Annabel FENWICK-ELLIOTT
This week, Australia’s treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced that Australia’s borders will likely be closed for another year. This, he says, is “assuming” there will be a vaccine available “around the end of 2021”. That makes it 452 days, minimum, until I can see my father and siblings again – added to the 790 days since we last saw each other.
I called my father to deliver the news. “I’m a prisoner!” he retorted, and made a joke about Australia reverting to a convict nation. Which it sort of has; the difference being that its citizens have done nothing to deserve their confinement. Indeed, in the name of fighting this virus, dangerous only to a fraction of the population, the Australian army has been deployed and civilian snitches recruited to catch anyone breaking a hint of a rule.
My father, unsurprisingly keen for a break, looked into meeting me in Europe back in August. For that he would have had to apply for written permission from the government to leave the country under exceptional circumstances, which he would have almost certainly been denied. Were he to somehow escape, he would, upon re-entering Australia, have been confined to a state-approved facility for 14 days (and pay A$3,000, or £1,700, for the privilege).
My little sister, 21, and brother, 18, should be at university in Melbourne enjoying the sort of reckless freedom that marks one’s ascent into adulthood. Instead they are at home, bored witless, plugged into online lectures, staring down a future in which they will have to pay for all this mass hysteria with a lifetime of inflated taxes.
In an average year, 158,000 Australians pop their clogs. There have been not even 900 Covid-19 deaths in the country thus far, which you might say is an impressively low figure
– proof that its stringent lockdown is worth it. But at what cost? Analysis of Frydenberg’s latest federal budget predicts that Australia will be in debt over this until at least 2080 – a grossly unnecessary number, for a virus that almost definitely will not harm the vast majority of the population.
The Australian government knows what will happen if it opens the borders. There will be an inevitable surge in cases as foreigners mingle with a population that has been denied the chance to build up any herd immunity. Most cases will be asymptomatic.
Yes, there will be more deaths, but nowhere near the number that would justify continuing to live like this. More people die of tuberculosis every year than have died from Covid-19. The same is true of road accidents. These are all risks we have to live alongside, not hermetically seal ourselves from.
I last saw my Australian family last Christmas. I certainly won’t see them this Christmas, or possibly even the next. It’s frustrating and sad but my plight is nothing compared with that of millions of people around the world whose lives had been wrecked, not by the virus, but our neurotic and miscalculated response to it.