Keep-me-safe enablers happily sell all of us out

Families separated at the Queensland-NSW border embrace.

Everyone has that one friend who’s a bit of an enabler. You know the type. The friend that says one more drink. Says life’s short, buy the shoes (or, in my case, horse. Trust me, do not buy the horse). They’re the mates who, when the stakes are low, are a bucketload of fun to have around, but when the stakes are high the last people you need in your ear.

A lot has been said this year about the way in which the premiers have politicised the Covid-19 response. If we judge actions by fruit, then the lot of them should hang their heads in shame. Division. Partisanship. Using fear as a weapon. Chucking the term “health advice” around like bonbonnieres at an Italian wedding while refusing to make said advice open to scrutiny. They’ve kept families apart. Separated parents and children. They’ve made exceptions for footy players and actors above everyday people and shrugged their shoulders all the while. The list is long, and all the fruit is rotten, but here’s the kicker that struck me this week.

They couldn’t do it without their enablers, without a free pass granted by voters.

When Scott Morrison unintentionally let the foxes into the henhouse via the (Clayton’s) national cabinet in a genuine but misplaced attempt to achieve unity in the face of a crisis, his trust and leadership were rewarded with duplicity and deception. The notable exception to this is NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who has never used border closures as a weapon and is the only one leading (even if imperfectly) forward.

As for the others, their doublecrossing wouldn’t have been palatable electorally without the enabling of a terrified, partisan, fraught electorate.

So, what does the past 18 months say about us as a community and as a nation? What has it revealed about our character?

An emotional scene at the Queensland-NSW border at Coolangatta, where two women, separated by border restrictions, hold hands. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

For starters, it was telling that when unelected and disproportionately empowered police chiefs and medical officers encouraged their communities to dob on one another, many didn’t need encouragement.

A dear friend of mine in NSW was recently shocked to find the police at her door. Police, plural, were acting on a complaint to Crimestoppers. My friend’s teenager had (wait for it) gone for a walk. Taken a study break and gone walking within the stringent rules of lockdown. Someone dobbed this kid into a hotline we’d typically use to report violent crime, drug deals and, well, actual crimes.

Covid has revealed who you’d want to be in the trenches with and who in times gone by would have dobbed you into the Stasi. Scarily enlightening.

Australians were fed a diet of fear and, just like Oliver Twist, went begging for a second serving. Who knew there was an entire cohort just gagging to be subjugated? What’s more, the keep-me-safe brigade hasn’t just enabled the behaviour of rogue state premiers, it has rewarded it. Plenty of us have been vocally, robustly aghast at the divisive, dishonest, fearmongering rhetoric. We’ve railed against the politicisation of this crisis. The awful truth is, many Australians electorally applauded the summary execution of compassion and empathy.

The same folk have happily sold their souls for bread and circuses, content with a two-speed society that prioritises footballers and their entourages over grief-stricken, separated families and critically ill children. They sagely decree that in tough times some people just must suffer for the greater good. This is of course an observation offered only in relation to the suffering of others.

I never thought I’d see a day when so many have been content to sacrifice the health and wellbeing of a generation for the inconvenience of learning how to live with Covid.

Crisis doesn’t form character, it reveals it. That’s as true for a nation as it is for individuals. Holding a mirror up, it has been shameful at times.

I guess that’s the price you pay for trading in fear, and fear only ever diminishes a person, makes their world smaller. The rogue premiers and their keep-me-safe enablers want to shrink our world to the level of their own fear and incompetence. Zero Covid is an absurd, medical impossibility. Only the clueless still cling to it.

Oh, but it’s hard to keep a tender heart, isn’t it? To stay anchored in hope and to walk in grace at a time that calls for strength and compassion yet leaves many of us feeling so short-changed. If wishes were horses, the beggars we’ve become might ride to our freedom.

We get only one roll of the dice. Time is all we have. How dare they demand we squander it in fear?

How to put a price on every embrace disallowed, every tender goodbye denied, every moment and milestone stolen by bureaucratic overreach? As so many of us know, there is no currency in the world that could ever compensate.