Lockdown lovers

Nanny state enthusiasts need to acknowledge that public sentiment on lockdown is shifting. By Nick Cater.

Australians have decided that rolling up a sleeve is a small price to pay for freedom. The speed of vaccine delivery has accelerated in the past eight weeks from 84 jabs a minute at the start of July to 180 a minute last week.

The eagerness to be vaccinated coincides with a shift in public sentiment from fear to hope that began when the states and the commonwealth agreed on a national exit plan on August 6.

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg were among the first to respond by stating plainly what the health experts had known for months: the pursuit of zero-Covid is the mission of a fool. Australia would have to learn to live with the coronavirus, a conclusion that has been reached in every country in the world, with the notable exceptions of China and New Zealand. Good luck to them. As Morrison put it bluntly last week, “We can’t stay in the cave forever”.

Two surveys six weeks apart show how accurately the Prime Minister and Treasurer have read the public mood. In the second week of July, fewer than one in five Australians (19 per cent) agreed that we must learn to live with the virus. Last week, three out of four (73 per cent) had come around to that view.

Last week’s survey by Compass Polling, commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre, found that four out of five Australians (81 per cent) support the national plan, agreeing that state and federal governments should co-operate to manage borders and lockdowns, rather than going it alone.

One by one, premiers have felt the change in the wind. Gladys Berejiklian was an early convert after eight weeks of learning the hard way that the Delta variant is all but impossible to beat.

Daniel Andrews, who stays closely in touch with public sentiment by spending more on polling than any other premier, came onboard last Monday. Other state governments are crab-walking their way back to reality. South Australia’s Steven Marshall has softened his tone, saying targeted lockdowns will only be a “very last resort” when vaccine targets are met.

However, not every premier’s ear is as close to the ground. Last week, the Labor premiers in Queensland and Western Australia retreated further into their grottoes, refusing to relinquish the right to unilaterally close their borders, even when four out of five Australians have been double-jabbed.

The extent to which this preposterous, vain and destructive sub-nationalism is driven by genuine concerns about the virus is an open question. Hindering Morrison’s ability to campaign in Queensland and WA by retaining the power to close borders until the next election would serve the premiers and their party well.

The adoption of the Sino-Kiwi zero-Covid plan by Mark McGowan and Annastacia Palaszczuk is, of course, absurd. Like other countries, Australian governments will have to take calculated risks if we want to end this nightmare as other countries have done. In Denmark, where 80 per cent of residents aged over 12 have been vaccinated, Covid-19 is about to be delisted as a “socially critical disease”.

Arguably, it is already socially uncritical in Australia where the risk of death or serious illness is many times smaller than it was in the early months of the pandemic. The risk of hospitalisation and death is reducing incrementally 11,000 times an hour as the vaccine is injected in tiny doses into mostly willing arms.

By now, almost every nursing home resident has had two shots. Four out of five Australians aged over 70 have had one shot and three out of five have been vaccinated twice.

Yet the media’s preference for bad news over good is difficult to break. Sometime this week we’ll be reading headlines about the “grim milestone” that will have been reached when the death toll from coronavirus enters four figures. Few will remember the last grim milestone 10 months ago, 900 deaths from the first 27,000 cases, which reflected the force of Covid-19’s rampage through Victorian nursing homes.

The relatively small number of fatalities from the 20,000 or so cases since then has deeply disappointed the lockdown-happy brigade, which insists on talking about infections. Fatalities rarely make the lead paragraph, except the occasional death of someone under 50, when extraordinary lengths are taken to hide any pre-existing co-morbidities under the shroud of patient confidentiality.

One suspects some premiers are enjoying their 18-month holiday from democracy and are reluctant to surrender the licence to boss us around. This should not surprise us, since ordering society from the top is in the left’s DNA. The progressive movement has been pursuing visions of utopia since the late 19th century, longing for a land where people live spineless and effortless under the benign protection of the state.

Growth in higher education expanded the cohort of people who think they are smarter than the rest and therefore have the right to issue orders. They are members of the laptop class whose jobs can be performed remotely, tend to live in the more comfortable suburbs, have their children late in life (if at all) and parade their moral certainties on Twitter.

Liberals have a battle on their hands. It is becoming increasingly unfashionable to attach oneself to a philosophy that puts human independence ahead of state control. The nanny state they have been pushing back for years is now upon us and it will take some effort to dismantle it when the pandemic finally ends.

Nevertheless, McGowan and Palaszczuk should think carefully before welshing on the deal they agreed in national cabinet. Australians don’t take kindly to broken promises and, after almost 18 months of lockdown, they have clearly had enough.

They should think carefully, too, before casting NSW as the laggard state, or mocking Morrison for saying that this is not a race. The rate of vaccination in WA last week was 34 per cent slower per capita than in NSW. In Queensland it was 44 per cent slower, putting NSW on target to reach the 80 per cent target weeks, if not months, in front.

The change in national mood is clear: let’s get the jab done and get on with our lives. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the strongest reason for people to bear arms is to protect themselves from the tyranny of the state. With a minor spelling adjustment, his dictum neatly captures the public mood.