I’ve been writing about Australia’s sleepwalk into a police state for so long, you’d think I’d be the least surprised now that it’s finally happened. But, like everyone else, I woke up on Tuesday morning and the reality hit me with its full dystopian force.
Brave new world indeed: police cars circling inside public parks, lights flashing, ordering stationary people to either get on with their exercise regime or go straight home. A tense debate on social media about whether visiting your boyfriend who lives in a different house qualifies as a “reasonable excuse” to leave yours.
Reasonable excuse. Let’s dwell on that choice of language, because there is the key to what’s wrong with this sudden descent into uncontained authoritarianism.
First though, the necessary disclaimer. The lockdown is necessary, proportionate and life-saving. I have quibbles about the details, like everyone, but we could never all agree on such vexed questions as whether that girl in the park is planking or just having a lie-down.
But remember why we are doing this, why we are surrendering our most fundamental right — freedom of movement — outside of wartime and for an indefinite period. That is for one reason only: to get us through this public health emergency as quickly and with as little death and damage as possible.
It is the perfect exemplar of communal action, requiring all of us to sacrifice precious elements of our humanity for the greater good. The point is that it is good.
Which is why it grates so horribly that the message we keep receiving is that it’s all bad. Specifically, we’re all bad.
In the COVID-19 world, the persistent failure of our leaders to communicate effectively has led to confusion, complacency and bad behaviour. These outcomes the same leaders have reflexively blamed on the public.
The roots of that reflex lie much deeper; they can be seen in every step that has been taken down the path of authoritarianism since September 11, 2001. In this moment of deep crisis, it is flourishing.
For that reason, when it came to “Stage 3” as Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews called it, the lockdown was automatically treated by lawmakers as if it is a punishment for our recalcitrance. We cannot be trusted to stay home, so they’ve made it a crime to go out.
It is necessary, in a public health emergency, to arm the state with the ability to enforce what is needed to be done. So, a legislated lockdown is appropriate, as is the availability of sanctions for those who flout it.
However, what we have is not a regime that enshrines our collective decision for the public good to stay indoors. What we have is a law that makes it an offence to leave home. Unless we have a reasonable excuse.
I object to the prospect of being stopped on the street by a police officer and required to satisfy him or her that I have a good enough excuse for being outside, to be determined at his or her discretion and with the possibility (in NSW) of a $1,000 on the spot fine, or an $11,000 fine and six months’ imprisonment if I get arrested and convicted.
I wouldn’t object to a regime under which I was required by law to remain home, with the proviso that I was able to lawfully leave home and go outside if I had a legitimate reason for doing so, subject to all the rules of physical distancing. I also wouldn’t object if that regime gave the police power to reasonably determine that my reason was not legitimate and to order me to go home; or to fine or arrest me if I refused and they reasonably believed that I may be presenting a danger to public health by my actions.
Am I being stupidly legalistic about this? To put it another way, who gives a shit? I’d say we all should. The lockdown regulations rushed into force by NSW, Victoria and other states are not just extremely draconian; they start with the premise that it is we who should bear the burden of proving that we’re behaving with social responsibility at all times.
That is unnecessary and wrong. There is no evidence to support the assumption that we wouldn’t as a community do the right thing in this extreme crisis, if our leaders gave us the facts and communicated clearly and consistently about why we need to take these measures.
It is also wrong in principle. Rights are hard-won and easily lost. We have almost no human rights in Australia, but freedom of movement is one that has always been at least assumed (for white people). We must suspend that right for the moment, but in a necessarily qualified way (so we can still eat, exercise, go to the doctor and stay slightly sane).
The onus should not be on us to prove we are doing the right thing, but on the authorities to prove we are doing the wrong thing. Then, the law may descend with appropriate consequences, as harsh as are needed.
As for NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s protestations that the NSW Police really don’t want to have to enforce this law, sorry, but we’ve got no reason to share that faith.
The relatively small number of lives that will be prematurely lost to this virus do NOT justify the much much greater cost to people around the world, our local and global economy and society in general.
SInce the beginning of this virus, globally, 42,000 have died from it.
In the same time, 20,000,000 have continued to die as they always have.
What are we doing about the preventable death amongst them?
Disagree. If we go hard early we should be able to eradicate it.
