Negotiating the madness: Gutwein vs Perrottet

He might have seemed reckless in bowing to pressure from ScoMo and the tourist industry but still I feel easier with a man like Gutwein, writes Charles Wooley.

Lemmings wouldn’t do it.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is an enigmatic stick-insect of a man. Like the beautifully camouflaged praying mantis, when he is seen Dom exudes a sense of tranquility and sublime indifference to everything else happening in the vegetable plot.

As NSW covid case numbers multiply with the same intractable mathematics that sent Europe into another lockdown, just like the inscrutable mantis Dom doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch.

As the shadow of the reaper fell across the garden, nervous NSW government colleagues were asking each other, “Does Dom know something that the rest of us don’t know?”

Those who didn’t resign this week devoutly hope he does.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet at a swearing in ceremony at NSW Government House in Sydney, Tuesday, December 21, 2021. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)

There is nothing so elegant or unreadable about our own

Peter Gutwein. He’s a nuggety fighter, a black belt in Tai Kwan Do, a publican and a financial planner; he’s a bloke who looks like he’s taken a few blows as well as laid some.

He’s not as unsettling as the ascetic looking Dominic. Our Peter gives every appearance of being a pragmatic politician who is ready to change when the wind changes.

Why sail into a storm when you can tack around it?

He might have seemed reckless in bowing to pressure from ScoMo and the tourist industry but still I feel easier with a man like Gutwein. There is a feeling that common sense and caution might eventually prevail.

The present passing madness of completely opening so many Australian borders has all the hallmarks of the incompetent military buffoonery of Gallipoli.

And sadly, none of the glory.

Tasmanian Government Covid update at Hobart, Premier Peter Gutwein. Picture: Chris Kidd

The Federation allows state premiers considerable independence so there is already the chance our premier will further break ranks as he did when he mandated face masks.

It is probably now just a matter of numbers at home and across the water before we tighten borders on hot spots like NSW.

There is of course always an outside chance that ScoMo got it right and “miracles do happen”.

Perhaps Tasmanians are the Chosen People and Christmas will become our Feast of the Passover.

If that happens, I shall happily admit I was of little faith.

Certainly, listening to Dominic Perrottet and Scott Morrison this week their betting strategy seemed based on a trifecta of Optimism, Faith and Wishful Thinking.

If Premier Gutwein does take a tougher precautionary approach to protect the health of Tasmanians, the hired guns of hospitality will continue to whine and cajole (that’s what they are paid to do) but it’s all bluster.

With the Omicron Gang in town, people are staying home anyway.

Most of us are double vaccinated but increasingly we hear this confers much less protection over time. Without a booster, which WA has mandated, can you consider yourself fully vaccinated?

Testing site at Macquarie Point. COVID testing in Hobart. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

It depends on which expert you listen to.

But unfortunately, Australia is near the bottom of a list of 70 countries when it comes to vaccine booster delivery. We are way behind countries like Sri Lanka and Ireland which began booster programmes months ago.

This week the Governor of Van Diemens Land (spoiler alert, the writer is a republican) was out and about in the media encouraging Tasmanians to get their booster shot.

Representing Elizabeth Windsor, the head of the most out of touch family on earth, there must always be the danger of appearing, merely by association, a little estranged from the reality of common people.

The Governor, Barbara Baker, was no doubt well motivated in (presumably) acceding to a request from Health to boost the booster. What she didn’t appear to know about was the long queue stretching well into the New Year.

When our vice-regal personage went to the head of that queue to get her jab for the cameras, had nobody bothered to explain to her the difference between spin and delivery?

In no time, talk-radio, letters to the editor and the dreaded social media were full of common people complaining about having to wait weeks to get their booster jabs.

Punters who immediately rang or visited pharmacies were very cross, some even rude, when they discovered the good gubernatorial advice couldn’t be acted upon right away.

The panic was understandable because our government had just decided to import a little Covid and see how it played out. That’s why having boosters in the warehouse but not in the arms of Tasmanians didn’t make a lot of sense.

Tasmanian Governor Barbara Baker after receiving a Covid-19 booster vaccine at Government House Tasmania. Picture: Chris Kidd

As the Governor said, “There’s a lot of people now coming into the state and the Omicron variety is out and about in other states.”

