Djokovic proves Australia’s Zero Covid policy was always an unsustainable con

Djokovic's visa troubles are ongoing - Tess Derry

Djokovic’s visa troubles are ongoing – Tess Derry

The strange case of Novak Djokovic has shone a bright light on the eccentric behaviour of the world’s top tennis player. But it also has awoken the world to Australia’s own eccentric response to the Covid epidemic.

Indeed, the cancellation of Djokovic’s visa on Friday sums up the uncompromising attitude of the Australian government over the past 22 months.

For almost two years, the nation has ploughed its own lonely furrow in response to the pandemic. The state government in Victoria achieved a world record in locking down Melbourne six times in 20 months for a total of 262 day, just overtaking Buenos Aires as the most locked-down city in the world.

Zero Covid was a deliberate policy of the state government and has thrown the country into a vicious political cycle: people got scared and demanded more restrictions; then the restrictions proved so popular that the state governments doubled down.

But is this draconian policy starting to rebound now?

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Australia had the idea that somehow the country could be completely sealed off from the rest of the world and kept virus-free. Its first response was to batten down the hatches. It looked at the rest of the world – the trolleys of dying people outside Italian hospitals – and said: “that won’t be happening here”. So it closed the borders on March 20 2020.

The thinking was that you didn’t need to be an epidemiologist to know this was a transmissible disease, so the best thing to do was avoid it. It appointed the chief medical officers as Governors of State. No-one had ever heard of Nicola Spurrier, the chief public health officer of South Australia, before. Within weeks, people were copying her clothes and hairdo.

But the truth is that the state governments scared the public witless. There was Australia, the free-spirited land of the rugged individualist ready to take on all the world throws at it, reduced to quivering in fear behind closed borders. The State Premiers talked up the risks of Covid to such an extent that the public came to believe that it was as dangerous as the Black Death.

A year or so ago, an opinion poll showed that Australians on average thought they had a 33 per cent chance of dying from Covid if they contracted it. No effort was made to put this into perspective and explain that the majority who lost their lives typically had comorbidities or were the frail elderly.

So frightened were the public that they demanded increasingly severe measures. The state governments started off by introducing mandatory mask wearing and social distancing. But then they decided to go further; closing borders between the states and whenever one or two cases of Covid appeared, the whole state was then locked down.

Despite this, from the outside it seemed to many that life here was continuing as normal. But the reality was very different.

Schools were shut for the best part of a year: it varied from state to state, but my grandchildren were away from their classrooms for over 200 days. All shops, except those which sold essential goods, were shuttered. Pubs, restaurants and other community outlets were closed. Curfews were introduced and police patrolled the streets to make sure a cowered public were sticking to the rules.

Then there were the quarantine hotels. This time last year, even Australian citizens who wished to return to their own country had to spend 14 days in quarantine after their arrival. For the privilege, they had to pay $3,000 (£1,590). In fact, when Djokovic came to Australia to play in the 2021 Open – which he eventually won – he had to endure the same two-week wait.

I can speak from my own experience. After travelling from London to Perth in December, I was obliged to book into the Pan-Pacific hotel in Perth. My crime? To return for Christmas to my own country.

There was no escape. You couldn’t stretch your legs in the corridor, let alone go outside. My hotel didn’t have windows that opened, so I lived in air-conditioned isolation accompanied only by my laptop, books and a television set for a fortnight. I had plenty of time on my hands so looked up the Western Australian regulations for prisoners in solitary confinement. They must be given, by law, one hour of exercise outside their cell every day.

What made the problem worse was that the state governments chose to make very few rooms available, having judged that the more quarantine hotels there were in existence, the higher the risk of Covid entering Australia. As a result, there wasn’t capacity to accommodate the demand from Australians wishing to return home.

Despite all of this, omicron is now surging Down Under, with a record number of cases being recorded – 109,000 were confirmed on Thursday, although there have only been 2,572 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. Some states have now introduced fines for those who fail to report positive antigen tests

No one seemed to care what the cost of all this would be. All they wanted was to be protected from Covid regardless of the social, economic and broader community consequences.

There has been no cost benefit analysis, no modelling, nor seemingly any thought given to the impact of these endless lockdowns, aside from some compensation to small and medium-sized businesses. What about the impact on children, particularly from low income backgrounds, after being locked out of school for months on end? Or the mental health impact of denying people the opportunity to mix with others and to see the people they love?

When John Howard was evicted from office, 14 years ago, the federal government delivered a budget surplus and had no net debt. Today it not only runs a huge budget deficit but has accumulated debt which will soon reach $1 trillion (£529bn). Australians will be paying off the Covid compensation debt for generations to come.

When the vaccines arrived, the federal government invested heavily in AstraZeneca. It was even manufactured in Melbourne. But once more a vicious scare campaign erupted, one which made even president Macron’s comments about the vaccine seem restrained.

People argued that there was almost no Covid in Australia. So why have a vaccine that could hold even a tiny risk of a blood clot?

Thus, the rollout was slowed down and the jab not recommended for under 50s. In January Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he was pursuing a deliberately cautious approach, because the country was not in an “emergency situation” and “we don’t have to cut corners. We don’t have to take unnecessary risks.”

Then because no-one was vaccinated, there was a greater argument for lockdowns.

There are two points to be made about these illiberal and oppressive policies. First, they were driven more by politics and fear than science.

Secondly, they were never going to work. Unless Australia cut itself off from the rest of the world indefinitely, Covid was always going to sneak in and spread. The Zero Covid policies of Australia’s state governments were an unsustainable con. Now that the omicron strain is rampant, it is being handled much more rationally: booster vaccinations are being rolled out at speed, the vulnerable are finally being protected and the public is socially distancing.

But the nonsense of closing borders and locking the public up in pursuit of the chimera of a Zero Covid society has been abandoned. Well, almost abandoned. Still the Western Australian government clings to this dotty idea but once Covid spreads there – as it will – then it too will open to the world.

Australia’s Covid policy has come a long way over the past 22 months. These days, it has even reopened to the vaccinated traveller. So it’s understandable that some people sympathised with Djokovic in his vain struggle against Australia’s Covid restrictions, with his supporters – some with placards – protesting outside the hotel in which he was being held.

Not that I was ever on his side. He wants to be exempt from the law. And ever since the Magna Carta, exempting the rich, the powerful and the famous from the law has been deemed a very bad idea indeed.

Alexander Downer is a former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He is now Executive Chairman of the International School for Government, King’s College London.

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