The line was long for a COVD-19 test yesterday. In one Brisbane suburb, cars snaked for a kilometre along a main road before being coaxed through a roundabout, an industrial area, a car park used as a waiting zone, and finally into the makeshift testing station.
Testers — mainly young women — stood shivering, their facemasks protecting them from the virus but doing nothing to keep the winds at bay.
In the car in front, a middle-aged woman was singing her heart out, patiently waiting her turn. In another, a few further up the line, a younger woman was trying to placate two toddlers who had sat in their child restraints, patiently, for 75 minutes.
A maxi-cab full of passengers was holed up a few vehicles back, just next to a tradie van, a ute, and a flash European car.
Mothers and fathers. Grandparents and toddlers. School children thankful to be missing the first classes on a Monday morning; young professionals keen to get back to the office and to their working week.
All sorts. Except one. None of those lining up to get tested in Brisbane — or Sydney or Melbourne or anywhere else — were likely to have been part of the anti-lockdown mob that took over city centres on the weekend.
That’s because there’s a clear chasm between the selfish, publicity-seeking opportunists who refuse to mask up, and the rest of us who understand the power of this insidious disease — which this weekend killed a young woman in New South Wales.
And it’s not only the power of COVID that most law-abiding Australians understand. It’s the lessons in history and the wonder of science and the importance of not spreading a disease to others. Forget their exaggerated outrage. This crowd of publicity seekers, above all, are plain selfish.
Selfish enough not to care that their foolish actions might plant the seeds for a new virus cluster. Selfish enough not to care that someone’s grandparent or sick child or healthy sibling will be the next to die. Selfish enough not to even register, perhaps, that the last death from COVID-19 in Australia was a healthy woman in her 30s.
Gladys Berejiklian, who looks in need of a long, restful sleep, said she was heartbroken. We all were. Scott Morrison condemned their “irresponsible” behaviour. I suspect everyone in that COVID-19 testing queue yesterday, irrespective of political persuasion, did so too.
But that’s not enough. Taking your eyes off the road for one moment and hurting someone can land you in jail. But knowingly endangering someone’s life during a pandemic? Lying to jump border restrictions? Moving around the community, knowing you have tested positive to COVID-19? Do any of these things, and the penalties are wishy-washy, differ between jurisdictions, and mainly add up to a rap over the knuckles that hurts neither pocket nor reputation.
That has to change. And our states, which seem unable to agree what time it is on most days, need to develop a set of standard behaviours that draw condemnation — and a punishment that deters others. The cost in refusing to act will be significant. More and more people who believe COVID is a threat in other parts of the country and not their own will adhere less to the law if rule-breakers go unpunished.
Increasingly, this pandemic is dividing our nation: vaxxers and anti-vaxxers; those who have kept their jobs and those who haven’t; students learning remotely and students able to go to school; those isolated from families and those who remain in their embrace. The list goes on.
But the weekend’s shenanigans shows another divide: those who wear a mask not because they fear the disease but because they want to protect others, and those who refuse to don cover; those who want us to wage war on this impostor together, and those without any sense of community; those running up the hours in testing queues each day, and those skipping borders against the law.
In short, fighting this disease comes down — in no small part — to the battle between the selfish and the unselfish.
You’re assuming they even believe there is a pandemic. There is a third group involved – the utterly deluded.
