Coronavirus: Locked down by political arrogance and overreach

Even in our blissfully benign democracy, cruel leaders can inflict pain. Just another hard lesson in the year of the pandemic.

Not only did Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk refuse to make an exception for Sarah Caisip to attend her father’s funeral, but she also refused to accept responsibility for the decision, sheltering behind her chief health officer. Picture: Liam Kidston

So even in the lucky country, governments can hurt people. Even in our blissfully benign democracy, cruel leaders can inflict pain. Just another hard lesson in the year of the pandemic.

These past few weeks it has been a new experience for most of us to see government interventions tormenting people who are merely trying to go about their lives. The heartless arrogance and incompetence has been breathtaking and the trauma distressing.

Keeping parents from their children; banning a woman from attending her father’s funeral; blocking an expectant mum from the closest hospital; locking Melburnians in their homes every night; stopping students from completing their studies; handcuffing a pregnant woman in her home over social media posts; preventing family deathbed visits — behold the meddlesome hand of the state during a health crisis.

In the sublime munificence of our postwar existence, we surely have been let down by governments, frustrated by them, and we have seen compatriots excluded from this benefit or that service. But it seems foreign to see government deliberately interfere in people’s lives to create trauma — in a word, it seems un-Australian.

Yet not only did Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk refuse to make an exception for Sarah Caisip to attend her father’s funeral (even though she had come from the ACT, which has been coronavirus-free for two months) but she also refused to accept responsibility for the decision, sheltering behind her chief health officer. Then she sought victim status by claiming a call for compassion from Scott Morrison amounted to “bullying and intimidation” — pathetic.

In Victoria, government incompetence (including quarantine bungles, lax rules for infected patients, poor contact tracing and a reluctance to use Australian Defence Force support) generated the nation’s biggest outbreak. But for months, while imposing draconian measures to retrieve the situation, Daniel Andrews insisted there was no alternative to his prescription. “They have to be guided by the data, the science and the very best medical advice,” the Premier has said repeatedly.

Yet we learned this week thanks to probing by Neil Mitch­ell on 3AW that neither the chief health officer nor the police commissioner recommended a curfew or were consulted about the move. So almost five million people in our second largest city have been confined to their homes at night for more than a month, with more than a month to go, on the whim of a premier who will not even say who came up with this unscientific heavy-handedness.

Medical experts are doubtful about the health dividends and police are stuck with the odium of having to impose restrictions that are more extreme than the nation saw in wartime. Andrews has drastically misled his state. He has constantly justified his authoritarian approach by claiming he was subservient to expert advice — yet all along he has known the curfew was his own contrivance.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has drastically misled his state. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

Unlike the other states Victoria has had a serious outbreak to deal with (even if it was self-generated) and in recent weeks infections have trended strongly downwards. Andrews and his many media barrackers will say this vindicates his strategy.

Yet reputable, independent experts have pointed to data showing level-three restrictions had turned the infection curve down, raising the prospect that the stage-four measures, and the curfew, and all the social and economic pain these have caused, were unnecessary. By using a policy sledgehammer, Andrews has not only maximised the collateral damage but removed any opportunity to test the effectiveness of less intrusive measures.

Deakin University chair in epidemiology Catherine Bennett wrote in The Age this week: “Stage three worked in the first wave, and our exit plan also worked then, though some still claim it didn’t despite the second wave being attributable to a new introduction of the virus.” Bennett said stage three also “turned around the second wave” with masks helping to bring down case numbers. “Their own report says while slow, cases would halve each 49 days.”

Late last month Australian National University infectious diseases expert Peter Collignon noted of the infection curve: “It’s probably been going down for at least 10 days, if not two weeks, which implies that it may have been level-three restrictions that had most of the effect rather than necessarily the most recent ones.” Collignon said the country’s earlier outbreaks in March and April probably were turned down, too, before the harshest restrictions were put in place.

The modelling on which our policymakers based their early decision-making has been revealed by James Cook University academics to have been wildly flawed; exaggerating infection spread by a factor of four. Yet our lockdown fetishists continue unabated, encouraged by many in politics, the media and, it must be said, the community.

University of NSW school of economics professor Gigi Foster says: “I feel we are just not getting the message across that these wholesale lockdowns do not, on net, save lives.” Foster says we are missing our opportunities to learn from experiences overseas so we can do better here on health outcomes and economic resilience.

In the balancing act between health outcomes and economic and social normality, Labor and Liberal state governments, with the exception of NSW, have skewed badly. They have been prepared to pay any price to keep infections low; every positive case is viewed as a political blow to the premiers, so they close borders, shut businesses, hurt people and do whatever it takes to prevent them — and send the bills to Canberra. The pandemic has exposed flaws in our federation. Our system infantilises the states by leaving most of the serious issues and the bulk of the revenue-raising in the federal government’s hands.

Usually this does not matter greatly — they run schools and police forces effectively enough — but then along comes a pandemic, and suddenly crucial decisions are in the hands of the states and the premiers who, instead of acting in the national interest, behave as if they are ruling fiefdoms.

The Prime Minister created the national cabinet in an act of goodwill, but the premiers spat it back in his face like toddlers. Canberra is frustratingly impotent. Morrison has a realistic approach to pandemic management but the junior federal partners are not up to the task.

Just look at their priorities. The security guards who were foolishly placed in charge of Victoria’s quarantine hotels were trained in diversity but not in infection control. This week, while Victoria laboured under a curfew, unnec­essary restrictions and adminis­trative incompetence, its govern­ment announced an initiative — a Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner. In this “Australian first” role, Niki Vincent will ensure that public sector organisations employing 380,000 Victorians will “create gender equality” action plans.

Vincent will be paid more than $300,000 to do this while hundreds of thousands of people are out of work or watching their businesses wither in the state. In the pandemic, she won’t even have to leave home.

Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing the bureaucrats who outsourced the quarantine security, imposed the curfew, stuffed up the contact tracing, refused ADF help and failed to stand up to an authoritarian premier will get some additional training — in gender equity. If it were not so sad it would be hilarious.

Considering the injustice of an Australian mum denied access to the closest hospital on the wrong side of the border, small businesspeople shedding staff because they cannot service customers across state lines, people lonely and locked down pointlessly in their homes, or unable to grieve with family, there is another cohort whose silence is deafening.

The entire human rights apparatus, from the Australian Human Rights Commission to the state bodies, from NGOs to activists such as Julian Burnside and all the public broadcasting virtue-signallers, and politicians such as all the Greens and Labor provocateurs such as Kristina Keneally and Mark Dreyfus — they have all gone missing. They seem interested in human rights issues only when they can be used to tarnish our nation’s standing or to attack right-of-centre govern­ments. When mainstream Australians suffer at the hands of mainly left-of-centre state governments these hypocrites are as quiet and invisible as a virus.

The more governments wander into ideological adventurism, the more they forget about getting the basics right. And the more they expand their remit and drift away from their prime responsibilities, the more they interfere in citizens’ lives. We do not need governments putting additional curbs and curfews on citizens. We need citizens enforcing limits and constrictions on government.