If politicians know best, why so many mistakes?

Imagine being barred from work, confined to your home and then tweeting #IstandwithDan to laud your captor.

Imagine being barred from work, then confined to your home from 8pm to 5am daily, and then tweeting #IstandwithDan to laud your captor. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Matray

Paradoxically, while the scale of the health, economic, social and political challenges are unfathomable, you get a sense about how misguided and ideological the pandemic responses are from the littlest of things. Consider the bizarre political theatre of a premier, who has decided his state is so besieged by the coronavirus that it must suffer a curfew and be put into an economic coma, standing up at a briefing beamed live around the nation and reading a list of medical supply deliveries.

“There are 2,173,507 face shields that have been delivered out to health services,” said Victoria’s Daniel Andrews on Tuesday. “Doesn’t mean they have all been used, some will be sitting, if you like, in mini stockpiles at local hospitals and health services; 89 million, I will round the numbers off because there are almost 90 million gloves; just under 5.5 million gowns; about, just under 300,000 hand sanitiser containers, just under three million masks …” And on he went.

This is a phenomenon I have seen from the inside and outside of politics — when confronted with a big picture that is too demanding, some politicians find solace by immersing themselves in detail that is more comprehensible. It is a comfort and distraction that avoids the major decisions; and is an ominous sign.

But Andrews’s obsession with micromanaging betrays a more important truth about the reaction to the pandemic. Contrary to much of the spin and commentary, large elements of the response have been driven by ideology, and that remains problematic.

Remember when the Victorian Premier told couples that if they did not live together they could not arrange conjugal visits to each other’s homes? He continues to boast about rules banning people from “popping over to a mate’s house” and warns that people not wearing masks or wandering too far from home will be caught and prosecuted.

This is a textbook, big-government, authoritarian approach. It betrays a firm belief that although the virus is invisible to the naked eye and highly contagious, only the awesome power of the state, wielded unflinchingly by the Premier, can defeat it. (Any dissenters and rule breakers will be prosecuted.)

Typically, such interventionist hubris is brought undone by incompetence. The quarantine shambles unfolded while the government department overseeing it filmed a self-congratulatory video about its public sector commitment to a fun, tolerant and culturally sensitive “quarantine holiday” for those in isolation. The Victorian hotel quarantine program ticked all the inclusivity boxes but failed to exclude the virus.

But just because the virus response is ideological, doesn’t mean it is partisan. The government-knows-best approach of Andrews and the Socialist Left has been matched, scold for scold, by the nanny-state tremblers on the right of centre.

South Australian Liberal Premier Steven Marshall increased restrictions on home gatherings and pubs earlier this month after just two new infections in his state, both from known sources. The state will impose a ban next week on Victorian families who work, attend school or visit doctors in SA border towns.

We are overrun with politicians on the left and right who have an ideological predilection for intervention and seem to think that laws can eradicate a virus. They are so addicted to government as an omnipresent guardian in all aspects of life that they believe — and their supporters expect — that politicians can stop the infections. If governments can stop me getting fat, give me broadband and save the planet, surely they can stop a silly virus.

The pathetic sheltering behind “medical advice” must start to wear thin soon. People know that an absence of human contact eliminates their risk of infection, but they also know they need human interaction to survive and put food on the table.

They can see that too many politicians have failed to even discuss the options to be weighed and the costs and benefits to be considered. The lockdown fetishists cannot think beyond the next day’s infection count.

New Zealand, hailed by the interventionists as an example of eradication, now has new cases and has locked down again. How long does this go on? A year, two years, or five years? When do we work out how to live with the virus?

Look, yes, there have been aspects of our response that are inspiring. Vulnerable doctors donning masks and gloves to treat people; nurses flying from COVID-free home towns in SA and WA to fight the virus in Melbourne; small business owners remodelling takeaway and home delivery options to try to keep their customers satisfied and their staff in jobs. But it is time to discuss how much has been troubling, shamefully at odds with our sense of being a practical and resourceful society.

People have dobbed in neighbours for throwing parties and television bulletins have denounced the offenders; police officers have fined people for sitting on park benches and have grabbed a woman by the throat while arresting her for not wearing a face mask; publicly funded journalists have treated lockdown like a social media fun-time, yucking it up during fully paid, work-from-home stints that have provided a change of scenery and a lark, while people in the real economy have lost their jobs or seen their life’s work wither on the vine.

Some of the worst aspects of our society have come to the fore through panic buying, hysterical reporting, dependency and, from some, a masochistic desire to take orders. Imagine being barred from work, then confined to your home from 8pm to 5am daily, and then tweeting #IstandwithDan to laud your captor. Patty Hearst eat your heart out.

Big-government approaches tend to get things wrong; that’s just the reality. Consider how Victoria imposed a curfew and stage-four lockdowns before it advised infected people they should not leave home for exercise. The government also ordered citizens to wear face masks, and had them arrested on the street for not doing so, before it bothered to organise timely test results or adequate contact tracing.

The ideologues have had a big year in this country. First, they co-opted a bad national fire season at the end of a severe drought as evidence of catastrophic global warming (despite worse fires and worse droughts predating carbon dioxide emissions). Then they demanded a debt-funded, interventionist, authoritarian response to the coronavirus pandemic and characterised this as their demand that the Coalition government abandon the “ideology” of fiscal rectitude.

In a Pavlovian response, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg gave the critics what they wanted. “Today is not about ideologies,” said Morrison, “we checked those at the door.” Frydenberg said, “there’s no ideological constraints at times like this”.

They were right, of course, to eschew ideology. But that is what conservatism is about — it is not an ideology but a movement, an approach, and the idea is to do what works, what makes sense, to avoid, contest and eschew ideological aspirations.

Their debt-funded aid package to give society a chance to flatten the curve, build health system capacity and work out next steps was justified as a wise conservative response. The ideologues cheered it as a recognition that government can solve the problem — but it cannot.

In this column way back in March I explained the difficult policy choice between special measures to protect the elderly or a broader approach that might hurt everyone. As it turns out, without a proper focus on the elderly, we have ended up with the worst of both worlds, society in a coma and our elderly suffering anyway (90 per cent of deaths have been aged over 70, and two thirds have been in aged care homes).

So what is our strategy now? Early talk of a vaccine is now exposed as pie in the sky, so how do we cope with the next year, or the five beyond that? Debt, economic sclerosis and social decay cannot continue forever, and will not kill the virus.

We do not elect politicians to announce daily infection and death tallies, list their medical supply deliveries, and admonish us for resisting their overbearing regulations. We pay them to develop policy options that might plot a path forward. Ideological approaches ought be avoided. Better to trust the pragmatic realism of conservative precepts like personal responsibility, self-reliance, community support and stoicism in the face of difficult challenges.

We need to invest in treatments, care, social distancing, and hygiene as we reanimate our society to the greatest extent possible — the only other realistic option is to borrow more, waste away, and hope a vaccine saves us. If we remain frozen by indecision, our kids are unlikely to thank us for the decades of misery we will leave them.