Coronavirus: Officials’ lack of consistency is bordering on heartless

The irony of the poor treatment mainstream Australians are receiving when it comes to borders is that mainstream Australians seem to support the restrictions.

Illustration: Tom Jellett

The state of Australian borders has become high farce. Restrictions are inconsistent, often elitist and deeply unsympathetic to the plight of ordinary Australians. The disagreements between the commonwealth and some states also have exposed serious fractures in the federation, as well as constitutional uncertainty.

We are all at sea.

The irony of the poor treatment mainstream Australians are receiving when it comes to borders is that mainstream Australians seem to support the restrictions. That’s because most of us aren’t adversely affected by them; not directly anyway.

But god help you if you’re suffering an illness and need understanding to cross a hard border for surgery or check-ups. Or if you are looking for compassion from a premier to be allowed to bypass a quarantine period to see a parent on death’s door or to attend their funeral.

The latter is what happened to 26-year-old Canberra resident Sarah Caisip. Even though there have been no COVID-19 cases in the ACT for 60 days in a row, she was denied one last face-to-face visit with her father or the opportunity to comfort her 11-year-old sister at his funeral in Queensland.

What kind of a society have we become?

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said it was a decision for the state’s Chief Health Officer, Jeannette Young. Hands washed, buck passed, accountability withdrawn.

Let’s be clear about one thing: politicians make the decisions; not bureaucrats, not health professionals, not academic experts or mobs with pitchforks. While we expect politicians to take on board all manner of advice, we pay them to show leadership and make decisions for themselves. Palaszczuk could have overruled her CHO in a heartbeat if she had wanted to. Instead, she hid behind her.

I can’t respect that. Especially when there are legitimate question marks over exactly why Palaszczuk is being so strident on borders. Is it because with a state election due on October 31 she thinks the lockdown will help her at the polls? Or is it because the Premier and her CHO have been spooked by the young women who broke rules travelling between Melbourne and Brisbane while infected with COVID?

Neither reason is adequate to justify some of the denials of common decency we are witnessing.

Caisip’s plight is far from an isolated incident. The children of a 39-year-old man with brain cancer have been denied passage across a hard border. Yet Australian diplomats fly overseas and return to home quarantine as long as their “itinerary is supervised”.

Hollywood actors get exemptions to fly into some states. Billionaires get exemptions to fly in and out of states, indeed to skip hotel quarantine altogether. Politicians frequently are granted exemptions for interstate travel. Football codes have been granted all manner of special rights.

Yet mainstream Australians are being treated like second-class citizens in their own country. We can’t find a way to get kids into hospitals to see their dying parents if they are unlikely enough to reside across artificial borders decided more than a century ago? Freight drivers can move about anywhere in the country with one COVID swab every seven days.

In the words of American journalist Edward R. Murrow: We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.

I’m not one of the nutters claiming we should let this virus rip through the community. When the pandemic started I was aghast at Brendan Murphy, the chief medical officer at the time and now secretary of the federal Department of Health, turning up at ABC Insiders for an interview and shaking hands with panellists before the show got started, then going on to pose for photographs with the panel without socially distancing. I kept my distance, but the photo didn’t catch me shaking my head. I thought it set a terrible example, frankly, as did Scott Morrison’s comments days before that he wanted to get to the footy one last time.

And they wonder why it took Australians time to start adhering to the rules in the days that followed when they all but yelled into their microphones demanding that people did as they said, not as they themselves had been doing so recently.

But fast forward six months, and surely an advanced society such as ours can work out a way to insert compassionate exemptions into a system of border restrictions and lockdowns. If not, can someone please explain the rationale behind the money and power-based exemptions that do exist?

I’m told the inconsistency on borders and the volume of exemption requests have generated a regulatory nightmare wherein public health officials are spending more time on who can come in and out of states than they are developing necessary strategies to control COVID. That sounds like a collection of officials who couldn’t organise a piss-up at a brewery.

The Prime Minister wants to take issue with premiers on border shutdowns doing economic damage. Indeed he appears to have a problem with Daniel Andrews’s lockdown in Victoria. But he’s deeply inconsistent, too. He threw his Attorney-General, Christian Porter, and Senate leader Mathias Cormann under the bus when he walked away from Clive Palmer’s High Court challenge to the West Australian border shutdown.

I’m not passing judgment either way on WA Premier Mark McGowan’s decision or the constitutionality of it. The courts and the court of public opinion will do that in the fullness of time. But Morrison wants to chastise some premiers (always Labor) and ignore others (always Liberal) on an issue that requires consistency. He’s inconsistent because he’s too political and too partisan, worried about Liberal seats in the west where a closed border is popular, happy to press Queensland’s premier on borders with a state election she might lose just over the horizon.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee has descended into irrelevance, largely because of the unilateral actions of chief health officers acting at the behest of premiers who are out of their depth or without direction from premiers who are unable or unwilling to show leadership. And we have a prime minister long on intimidating phone calls (according to at least one premier) and short on consistency. The nation has become rudderless.

Peter van Onselen is political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.