(Image: INA Photo Agency/Sipa USA/Andi M Ridwan)

As New South Wales throws off the mantle of vaccine Stalino-Nazism, as the flights start landing in Tasmania, the news is exciting: there’s another new COVID-19 variant on the way. What? No, not Omicron. OMG Omicron, more like Overcron. Catch up.

Omicron is everywhere already, has been for weeks and is, we are told — on no sure authority — far less severe in its effects than Delta, which is still in the charts. No, not Omicron. I’m talking about the Pi-variant. Or maybe it will be Rho. Or Omega. Whatever, it’s the one that will come to us not from Africa but from Papua New Guinea and/or Indonesia.

Lucky us, of all those in the First World, we’ll get it first. It may be even less severe in its effects than Omicron, if that’s even true of Omicron. But there is no iron law of declining virulence, and so it may reboot. But whatever it will be it is coming. 

The coming of our own neighbourhood variant will be a product of our immense failure in dealing with COVID as a regional issue, a subset of the failure of dealing with COVID as a global issue. Our lazy, cynical, corrupt, incompetent federal government, led by a prime minister whose inability to act decisively is a product of the fatalistic brand of Christianity he follows, failed the initial test of COVID multiple times until pushed to action by the separate action of state governments, events which made visible the joins of the federation for the first time in decades.

When it finally got its act together, the very sense of national purpose it relied on created a “second order” error in ignoring the realities of geography, and treating countries surrounding us as afterthoughts, charity cases. National purpose discovered late revived the bedevilling national illusion that because we are a continent-nation, we can separate ourselves entire.

It should have been obvious from the start that political — not merely physical — geography should have played the greater role, and that we were the rich colonial nation in a sea of underdevelopment that is partly a product of our brilliant progress.

Our quest for vaccines was first lazy, then obscene, without any intervening period of decency as we scrambled to scarf up whatever we could, and boosters on top. Now we’re in the situation where we lack sufficient boosters for ourselves — sufficient to close the five-month gap for the elderly and chronically ill — and there is also gross under-vaccination of the countries around us. Papua New Guinea is at 2.4%.

Dumb and evil, we got the quinella. OK, evil is unfair. There is a regional buying scheme in place, and its failures and ineffectualities have many causes. Application of mass healthcare in countries lacking adequate infrastructure can’t be done with the wave of a hand, and one can’t keep pointing out why they lack it forever. Furthermore, a more sweeping scheme in the earlier stages to prepare for the prospect of mass vaccination would have brought accusations, and the real practice of, colonial paternalism, if not outright bastardry.

Would Labor be any better? Probably less worse — significantly so, depending on the personage. The only two PMs who would have had the vision and focus to conceive of such a plan and get it done would have been Kevin Rudd and Bob Hawke, both with a bit of help from their friends. Malcolm Turnbull would have had the idea but fluffed it. Julia Gillard persuaded towards it. 

What would that wider vision entail? It would have been a buyers’ club essentially — say ourselves, PNG, East Timor, Bougainville, New Zealand and south-west Oceania on the market for enough vaccines for everyone, and with the radical notion that they go first where most needed to stop the spread, second where comorbid chronic illnesses and age are greatest (as a combo) across the whole zone, and third, absolutely equally and proportionally by country with no regard to purchasing power. 

To sell that deal back to the Australian people would have taken a real leader. The point is that any real leader would have jumped at the chance because the moment would have occurred at the juncture of national self-interest and universal morality, which is where the chance to be part of history occurs. Hawke would have been flying around the islands injecting people, his tears a level four biohazard; Rudd would have learnt all 700 of New Guinea’s languages to chat nonchalantly with village headmen for the cameras. But they would have sold it to us as what we needed to do, for ourselves, even if we were cross-subsidising to our immediate detriment — the health of others. 

Currently we have provided the equivalent of Panadol and a leaflet on scabies. Any genuinely regional scheme would have involved not only a buyers’ club on the three principles above, the contributions calculated by gross GDP.

Indonesia would have to have been related to in a more federated way, its size and other factors making for vast complexity. Debts and interest payments to Australian banks would have had to be paused or forgiven. Mobile hospitals and some sort of combined “vaccine corps” would have had to be created, in parallel with existing health systems.

The last of these especially would be a nightmare of colonialism, condescension, inefficiency, corruption and pettiness from both ends, but all those are not arguments against it, but arguments for doing it. Why? Because we are going to have to do it for the next, nastier virus, for the coming climate catastrophes and biosphere disasters, and much more.

Whatever the history of our relations with each other, we are in the region, the region is all of us, and there is no other solution. The Third Worldism that issued from Bandung — currently ravaged by COVID, I presume — in 1955 is gone now; its remnant is Chinese investment, and a lot of countries are recognising that the new Beijing consensus looks like the old Washington consensus, at the same rate of interest.

COVID was a rehearsal for Delta; Delta was the dress rehearsal for Omicron. Omicron is the tech rehearsal, with the lighting rig falling from the sky. We stuffed them all, and showtime is approaching. Our state forms are from the 1648 treaty of Westphalia, their relations from the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the north-south imperial dimensions of it are from the 1875 scramble for Africa, and the world is a high-tech petri dish in rising oceans and dying food chains.

Quite aside from our reciprocal responsibilities, it is only in the context of a regional, fair solution that we could full-throatedly demand that the government STOP SCREWING UP AND ROLL OUT THIRD DOSES IMMEDIATELY!

Your correspondent has, you will be shocked to hear, one or two comorbidities. Yet the only moral action we could make now is to send all third doses, save for those for the severely immunocompromised, to East Timor, PNG etc as first or second doses. Only COVID’s relatively low death rate is hiding from us the obscenity of how we are doing this.

We are going to need to change very smart, very fast, and try to fail a little less at doing so. History repeats as tragedy, farce and a bad Dr Who episode. Omicron is here, Omega is coming. If we keep missing chances to change ourselves, it will change us anyway.