Eradicate it? That seems wildly optimistic now it has spread more or less everywhere, unless you only mean eradicate it locally in some places. That still leaves big problems. For example, the ABC website has an article about what faces WA if its lockdown is a complete success, “Coronavirus infection rates begin to fall, but ‘flattening the curve’ may mean WA is locked down even longer”, which points out that even if WA has no cases after a time it will only stay that way for as long as it borders remain closed. Realistically, this disease will be endemic for the foreseeable future and only a vaccine will really protect us.
europereloaded com live exercise pompeo lets slip how he sees the covid 19pandemic
It’s a live exercise according to Pompeo. Watch as Tr-mp tries to intervene and cover Pompeo’s freudian slip. It’s brief but distinct.
How do you know whats realistic? China appears to have stopped new cases. The first SARS was eradicated. This virus only lives in people, apart from wherever it first came from. If we isolate all the people until all the infected ones have recovered, plus a bit, we should have eradicated the virus. Why are few talking about that? Some are. See Rina McIntyre in this article: https://www.smh.com.au/national/can-australia-sustain-a-lockdown-with-no-end-20200327-p54eic.html
We shouldn’t aim to “flatten the curve” but to eradicate it. Then, yes, we have the problem of how to interact with countries that haven’t and the danger of re-introduction.
An early, technically informed analysis of the tension between epidemiological measures for reducing rates of transmission of COVID 19, control or eradication of it and concurrent needs for studying the disease onset and progress at both community level and within individual patients can be found in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/how-does-the-coronavirus-behave-inside-a-patient
The study points to the importance of developing, over time, understanding of the relative impacts of degrees of infection on individual patients and applying that knowledge to both improve treatment and develop vaccine or control measures; tasks said to be especially difficult in pandemic conditions.
This virus lives for up to 24 days (not 15) in asymptomatic people.
It can leapfrog from person to person, in aerosol droplets for up to a couple of meters and remain viable outside on hard surfaces for several hours.
We do not yet know whether infectin confers effective immunity.
At the moment it is not particularly dangerous and essentially only kills PREDOMINANTLY older and more vulnerable from comorbidities..
Older/vulnerable (like me) who will be dead within a relatively short time anyway.
Personally do not think unprecedented global disruption of economy, human society and human rights, is justified. Particularly in this country, it could and should have been managed with enforced PPE, isolation and quarantine where indicated, treatment with triage to flatten the curve .. Shutting of all ports and nobody allowed to disembark aircraft or boats without quarantine.
The virus was known O/S for weeks. The government stubbornly failed to seek advice from the Chinese or ignored the multibillion Intelligence and Border Farce services .. unless Intelligence and Border Farce failed (abysmally) in their nominated duties to protect the Australian “homeland”.
Mark, you don’t eradicate a virus like this in the absence of an effective vaccine.
It will become endemic.
All we have at the moment is holding/delaying tactics … and those holding tactics were implemented after a significant delay and now the government is playing catch up, hoping we won’t notice, with these draconian actions.
What about the first SARS? What is China doing now? I fear the reason will be because we don’t go hard enough. It shouldn’t take long. But, if you’ve got better viral epidemilogical info, go for it please.
There was a vaccine for the first SARs and Chinese/others learned valuable lessons. We didn’t.
I don’t know if its gospel, but Wikipedia: “There is no vaccine for SARS. Clinical isolation and quarantine remain the most effective means to prevent the spread of SARS. ”
Why can’t we learn China’s lessons from them. Seems we are.
Correct Mark, no vaccine for SARS was developed, what was found across a number of different trials was that when the live vaccine was introduced into the vaccinated it generated a cytokines storm in random lab.animal subjects. That problem was never resolved so far as my research has come up with. The problem now has new relevance as today we will need a vaccine for COVID19. Treatment research is progressing well along several different fronts to better control the co-virus. There is political risk in the US that Phase two vaccine trials will be be run live in the general public in the haste to ‘have a vaccine’.
Stand corrected.
I mistakenly understood there was a vaccine for SARS that Yes, had some significant problems, but money for further development dried up. Not enough profit in it?
“In the same time, 20,000,000 have continued to die as they always have.”
