Last weekend I was sitting on the couch in lockdown, idly fantasising about a bus running over the genius in the Victorian government who thought it was a good idea to house a bunch of highly infectious people in a hotel right next to the airport with a clapped-out airconditioning system - when a bleak thought crossed my mind. That is, the way state governments are treating their citizens these days has taken on certain dynamics that are not dissimilar to a dysfunctional domestic relationship.
I know this is treading on sensitive ground and I certainly don't want to make light of the issue, as I know people who've been in that situation and understand the terrible time they have gone through. However, some of the behaviour of state governments during the pandemic has been so heartless, culpable and despicable that it's hard for me not to draw some sort of comparison.
Take the fining of people for trivial breaches like being out after 9pm or forgetting to wear a mask while presiding over a quarantine system which lets weddings take place in "hot" hotels or allows guards to fornicate with infected guests. It reminds me of the abusive husband who berates his wife for over-spending $5 on groceries while at the same time he's just gone and drunk and gambled away all of his monthly pay.
The sick feeling in my stomach that I get about life being upended yet again whenever the government announces a new quarantine leak on late night TV made me doubly sympathetic with the plight of the family who are always treading on eggshells around a volatile partner.
The favourable treatment handed out to celebrities who get to skip hotel quarantine, or to tennis players who get handed "exempted worker" status while stopping people in urgent need of medical treatment crossing the border reminds me of the coward who is charming to his superiors at the office but behaves abominably towards his own family.
The press conferences where Premiers get up and breathlessly announce that after an extended period stuck at home we can now go get a haircut like they're doing us a favour instead of us exercising a basic human right is redolent of the father who, after yelling at his kids for over an hour, tells them how lucky they are to have him looking after them.
The snap closing of borders and resultant heartache visited on people who've decided to go interstate for a much-needed holiday has a lot of similarity to the kid who has run out of the house to get a break from his situation only to be told by his father to get back inside quick smart or he or she will be sleeping outside that night.
You can agree with me or not about this comparison, but what's undeniable is that after a constant barrage of new lockdowns and state border closures, there is a lot more uncertainly and anxiety in the community about what the immediate future holds and how it is impossible to make even short term plans in either a personal or professional sense. Which to me says that while Australia has done a good job dealing with the public health threat of the pandemic, managing the aftermath has been an abject failure.
Instead of benefiting from a national approach on the way forward, everyone is being held hostage in a destructive race to the bottom by the states on risk-aversion. It seems to have been completely forgotten that the whole purpose of the initial lockdown was to make sure that the hospital system was not overrun with patients and to give government some breathing space to put in place measures such as hotel quarantine to help prevent the spread of the disease. But now, long after those measures have been in place and for the most part seem to be working, state governments (NSW excluded) remain obsessed with complete eradication to the almost complete exclusion of their other responsibilities like education, supporting small business, or, to my earlier point, dealing with the completely predictable spike in domestic violence.
Let's just examine for a minute the reasons why an eradication policy is mind-numbingly stupid. First, this bug is clearly highly contagious. Second, even with the international border closed, the trickle of people coming in from overseas is not going to stop, meaning that even if you do temporarily get rid of it locally, the virus is going to be on the first plane back in. Third, its evident from a succession of quarantine leaks that whether due to incompetence or just bad luck, state governments are simply incapable of stopping it getting back into the community. Ipso facto, eradication just does not work.
What is equally evident, however, is that a containment strategy DOES work. Since Melbourne finally emerged from lockdown last October, actual outbreaks in NSW and SA have been quickly dealt with, as have faux outbreaks in WA and Queensland. Even the unrivalled dunce of the pandemic management class in Victoria managed to get on top of an outbreak just after Christmas.
To support my point, let's look at the recent statistics. In the almost 4 months since Victoria re-opened, there have been 1350 cases in the whole of Australia, of which 323 have been acquired locally. To put that in perspective, yesterday the USA recorded that number of cases in 30 minutes. In total, of the 1350, these have resulted in a peak hospital load of 51 nationwide (with 5 patients in total needing to be in intensive care) and 2 deaths.
When you look at this, it clear that in post-pandemic Australia, you're more likely to die or sustain serious damage from fatigue driving off the road racing back to beat a border closure than you are from COVID-19. Yet despite these numbers, since that time it has only been possible to travel unimpeded between Melbourne and Sydney for 2 of those 4 months, Melbourne and Brisbane for 1, Melbourne and Adelaide for 1.5 and Melbourne and Perth not at all. Small wonder the tourism industry is on its knees, as who in their right mind would plan an interstate holiday right now?
So given all this, why is it that state governments are persisting with an eradication policy which doesn't work as opposed to a containment policy which does? If you understand how modern politicians think, then the answer to me is depressingly simple - if there is a major screw up with contact tracing, then they'll be held to account and might lose an election, so why take any risk? Far better to disrupt people's lives indefinitely than suffer a drop in the polls.
Worryingly, it's hard to see an endgame to this constant cycle of lockdowns and border closures. I really can't see vaccination being the silver bullet when you consider that a fair number of people can't or won't get vaccinated, meaning there could be a pool of at least 1,000,000 who could still be infected, or 50 times the total number of infections in Victoria last year. In a scenario where you're prepared to shut down a city the size of Brisbane off the back of 2 cases, that's an eye-popping figure for a state premier to confront.
And you can forget the Federal Government banging heads together to make this stop. After appearing to lead for the first 6 weeks of the pandemic, Scomo unwisely then stood back let the states run the show, which led predictably to the self-interested scenario we find ourselves in now. Also as a politician first and a leader second, he's well aware that the scare campaign is working at state level and the current settings are popular. So while he'll happily give NSW praise for the way they've handled things, he'll stop short of pushing the other states to follow suit.
The only way I can see a way out of this mess is if finally people start to say, enough is enough. We're sick of cancelling weddings, attending funerals of loved ones by Zoom, and want to go to Noosa for our holidays instead of Wonthaggi - so if we have to deal with an outbreak of 30 cases, how about you bozos manage it and let us get on with our lives. If governments start to sense a change in the political wind, then these days, inevitably they'll follow it.
But as things stand now, that's still some way off. State governments responsible for these settings won last year in Queensland, will romp home in WA and perhaps most bizarrely, hold a comfortable lead in the polls in Dystopian Victoria.
Which, without wanting to unnecessarily labour my analogy, makes it sound like we're all caught in the thrall of a form of Stockholm syndrome.
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