Alarmists seem to have Albo’s ear

Covid travel testing pointless, writes James Morrow

ALONG with the Catholic Church, the Rabbitohs and the ALP, Anthony Albanese has always been keen to remind us that he is a strong believer in science.

The only problem for the Prime Minister is that science doesn’t vote.

Teals, Twitter hysterics and doctors’ lobbies all do.

Hence the government’s bizarre decision to go over the top of its own high priest of science, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, to impose what pretty much everyone agrees is a window dressing requirement for negative Covid tests for travellers from China.

Here it’s worth considering our two nations’ respective Covid caseloads.

To put it simply, while China and Australia may be very different countries, one thing we have in common is an absolute ton of Covid.

Australia, the incredibly helpful Worldometers website tells us, has something like the 16th highest number of new cases in the world – an amazing accomplishment for a nation that for a time was second only to China in its love of locking people up for their own good.

And we know that number is likely far higher because even pernickety rule-following Australians have for the most part stopped telling anyone connected with officialdom if they test positive, with growing numbers of people just acting normally and staying home if they feel a bit crook.

China, meanwhile, has basically stopped reporting its Covid cases altogether, both because no one has ever trusted their figures and anyway if they did publish them the number of 0s would run off the edge of the page. Yet the country which terrified the world with what were in retrospect hilariously slapstick viral (ahem) videos of Covid sufferers collapsing in the streets is now seeing something like a million people infected every day.

The biggest problem with this, we are told, is not that their hospital system is overwhelmed but that so many people are calling in sick that the world is going to face delays getting parts and materials out of mainland factories.

Oh, the humanity.

Of course, we are told that there are good scientific reasons behind the Albanese government’s flicking the switch to, if not full blown alarmism, then “an abundance of caution”.

We were also told that there was good scientific reasoning behind cops harassing and fining people for sitting in a park reading a book or going for a swim in the ocean. The reasoning was so sound that in November a court finally vacated over 33,000 Covid-related fines issued by NSW Police.

And people wonder why there is a declining trust in “experts”.

Today the reasoning around the China test requirement seems to be that, well, there may be some new variant swirling around up there that will be some long-jumping superspreader with more skills at vaccine dodging than Novak Djokovic. If this is the case, though, we haven’t a hope in hell.

Even many of the old Covid maximalists have said the government’s move is pointless.

Professor Raina McIntyre, who once suggested that if you could smell your neighbour’s cooking you might catch their Covid, called the idea out on Twitter the other day.

“The point of closing borders is to prevent infection coming in when there is none or little domestically,” she tweeted. “There is little point when infection is rampant in the community.” Indeed.

And again, the CMO has also said that the testing requirement was pointless and imposed against his specific advice.

So much for “trusting the science”.

Absent any other justification, then, what could be going on here?

Back in 2020, Albanese lamented that “for years, science has been a victim of the culture wars”. And indeed he may have been correct, just not in the way he thought.

“Science” is not a monolith any more than the Roman Catholic Church which, to judge by some of the reaction to the death of Pope Benedict XVI, has more than a few dissidents who nonetheless count themselves members of the tribe.

And in the case of Covid it also has more than a few fundamentalists.

Such as Roderick McRae, the head of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association who said passengers from China landing in Melbourne should be quarantined for a week.

And Kooyong teal MP Monique Ryan who this week asked if it was “time to require pre-travel testing of all travellers entering Australia from Europe, the US, Africa and Asia” as well as “maybe reinstate other public health measures”.

No points for guessing what she meant there. Nor for guessing which faction of “science” the PM will ultimately listen to when there is a doctrinal dispute between its branches.