We must live with coronavirus, says tycoon Sam Shahin

South Australia’s most successful businessman has launched a withering attack on the state’s lockdown strategy and a lack of leadership across politics nationwide.

Peregrine Corporation executive director Sam Shahin. Picture: Russell Millard

South Australia’s most successful businessman has launched a withering attack on the state’s lockdown strategy and a lack of leadership across politics nationwide to chart a path out of the pandemic.

Despite strong public support in SA for the seven-day lockdown which finished at midnight on Tuesday, Peregrine Corporation executive director Sam Shahin urged the state and ­nation to have a more thoughtful conversation about the impact of the closures and the fact they may occur again.

He said he was yet to see any political leader in Australia who had properly explained how we could move beyond using the blunt instrument of lockdowns to combat the threat of outbreaks.

He urged Australia to look to moves by Singapore to stop running daily case counts and press conferences, and to treat Covid not as a pandemic but an ­endemic disease similar to influenza, HIV and malaria.

“One could argue that our political leaders have erred on almost every front in managing the pandemic,” Mr Shahin said.

“The pandemic has rushed our political leaders into the ‘today’, the tactics of survival. They lost the opportunity to ­establish the objectives first and to lead our nation through a global crisis with the minimum damage possible to our nation.

“The message about Covid had to be strong, clear, simple, and honest. It had to offer hope and it had to reward compliance.

“This is one of the key roles of leaders, to offer hope. Our leaders have not done a good job of it. They have relied on scare and doom tactics that are well established to work for only short ­periods, and known to backfire in long campaigns.”

Mr Shahin and his brothers Khalil and Yasser have a combined wealth of $1.93bn through their On the Run service station chain and other investments and were the highest placed South Australians on this year’s Australia’s Richest 250 published by The Weekend Australian.

They have invested much of their own money back into the state, principally through the Tailem Bend Motorsport Park which they funded entirely and earlier this year offered to lend to the state government as a quarantine venue.

Mr Shahin said it was a mistake for political leaders to pretend that a worldwide disease such as Covid could somehow be eliminated and that Singapore was taking a much more realistic approach to living with the virus.

“Our leaders need to assure and prepare the population for a future with an endemic disease,” he said. “We need strong, reassuring, confident, factual messaging providing a high degree of hope every citizen aspires for. The Singaporeans have done exactly that … They are transitioning from a pandemic to an endemic disease much the same as influenza, ­malaria or HIV.”

Mr Shahin said he feared Australia’s political leaders had surrendered so much of their decision-making to public health officials that they did not know how to regain their authority.