Earth to the premiers: your futile Covid zero war is over

We’re told the panic merchants we call leaders will accept infections in their states within two months. Does that sound likely to you?

Members of the Australian Defence Force team up with NSW police officers to perform compliance checks on residents in lockdown in Yennora. Picture: Toby Zerna

You get the impression some of our premiers will be like those Japanese soldiers found on islands in South-East Asia in the 1970s, thinking World War II was still going. At some stage someone will have to crash through hard international and state borders to shake these holdout premiers by the shoulders and tell them that the war to eliminate Covid-19 is over, the rest of the world is living with it.

Pandemic management in Australia has struggled for a rational focus, with sensationalist media striking a symbiotic relationship with hysterical politics. The fearmongering has enabled leaders to assume the coveted position of protector-in-chief.

This week I heard two radio presenters refer to the sad Covid-19 death of a 90-year-old in palliative care as “tragic”. Sympathies go always to those who lose loved ones, but the use of “tragic” in these circumstances is to render language meaningless. We continue to catastrophise a health situation that is the envy of the world.

Our path forward is clear, but the implementation is confused. Consider the logic of 13 million people being in lockdown this weekend in a drastic effort to eliminate infections when the ­official national cabinet position is that when the nation hits a 70 per cent vaccination rate – perhaps as soon as October – these lockdowns will cease and we will accept a level of Covid-19 infections in the community.

So we have soldiers on the street now, kids kept from school, and businesses slammed shut, so we can crush infections in the eight weeks or so before we switch to accepting infections and living with the disease.

Do we expect to pivot from zero tolerance to virus acceptance overnight?

The worrying scenario is that most states will struggle to make this switch. Only NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian uses language and adopts measures that show any acceptance the disease will be endemic – the other premiers continue to push for elimination in their ongoing war.

States such as Western Australia and South Australia, which have both locked down twice unnecessarily, are not going to suddenly demonstrate a propensity to accept Covid-19 among their populations. Having incarcerated his own citizens in mandatory internal quarantine, catastrophised every infection and inflicted cruelty even on his state’s Olympians, South Australian Premier Steven Marshall is hardly going to go to his election in March with infections, hospitalisations and deaths blotting his Covid copybook.

Likewise with the other premiers – they have created Covid zero as their sole KPI, so how can they surrender it? Their citizens remain captives to the unrealistic obsessions of pandemic panic merchants.

It is worth mentioning that we would all prefer a zero-Covid world, and no one would argue we accept a deadly disease by choice. The harsh reality, however, is this is not possible. The Covid-free world no longer exists and the states can only delay the inevitable at enormous cost.

This was expressed starkly by the former deputy national chief health officer, Dr Nick Coats­worth, when he criticised SA’s double quarantine provisions for returning Olympians. “Covid zero is an addictive and vindictive policy when taken to these extremes,” he tweeted.

None of this pretends that the choices are easy. It is all about choosing least worst paths, and the national conversion from suppressing all community transmission to living with the disease will be delicate. So far our leaders have been reluctant to start the task.

There is too little emphasis on the crucial fact that the most vulnerable in Australia are already vaccinated – those in aged care – with high proportions of the other vulnerable cohort, those over 70, protected too. This strong position is why the case fatality rate of the Sydney outbreak is a fraction of what we faced last year.

Good news like this seldom suits a media narrative, but why the premiers and their chief health officers fail to share this ­reassurance remains a bit of a puzzle. Presumably they prefer to harness fear as a motivation for vaccinations and compliance.

WA Premier Mark McGowan this week said the virus was running “rampant” across NSW and this was “risking the lives” of everyone.

“NSW just needs to crush and kill the virus,” he said.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews spoke about Sydney being “on fire” with the virus “running wild” as he vowed to “defend” his border.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk vowed “harder” measures to stop the virus “creping north” and Marshall said the “Delta variant is a killer”. Yet according to the national cabinet position, these premiers will be accepting infections in their community within two months.

This seems unlikely.

Aside from abandoning the stoicism we once prized as a ­nation, the absence of common sense and decency is deflating. We still have officials and premiers keeping people from visiting dying relatives, sick children or attending the funerals of loved ones. Australians cannot leave our shores without government permission, and cannot return because places in hotel quarantine are drastically limited.

Spineless politicians hide behind health bureaucrats like Queensland Chief Medical Officer Jeanette Young. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Marshall

Once an open and generous country, we have flicked the switch to selfish and insular. We do not even offer our fellow Australians what should be the inalienable right to come home.

Spineless politicians hide behind health bureaucrats and police commissioners. They have outsourced their authority and surrendered responsibility but hope to be re-elected for “keeping us safe”.

Presumably they will reward their bureaucrats; Palaszczuk has appointed her chief health officer, Jeanette Young, as the next governor. The state’s Covid situation is dire enough to require lockdowns and border closures, apparently, but not so dire that Young cannot move into government house in a few weeks.

The pandemic has expunged any sense of an egalitarian Australia. The Covid-19 response has split the nation; those who are on the public purse or in white collar jobs can work from home and sail through, while those in transport, retail, services, trades, manufacturing or anything else that cannot be done with a laptop and Zoom call are hit hard.

It is the triumph of the public sector over the private, the leaners over the lifters. While small businesses are shut down, publicly funded journalists tweet about the fun of lockdown life while they constantly admonish politicians for not locking down faster or harder.

Highly paid health bureaucrats adopt the tone of Play School presenters as they lecture the public to “duck” footballs, avoid pizza boxes, or “don’t talk to your neighbours”. Police fine people for sitting in parks, while tens of thousands of people call police to inform against their neighbours for such crimes as having guests at their homes.

Most of us obey the rules, no matter how absurd they are, yet still this dobbing culture is not an attractive development. It points to significant changes in our ­culture that we can only hope are temporary.

There is too much focus on how the pandemic response will play out in the party-political horse race, rather than what it will do for the country.

Unsurprisingly in the current chaos, polls show voters are restless and expect better from government, but this does not give us much of a guide to what will transpire at a federal election in March or April next year.

Suffice to say that it will be close and that because of his narrow margin, Scott Morrison faces a daunting challenge. Yet a relatively minor uniform swing towards the government would deliver a handsome majority.

Labor provides no clear alternative, merely taking cheap shots on the pandemic response and going with the same nebulous promises about additional climate action that have hindered it for more than a decade.

There are, however, two major positives for Anthony Albanese: first, the obvious potential to benefit from voter dissatisfaction over pandemic management; but also, the Coalition’s abandonment of fiscal restraint in its pandemic response means the usual scares about Labor spending and budget management are rendered impotent.

Six months from now we are likely to be living with high vaccination rates and ongoing but limited Covid-19 outbreaks, hospit­al­isations and deaths. If so, voters should appreciate that we minimised pandemic damage at close to world’s best practice, but many might join sensationalist media and timid premiers in believing that we squandered a fanciful Covid-free future.