Restrictions are borderline crazy
Inflexible travel shutdowns are killing country towns and ruining people’s lives for no reason
AUSTRALIA today looks less like a country than a group of tribes led by local strongmen and women whose principal interest is their own clan.
It has of late felt increasingly as if national cabinet is a casual, non-binding get-together where everyone has a bit of a chinwag and then sets back about doing whatever they like.
The Prime Minister has looked emasculated, if not impotent, as state leaders continue to act as they wish, arguably in an unconstitutional fashion, outsourcing responsibility to non-elected officials to make decisions that directly affect people’s lives.
It is bizarre the states have made such fanfare about the need to maintain sound mental health during the lockdown, yet have acted in a manner which, for many communities, maximises the mental anguish they must endure.
By mental anguish, I don’t mean the trifling inconvenience of staying on the couch for a while. I mean shutting your business, sacking your staff, pulling your kids out of school, moving into a caravan on the right side of your farm, all because you’ve been deemed to be living in the wrong part of Australia on the basis of some arbitrary line that a cartographer drew a couple of hundred years ago. As a South Australian, I am hardwired to feel a level of animus born from inadequacy towards the state of Victoria. Yet, proving that anything is possible in 2020, I now feel nothing but sympathy for the manner in which the people of that state have become lepers in their own land.
It is at the borders where this treatment is at its most appalling and illogical, where in some districts that are the size of European nations, with barely any (if any) coronavirus cases, the shutters have been drawn up to keep the infected Victorian hordes at bay.
All this in small Victorian rural towns, where the residents would no sooner travel to Melbourne than Mogadishu. The exact same situation is happening along Victoria’s northern border with NSW.
In Queensland, the Premier merely shrugged her shoulders last week when Qantas boss Alan Joyce rightly identified border closures as a key driver of the loss of 6000 jobs and $2.7bn at the national carrier this year.
In a memorable front page, the Hobart Mercury declared “WE’VE GOT A MOAT” in cheering the announcement of a hard border closure early in the pandemic. Canberra has no cases but its residents are still locked up. And in the NT, Territorians have been told to cancel their Christmas plans to see family — even to places where there are no cases of the virus.
In defence of the premiers and chief ministers, none of this madness would be happening if it wasn’t in keeping with the public mood, and urged on by opportunistic oppositions who, desperate to muscle their way onto the dance floor at a time of acute irrelevance, are often trying to outflank the incumbents by making outrageous demands for tougher closures and tighter restrictions.
To this end, we really are all in this together. The mass outbreak of state-based paranoia is a combined effort by governments, oppositions and voters.
It is country people who are suffering most as a result.
The handling of the pandemic has probably proved the long-held suspicion of rural folks that decisions in this country are made by citybased politicians and bureaucrats who have no understanding whatsoever of how their lives operate — and probably not that much interest either, as elections are won and lost in the cities.
Over the last few weeks I have ended up on speed-dial with a bunch of families along the SA-Victorian border. They are at their wits’ end.
In a dramatic escalation of the rules, SA banned all Victorian children except those in Years 11 and 12 from continuing to attend SA schools, barred all “non-urgent” medical travel and narrowed the definition of essential work to exclude a whole raft of small businesses.
They include Pinnaroo business owner Guy Badman, who shut his coffee shop indefinitely when the border exemptions were scrapped. His next-door neighbour on Pinnaroo’s high street, retailer Bec Oakley, did the same, and was busily packing away stock for storage as she contemplated the indefinite closure of the homewares and fashion store she opened almost two years ago.
Mr Badman’s wife Bronwyn teaches at Pinnaroo Primary School and is working on plans to create a “cell” of half a dozen five-year-olds who, as Victorians, will no longer be able to travel a few kilometres over the SA border to continue to attend their new school and must now be taught off-site on the Victorian side.
Ms Oakley also works one day a week at the primary school but has been told that, as a Victorian, she won’t be allowed back into SA from Friday to work.
The Badmans and their three children live 4km over the border in Victoria, while Bec Oakley and her farmer husband Trent and their two children live on a property that straddles the border in Panitya, but because their house is on the Victorian side of their property, they’re classified as Victorians.
“What sort of government are we living under that does this to Australian citizens?” Guy Badman asked.
It’s a fair question.