Difference is _I_ can’t catch malnutrition, or most of the other reasons these people die.
I agree with you (and your following comments) If I was someone under 45 years old and seeing the massive amounts of resources going to attempting to save predominantly older people (and I speak as someone much much nearer to 70 than 45), I’d be pretty pissed – just like all the negative gearing, franking credits etc are resulting in a massive free kick for older people at the expense of younger. Not to mention who are the ones who will ultimately pay for climate change.
But with these massive resources, it might be contained within the richer countries. I fear we’ll see what would have happened without the draconian measures when it spreads in the poorer countries without our resources – possibly a far higher death rate, among all groups.
The comments are good and well placed. But there is too much emphasis that C19 is actually as serious as we are lead to believe. Famous last words I know, but too many commenters have completely ignored renowned and respected virologists and microbiologists who say….it’s not much more than the flu.
Rather than the vanity and opportunistic political point scoring, do the research on those “real” experts who say otherwise to the medical and health complex mantra.
I wonder what sort of a reception you might receive if you chose to espouse that viewpoint in Bergamo , Madrid or ew York. If our Metropolitan areas get away without similar just be thankful for being in Oz
Have you even been to Madrid or Barcelona? Most people live in high-rise apartments that never see the sun. They are year round flu-pits where transmitting viruses is part of every day life. Why did they call it the Spanish flu? Do the research and start being honest.
Ah, honesty.. like posting in a pseudonym, not your name? I read (research!) that it was only called Spanish flu because Spain was open (honest) about the number of cases but other countries weren’t. Honestly can’t find the article but will look some more. I reckon a lot of people in China live in similar conditions but they’ve done well.
Good advice Cerebral faux pas, do your research.
Cerebral Faux, don’t you know making April Fool jokes is supposed to cease at midday?
Better to be safe than sorry.” it’s called Risk Management.”
Over the last few decades, we have systematically under-resourced every part of the public sector except for the military, police, security agencies and border control, whose budgets have all gone up exponentially. It’s no wonder that in a crisis politicians look to those agencies – they’re the only ones with the resources and staff to have given any thought to crisis contingency planning like this. We saw it in the bushfires, where the rallying cry was to send in the troops. And those agencies will use this crisis – as they have done with previous ones – to seek more resources and staff. Michael is absolutely right – we are a police state.
In the early 70s Britain’s troops in NI were openly acknowledged to be training in what was called “low intensity warfare” aka civil unrest in urban areas – it was a rare week that there wasn’t some ponderous discussion in serious outlets such as the BBC, Times (as once was) & the Guardian/Observer about whether Britain was becoming ungovernable.
At one point there was a tense meeting of the Great & Good with the Army brass who, fortunately, told them to take a hike, just as in 1975 after the Dismissal.
One of Margaret Thatcher’s first acts on becoming PM was to almost double police pay and treble the numbers (this in a country which does NOT have a national police force) because it was expected that tory policies would create massive unrest.
Then, by sheer coincidence, came the miners’ strike and the rest is neolib history.
Yes, all true. And there’s some sort of epilogue to Thatcher buying up the police to be the Tories strike breakers. Thirty years on Teresa May as Tory Home Secretary cut police numbers and froze their pay, and when things started to going off the rails with her as PM she soon found, as the saying goes, there’s never a policeman around when you need one.
Michael Bradley’s article is one of the few pieces I have seen that bring a legally informed perspective to what is occurring as our governments attempts Jacinda Ardern constructively puts it ‘to break the COVID-19 transmission chain’.
COVID-19: garbled and conflated nomenclature about ‘social distancing rules’ and legally enforceable prohibitions on movement and gatherings.
There is a compelling need for more rigorous journalism around the regulatory regimes intended to reduce transmissions of COVID 19. Across media there is confusion and conflation of expressions such as social distancing, quarantine, isolation, movement restrictions and gatherings. A good start would be to have a common understanding of nomenclature and better still to tie comments about each or any of them to the terminology in the various State Ministerial Orders and legal instruments.
In NSW the key provisions are in in Government Gazette No.65 issued 30 March 2020: Public Health (COVID-19 Restrictions on Gathering and Movement) Order 2020, issued and enforceable under the Public Health Act 2010.
