A lot can happen in a week. We all know it. We’ve all lived it, especially in the past two years. I have to say, though, that these past seven days of Australia’s varying Covid health regimes have clothed themselves in glory when it comes to sheer, idiotic inconsistency.
Inconsistency that’s given most of us whiplash trying to keep up. I thought we’d seen it all: South Australia Health’s pizza box with an extra serve of Covid; cleaners in full PPE at the AFL Finals at Perth’s Optus stadium, furiously wiping down goalposts after each score, while 60,000 unmasked fans (some just a few metres away) crammed into the stadium. Victoria closed its playgrounds and warned against watching the sunset, and back in the grand old state of Westralia, we keep getting told this virus can and will be crushed but only until February 5.
Peak stupid, with a side of hubris for good measure.
But then, just this week the Queensland government threw two full plane loads of passengers into quarantine for Christmas after cases of Covid were identified. They were without warning, nor choice, chucked into quarantine. Until, of course, they weren’t.
A swift, savage backlash to the decision, and resounding public outcry, gave birth to an equally swift reversal of that decision.
A Christmas miracle without the manger – and very definitely without the three wise men, or women.
The explanation, of course, was that the “health advice” had changed. May I ask us all to stop for a sweet moment and reflect on the wild, unjustifiable and at times, completely bizarre rules and regulations that have been imposed on us by people with “public health” in their LinkedIn profiles.
Of the many casualties Covid has claimed, trust and respect for public health would have to be up there. You cannot say in one moment trust the vaccines, trust the science, then in the next throw 200 people into quarantine just in case. It is stupid. It is the medical version of kabuki theatre.
Has there been a single superspreader event related to a Covid case on an Australian flight? Flights have been going between NSW and Victoria for months. The overreach and fear mongering in the name of public health knows no bounds and Australians have been mostly very accommodating – but with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, the nonsense is wearing thin.
Australians have overwhelmingly shown we trust the health advice around vaccination. We have voted with our rolled-up sleeves. The constant game-playing and one-upmanship, and the shameless political grandstanding – all of which has been done in the name of public health – have fractured trust and fed a growing indifference for whatever sensible measures remain.
Infectious diseases physician Dr Nick Coatsworth is measured in his broad assessment but agrees the unilateral decision taken by various states throughout the pandemic has been problematic.
“There is a real danger that growing numbers of the community will simply ignore or find ways around the rulings. This is why balance is important. The community are savvy; they can tell what is overreach and what isn’t.”
Overreach indeed. How do governments, and their public health boffins, redeem themselves from the grubbiness of politicisation, the nature of which has delivered us a “greatest hits list” that includes Queensland Hospitals are for Queenlanders, Don’t Touch the Footy, and Crush and Kill the Virus.
That’s before you even try to unpack the opaque and shamelessly unaccountable manner in which travel exemptions have been granted, the only consistency being that outside of NSW, suffering families remain at the bottom of the heap.
Soberingly, public health officials – none of whom is accountable for their actions – have also been responsible for decisions which saw an elderly man die in a NSW caravan park, waiting to get back to his family in Queensland but denied an exemption by Queensland Health.
Coatsworth says there are wrongs committed in the name of public health that must never be allowed to happen again.
“I think people have had enough with being told that inhumane border decisions that affect real people are ‘heartbreaking but necessary to keep people safe’. We passed the point where we needed that sort of paternalistic behaviour.
“I was astonished that the Victorian Ombudsman’s report got only 24 hours in the news cycle. Under any normal circumstance that would have cost the jobs of senior public servants. What is the point of the Ombudsman if they can release a report like that and there is no accountability?”
This is before we bring in the various institutes and their various modelling and various political affiliations. Not one of the doomsday Covid models has come within a whisker of accuracy. Not one of the black prophecies has eventuated. Is it any wonder public health mandates are about as popular as a colonoscopy?
Trust is impossible without consistency. Ditto, accountability. I’ve seen very little of either.
Perhaps it’s impossible to divorce public health from politics, but even if that is the case there must always be accountability and that, too, has been a quiet victim of this pandemic.
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