrall to the daily case numbers that are an index of modern political virtue and they “make no apology” for it.

How could they understand anything beyond their own dismal horizons? They are people entirely insulated by their cocoon of privilege for whom the future is paved with parliamentary pensions. They are, and it is a commonplace sentiment but has seldom felt truer, not like us. They are wholly separated from the quotidian reality of Covid World.

Australia has had more than 32,000 cases of Covid and 915 deaths. Even now a sizeable majority of people do not know anyone who has suffered the virus, let alone died. But everyone has experienced the constant changing of plans, the stress and disappointment of last-minute cancellations, the fatigue and apathy that now attends any effort not directed at simply getting through a day, the boredom that comes from everything that takes 10 times as long as it used to, the government helplines that offer no help, the government websites seemingly designed to have you click in circles until you give up.

Melbourne’s CBD feels like a commercial My Lai, where they have destroyed the village to save it. Some of us have accumulated sufficient Jetstar vouchers from cancelled flights to fly to the moon and back.

If not ourselves, most of us, especially in Victoria, know people whose life has been entirely dislocated not by Covid but by its repercussions, bureaucratic contortions and pettifogging restrictions. That’s not just the small business owners now into their fifth lockdowns, who do at least have spokespeople, who should be able to hustle some compensatory cash. It’s the sports clubs whose seasons are being chopped up, the plucky little festivals thrown into chaos, the first-time authors who’ve had their launches cancelled, the young scholars whose research has been permanently deferred and positions cancelled.

They may not be measured by the audits of lost economic activity; but their losses are real, permanent, probably irrevocable and certainly lamentable. It’s not as though anyone begrudges the loss of overseas holidays. These now seem frivolous and indulgent. But are we ever to be allowed anything beyond simply existing? And oh to be so patronised by a Prime Minister with his homiletic meanderings about Aussie resilience. Why not just play Chumbawamba in the background?

Sooner or later, it will dawn that Australia’s Covid response needs to move on from simply keeping people from harm; it needs to be directed at restoring the security and predictability that is a precondition of hope.