Sharp lockdown: blunt instrument
Daniel Andrews has once again taken to whacking the virus with a sledgehammer to cover up his government’s bureaucratic ineptitude. By Nick Cater.
It would have been a busy week at the excuse desk of Dan Andrews’ Department of Premier and Cabinet as its staff searched for something strong enough to immunise the boss from a new outbreak of bureaucratic ineptitude.
Their task was made harder by an unfortunate outburst of hubris on Tuesday when the Victorian Premier appeared at a news conference sans masque, as they like to say on the Paris end of Collins St. He boasted of Victoria’s “gold-standard” hotel quarantine system, even as early cases of the Holiday Inn outbreak were under investigation.
By Friday the mask was back as Andrews revealed some selected facts about breaches in protocol in a dowdy airport hotel to justify plunging the entire state back into lockdown hell or, as the Premier prefers it, “a short, sharp circuit breaker”.
Andrews should have abided by Aldous Huxley’s precept: “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”
Instead, he and his Chief Health Officer blamed a sick man who had recklessly applied lifesaving medication to himself by means of a nebuliser.
The sick man has since defended himself from his bed in intensive care, saying he is not a criminal, and insisting the nebuliser was used in his hotel room with the full knowledge of supervising staff.
Excuse number two was Variant of Concern 2020/12/01, otherwise known as the UK variant to everyone other than the Scots or the French, who call it the English Variant and “la Variante Anglaise” respectively. These terms, unlike the phrase “China virus”, do not qualify as xenophobic apparently. Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, refers to the variant as “super-infectious”, and Andrews as “hyper-infectious”.
The virus, he said, was “moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country over the course of these past 12 months”.
At that speed, so the feverish logic goes, it could be 300km along the Calder Highway before you know it. The Swan Hill Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, 3½ hours by road from the Holiday Inn, was forced to call off the country Victoria tennis tournament on the weekend with less than 24 hours’ notice. The club lost $40,000 in perishable stock and hundreds of hotel rooms in the town were left vacant.
“We agree with a lockdown to get on top of it,” tournament convener John Brookshaw told The Age, “but why are they using such a blunt instrument to cure a problem in Melbourne?”
The Premier’s excuse boils down to bureaucratic inertia. Soft rules in the country would have meant a harder lockdown in a city.
“You haven’t got time … to get a comprehensive ring of steel up – people from Melbourne will go to the regions and they could potentially take the virus with them.”
Best European estimates rate the variant as 40-60 per cent more transmissible than the original virus. Britain’s neighbours have responded with concern, but nowhere other than Victoria has an outbreak of so few cases, none of them as yet fatal, justified such draconian measures.
In NSW, for example, the arrival of the UK variant simply accelerated the improvements to the contact tracing system to match the speed of infection.
Not in Victoria, however, where excuse number three, uttered in barely a whisper, is that the state still lacks the capacity to close down outbreaks in a civilised manner. It has yet to apply the lessons from the outbreak last winter. One wonders if it ever will.
The intellectual left’s foolishness in adopting Andrews as a poster boy for good government is being sorely tested. The strain of covering up for the Premier’s deficiencies began to show on Friday as previously staunch supporters began to waver at the prospect of being trapped indoors for the last days of summer.
Andrews attempted to lift their spirits in the manner of a coach addressing a deflated team in front of a lopsided scoreboard at three-quarter time. “We’ve all given so much, we’ve all done so much,” he urged. “We’ve built something precious, and we have to make difficult decisions, and do difficult things, in order to defend what we’ve built.”
It was to little avail. On Saturday, the local Fairfax press went to town with page after page of critical coverage. “Victorians understand that this is a hideous virus that is highly infectious,” The Age editorialised. “They do not expect perfection. But they do expect honesty.”
On Twitter, diehard members of the #istandwithdan crew blamed “right-wing media”, led by a villainous cohort of conspirators that now includes Peter Costello, the chairman of Nine Entertainment, owner of the former Fairfax group.
Costello, like Rupert Murdoch, is said to possess supernatural powers that allow him to control the minds of hundreds of journalists, sub-editors and editors for the sole purpose of undermining the Premier of Australia’s second-ranking state.
This artifice is becoming too much for some of the smarter Twitter contributors from the left. LGBTQI+ advocate Sally Rugg, a former GetUp! campaigns director, stood up for the Fourth Estate at the weekend. “Are you implying that Age journalists are fabricating stories?” she demanded of the mob. “Spreading the conspiracy that it’s all ‘Murdoch’s fake news’ and ‘Costello’s fake news’ and ‘ABC right-wing bias’ actively erodes public trust and does nothing to make the press better.”
It is too early to describe the latest lockdown as an epiphany, beyond the confines of a handful of inner-city and bayside Victorian homes where Twitter matters. Andrews should consider himself on notice, however.
The pandemic is a long way from over, and the longer it drags on without serious incident, the weaker the politics of fear will become. There is yet time to find a tool other than a sledgehammer with which to address future outbreaks, which, sadly, seem inevitable given the level of ineptitude infecting the Victorian bureaucracy.