As Omicron rises again, Australian politicians appear to be adopting the American tactic of denial. It’s a dumb strategy.
This week, the national health chief urged people to wear masks indoors, but that’s all he could do: no leader has introduced mandates. Earlier this month, Victoria’s health minister said she rejected the state health chief’s recommendation to impose masks in early childhood education and some commercial settings.
In late 2020, a friend of mine fled the chaos of Trump’s USA and returned to Western Australia, where she was raised and had not lived for decades.
With her young children in tow, she and her partner spent a year in splendid isolation, camping with her parents in a small beach town a few hours south of Perth.
Finally he had to go back.
Biden had won the election and called for jobs. We exchanged emails in the weeks after her return, and she described having to make a dizzying array of decisions on a daily basis in order to weigh her risks of infection and determine how much she was prepared to expose her children. She found herself wondering if she should ask parents if they were vaccinated before setting a play date for their kids.
Her employer eventually forced her to wear a mask, but before that clarity was provided, she was petrified.
In Australia the rules were clear: masks, vaccines, social distancing, limits on public gatherings. You didn’t have to like it, but I meant that other people’s health didn’t depend on whether you left your mask in the car or if you thought vaccines represented some kind of conspiracy.
There are all sorts of reasons why people don’t do the right thing when given the choice, not all of them malicious, but in Australia, for the past few years that hasn’t mattered. No matter your reasons, if you wanted to be a functional member of society you had to follow public health orders.
You didn’t have to like the government of the time but you understood that, for the most part, public institutions worked from science, not ideology; that they were there to safeguard your health rather than arbitrarily exercise authority over you.
Back in the States, my friend was relieved that Trump was gone, but it was clear that the chronic mistrust of the state that has characterized America since its founding was alive and well and had real-life implications for how he navigated the world
Australians were largely spared this kind of existential angst. Sure, there were some tough times under the Morrison government and tough lockdown measures were applied unevenly across parts of NSW and Victoria, with well-to-do communities often getting a free pass, but at least (mostly) you knew what the rules were, and finally science and common sense have prevailed.
Bye now.
At this stage, most people understand the basic science of this virus, as well as its economic and social effects. So it’s strange that leaders should choose this moment to resist mask mandates.
Some may believe that people simply want to move on and are trying to avoid short-term conflict. This is not wise. In the long term, they risk undermining public confidence in the very principles that have helped us get through the pandemic so far.
A year ago, political leaders assured us that a combination of social distancing, masks and vaccines would get us through the worst of the pandemic. They were right.
Their sudden prevarication in the face of the latest increase is worrying. Delaying the inevitable is something normal people do all the time: denial is a normal human instinct. But the job of our leaders is not to bury our heads in the sand and hope that life will return to normal. We hope they face the facts and face reality.
If our faith in health institutions is to remain intact (the police are another matter), it will be based on strong political leadership that is based not on populism but on science.
People may not like it, but they will respect it. More importantly, reinstating mask mandates across the country will save us all the burden of taking other people’s lives into our own hands every time we step out of the house.
After all, this isn’t the US.