In the 19th century, Prince Metternich of Austria famously described Italy as "merely a geographical expression", reflecting the patchwork quilt of politically separate states that made up the peninsula. This also seems an apt description of Australia in 2021, a motley crew of uncoordinated, bickering, largely independent states on a continental island sharing a currency, an army and some sporting teams, but little else.
It even seems reasonable to ask if the Commonwealth of Australia is as cohesive or functional as other unions of sovereign states like the European Union. Other than a brief period in the early stages of the pandemic, EU nations have largely kept their borders open to each other. Even in the depths of the crisis in Europe when hospitals were overflowing and there was a humanitarian crisis, it would have been unthinkable to hear senior national EU leaders publicly declare, to paraphrase Queensland Premier Anna Palaszczuk, "people living in Italy, they have Italian hospitals. In Germany we have German hospitals for our people." Far from being embarrassed, Queenslanders rewarded Palaszczuk for her parochialism at the state election, even after fatal medical mishaps resulting from northern NSW residents being denied access to their nearest hospitals.
The Tweed today feels wider than the Rhine, and the Nullarbor much more impassable than the Alps.
Travelling to Tasmania requires what is effectively an e-Visa, registering with the government before arrival, while WA's G2G is even more like an online visa system. One needs to satisfy the bureaucracy they have a valid reason to travel to WA, with no guarantee permission will be granted. For those who apply for a WA visa, the first reason in the drop down list of reasons to travel is "Senior Government Official" followed by "Active Australian Military", followed by 5 other categories of government officials. The ordering of that list almost gives the impression of a Soviet-style system designed more for government officials than the masses. For mere civilians seeking entry to fortress WA, "compassionate or other grounds" does not appear until halfway down the page.
Spare a thought for Scott Morrison. It must be an awkward time to be Prime Minister of Australia. What we long have thought of as the highest office in the land, the most powerful political position, is less relevant than could ever have been imagined, particularly in the midst of a national and global crisis.
What does the PM think of the relative merits of suppression and elimination of the Covid-19 virus? What does Health Minister Greg Hunt think of the need to mandate face masks in public to slow the spread of the virus? Well, it doesn't really matter.
State Premiers have taken matters into their own hands, chosen radically different approaches, and unilaterally closed borders to other states in the manner of sovereign nation states. To rub salt in the wound, they even publicly attack each other's approaches, in a debate where the Prime Minister and the federal government are conspicuous by their absence and their powerlessness. Other than being in charge of administrative issues such as purchasing vaccines, the Prime Minster and Health Minister appear to have little more influence than lay citizens in affecting the most important public policy decisions of the day, in a once in a century crisis.
Of course, the PM still controls the nation's pursestrings, but has little choice other than to keep writing the cheques to finance the independent policies of each state's Premier, no matter how much he may disagree with them. Last year he expressed a strong preference for states to keep their borders open, and for Victoria to limit the duration of its lockdown, only to be completely ignored. The federal government joined a High Court challenge to the Western Australian government's extremely strict border closure, only to pull out at the last minute, presumably in deference to opinion polls finding the WA government enjoyed deep popular support for its border policies.
Scott Morrison's decision to change a word in the national anthem from "we are young and free" to "we are one and free" could hardly come at a worse time, reminding us that we have not been "one" for almost a year now, and that he seems powerless to do anything about it.
Then again, he's hardly in a strong position to push for open borders when he has shut the international border so tightly that tens of thousands of Australians have been locked out of their own country for almost a year. Meanwhile Australians are also locked in their own country for at least a year, unable to leave without getting an iron curtain exit visa style permit from the Australian Border Force.
Australia's apparent return to its roots as a penal colony is beyond parody, but it is a serious question to ask why one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the fourth largest land area on earth has been so ineffective in repatriating its own citizens during a pandemic. No other comparable country has treated its own citizen in this manner.
Perhaps the lyrics of the revised national anthem are also ripe for fresh interpretations, with "Australians all let us rejoice for we are one and free" really supposed to mean "for we are Covid free", as opposed to more conventional notions of freedom.
The speed at which we've othered Australians living in different states, and the insouciance shown towards the tens of thousands of Australians still stuck overseas should shock us. It is said a person's true character comes out in a crisis. The same is likely to be true of national character. What does it say of our national character that this is the depths to which we have sunk when outside of Victoria, we have scarcely even been touched by Covid-19?
What happened to the Australian values of mateship, the healthy irreverence towards authority and the laid back larrikin spirit? When it came to a pandemic of a relatively mild disease that barely circulated outside our two major cities, we turned out to be paranoid parochial subjects looking to nanny states to lock us down, fine us for not wearing masks, and shut our borders to other states.
