Aussie’s rules: COVID is becoming Australia’s state religion

Sydney

Social media is depressing at the best of times, but when you are on Day 60 of a lockdown that doesn’t let you stray more than five kilometers from your house, it’s a nightmare.

Open up Facebook, and there’s an old high school mate smugly plopped down in a business class seat heading for Hawaii, toasting you with a glass of second-rate fizz.

Flick over to Instagram, and your favorite little hotel in Tuscany has got the long table set for a ‘celebration of love’ and the union of a couple who live someplace that doesn’t require exit visas of its citizens.

Then, if your masochism isn’t quite sated, it’s time to open up Twitter to feast on a recursive loop of arguments between epidemiologists (of both the armchair and certified variety) fighting over just how many deaths your selfish desire to one day be allowed back to the pub for a few beers and a sirloin might cause.

Welcome to Australia, where half the country is under virtual martial law thanks to the ravages of a third wave of COVID-19 that is taking on average three or four lives a day — mostly the very elderly inpatients of aged care homes and hospitals.

At this point a reader in the US or UK or some other country that has (we hope) put the worst of the pandemic behind them and opened up, accepting that lockdowns can’t be forever and that death is a part of life, might be wondering just what is going on in Australia.

How, they might ask, did the country whose most famous cultural export was for years a guy who wrestled with crocodiles for a living, become so horrifyingly risk-averse that there is serious talk about how lockdowns will need to continue well after we have 80 percent of the population vaccinated?

Well, it turns out that much of that legendary Australian ruggedness is about as much of a myth as the notion that everyone here drinks giant tins of Fosters.

While there is a political tale to tell of Australia’s snatching pandemic defeat from the jaws of victory, the far more interesting story is psychological, social and philosophical.

Long before the pandemic a tut-tutting expert class of scolds, backed by the academic left and funded by center-right governments that didn’t know better, had been slowly building power and authority. For the most part their efforts were confined to things like lowering speed limits and raising excise taxes on booze, things that made a return to Australia from a la dolce vita driving holiday in Europe feel like being sent to reform school.

That all changed when COVID hit. Elected heads of governments at both state and federal levels (Australia has a parliament much like Westminster but its federation runs along more American lines) suddenly found themselves competing to ‘keep us safe’ by whatever means necessary, always deferring to ‘the health advice’ proffered by their chief health officers who would become the high priests of the pandemic.

This was aided and abetted by the nation’s island geography which fooled Australia into thinking it could keep COVID at bay forever. The promise that we could do better than the rest of the world led to state leaders locking their borders to fellow citizens — often causing immense collateral cruelties — at the slightest inkling of a case load.

All of this was made worse by an unforgivably glacial health bureaucracy first went slow on approving vaccines for use and then allowed themselves to get caught up in the politics of the AstraZeneca shot, doing almost irreversible damage to its reputation over minuscule risks of blood clots.

And no one in authority really acknowledged that after keeping it more or less at bay for months COVID was always going to sneak back in — instead preferring the fantasy of a soft landing cushioned by rising vaccination rates and a slow re-entry into the world.

That is why when the third wave did hit, Australia responded like it was still March 2020, complete with draconian lockdowns and a competition between jurisdictions (sadly egged on by large segments of the media) to see who could make their citizenry the most miserable in the service of saving them.

New South Wales’s top medico Kerry Chant a few weeks ago warned people wearing masks not to be friendly to one another in the shops as the risk was too great. Not to be outdone, Victoria’s premier last week told off Melburnians for walking down to a local beach to watch the sunset.

It is not too much of a stretch that for many in deeply secular Australia, COVID has become something of a religion complete with elaborate rituals of cleanliness, puritanical beliefs that any joy-making activity must be ipso facto dangerous, and a mutaween of Karens who are regularly congratulated by the cops for ‘dobbing in’ those ‘doing the wrong thing’ to the hotline.

In this sense Australia may be the furthest along in what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben years ago predicted would become the eventual medicalization of politics in the West — that is, where the role of the state stops being that of provider or protector of liberties and becomes instead a ‘sanitary dictatorship’ devoted to the ‘religion of health’.

Even after COVID is gone, it will take years for Australia to get back to some semblance of its old free and easy ways, given the power over daily life it has ceded to authority.

In the meantime I’ll just be happy if I can go back to the pub.

James Morrow is federal political editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and co-host of Outsiders on Sky News Australia.