Well what a holier than thou rant from Madonna King and I am sure it will have the desired effect in garnering support from the morally righteous majority. Let us make a few points. First one of the things that parents would expect from schools is that they teach against the creation of simplistic stereotyping, especially negative stereotyping. King reduces this complex issue to a selfish vs unselfish dualism. This fits in with what I presume is King’s equally simplistic neoliberal views of society consisting of the deserving and undeserving which permits King and her elk to simultaneously support growing inequality and attack welfare as charity and a burden upon the morally superior ‘lifters’-the wealthy, who carry the burden of economic growth. One result of this growing inequality is reflected in the workforce between those whose jobs permit them to work from the relative safety of their homes as opposed to the low income workers often in casual work that cannot be done in the home but rather in some of the most dangerous work areas. Those who have financial reserves to fall back on and those who do not and so cannot pass up the offer of more shifts at work. More importantly King totally avoids the key question of ‘What turns normally law-abiding citizens into law breakers? It may just be that after doing the ‘right thing’ for all of 2020 and most of 2021 they no longer believe that things will get better. Remember how we were told that by doing the ‘right’ thing Australia was way ahead of the pack. So where is the payoff for having done all the ‘right’ things??. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel that we were promised???. And who could forget Morrison’s reassuring boast that ‘this is not a race’ so how dangerous is COVID19 if it isn’t a race?? And then just like the cavalry arriving in time to save the settlers from the marauding Indians there was the promise of the charge of the vaccines to send the bad guys packing When people really believe that there is no virus running rampant and have lost all faith in the government to act in their best interests then public demonstrations are the only form of protest. What King also makes a point of totally avoiding is the compelling evidence that the Morrison government has been one of the most corrupt dishonest governments Australia has ever had the misfortune to endure. It has shown a keen willingness to subvert all to its self-serving ambition to retain power at all costs. This government has done nothing to earn the respect or trust of large sections of the Australian people. It has failed miserably to keep Australians safe by having copious amounts of vaccine available so that much of the suffering of the last few months could have been avoided. So why follow its directives?? Just out of interest where have there been similar crowds of protesters in New Zealand or even Finland? Perhaps the Corruption Perception Index could help here. This international index is a measure of how much trust citizens have in their government to avoid corrupt practices and look out for the best interest of its citizens. It first was used in 1995. A random check at five yearly intervals produced the following average ranking in comparing levels of trust between three nations. Australia had an average ranking of 10.2 with its highest ranking of 7 in 1995 and its most recent ranking of 11 in 2020. New Zealand average ranking of 1.8 and ranked 1 on 3 occasions with its latest ranking 1 and lowest 3. Finland average ranking 2.9 ranked 1 on two occasions with a lowest ranking of 4
Sure there are a lot of ratbags out there but to simply stereotype society as King does is far too shallow.
Totally agree with your post. “Madonna King is an award-winning journalist ” What a load of BS. She must have stayed too long at the ABC propaganda factory. There was nothing whatsoever in this article to indicate it was written by anyone other than a hack ! Her finishing statement : “In short, fighting this disease comes down — in no small part — to the battle between the selfish and the unselfish.” — is no more than Virtue signalling from the cult of Woke!
Madonna King is just parroting MSM /Govt announcements. No Journalsism involved. Cascade Of Consequences https://tinyurl.com/8z38er4v .Did she inform us about the recent announcement from The FDA, that it will be abandoning the PCR Test for COVID at the end of this year. WHY ? -because it doesn’t work & has resulted in 90% of tests giving false results. Which I have posted about months ago!
Case: Someone otherwise perfectly healthy who has unaccountably presented themselves for testing with a PCR test conducted so that it would find viral strands on Howard Hughes’s gloves.
The Science: A subset of scientific knowledge which cannot be challenged on the basis of empirical data or repeatable experiment because it has been ‘settled’ by the consensus between the subset of ‘experts’ who adhere to it.
Antivaxxer: Anyone who declines or criticises any of the Covid-19 vaccines, regardless of their reasons and general attitude towards vaccination – even if they are a well-regarded medical scientist who has been involved in the development of vaccines for many years. Any evidence produced by the antivaxxer is irrelevant because proof denies faith and without faith ‘The Science’ is nothing.
Agree with most of what you say, for me, I’d probably ease up a bit on your comments about Morrison, but agree the vaccine shemozzle was first rate mismanagement.
The rot starts with Howard, and I rate him worse than Morrison.
Yes agree with you totally here. It started with that little worm and got steadily worse and worse to the stage where it is anything goes to preserve your hold on power. I think you might agree that this kind of attitude has gained ascendancy thanks to a public to self absorbed with their own private aspirations to demand a higher level of behavior among the political class.
I’m no fan of King’s but this is just unhinged invective.
King has captured it correctly. But how are we to think of this insidious (is it a ‘woke’…) phenomenon of having to pity the perpetrator and therefore let them off. The pizza guy in SA who shut down the whole state got nothing. The two eye-candy moles who snuck from VIC to QLD and compromised everyone got nothing. And now, the removalists who broke all the rules of their permit in order to ‘get another load in’ have got (practically) nothing… except their mother caught Covid and died. So we pity them. Because they’re obvious. We know their ‘story’. What about the thousands who are not obvious? Who may have been about to travel somewhere (NZ maybe?) for reasons other than pure recreational indulgence? Who pities them? King has captured it correctly.
Bloody good point Madonna! It exemplifies the reluctance of the criminal law to penalise sins against society, against community and an enthusiasm for penalising sins against property and person.
I’d be wondering about the penalties for the self-serving morons at SKY, 2GB or any of the other media companies who encourage the idiotic and the gullible in their dangerous shenanigans.