Let’s just live as hermits forever
DAVID PENBERTHY
IT’S not so much that Australia’s handling of the vaccination rollout and the creation of a postlockdown strategy has been inept. It actually appears to be inspired by the worst of us.
Our island nation risks becoming a hermit kingdom. Having taken the advantage of using our ocean perimeter to close the drawbridge on the rest of the world, a handy defence mechanism at the onset of the pandemic, we now seem halfinclined towards leaving that drawbridge closed indefinitely.
Most sensible people in Australia know that we can’t go on like this forever. But more than a few Australians seem to be thinking that maybe we can. It is my fear that the federal government in particular – and also the states with their kneejerk border closures – are governing not on the basis of the sensible majority who want a more energetic and ambitious return to normal, but that paranoid, myopic and unworldly rump of voters who might turf them out at the next election if they dare take even the most calculated of risks.
A recent visit by an old South Australian friend who has lived for years in the US helps illustrate the point. He was granted permission to return home to Adelaide to visit his elderly and unwell parents. Despite the fact he has been vaccinated twice and repeatedly tested negative for Covid, he was forced to spend two weeks in quarantine when he arrived here. When he leaves next week he will land back home in North Carolina and immediately return to normal life. Compare that situation to ours, where a pathetic 2 per cent of Australians have had their second vaccination, and where the federal government is still refusing to guarantee that we will be allowed to leave the country even once we are fully vaccinated.
Public policy in this country is being dictated by people who hold some or all of the following views. There’s no Covid here anyway so what’s the rush in getting vaccinated? We want to wait for a vaccine that we like. No one should be allowed in from overseas, especially overseas students. In fact no one should be allowed in from overseas even if they’re Australian citizens.
We even deign to call these
people “citizens of convenience”, even if they’re returning from an urgent family visit to India or because they were promoted from their Australian job to a posting overseas. Also, what’s the rush in opening the borders? I’ve travelled enough anyway. I don’t need to go overseas again for a while, if ever.
In a policy sense, these sentiments hold the whip hand. One of the many things Covid has killed in this country are the values of the 18th century Enlightenment, that great period of philosophical modernisation where people started to question authoritarianism, place their faith in science and recognise the educational value of travel.
In this unenlightened age, powered as it is by the internet, we see suspicion or hostility towards science evidenced by anti-vaxxer sentiment and baseless anxiety over statistically-minuscule rates of illness from overwhelmingly safe vaccinations. We see a selfish and narrow-minded hostility to the value of travel, both in and out.
It’s a fortress mentality aimed even at our own people who find themselves living abroad – especially those apparently upthemselves, cashed-up expats who dared “turn their back” on
Australia to work in London or New York. There’s also this absurd view that we have got all we need here in Australia anyway, and that we don’t really need to leave.
And as for the Enlightenment era’s determination to question authority, we now have a situation where some people are literally clamouring to be told what to do not just by elected governments but unelected people heading our police forces and public health departments. From toxic AFL balls that need to be dodged lest we catch Covid off a stray Sherrin at an Aussie rules game, to demonstrably dumb-arsed rulings that people in remote rural Victoria, even in towns where Covid has never been found once, must be treated like lepers in their own land. In response to that, the response from some in the community has been: well, if that’s what it takes to keep us safe, then so be it. It is supine.
We cannot tolerate a situation where Australia is governed on behalf of a handful of elderly folks who went to Bali twice and Fiji once – or maybe never even left Australia at all – and are happy to spend the rest of their days having coffee once a week at the local shopping mall.
Much has been said about the impact of Covid on the old. Obviously as a country we had to do everything to keep my parents’ generation safe from that health threat. To do otherwise would be inhumane. But in terms of where we are now – principally around the commonwealth’s shambolic management of the vaccine rollout – we risk a situation where the biggest victims of Covid in this country are the young.
We have already smashed our budgets and left the bill for future generations, and we clobber them further every time we impose a lockdown or close a border.
We have sent young
Australians half-mad through home schooling and social isolation at a time when they need human contact and increased mobility and socialisation to develop and grow.
And now we have a situation where all the freedoms that past generations took for granted are denied on behalf of the paranoid and insecure – all with one eye on not doing anything even remotely risky, for fear of losing a bloody election.