Daniel Andrews sounded like he needed a COVID-19 test.
Voice raspy, his tired possum eyes magnified behind his glasses as he read slowly through the daily list of fatalities and infections.
None dead, no new cases; but a whole lot to see.
“I don’t know whether I’ll be drinking a beer tonight, I might go a little higher up the shelf,” he said as the enormity of the day spread, virus-like, to millions.
There would barely have been a dry eye in the Victorian house.
Within minutes, the first text beeped, a business focused on fixing middle-class aches and pains in suburban Hawthorn will reopen on Wednesday.
Thousands of other privateers were forced to their feet for the first time in months, in readiness for the rebuild.
The lockdown has lasted for 111 days but in fact this ordeal has been going for more than seven months, the moment upon which an entire state was sent home, naively buoyed by the prospect of broken routines and more family time.
Seven months later, its people — certainly those in the city — were stretched to the outer limits of their sanity as the virus took 798 lives after the hotel quarantine calamity and the government looked for much of the time lost in the pandemic’s weeds.
The Victorian Premier, as tired on his feet as he was, showed signs of unimaginable relief as the dead weight of the pandemic lifted from his shoulders for the first time in months. Now was the time to open up, he declared. “Now is the time to congratulate every single Victorian for staying the course.’’
Some days are above politics and October 26, 2020, was almost one of them.
After Andrews and his public health team left the Spring Street theatrette, state Liberal leader Michael O’Brien was there to remind the world about everything that had gone wrong, all 220,000 jobs lost, thousands of business closures and almost 800 deaths.
Both men will live or die on the strength of the virus.
In suppressing a second wave, Andrews, who will mark his 10th year as Victorian Labor leader on December 3, has done what scores of leaders around the world would envy. But having used the bluntest of instruments, an intolerably long shutdown of Australia’s second-biggest state, he will be judged harshly if the economic recovery is tepid. He knows that.
The Victorian Liberal Party, so sadly diminished in the state parliament, has struggled with how to respond to a complex health crisis, marked as it was by undeniable political and bureaucratic failures.
The politics of all this are complicated and those seeking to make early calls about how this will end are better suited to Flemington than psephology.
Melbourne has become one giant community caught between protecting its own and contributing to the greater good; there is a collective investment in the virus being defeated.
This was, after all, a health campaign executed by millions, not just the doctors, nurses and police who patrolled the wards and the city streets keeping the dying comfortable and the neighbourhoods quiet.
For these reasons, as a Victorian, it was hard to feel anything other than relief and optimism as Andrews spoke. But buried in the detail, and clear in the Premier’s language, is the understanding that Melbourne is a long way from normality.
Anyone who doubts this should consider this warning from the Premier: “The most dangerous environment for the spread of this virus is in your home.”
Welcome to COVID-19 normal.
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