What Brett Sutton should have said ... ‘I had to eat!’

Christine Nixon, left, and Brett Sutton.

Having confined millions of Melburnians within 25km of their homes as well as prohibiting them from receiving visitors due to Covid restrictions, the state’s chief health officer, Professor Brett Sutton, travelled last week to Canberra for the National Health and Medical Research Council awards ceremony.

Many have reacted angrily to news of the trip, but only the ignorant and ill-bred types. As Sutton explained, far from being a soiree, this was a work trip and thus within the rules. “It was an event held over two days to honour medical researchers,” he said. “You can’t really honour people for their fantastic research without being there in person.”

Indeed, one cannot. It is not possible, for example, to honour the researchers by emailing a cheery ‘well done’, or by sending them a congratulatory note on letterhead. Presumably, his office does not possess video conference facilities that could have enabled his virtual attendance. And let’s be clear, even though the occasion is ostensibly about the prizewinners, it would not be a success without the great man himself being there. I empathise with Sutton. I too believe in the necessity of flying interstate to honour colleagues while I hoover hors d’oeuvres and drink fine wine at someone else’s expense.

Appearing bemused and even slightly hurt at the adverse publicity, Sutton observed “Maybe, if I could have my time again - I was disappointed that the distraction was about me and not about that important meeting.” That was far too conciliatory. Taking his cue from former Victoria Police chief commissioner Christine Nixon, he instead should have exclaimed “I had to eat!” when challenged. Naturally, the hashtag #IStandWithBrett soon began trending on social media when criticism of him became public.

All reasonable people would surely agree it was only right that the number one priority of Victoria’s chief health officer last week was an interstate junket, as opposed to allowing a community to honour Cooper Onyett, the eight-year-old Warrnambool boy who drowned on a school camp. Last month Victorian health bureaucrats refused to grant his family an exemption to the 10-person limit to enable his mother, Skye Meinen, to give her son a normal funeral, notwithstanding that Warrnambool is 250km from Melbourne and had no Covid cases. Refusing to intervene, Sutton declared the decision-makers were mindful of “equity issues” regarding other funerals.

It was only last year that Sutton was tweeting the hashtag #StayHomeStaySafe to remind Victorians of the necessity of minimising contact. I do not recall #ExceptForInterstateShindigs being a rider to that advice. Neither do most Victorians, I imagine, who have just emerged from the fourth wave of the virus. Over 30,000 of them have moved interstate since March last year. The only growth industry there now is the receivership one. For Victorians not on the state’s public payroll, the financial situation is indeed grim. But as one might observe in between canapes, we’re all in this together.

Sutton’s hypocrisy and lack of emotional intelligence are proof that the term ‘public servant’ is an anachronism. Australians have long regarded that title as ironic, and the pandemic has only further exposed the pretence, particularly in states with Labor governments. For example, as the Fin Review reported last month, public service wages in Victoria under the Andrews government have grown faster than those in any other state or territory. As of November 2020, full-time adult weekly cash earnings for Victorian public sector worker were on average $333 higher than those of their private sector counterparts. Over the last five years, the number of Victorian public servants has increased by 32 per cent.

It is boom time for the public service class in Queensland as well. No fewer than 34,357 workers have been added to the public sector since 2014-15 under the Palaszczuk government, their wage bill for next year estimated at $27bn. The Queensland Premier has looked after her true constituents. As for those in the private sector, her attitude has been tokenistic. Her arbitrary border closures have all but destroyed the state’s once thriving tourism industry. Her response? “I’m calling on the Prime Minister to extend JobKeeper for the entire tourism industry,” said Palaszczuk in March.

Federally, let’s not forget Australian Securities and Investments Commission employees who last September rejected calls to observe wage restraint, and instead voted not to delay a two per cent pay increase in 2021, despite having received an identical one in May 2020. Assumedly they are doing it tough given only 55 per cent of them are at the executive level.

It is now citizens who are beholden to public servants. We seek their permission to cross state borders, we implore them to let us leave the country, and in some cases they deny us entry when we try to return from overseas. Whether you are allowed to see your dying parent can depend on their say so. For the statutory office holders such as chief health officers, their powers are omnipotent.

Of course, people like Sutton and his Queensland counterpart Jeannette Young are experts in their field, and it is impertinent of us non-experts to question their reasoning. As Young told the Courier-Mail in December, “I am a very, very conservative person. I’m always going to take the safest outcome.” Take for example her decision to allow American actor Tom Hanks and his entourage to enter Queensland, as well as AFL players from a state then experiencing the worst of the pandemic – while at the same time denying interstate Australians from Covid-free areas from visiting dying relatives. It’s the science, you see.

What we are seeing is government by technocrats, a phenomenon evident well before the pandemic took hold. Lord Salisbury, Britain’s greatest prime minster of the nineteenth century, said it best about this class. “No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts,” he wrote. “If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”

I am not denying that experts possess superior knowledge in their field, but I do worry the more their liking for a microphone, the greater their capacity for extrapolation. In March last year epidemiologist and University of NSW professor Raina McIntyre told Seven News that between “25 per cent to 70 per cent” of Australians would be infected by Covid in the event of an outbreak. “It could be hundreds of thousands of people,” she said, when asked how many would die. At last count just under 0.12 per cent of Australians have contracted the virus.

The same month that McIntyre made this prediction, science commentator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told Adelaide’s Mix 1023 listeners that “in Australia about a quarter of a million people will die” of the virus. As of today, the number of deaths is 910. Around the same time, ANU professor Warwick McKibbin used economic modelling to predict Covid would kill between 21,000 and 96,000 Australians.

But what does it say when so many of us are prepared to accept these wild predictions without question? To this day some still regard mammologist Tim Flannery as the guru on climate change, despite his predictions being but a stand-up routine of climate comedy. And for the last seven years, we have overturned every historical anthropological observation about Indigenous Australia solely on the farcical conclusions of Bruce Pascoe, a former teacher with dubious claims to Aboriginality.

Then there is the ABC’s medical journalist Dr Norman Swan, who told Radio National yesterday “NSW people are not respectful of this virus the same extent Victorians are.” I have written recently about Swan’s many dud forecasts and will not repeat them, save for mentioning that he tweeted last year on the eve of Victoria’s second wave last year that the state “seems to have done everything right”. Enough said.

Whatever the crisis, there is always someone demanding we follow the advice of the experts. No worries. Let me know when you have sorted them from the agenda-driven, the charlatans, the egotists, the self-promoters, the hypocrites, the dilettantes, the empire-builders, the activists, the careerists, the opportunists, and the control freaks. You will find then I am all ears.