The operative clauses are Ministerial Directions. A key focus is on Clauses 5 and 6.
Clause 5 directs that a person must not leave his or her place of residence without reasonable excuse, instances of which are set out in a Schedule but include essential shopping, going to work and so on.
Clause 6 directs that a person must not participate in “a gathering in a public place of more than 2 persons”.
I studied these provisions because I was first frustrated and angry about the glib, tendentiously partisan and now authoritarian glossing over the variety of conducts being conflated under the single expression ‘social distancing’. Among others, the New Daily has conflated social distancing with mandatory quarantined isolation. This morning’s digital issue of the Guardian states that NSW provisions about “gatherings’ are the same as those in Queensland. They are not, NSW provisions relate to gathering in a public place; in Queensland it seems residences are also covered. Fran Kelly on Radio National glibly refers to ‘social distancing rules”. Even Kay Patterson, Commissioner for Age Discrimination, seemed unable to discern any difference between Ministerial Orders prohibiting movements except for reasonable cause and Prime Ministerial enjoinders from press conferences for people over 70 to stay at home. Meanwhile policemen at large with a Commissioner cable ‘discretion’ are reportedly driving over grass to check whether a mother with a kid in a pram is out for doors without reasonable excuse; and telling an elderly couple to “move on’, when they paused in a walk to look at the ocean. It seems NSW police are troubling themselves with questions of whether a person sunbathing, or sitting on park bench can be said to be exercising or must be accosted to demonstrate reasonable excuse.
Canberrea press conferences now feature routine quibbling and even inaccurate statement of details that presumably should be manifest to participating expert medical advisers, let alone l=any legally literate advisor. Certainly, those responsible seem to have been well and truly socialised by the experience into aligning themselves with whatever is the party line of the day coming from National Cabinet or the Morrison hierarchy. The key media players seem also to be indistinguishable from the team. The profusion of ‘matey’ comradisms, “Frannie”, “Stutchie”, “Speersie”, “Scottie” and so on, evokes a happy few bound together in common understandings and respect. Acumen, rigour and traditional journalistic attention to the hard details and storylines are not a hallmark of that sort of collegialism.
It was that perspective of a co-opted and weak-minded media that prompted me to try to construe the provisions of the Public Health (COVID-19 Restrictions on Gathering and Movement) Order 2020.
I wanted to test whether I, an octogenarian, and my equally ‘vulnerable’ wife may legitimately entertain at a social distance in our apartment a solitary visitor. Certainly, in NSW, three of us would not be a gathering in “a public place”. However, unless the visitor is travelling to us to do work, it seems that unless he or she is immediate family ‘continuing existing arrangements’, they may lack reasonable excuse; hence, visiting us would be in breach of the Ministerial Direction to stay at home.
An accurate or even coherently expressed interpretation of requirements cannot be found in the media searches I have made. Some are grossly inaccurate. It is understandable that hastily drafted subordinate legislation of the kind will be makeshift; may even be designed to rely on bluff rather than substance. However given the presence of an authoritarian bent in police, evident even in their public expositions of their use of ‘discretions’, and low public trust, perhaps it may be opportune for one or two of the more legally literate journalists to examine the wording of these sweeping powers and embargoes on everyday conduct. Once better informed, some vitriol might be directed to over authoritarian police conduct and ignorant barracking for the prevailing party line by statutory officeholders who should stay silent if not able to accurately state the effect of and difference between policies concepts and legally enforceable provisions.
100% agree. The government can’t get it right but they want to set the police onto US. Can we set the police onto THEM? eg why is there a gift shop still open in my town?
I agree with Malcolm Bradley’s article, but when he says “We have almost no human rights in Australia, but freedom of movement is one that has always been at least assumed (for white people)” I suppose he means since Federation. Before that the colonies had various laws that imposed serious restrictions on such freedom of movement. The Victorian “Convicts Prevention Act”of 1852 is a fine example. Anyone trying to enter Victoria from Tasmania had to prove he was unconditionally free or face a sentence of three years hard labour in irons, so even an ex-convict with a conditional pardon (which by law meant they were free to go to anywhere in Australia) could be imprisoned for entering Victoria. It seems to me that the instincts of the authorities in the time of the penal colonies remain even now deeply embedded in the psyche of government here.