Stop wetting the bed premiers, and let us live our lives

Covid psychosis has infected Australia for far too long. This is self-harm now.

WA Premier Mark McGowan has extended border closures yet again.

Despite the political argy-bargy and media hysterics, it is clear – as it has been for almost two years – where pandemic management is going in this country. The incessant and futile attempts to impose Covid-zero strategies will continue to fall away against the inevitable path towards endemic Covid-19.

Australia’s critical success was keeping the virus largely out of the country through closed borders and quarantine provisions while we did not have vaccines. But we have become a victim of that success because politicians, bureaucrats, and large elements of the public are entranced by the unachievable goal of permanent insulation from Covid.

Politicians claimed credit for “keeping people safe” by temporarily ensuring the virus was kept at bay, and some people demand a continuation of this protection pretence. Governments are now hostage to expectations they raised and cannot meet, and their attempts prevent us from taking advantage of our enviable position.

Nearly six months ago I likened the premiers to Japanese soldiers found on islands in the 1970s who thought the war 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.” Omicron has crashed through and is forcing most of them to belatedly accept reality, but just look at Western Australia to see how paranoid a premier can become.

As illogical and infuriating as they are now, restrictions, mandates and paranoia must dissipate eventually, to be replaced by a general wariness of infection, sensible isolation of the symptomatic, and an ongoing concentration on treatments, vaccinations and health resourcing. This is where Australia should be now.

Empty shelves at a Coles supermarket in Richmond in inner Melbourne. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Instead, our bedwetting state governments seem determined, incredibly, to disrupt a third school year, even though there has never been a discernible threat to children, who now have access to vaccines. A variety of workplaces face staff shortages not from the direct effects of the disease, but from the government-imposed bans on people who might have been in contact with Covid.

This is self-harm. Social, educational, economic and even other medical damage is disregarded in favour of an obsessive focus on Covid to the exclusion of all else. This is why health bureaucrats should only ever have been a key source of advice, not dictators of government policy.

For almost two years we have seen unrealistic goals, exaggerated fear, threats deliberately cast broadly beyond the vulnerable cohorts, and few in politics or the media prepared to dissent; this has generated a communal Covid psychosis. People snap at shoppers who stand too close, they bay at tennis stars, condemn dancing teenagers, and dob in partying neighbours.

We like to think we have the resilience of Crocodile Dundee or Aeneas Gunn but we have been exposed as a nation of hypochondriac fretters, like Dorrie Evans or Norman Gunston.

So, we still get the Covid theatre of daily infection announcements, even as they are based partly on people just testing themselves and staying at home with paracetamol. The daily death tolls persist too, opaquely failing to differentiate between those who die from the disease or with it.

Supporters march in Sydney to protest the treatment of tennis star Novak Djokovic. He was no threat to us, he broke no rules or laws, yet he was vilified and deported. Picture: David Swift

If we must focus on one category in the 400 or so deaths this nation records every day, we should demand to know if Covid was a primary cause and the extent to which it is replacing influenza and other ailments in sadly ending the lives of vulnerable people every year. Nothing demonstrates the potential distortions more clearly than the fact deaths in palliative care have been counted as Covid fatalities.

We are one of the most vaccinated nations on the planet, with more than 90 per cent of eligible adults doubled jabbed. We have ample medical resources available, with the surge capacity of thousands of extra critical care beds not even close to being needed – the main problem for the health system is staff forced from work by over-the-top isolation rules (despite the shortages, hospitals will not accept unvaccinated nurses).

It is the height of summer, too, and the dominant Omicron variant is even more mild than what has come before. If we cannot open now, then when?

Attitudes towards the unvaccinated seem to be less about science than feelings, more about group control than effective outcomes. It is important to point out that I am fully vaccinated, plus booster, and from the start I have not only been eager for my elderly relatives to be protected but have promoted the benefits of vaccination on air – but to pretend vaccination gives foolproof protection or that the unvaccinated are a threat to the rest of us is just to defy reality.

Aside from managing our pre-existing health and wellbeing, the fully vaccinated have done all we can to protect ourselves from the worst effects of coronavirus. But it won’t stop us getting the disease or spreading it.

The unvaccinated are more likely to contract the disease, marginally more likely to pass it on, and certainly more likely to suffer serious ill-effects. But even still, outside the vulnerable cohorts, Covid-19 still will not cause serious illness for most of the unvaccinated – that is just the reality.

All of this renders incomprehensible our antipathy towards the unvaccinated, as demonstrated most vehemently in the treatment of Novak Djokovic. He was no threat to us, he broke no rules or laws, yet he was vilified and deported.

It would be understandable if the unvaccinated posed a serious threat to anyone but themselves; they do not. The worst that can be said is they could impose a disproportionate burden on the health system – the same could be said for the obese, smokers, heavy drinkers, motorcyclists, and others.

And whatever the arguments, the unvaccinated look like amounting to no more than 5 per cent of the population – so let us move on. If you want a bogeyman, target the overreach of politicians and the reckless interventions that will both discombobulate the education and early careers of so many young people, and weigh them down with taxation for decades to come.

To question the vaccine mandates or strategies is to be dubbed a heretic. When the Coalition government deported Djokovic for his anti-vaccination stance, the Labor opposition did not oppose it on principle; rather, they questioned why it was not done earlier, and they called for other political sceptics to be silenced too.

Free speech does not exist on vaccines or Covid responses; pregnant women have been arrested in their homes for daring to disagree online, and basketball star Andrew Bogut was threatened by the Victorian Electoral Commission over a pandemic-related anti-government tweet. Extreme views on the other side of the debate – arguing for blanket vaccine mandates, extended lockdowns, school closures, harsh border bans or even the denial of public healthcare to the unvaccinated – are not censored, silenced or prosecuted, but rather amplified and even endorsed by the ABC and other hysterical media.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on quarantine facilities even as the state governments that demanded them scrap quarantine requirements. This was not unforeseeable; I said at the time these projects were demanded and agreed as political plays, and were destined quickly to become white elephants.

Oppositions of both political persuasions have been too cowardly to call out the overreach of Covid responses or propose more pragmatic strategies. Instead, they have nitpicked around implementation and priorities, so that every outbreak and death count can be used as a political barb – it is that cynical.

There are too many uncertainties to confidently predict how this will play out in the federal election. Scott Morrison needs to ignore the admonition from sensationalist media and panicky premiers, and focus on a pragmatic approach to opening up the country as we learn to live with a disease always destined to touch us all and be with us for the long haul.

Morrison can argue few countries have put themselves in a better position to do this without experiencing massive mortality and trauma along the way. Having been too complicit in frightening the population and accepting state overreach, he has three or four months to reintroduce voters to reality.

Labor runs an implausible attack, arguing the Coalition: bungled the vaccination rollout, when we have one of the highest vaccination rates in world: stuffed up the quarantine and medical response, when we have one of the lowest fatality rates; and mismanaged the economic response, when we have more people in work than before the pandemic.

If this is an unsuccessful pandemic response, I would love to see a good one.

We now have media stories demanding vaccines for pets. This a clue as to how mollycoddled we have become compared to the rest of the world.

Since the arrival of vaccines, we have suffered more from our response than from the disease. With the average age of Covid deaths still higher than average life expectancy, it is the young who are suffering and who will pay the highest price.

The fate of the country will depend on how meaningfully we can recognise and reverse the appallingly timid, needy and compliant character traits that have been revealed over the past two years. We also urgently need to review and reform the unfit-for-purpose emergency laws that have allowed state governments to act so capriciously, with scant regard for the nation as a whole.