Australia, much like USA, gives each state government jurisdiction over police and health, two key policy areas in the Year of Covid. One consequence of this is that the intensity of the pandemic has varied from state to state. Victoria, for instance, endured one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. Meanwhile, in the whole of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, which constitutes more than half of the continent’s land mass but less than twenty percent of the nation’s population, only 11 people have died from the virus. If there is anything to be learned from the anomalous Australian experience it is the advantage of the ‘lockout’ over the dreaded lockdown.
The lockout, in terms of Covid-19, was initiated by Taiwan well before Australia. Most commentators expected that Taiwan, in unenviable close proximity to China’s Fujian province, would be overwhelmed by the pandemic; and yet, as I write, there have been only been 7 deaths amongst a population of 25 million. Moreover, the island has now been Covid-free for more than 200 consecutive days without mandating facemasks, let alone enforcing a lockdown, temporary, partial, regional or otherwise. One obvious explanation for this is geography. For many countries, unfortunately, it is logistically impossible to pull up the drawbridge. The Taiwanese also had the advantage of distrusting Beijing’s early narrative about the non-communicability of the coronavirus emerging from Wuhan. Travellers from the PRC were being monitored as early as December 31, 2019, and totally prohibited a week before President Trump made a similar decision on January 31 and Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison one day after.
China’s Xi Jinping might be threatening to ‘liberate’ the Taiwanese but at least he cannot accuse them of anti-Chinese racism. Australia, despite its multi-ethnic make-up, is another matter. In early February, Ambassador Cheng Jingye condemned the Australian government’s decision to deny the entry of Chinese nationals, including tens of thousands of young people wishing to take up their places at Australian universities and private schools. Relations between Beijing and Canberra, as I have reported previously, only worsened in June when Morrison requested an independent inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. The Australian people as a whole have not taken kindly to the resultant bullying attitudes displayed by Xi Jinping’s regime and his English-language propaganda outlets such as The Global Times. That said, the embargo placed on young Chinese nationals saved us from the Wuhan virus because our schools return from summer vacation in February and the universities as late as March. This, of course, is not the case in the United States or Europe. The coronavirus, though few were aware of it at the time, already had a beachhead in the U.S. before Trump’s January 31 travel restrictions.
A lockout, then, is not the same as a lockdown. It comes at a price, starting with the collapse of an international tourist industry. It means being confined to your island home for the duration even if, for example, a family tragedy or urgent business necessitates being elsewhere. It has even meant being confined to your own state. The passion for international travel, no less intense for the Taiwanese than it is for Australians, has been satisfied in the most unusual way – flights to nowhere. In the case of Taiwan, planes regularly depart Taiwan’s four international airports and head out over the international waters of the East China Sea or the Philippine Sea, only to turn homewards after several hours. Most passengers, we are informed, dress for their ‘flight to nowhere’ as if for an evening at the opera and take great delight in the on-board duty-free shopping on the return leg.
Qantas has now introduced its own version of flights to nowhere. Its seven-hour trip without an actual destination sold out in ten minutes despite being on the pricey side, the equivalent of £430 for an economy ticket and more than £2,000 for business class. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, normally reserved for international flights, flew over Uluru, Kata Tjuta, the Great Barrier Reef, Byron Bay and Sydney Harbour and then repeated the whole thing several more times. Because Australia is an island-continent rather than a mere island like Taiwan, Qantas has now announced flights to somewhere, which involves touchdown near Uluru and a night under the stars before flying back to Sydney.
Many Australians would now argue that the advantages of a lockout (a global quarantine in essence) outweighs the disadvantages of isolating ourselves from the world and even from the other regions of Australia. In Western Australia, for instance, Premier Mark McGowan (Labor) boasts that his state has been an ‘island within an island’. The WA police force, until very recently, operated a hard border against the rest of the country, including its immediate neighbours South Australia and Northern Territory, despite the two not recording any locally generated Covid infections for months. Travellers from New South Wales and Victoria are still locked out of Western Australia. Covid-proofing his state, McGowan asserts, not only protected the locals but also the interests of all Australians, since WA’s enormous mining industry provides a significant share of the nation’s export revenue and has remained in full operation throughout 2020. It is also true that during the period of Western Australia’s lockout, the locals have not needed to wear facemasks, feel scared in supermarkets, sanitise every two seconds, avoid people on the street and never see their families.
Premier McGowan, backed by the vast majority of West Australians, would also argue that prevention is better than the cure from both an economic and medical sense. In Victoria, for instance, Premier Daniel Andrews (Labor) failed to put into place a protocol for returning expatriates, the one group living outside Australia permitted to enter the country. Over the last six months, tens of thousands of Aussies living abroad have managed to secure (very expensive) seats on specially sanctioned flights into Australia. Expats, in almost all cases, have been escorted to a specified ‘quarantine hotel’. They must pay for their own accommodation at the stipulated hotel and remain isolated there, under supervision, for two weeks. In every case, apart from Victoria, professional supervision was provided by the police (which in Australia is the domain of the six states and two territories). For still unidentified reasons, the Andrews’ administration assigned supervision of the quarantine-hotels to private security guards, some of whom were given no more than ten minutes’ training.
One (possibly apocryphal) story which emerged out of the fiasco is that a guard believed it was all right to have sexual relations with a virus-affected returnee because Covid-19 is not a sexually transmitted disease. Other guards – and this is from the subsequent enquiry – took their charges shopping in the local mall to cheer them up. Daniel Andrews, in true politician style, has accepted ‘overall responsibility’ for the catastrophic lapse without offering his resignation or admitting that he himself made an error of judgement. He even denies that the federal government’s repeated offer in June to provide members of the Australian Army to supervise the quarantine-hotels reached his office. As a consequence of the ineptitude of the Andrews’ government, 800 of the nation’s 900 Covid-related deaths have occurred in Victoria.
The population of Melbourne (almost five million) has paid a bitter price for the failure of its state government, including a brutal 111-day stage-four lockdown. There have been evening curfews, 25,000 people charged with contravening the strictest lockdown rules in the world, an East Berlin-like barrier erected around the greater metropolitan area, the decimation of small businesses and an exponential rise in mental ill-health. A friend of mine, trapped in Melbourne for the duration, described a typical Saturday morning in one of Melbourne’s parklands: ‘I’m sitting in a park in Carlton and there are people walking/running in circles and talking/screaming to themselves’. On the evening Premier Andrews eventually lifted many of the lockdown restrictions, he toasted his fellow Victorian on a job well done with a photograph of an expensive brand of local whiskey. For some there is no shame.
Without the advent of a reliable vaccine, Australians are determined to remain cut off from the world. Prime Minister Jacinda Ahern’s recent electoral triumph in New Zealand tells a similar story. In fact, New Zealand looks like being the only country to be added to our travel bubble in the immediate future. Taiwan, possibly, is somewhere on the horizon. This whole scenario must sound decidedly unreal for those in the UK, Europe and the U.S. experiencing a dire second wave and even third wave of Covid-19. But few here are willing to give up the miracle of normality as the blight of Covid-19 threatens to carry over into 2021 and beyond. Mark down Australia and New Zealand as the two new Hermit Kingdoms of the Pacific.
