As Omicron surges again, Australian politicians seem to be adopting the American tactic of denial. It’s a foolish strategy.
This week the national chief health officer urged people to wear masks indoors, but that’s all he could do – no leaders have introduced mandates. Earlier this month the Victorian health minister said she dismissed the recommendation of the state’s chief health officer to mandate masks in early childhood education and some retail settings.
At the end of 2020, a friend of mine fled the chaos of Trump’s US and came back to Western Australia, where she was raised and where she hadn’t lived for decades.
With her young kids in tow, she and her partner spent a year in splendid isolation – camped with her parents in a small beach town a few hours’ south of Perth.
Eventually she had to go back.
Biden had won the election and work called. We exchanged emails in the weeks after she returned and she described having to make a dizzying array of decisions on a daily basis in order to weigh up her risks of infection, and determine how much she was prepared to expose her kids. She found herself wondering whether she should ask parents if they were vaccinated before setting up a play date for her kids.
Her employer finally mandated mask wearing but before that clarity was provided, she was petrified.
In Australia the rules were clear – masks, vaccines, social distancing, caps on public gatherings. You didn’t have to like it but it meant other people’s health wasn’t contingent on whether you had forgotten your mask in the car or whether you thought vaccines represented some sort of conspiracy.
There are all sorts of reasons why people don’t do the right thing when left with the choice – not all of them malicious – but in Australia, for the last few years this hasn’t mattered. No matter your reasons, if you wanted to be a functional member of society you had to follow the public health orders.
You didn’t have to like the government of the day but you understood that, for the most part, public institutions were working on the basis of science, not ideology; that they were there to safeguard your health rather than arbitrarily exercise authority over you.
Back in the US, my friend was relieved that Trump was gone but it was clear that the chronic mistrust of the state that has characterised America since its founding was alive and well and it had real-life implications for how she navigated the world.
Australians were largely spared this sort of existential anxiety. To be sure, there were some bumpy moments under the Morrison government and harsh lockdown measures were unevenly applied in parts of NSW and Victoria, with affluent communities often given a free pass, but at least you (mostly) knew what the rules were, and ultimately science and common sense have prevailed.
Until 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 people simply want to move on and they are trying to avoid short-term conflict. This isn’t wise. In the long term they risk undermining public confidence in the very principles that have helped us through the pandemic this far.
A year ago, political leaders assured us that a combination of social distancing, masks and vaccines would see us through the worst of the pandemic. They were right.
Their sudden prevarication in the face of the latest surge is worrisome. Delaying the inevitable is something regular people do all the time – denial is a normal human instinct. But the job of our leaders is not to bury their heads in the sand and hope life returns to normal. We expect them to face the facts and front up to reality.
If our faith in health institutions is to remain intact (the police are another matter altogether), it will be based on sound political leadership that is grounded not in populism but in science.
People may not like it but they will respect it. More importantly, reinstating mask mandates across the country will spare us all the burden of taking other peoples lives into our hands each time we leave our homes.
After all, this isn’t the US.