In hindsight, perhaps the signs were there before the pandemic. A strong paranoia of pathogens has always been a feature of our border control, be it the mandatory spraying of flights before they landed in Australia, the "don't be sorry, declare it" quarantine ads, or as the Scottish stand up comedian Danny Bhoy noted, the "fruit police" checking his car for illegal bananas at state border crossings and large billboards warning "fruitflies can kill" (large depictions of which he joked he didn't realise were not to scale).
Jokes aside, the nature of the Commonwealth of Australia through the pandemic is a serious matter that deserves more debate. I imagine I am not alone in having significantly underestimated the sovereignty and power of the states prior to the pandemic.
The system of fiscal transfers and equalisation meant that in one integrated country, it shouldn't, and didn't really matter what state you lived in. If you were the victim of a flood, bushfire, cancer, unfair dismissal, crime, or any other of life's misfortunes, your experience and levels of government support didn't vary significantly depending on which state you were in.
Clearly this has no longer been the case in the pandemic. For many long weeks in September and October, while NSW remained more or less completely open, Victorians facing a similar number of daily new Covid cases to NSW remained in one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, almost in a state of house arrest. Western Australia, like South Australia and Queensland managed to remain mostly free of Covid-19 in the latter part of 2020, but remained locked out to the entire country, even to states with no community transmission, for months on end, while Queenslanders and South Australians were allowed to travel to states with no community transmission. Recently, Queenslanders were ordered into lockdown for 3 days and not allowed to leave their homes without a mask, over just one outbreak, while late last year the entire state of South Australia was locked down after one person lied about the time they had spent at a pizza shop.
It would appear that the extreme contrast in how states react to one outbreak of Covid-19 reflects the fact that these decisions are being made not as part of a deliberative policymaking process, but on snap decisions of those in power, under sweeping state of emergency laws giving them the power to override civil liberties.
It should disturb us, that in a pandemic of a disease in which 80% of cases are mild or asymptomatic, and the death rate is less than 1% overall, entire populations are at the mercy of their state Premier and/or their advisers. It appears to be blind luck that New South Wales happens to have Gladys Berejiklian at the helm, with her relatively measured and proportionate response to outbreaks which has kept most of the state humming along almost as per normal. Meanwhile thousands of Victorians who survived three months in 22 hour house arrest and who dared to venture out of their states over the summer holidays ended up being marooned outside their home state after being given 24 hours to get back in.
So far it seems the governments have largely been given a free pass by voters and the media, who appear to have largely taken the view that even 10 months on, the coronavirus is so threatening and dangerous that it is worth eliminating at any economic and social cost, and no response to restrict its spread is too extreme.
At some point though, surely there needs to be a debate on how Australian governments ought to respond to future emergencies like this. I hope I am not the only Australian who believes state borders should not be political footballs and the plaything of state premiers to open and close at their whims. Or that entering our own country is a fundamental right, and that it is one of the most basic responsibilities of the federal government to uphold and fulfil.
There's a long list of things we have witnessed in this pandemic that we never though was possible in Australia, and we need to ensure never happen again in similar circumstances. This includes locking up vulnerable public housing residents in Melbourne and violating their human rights, arresting and handcuffing a pregnant woman in pyjamas in her home in front of her children for sharing a facebook post, a NSW woman losing her baby after being refused admission in a Queensland hospital, families from two states with zero community transmission being prevented from seeing each other for month on end. The list goes on.
An easy response to all the above is "but it's an emergency", and early in the pandemic, there was a lot of truth in that sentiment. A temporary suspension of our freedoms seemed sensible in the face of a highly contagious virus we knew very little about, that was wrecking havoc abroad. It has now been almost a year though, and freedoms and liberties don't mean much if they can be suspended indefinitely for this long. Are we really free if our most basic freedoms can be suspended with no warning until further notice for years on end:
The pandemic has exposed the fragility of our civil liberties and indeed of our very federation. Despite the rhetoric, we have not been in this crisis together as one country. Australia as we knew it is crying out to be made whole again. Sometimes satire can truer than the truth, and the Meat and Livestock Australia's lamb ad campaign envisioning a Berlin style tearing down of walls between states in 2031 likely hit a winning note with many Australians. There is a chance the ending did too, in which a familiar looking bespectacled middle aged man steps off a Hawaiian Airlines jet in Sydney Airport saying "what have I missed?"
Happy Australia Day.
Links:
Danny Bhoy crossing Australian state borders: https://youtu.be/BnBAXMiIiis?t=130
MLA's excellent lamb ad in case you missed it:https://youtu.be/aCIMYjqWxwA