So, what should the Governor of Van Diemens Land have done?

Well from my own modest experience of promoting what at first seem like genuinely good causes, you should always ask questions.

In this case: “Can everyone get the jab right away as I have just done?

And if not, why not?”

In our curious monarchial system of government vice-regal powers are often abstract, except back in 1975 when John Kerr had a couple of clarets too many and sacked Gough Whitlam.

Of course, the whole show is abstruse, inane and archaic and the sooner we stand on our own two feet the better.

Meanwhile the authority of the Queen’s powers (which devolve to our governor 17,396km from Buckingham Palace) was defined more than a hundred and fifty years ago as “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn.”

The Governor of Van Diemens Land also has the right to be “not amused” by being compromised by spin doctors. She should now be encouraged to consult and warn, telling them not to do it again.

I expect no thanks, no champagne and no canapes at the castle for pointing this out.

It’s a myth that lemmings “behave like lemmings” and blindly follow the leader, leaping off cliffs to drown in the wild seas below.

In fact, lemmings have been given a bad rap. They don’t do that but as history repeatedly and clearly shows, the metaphorical blind-leaping off a cliff is classic human behaviour.

If only lemmings could speak, they might have warned this week against opening our borders before we organised the boosters. They might even have cautioned, “Stop behaving like humans.”

Tasmania is selling itself short

IT wasn’t until 1999 that a chickenpox vaccine became generally available to all Australian kids.

Before then, if little Freddy down the road contracted the disease, all the kids in the neighbourhood were invited to what was called a “Chickenpox Party”.

The idea was that this was a disease milder when suffered young, so while the mums had tea and cakes the kids would play while Freddy spread the pox.

As a kid I thought it was a scary strategy.

I still do.

This week we are holding an “Omicron Party” and everyone is invited. You might prefer not to attend, but participation isn’t optional. Regardless of your reservations and fears (which could well be warranted given what is happening in Britain right now) and regardless of the declining efficacy of the inoculations you were convinced or cajoled into accepting, all Tasmanians are now in the path of what the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called an “Omicron tidal wave”.

Given the optimistic insouciance of our political leadership at the beginning of this week, we could only hope our government knows something that the British government doesn’t.

But yesterday’s news that Covid had come to the Tasmanian party was hardly a surprise.

You can’t have a Pox Party without inviting pox.

In the US, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that 80 per cent of confirmed cases with the mutated virus were twice vaccinated for Covid.

A third of infected cases had also received a booster.

There’s some hope that those folk had simply not been “boosted” in time to be fully protected before they were infected with the Omicron variant.

Warning this week that vaccines alone will not protect countries from Omicron, the World Health Organisation recommended a return to masks, distancing and sanitising.

Masks being worn at Salamanca Market. Picture: Richard Jupe

Despite a declining efficacy we are still advised to be inoculated and boosted. But until our government prioritises the booster program, the queue in Tasmania appears long and slow. At the time of writing, the earliest I can get my third jab is two weeks away.

I noticed that WHO didn’t recommend the medieval practice of crossing our fingers which did initially appear to be part of Tasmania’s defence strategy.

On Wednesday, Cassy O’Connor was speaking for a lot more people than just Greens voters when she said: “We hope that the Premier, having made the decision to open up our borders, has the courage and the flexibility to change tack if necessary and to pull up the drawbridge.”

Health Minister Michael Ferguson, the same day, made a pragmatic concession that said it all without really saying too much.

“We are ready for anything, and we are prepared to take any decision that is necessary to keep Tasmanians healthy and safe,” he said.

The politics of Covid are complicated and apparently as mutable as the virus itself. The government must look like it cares about ordinary Tasmanians while at the same time responding to sustained pressure from a powerful travel industry for whom a certain human collateral damage is acceptable, so long as it balances the books.

But the rising public alarm about our apparent medical unpreparedness for what is coming can’t be ignored. A federal election is looming and New South Wales has experienced a fourfold growth of infection in as many days and the overseas figures are nightmarish. Talk to the people in the front lines of our hospital system, the workers not the bureaucrats or the politicians, and you will find alarm and despondency.

