Spectator Australia

Spectator Australia, 7 August, 2021

The long line of red lights stretching into the darkness ahead of me is a familiar sight. I am on the Hume Highway driving to Canberra once again to avoid the prospect of 14 days in quarantine should the Victorian Premier continue to lock down the State. The drive is hardly lonely; there is a semi- trailer, lit up in bright red and white lights, every few hundred metres, maintaining the essential supplies to our cities and exports overseas despite the Covid restrictions. After a negative Covid test, I can work from my Parliament House office, dealing with constituents’ issues and continuing my committee business. The ACT has been the most open jurisdiction in the Commonwealth. I am one of the fortunate ones who can work from home or remotely. Many people cannot, but their plight seems lost in the continuing lockdown fetish of state premiers.

After months of refusing to say so, the Victorian Premier finally admitted that he has been pursuing a zero-risk approach. We must ‘stamp out this Delta variant,’ he said in announcing yet another extension of the State’s lockdown.

Globally, governments have pursued one of two strategies:  a zero-risk approach or a managed-risk approach. Along with New Zealand and South Korea - at least until recently - and China - we have attempted isolation rather than management. Other countries, such as Britain, have sought to manage the risk, opening, even with significant cases. While the rhetoric has sometimes been confusing, the actions have been clear: to manage and live with the risks. As England’s Deputy Chief Health Officer, Jonathan Van Tam, said recently, “Nothing reduces the [Covid] risks to zero other than standing in a meadow completely on your own ad infinitum.”

At some stage, Australia must move to a risk-management approach. Covid is not going to be eliminated, and we cannot keep state and national borders closed for ever. Only one human virus, smallpox, has been eradicated, and that took two centuries to achieve!

Australians have been very patient, but that patience is quickly dissipating. They are becoming increasingly frustrated that governments are obfuscating. Why could an online comedian release the NSW daily infection numbers 15 hours before the Premier?  Governments should be upfront with the public. For example, the number of Covid patients in hospital, the number in ICUs and the number who had died, including their age and comorbidities, on a daily rate, to date and per 100,000 eligible people, for global comparisons. State governments should also provide daily, and up-to-to date statistics of the eligible people vaccinated, as well as per 100,000 eligible people for global comparisons.  In 2019, 464 people died each day in Australia, a comparison that fear-mongering premiers fail to mention. Many more people continue to die from car accidents, suicide, influenza and other causes than from Covid. How many are dying because of the inability to obtain timely treatment for other conditions due to the restrictions?

There has also been an abject failure to consider other, complimentary approaches to dealing with the virus, including possible treatments and rapid testing.

There are vague hints that our risk adverse approach will change at some stage in the future, but there is no guarantee.   While premiers continue to hide behind unelected health officials who offer such idiotic advice as not touching a football that flies over the boundary fence at an AFL game, or, if you are frustrated with lockdowns , rearrange your sock drawer, there is no certainty about opening-up. We should be told what proportion of the population being vaccinated means no more lockdowns. And when will people who have been fully vaccinated be at liberty to go about their lives free of restrictions?

Preliminary analysis from the UK indicates that during the northern hemisphere winter wave, when daily cases were averaging what they are now, there were almost 27 times more Covid deaths each day and nine times more people in hospital.

There are currently 125 patients on a ventilator for every 10,000 daily new infections, compared with 2,312 per 10,000 cases at the same point in the previous wave.

People aged 54 and under account for 60 per cent of virus patients admitted to hospital in England during this wave, compared with just 22 per cent during the winter wave.

Some 87.6 per cent of people in the UK have now received at least one dose of the vaccine, up from 28.9 per cent at the same time point in the winter wave.

Australians deserve to be told at what point of vaccinations, large-scale lockdowns will cease.

Because of the strategy adopted by the premiers, the Australian polity faces two significant challenges beyond the health and economic consequences of Covid.

The first is to repair the growing gap between two groups of Australians. Benjamin Disraeli once said that “the Privileged and the People formed two nations.” His famous reference was less about poverty as such and more about the lack of connection he observed between the rich and the poor. In Australia today, the lack of connection between the information generating ‘elites’ who dominate much of the media, especially the social media, and ordinary people who operate and work in traditional trades and businesses has been exacerbated by the Covid restrictions. Australia is more factionalised and divided than it has been for decades.

The second is to repair the Commonwealth. It was Henry Parkes’ great rallying call for federation that we are ‘one people with one destiny’. That notion has been abandoned by the premiers. If it wasn’t for section 92 of the Constitution, I suspect that they would even stop interstate trade. It is fanciful to imagine that the founders of the nation ever envisaged that Australians would not be able to travel freely between states. Even if some restrictions for health reasons can be justified, there has been no precision in their application. Whole states are locked down, including areas that have never had a Covid infection.

In addition to securing our economic and national security, reclaiming the notion that we are ‘one nation with one destiny’ is the great challenge facing us.