Covid madness is ruling our lives

We should have called it Covid-22 because Joseph Heller would have revelled in the paradoxes, absurdities and circular arguments it has created.

Just think about the rank politicking at play here; under pressure over hard borders, exemptions denied to Queenslanders, and passes given to NRL WAGS. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

We should have called it Covid-22 because Joseph Heller would have revelled in the paradoxes, absurdities and circular arguments it has created. This is a time, after all, when our media run more sickening self-justification from Taliban extremists than they do dissenting views on pandemic management.

Heller could not make this up. The SARS-CoV-2 virus can be life-threatening for some but to protect them governments require everyone to stop living their lives. The young are blessedly spared the threat of serious illness or death, but they must sacrifice their livelihoods and lifestyles to reduce the impact on others now, and the young will pay a second time through future taxes and debt.

It is surely the revenge of the baby boomers.

We have a national cabinet devising a so-called national strategy which is notable primarily for the way each state interprets and implements the plan according to its own political and practical priorities. As a term, national cabinet is as oxymoronic as a Biden plan.

Premiers justify every decision based on their “medical advice” but they refuse to share it. Under Covid-22, people who are never inclined to protest or break the law feel a great sense of injustice and decide to gather in the streets, but that too is now against the law.

Democratic systems designed with checks and balances on power have handed over all authority to unelected officials without checks or balances. And parliaments are suspended to end any hope of scrutiny.

The deaths of 90-year-olds in palliative care are described as “tragic” while we ignore the other diseases going undetected, leading to certain additional and unnecessary deaths.

On average more than 400 people die across the country every day but it is only the handful who die with Covid in their bloodstreams that make the news.

News bulletins in states like South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland often lead with reports of single infections of a virus which is little more than a mild illness to more than 95 per cent of the people who contract it and which is now endemic in our country. Children in suburbs and towns with no infections are kept home from school to avoid a virus that is not there and would not imperil them anyway.

Young adults, who are not at risk from the disease, are fined by police for sitting outside in the sunshine, where the virus has never been known to spread, so they are forced to go home and remain indoors, which is where most infections occur. Australians are forced to obtain permits to cross state borders at which time officials demand to know the purpose of their journey – to go from one state to another.

This is a reversal of Yossarian’s Catch-22; where his desire to leave the armed forces during war on the grounds of insanity became proof that he was of sound mind. If you call out the madness of our pandemic response you are seen as a loopy exponent of rational arguments who must be designated a reckless granny-killer, banned from public debate and subjected to more stringent controls.

The silenced and hobbled majority is forced to sit at home and watch the madness ruling their lives. The leaders of governments around the nation address their states – and thanks to modern media, the entire nation – to give daily tallies of infections, hospitalisations and deaths.

Do not sing, do not dance, do not go to work, do not send the kids to school, do not pop in to your neighbours, do not leave home except for designated reasons, do not talk to your friends at the shops, do not browse in the store, do not go out after dark, do not wander more than 5km from home, do not worship, do not walk the streets without a mask and do not complain. The politicians do not grow tired of issuing patronising instructions and the media pack never tires of begging for more restrictions or urging further closures – this daily television ritual is a horrible cross between Play School and 50 Shades of Grovelling.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews provides a Covid update. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

It amounts to a macabre catastrophising of an ongoing public health challenge. The worse the leaders’ performances in public health, the more compelling their media appearances and the more of a cult figure they become – see Andrew Cuomo and Daniel Andrews.

Opposition parties, Labor and Liberal, nitpick government policies so they can sheet home the blame for every death, making coronavirus a very political infection. Yet those same oppositions then fail to question fundamental government strategies or propose alternative actions for fear of inviting the blame to come their way.

On the pandemic voters have been disenfranchised. With Covid-zero approaches to the left of them, and elimination strategies to the right, they have been stuck in the middle with lockdowns.

In Victoria and NSW the governments now have been mugged by reality. Suddenly they have accepted they have to live with Covid, only after finding their repeated, costly and damaging elimination efforts have failed.

Some readers were critical of me when I opened a column in these pages seven weeks ago with these words: “It might be best for the country if the NSW lockdown fails, if it doesn’t reach the unrealistic and unsustainable goal of zero community transmissions. Maybe the only way to convince our overzealous politicians that they must learn to live with Covid-19 is for them to confront a situation where they cannot eliminate it, no matter what pain they impose on their communities.”

My point was that the disease was already “endemic” – as it was always going to be – that we were already in a good position to live with it – as we were always going to have to do – but that the media and political debate suggested otherwise. We needed a prod to stop holding reality at bay, and now it has happened.

Gladys Berejiklian has been far and away the most pragmatic, honest and realistic leader when it comes to this challenge but even she was hemmed in by the Covid-zero pressure from the other states. Now Andrews has reluctantly accepted reality.

There are probably two ways to look at our place on the pandemic recovery continuum. On one reading, given our slow start to the vaccination rollout and adherence to internationally high vaccination rates before ending the lockdowns currently crippling more than half of the population, we might only be about three months behind where we should have been on living a new Covid normal.

Alternatively, you could argue that by refusing to live with even low levels of the original Covid-19 strain last year, we locked ourselves into a trigger-happy 2021 with at least eight lockdowns. We became victims of our own success and might have put ourselves closer to a year behind.

The good news is that parts of the nation are plotting a way out, however sluggishly. Condemned by most commentators just two months ago, Berejiklian continues to lead the way. The usual leftist barrackers were telling us she was about to be shown up by the Victorian Premier’s sixth attempt at a “one chance, hard, early, snap” lockdown. Just weeks later, Andrews has abandoned Covid-zero and replicated the Berejiklian strategy of vaccinating a path to normal (causing all sorts of acrobatics from ABC commentators who have backed Dan through every contortion, plan and failure).

So, as became clear a few weeks back, the nation is split in two – NSW living with the virus, and the other hard-border/snap-frozen/ Covid-zero cryogenic states. Victoria needs to join NSW and even though it will struggle to make that adjustment, the border between our two largest states should be the first to open. This will be a tough path for Andrews. As well as having to swallow his pride, Victoria is about three weeks behind NSW on vaccinations.

The significance of the past week is best summarised as a switch from politics controlling the virus, to the virus controlling politics. It wasn’t the national cabinet, media or even internal polling that changed Andrews’ mind; it was the Delta strain, and eventually it will force the recalcitrant states to face reality too.

While the separatist bravado of Mark McGowan in Western Australia and Nanny State paternalism of Steven Marshall in South Australia is frustrating, we know that sanity will eventually prevail. But it is impossible to stomach the shameless fearmongering and confected hysteria of Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland.

Here we had a Premier who must have known the facts choosing deliberately to mislead people about the threat of Covid-19 to children. This scare was designed to justify her harsh stance on borders.

Just think about the rank politicking at play here; under pressure over hard borders, exemptions denied to Queenslanders, and passes given to NRL WAGS, Palaszczuk chose to generate unjustified fear about the health of all Queensland children. The following day, instead of apologising and retracting, she chose to misrepresent pandemic modelling to pretend nearly 2500 Australians a month would die from Covid-19 next year.

In just a couple of days Palaszczuk proved herself unfit for office; but she is in office and has three years to run. The coronavirus has done enormous damage to the minds and hearts of people who have never had the virus in their veins.

Our country is not united by this trauma but ripped asunder. Our leaders, in the main, have not risen to the challenge but shrivelled.

A country once run by politicians who were empowered by voters, is now run by bureaucrats empowered by politicians. The virus of government intervention and political overreach has infected every corner of our lives because, during a crisis, we welcomed it. Getting rid of this will make Covid-zero look easy.