Even before the around 40 flights a day started to arrive at Hobart Airport, our medical system was stretched beyond capacity.

I had a sick family member in hospital last week (unrelated to Covid) and it was a salutary experience, despite our being fully insured. Until now I had always thought that private medical insurance was responsible and prudent. Now I am not so sure.

What’s the purpose if there are no beds?

At midnight our teenager was turfed on to the street from one of the state’s best private hospitals. Only to be re-admitted in worse condition a day later.

The kid would have possibly done better, and certainly no worse, had he been ramped up at the RHH.

Doctors in America and in Britain agree that Omicron is spreading much faster than the Delta variant. While there is hope and some evidence that the new strain might be milder than the old, definitive scientific studies have not been published.

So maybe we shouldn’t bet the house on it just yet. But no. Too late. We already have.

The travel industry is important in Tasmania. Tourism claims to support 37,400 jobs or about 14.9 per cent of total employment.

So, it is at the very least damned inconvenient that air and sea travel are ways Omicron, and whatever variant comes after, hitch a ride around the planet.

I am not against tourism per se.

But I’m not alone in being uneasy about mass tourism which, even before the plague, had become increasingly unpopular in many of the world’s most visited destinations.

Barcelona is a lovely city of about 1.6 million people, made a lot less lovely for the locals by what is known in Europe as “over-tourism”.

La Rambla is the Barcelona equivalent of Salamanca Place (coincidently also a Spanish name).

And each day in the season 35,000 tourists would discharge from cruise ships to engulf what was once a favourite spot for locals. Those maritime invaders were just part of the annual horde of a staggering 32 million people who visited the city every year.

With Covid and the new variant causing lockdowns across Europe, Barcelona will be much quieter next summer which will please locals who had placed signs around the city saying, “Las turista van a casa”: Tourists Go Home.

In Barcelona, as in Hobart, residential accommodation had been converted to more lucrative short-stay accommodation.

Homeless and angry protesting Barcelones were driven to slashing the tyres of tour buses and abusing travellers.

Wineglass Bay viewed from the summit of Mt Amos. Picture: Nigel Killeen

The Age of Pandemic might give Tasmania a chance to draw breath (albeit through a mask) and to adopt a different approach to the travel industry and avoid the global crisis of over-tourism. Instead of the 1.2 million visitors we had pre-Covid, how about half that number paying twice as much?

We undervalue Tasmania’s assets if we modestly pitch our state as an economy destination, when we can see the success of upmarket offerings like Saffire and Pumphouse.

We need to attract visitors who are discerning and respectful and who appreciate a less crowded holiday with more intimacy, smaller personable hotels and a waterfront not crammed with cruise liners.

Then they will also appreciate the friendliness of the locals.

This isn’t to say that only the rich can come here: just to suggest that a Tassie holiday shouldn’t be the cheapest choice available.

The Tasman hotel’s St David’s Suite. Picture: Adam Gibson

This week I was shown the kind of upmarket accommodation appropriate for our city.

The Tasman is a brand-new luxury Marriott hotel in the heart of Salamanca. Like Pumphouse at Lake St Clair it has substantially repurposed existing architecture and I think done it well.

The Tasman, which opens today, incorporates Hobart’s built history of Georgian and Art Deco while it acknowledges the present day with a classy glass Pavilion building.

It has an elegant Italian restaurant, and a couple of cool bars.

I was fascinated to find in one hotel room, a beautifully crafted blackwood bathtub, built I am told by a boatwright.

Throw in an owl and a pussycat and you could sail away.

I might have to save up to stay at The Tasman where my favourite rooms are on the northeast corner looking back up Murray St to the junction with Macquarie St and the last intact Georgian intersection in Australia.

Given a tendency towards architectural vandalism, I’m not sure how we did it, but today’s discerning visitors are lucky to get to appreciate this unique cityscape unspoiled.

They might even murmur a word of thanks to Gough Whitlam who once told me it was his government’s heritage listing that saved Australia’s last Georgian intersection from destruction, “Comrade, I saved it from the barbarians,” Gough intoned.

Whitlam also helped to rescue the beautiful State Cinema in North Hobart. And he wanted to save Lake Pedder.

He would have surely been an upmarket tourist.

Come back Gough. All is forgiven.