Sullied by the sledgehammer
Elected leaders and bureaucrats emboldened by public acquiescence to increased illiberalism will struggle to relinquish their powers as the pandemic threat recedes. By Nick Cater.
The good news is that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could be fortifying our immune systems by March, removing the last remaining excuse for the suspension of freedoms once considered inviolate. The bad news is bureaucrats, temporarily appointed as masters of the universe, will be reluctant to hand in their badges. The steady transfer of power and money from citizens to the state will not be reversed without a struggle.
The reluctance of our weaker premiers to lift border controls, for which justification was never more than scant, is ominous.
The Business Council of Australia estimates the closures have cost more than $2bn a week in business forgone and welfare received. Families have been kept apart and are wondering if they’ll be reunited by Christmas.
Yet Premier Mark McGowan refuses to stand down his border guards, reserving particularly onerous restrictions for residents of WA’s two biggest commercial partners, NSW and Victoria.
On Friday, the Department of Health reported there were just 70 active cases of COVID-19 in Australia, more than 60 of which were returning overseas travellers. No sufferers were in intensive care.
Yet all WA Health Minister Roger Cook can offer is “a gradual and deliberate next step … part of a journey that the West Australian community is on to make sure that we can keep on top of the COVID-19 virus”.
Keeping on top of the virus should not be this hard. Australian jurisdictions, with one notable exception, have managed it well, giving Australia a head start in resuming normal business.
That opportunity is rapidly being squandered by premiers such as McGowan and an army of public officials that have come to enjoy lockdown life. The luxury of working from home, increased public profile and expanded powers must be exhilarating. Any pretence borders remain closed on the advice of health officials evaporated months ago. WA Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson determined a state would be deemed “low-risk” once it achieved a 14-day rolling average of less than five community cases a day.
Even Dan Andrews’ Victoria can now squeeze comfortably beneath that low bar. Yet every man, woman and child from that disinfected state must endure 14 days in quarantine in WA.
The failure to properly gauge risk and temper the public health response accordingly is not a failing peculiar to WA, or indeed Australia. The sledgehammer has been wielded as a tool of government policy across most of what we dare to imagine as the free and democratic world. The level of illiberalism citizens are asked to tolerate has increased, even as the chances of dying from COVID-19 declined.
Petty officials have been emboldened by the public’s acquiescence. In their single-minded crusade to save humankind, they have grown indifferent to human feelings and insensitive to their dignity. The trappings of authoritarianism can be seen in Britain, where the muddled attempts to tame the virus have taken an ugly turn. Parents in Liverpool were informed last week the army would be testing their children, who would be identified with a barcode. If a child tested positive, the letter read, “the school will secure the individual concerned”.
The “challenging and unprecedented circumstances” meant it would not be possible to seek parental consent for the testing. “Therefore we would ask that if you wish to exclude your child from this test please do so in writing to me (the principal) first thing on Monday morning.”
In a video circulating on social media, police are seen breaking up a church service. The pastor insists in vain that the congregation were not law-breaking people. “But when they say to us that it’s illegal to come and worship our God, this is the West. Forgive me, this isn’t a nation somewhere off in the distance,” he said. Proponents of lockdownism say there is no alternative, and those who insist on observing the niceties of liberal society are willing grannies to die.
The mud-throwing expression “lockdown denialism” has been added to the arsenal of the left’s character assassins. They have been assisted by the censors on social media, intent on keeping their platforms purged of all wisdom except the conventional kind.
The pledge by president-in-waiting Joe Biden to make mask-wearing compulsory rings hollow. Public health measures, thank goodness, are not decided in the White House. Instead it reeks of revenge, the symbolic muzzling of the Always Trumpers and a mark of subservience that sits uneasily with America’s reputation as the land of the free.
The ugly side of lockdownism should not surprise us, since it originates from the same city as the virus it purports to control. The coercive measures enforced by the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan in January have been emulated in much of the free world. So too has the stifling of free discussion, eliminating the opportunity to pursue alternative courses of action.
The response by the free and democratic state of Taiwan would have been infinitely preferable. Early closure of borders, sophisticated application of track-and-trace drawing on all the data at the government’s disposal, a well-drilled health service and strong civil society shine as the gold standard of pandemic management.
Of the Australian state jurisdictions, only NSW has come close to emulating Taiwan.
Victoria, as we now know, lacked the service delivery capacity to pursue that path. Much as McGowan and his posturing Queensland counterpart, Annastacia Palaszczuk, might pretend that border closures are a sign of strength, they are the opposite.
They are the costly, cowardly, burden-dodging legacy of leaders who derive policy from polling and are fearful of failure, doubting the capacity their own governments to deliver what Taiwan has shown is possible.