Border Force Majeure
The Queensland Government is exercising godlike powers for political gain while abdicating its responsibility to the state’s businesses. By Nick Cater.
A Maroons victory in the State of Origin would have been a welcome distraction for Annastacia Palaszczuk right now, with her government up to its neck in scandal and Queensland drowning in debt.
The competition having been postponed to November, a month after the state election, Palaszczuk has engaged in another jingoistic campaign to keep the border with NSW closed, supposedly to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 cascading across the state.
She seems little concerned about the economic pain these ill-judged and possibly unconstitutional measures will cause. Those old enough to have worked in a recession (Palaszczuk is not among them) do not quickly forget the sight of bosses poring anxiously over line items, or fellow workers being laid off job market.
COVID-19: Read all the MRC’s coverage here
Yet we have reached the point in the Queensland electoral cycle where the only jobs that seem to matter are those of the governing party and its salaried acolytes. The Premier – who is also Minister for Trade – seems indifferent to the jobs at risk from severing the economic artery that runs across the 69th parallel.
Residents of Tweed Heads can now better imagine how Berliners must have felt in August 1961, when the Soviets cut their thriving metropolis in two. Crossing Binya Street without a valid reason is now technically verboten. And what happens with the section of the border that runs across the runway of Coolangatta Airport?
The Palaszczuk government sees advantage in politicising the pandemic, exploiting popular fear of a virus that had been contained before border restrictions were introduced. In the seven days before the April 11 closure, the number of infections in Queensland had risen by just 8 per cent to 974. Two weeks before they had risen by 44 per cent, and by 182 per cent the week before that.
Four out of five infections in Queensland were acquired overseas. Fewer than 2 per cent were acquired interstate. In other words, justification for closing the borders in the first place, let alone keeping them closed, is zero.
Yet sealing the borders is a popular step if you believe a series of Facebook polls run by the ABC. Two-thirds of regional Queenslanders supposedly oppose any lifting of restrictions.
The ABC, naturally, does too.
State political reporter Allyson Horn wrote a partisan piece on the weekend, claiming it was irrational to suggest that the Premier would persist if closing the borders wasn’t “absolutely essential”. Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington, on the other hand, was engaging in opposition for opposition’s sake. Frecklington’s criticism of border closures while claiming she was listening to health advice was “a pretty glaring contradiction”, wrote Horn. That’s about as deep as it gets on the ABC.
As happens so often in the Facebook era, we have long since lost any sense of proportion in the COVID-19 debate, let alone an impartial assessment of the facts.
For all the talk of a second wave from a mutant strain, the only thing that has demonstrably mutated is the public policy mission on which we have embarked. In late March it was the avoidance of overcrowded hospitals. Today it is the avoidance of death, the value of every life being priceless in the eyes of the public health brigade.
Avoiding a prolonged and deep recession seems to be low in the priorities of the Queensland government and its partisan cheer squad, even though that is the most evident danger right now.
Who are the experts giving the advice upon which Palaszczuk is making these barmy decisions? Clearly not economists or the Business Council of Australia, whose modelling demonstrates that the cost in jobs and wages of prolonging the shutdown rises exponentially.
Nor is she taking the advice from experts in pandemics. The science of epidemiology is primarily an exercise in mathematics, not medicine. The methodology we use to combat contagion was developed early in the last century by Ronald Ross, who set out to prove that malaria could be contained by removing the tanks and ponds that bred mosquitoes. His breakthrough was the discovery that not every mosquito needs be hunted down to the last foetid water source. You just had to remove enough mosquitoes to bring the rate of infection below the rate of death and recovery and leave the rest to the maths.
Ignorance is hardly an excuse. As a member of the national cabinet, Palaszczuk would know that whatever fears there may have been of a full-blown pandemic in late March have greatly subsided.
One can only assume, therefore, that the fear she has is the well-founded fear that she might lose the election.
The experts she appears to be listening to most are the experts in polling. They have led her to believe that stoking fears of a second wave and cocooning the state are the best way to win regional Queensland.
Robert Menzies reserved special contempt for any politician who was “sufficiently spineless to abandon his own reasoned convictions for fear of losing his seat in parliament”. He spoke about it in the second of two radio talks entitled Freedom From Fear, delivered in the middle of World War II.
“If I have honestly and thoughtfully arrived at a certain conclusion on a public question and my electors disagree with me, my first duty is to endeavour to persuade them that my view is right,” he said.
“If I fail in this, my second duty will be to accept the electoral consequences and not to run away from them. Fear can never be a proper or useful ingredient in those mutual relations of respect and goodwill which ought to exist between the elector and the elected.”