India ban takes pandemic philosophy to point of cruelty

Michael Slater (right), pictured with Mel McLaughlin and Ricky Ponting, has called the India travel ban a ‘disgrace’. Picture: AAP

He was whining when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just ‘on spec’, addressed as follows, “Michael Slater of the Star Sports on air team”. ‘Twas KP who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: “Slats has gone to the Maldives, and we don’t know where he are.”

All right, apologies to AB Paterson obviously. I’ll grab a tenner and will atone later. I promise.

The point is the 74-Test veteran and one of the more annoying cricket commentators this country has to offer, has escaped the ravages of the pandemic in India, headed to the Maldives and from there knocked out a series of tweets that in the normal course of events would have been dispatched to the ether. But due to the heightened controversy associated with the Indian travel ban, Slater’s online missives were repeated across every available news service in the country.

How many Australian cricketers or coaches or commentators will follow Slater and flee to the small archipelagic state, living there in unimaginable difficulty, possibly having to share beach bungalow accommodation with just one private fibre optic-lit plunge pool, a resident butler and world-class snorkelling off a private jetty?

How many more flannelled fools, albeit in fancy Indian Premier League pyjamas of various hues will now shuffle off to languish in private hells with excellent snorkelling and diving spots frequented by friendly dolphins, a 24-hour health spa, yoga and meditation, a gym, tennis courts and golf simulator?

The prevailing view at home is that cricketers and their coaches are privileged and wealthy and while that might be so, when did we become so judgmental about any Australian pursuing his or her trade? Besides Slater, not one Australian cricketer in India has demanded preferential treatment. Those interviewed acknowledge there were risks attached to playing in the tournament and they understood them both before they decided to play and now that the tournament has been postponed indefinitely.

Australia’s cricketers on IPL lists travelled to India with the consent of the Australian government and the approval of Cricket Australia who receive ten per cent of the players’ salaries by way of commission.

The broader issue is that the 30-odd cricketers and staff playing in the IPL are a minuscule part of an estimated 9000 Australian citizens currently in India. How many of them would like to come home? One suspects quite a lot of them.

That figure is small beans compared to the estimated 35,000 Australians overseas who have registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, wanting to come home. But it is only the 9000 in India who face fines and imprisonment for returning home.

Michael Slater’s rant might have been better posed as a question to the Australian government. It is a question any one of the stranded 9000 Australians in India would have asked themselves many times: What is the point of Australian citizenship? What intrinsic value does it hold if a government can turn its back on you at any given time, effectively criminalising a return to these shores?

Back in March 2020, a Biosecurity Emergency was declared by the Governor-General in accordance with the Biosecurity Act (2015). Section 475 of the Act permits the Health Minister to make emergency determinations. According to Minister Hunt, the decision made at ten minutes to midnight last Friday was based on advice from the Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly.

Kelly has acknowledged the potential consequences of implementing the travel ban include the risk of Australian citizens experiencing “serious illness without access to health care, the potential for Australians to be stranded in a transit country, and in a worst-case scenario, deaths”.

There is a moral dimension to the decision, or possibly an amoral one, depending on your view, that simply cannot be ignored. Implicit in it is Australia’s quarantine functions – a responsibility of the commonwealth (although you wouldn’t know it these days), are weak and rely on hotels that virtually everyone agrees are not fit for purpose.

Across the country, state and federal governments have been rewarded with support at least at polling level and in Queensland and Western Australia with wholehearted endorsements at the ballot box. Border closures, lockdowns on short notice, often without due consideration of the economic toll and in recent times absent of any substantial threat of widespread infection, have become not just accepted but acceptable to the Australian people.

These are policies that have skewed risk assessment to vastly improbable scenarios. Those cheering them on should be careful what they wish for.

But the India ban has taken the ‘treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen’ philosophy of pandemic control to the point of manifest cruelty.

Talk of fines and periods in the slammer were breezily dismissed by the Prime Minister yesterday on Channel 9’s Today show.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Evan Morgan

“As I have said, I think the likelihood of anything like that happening is pretty much zero,” Mr Morrison told Karl Stefanovic.

If these sanctions exist only in the ethereal world of deterrent, why make so much of them?

It is as if our governments have decided its citizens have enjoyed the smell of the jackboot so much, they hanker for more of the fine aroma of leather and boot polish.

But there is an end point to heavy handed government edicts, and I think we’ve reached it in the past couple of days. These are not the actions of a centrist political party in government who make a great deal of noise about individual freedoms and a light touch from the state.

Flights from India to Australia are banned until May 15. Australian cricketers are just one of the cured meats in this particular sandwich. How long will that last? How long before more than the 9000 Australians stranded in India start to question why protections extended to Australian citizens are so roughly pulled away?

I give it 48 hours before some Nadia Comaneci style backflips.