Border battle: McGowan wears the armour of public opinion — but national separation should not be seen as a win

Seven of eight Australian jurisdictions have reconfirmed their commitment to the project of a united Australian nation. Mark McGowan’s Western Australia is the outlier. It is a sort of secession by administrative decree, a secession of convenience that works beautifully politically for the incumbent. The Premier will not have to give back the billions of JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments, or the billions in infrastructure funds that pay for his election promises and keep the economy afloat. And, of course, there is no need to raise a military to secure the fiefdom’s prosperity. Having played to deep parochial instinct, McGowan wears the bulletproof armour of public opinion and he knows Scott Morrison dare not retaliate. So the PM has moved on with the rest of the nation. And now the path out is entirely McGowan’s responsibility. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. The hard border is beloved for now, but it is not actually the only way you can run a COVID-safe jurisdiction. The Northern Territory and South Australia have effectively been running a version of the flexible hotspot-style travel arrangements the PM wants to run nationally throughout this pandemic. It has never been impermissible to travel between them, WA and Queensland, and travel to NSW and Victoria has been scaled to outbreaks. And yet South Australia and the NT’s COVID performance is equal to or better than WA’s. With Victoria slowly getting its outbreak under control and NSW demonstrating that low-level community transmission can be traced and controlled, by Christmas, the rest of the country will be moving about much more freely. As Morrison said on Friday, it will be for McGowan to explain to West Australians at that point why his more draconian arrangements are superior. It is possible to make the case for temporary and necessary travel restrictions without ramming it down the throats of people who may have family in other places or businesses that require the movement of people — with no end in sight. The Premier did on Friday lay down a marker: zero community transmission of coronavirus in any Australian State for 28 consecutive days. If he’s serious, it would mean that a single community case in, say, Tasmania, on day 27 of the cycle would reset the clock for another month. It’s not a sensible risk-based measure and it’s a milestone that may never be reached. The border rhetoric has gone over the top and it has unleashed forces that may be difficult to contain. Log on to Facebook and you can see how West Australians now treat their countrymen with contempt, fear and suspicion. It is all, of course, predicated on the “health advice”, which given its centrality to justifying these extraordinary and draconian measures is kept scandalously secret. The “I’m all right Jack” approach is justified by protecting mining at all costs. The mistake is to imagine that this won’t have consequences at some point down the track, when iron ore is not above $US100 a tonne and when WA’s luck is not running so hot. A time will come when we will need to lean on the rest of our nation and ask for help — how will such calls be regarded? Separation from the rest of the country should not be celebrated, nor viewed as a “win”. It should be as temporary as possible, and be seen and explained as so. This is true also of the Federal Government which has shamefully abandoned Australian citizens overseas, an issue highlighted in this space two weeks ago. What I would hope for in the meantime is a little more compassion. This week on radio I interviewed Sara, a health professional and single mother of a two-year-old daughter, who had returned from a medical procedure in Sydney. She had permission to quarantine at home, but the police officer at the airport decided her daughter would not be permitted to join her due to the COVID risk this posed. It is a pretty crook assessment of risk — Sara’s chances of being COVID-infected were near zero, her chances of her infecting her daughter were also near zero, and what was the two-year-old going to do — run off to the pub? A disagreement ensued and so the police officer decided Sara should be sent to hotel quarantine at her own expense instead. The decision was reversed and mother and child reunited after four days and a radio interview, but it should not take media intervention for these circumstances to be resolved. There are tens of thousands of these stories. FIFO workers are separated from their families, university students from their parents, grandparents from their grandkids. COVID-19 is bad, but other things can be bad, too, and the power of the state, wielded under emergency powers, must be constantly challenged to make sure the balance is right. I cannot believe it is Mark McGowan’s intention, but people I know are now brought to tears when they hear his border commentary on the radio and television news, because all they hear are tough, cold words without hope. I am not sure how the mental health toll is weighed up amid the daily recitation of the COVID-19 statistics, or what weight it has in the all important “health advice”, but it is real and it is growing.