Coronavirus Straitjacket

We are trapped in a vortex created by a Premier lacking the courage or imagination to chart a smarter course than the current one that has demonstrably failed. By Nick Cater.

The Victorian Premier needs rescuing from a trap of his own making; for the sake of his state and the nation, he must quickly break free.

For the last five months Daniel Andrews has been enflaming anxiety about COVID-19. He enforced the most draconian lockdown in the nation in response to a crisis he had deliberately inflated. Now that he has a real crisis on his hands, he doesn’t know what to do. The hermetic seal that should have been placed around nursing homes has been breached. The tracking and tracing mechanism, a state responsibility, is largely ineffective, as the graph below illustrates. The virus has been allowed to get out of control.

Most seriously, Andrews has lost the trust of the community. Our tolerant, diligent, civic-minded people have been our greatest asset during this crisis. Most Australians have complied with social distancing and consented to the extreme, coercive control imposed on their lives, believing it was in everyone’s best interests.

Now, that consent is being withdrawn. Mobile phone data shows that movement in Melbourne’s CBD is significantly higher than it was during the first lockdown in March, even though the threat of community transmission is greater.

Before rushing blindly into ever-more punitive lockdown measures with diminishing returns, we urge Daniel Andrews to pause, take a break from his daily news conferences, and start again from first principles.

First, what is the public policy challenge to which he intends to rise?

If the aim of the exercise is to eradicate the virus, forget it.

If the aim is to reduce the demand for intensive health care so as not to overwhelm the system, and save lives, then there are smarter ways to do it.

We should learn the lessons from previous public health campaigns by targeting the message.

We didn’t stop kids from drowning in backyard swimming pools by banning them. We did so by mandating fences. We must adapt the ring-fence strategy to control COVID-19.

We must protect the elderly and Australians with pre-existing medical conditions much better than the Victorian government is doing.

If we can prevent someone in their 80s from contracting the virus, it is a least 20 times more likely that we will save a life than if we keep a person in their 40s virus free.

Resources, including the police and the army, must be deployed where the risk is greatest.

General practitioners should identity patients on their books with the most common co-morbidities, proactively inquire after their welfare, and politely suggest they stay at home.

Second, the Andrews government should return to public policy 101. It must trade off costs and benefits.

The benefits from lockdown measures have been decreasing, but the economic and social costs are rising, as Henry Ergas and Joe Branigan concluded in a report for the Menzies Research Centre last month.

Just because the economic costs are not immediately felt by the Premier and his Cabinet, or anyone else who draws their wage from the public purse, doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

The COVID-19 lockdown measures have induced a small-business recession that is eroding the base of our economy, and the costs are increasing exponentially every day.

The Victorian government is not paying the cost of JobSeeker, JobKeeper or any of the other special payments and concessions offered by the federal government.

It is not paying for the cost of the defence personnel and Commonwealth public servants drafted into his state. The Victorian lockdown imposes an impost on every taxpayer.

Ultimately, we are all trapped in the vortex created by a Premier lacking the courage or imagination to chart a smarter course than the current one that has demonstrably failed.