We Cannot Ignore This Double Standard - IPA Keeping In Touch

Dear IPA Members

The weekend’s protests and the reaction of politicians to them reveal something about this crisis that we discovered a long time ago – we’re not all in this together. When public servants get pay rises while the decisions they make ruin lives and businesses – we’re not all in this together. And we’re not all in this together when politicians say you can’t visit your mother on Mother’s Day but you can go to a protest to shout that Australia is a racist country.

How else can you explain the scenes we saw over the weekend? How else can you explain the extraordinary, bald-faced double standard that state premiers have now effectively endorsed?

For months, we’ve been told that life as we know it is over, or at the very least put on hold. The most ordinary acts of everyday life – ranging from simple pleasures to basic human needs – have been conflated with a selfish callousness. Opening your business risks lives, going to work risks lives, sitting down at a café, going to the footy, playing golf, celebrating your wedding, attending a dawn service, shaking hands – all potentially lethal, and therefore unspeakably irresponsible.

But for reasons that I’m still trying to understand, none of that applied to the so-called ‘Black Lives Matter’ rallies on Saturday, in which tens of thousands did attend ‘mass gatherings’. Nobody left their contact details, only a fraction were wearing masks, and all were standing well within the now laughable directive of 1.5 metres apart, with which every single other Australian has at some point been asked to comply.

And unbelievably, present at the rallies were a number of MPs. Four Labor MPs were there, despite their leader Anthony Albanese writing in April that “social distancing measures are difficult but necessary and Australians are showing tremendous discipline and care for others in their compliance”. As far as I’m aware, nobody has asked Mr Albanese what he makes of the lack of discipline and care for others that members of his own caucus – according to his own standard – showed on Saturday.

Worse still are the Greens, who called for a New Zealand-style ‘full lockdown’ in March. “If we want to flatten the curve and give our health system a fighting chance, we must now move to this highest level of lockdown,” thundered Adam Bandt’s media release, “and Australians should expect that we could be in this position for some time to come”. Two of Bandt’s senators – Janet Rice and Mehreen Faruqi – attended the rallies. They are in Parliament today, and are not getting tested.

Then there are the Premiers themselves, who have scrambled to defend the indefensible. Gladys Berejiklian at least tried to stay consistent, launching court proceedings to try to scuttle the protests, which ended up being overturned on appeal.

Annastacia Palaszczuk, on the other hand, fronted a press conference to “thank Queenslanders for social distancing,” adding “I understand that there was hand sanitiser”. Such platitudes are cold comfort to Queenslanders who have watched their businesses and livelihoods collapse as tourist numbers dry up. Most of them would have happily practiced social distancing and provided hand sanitiser. They never had the chance.

But as always, the great villain is Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who has inflicted restrictions on Victoria so severe and nonsensical that they have bordered on sadistic, admonishing Victorians for all manner of minor infractions in his daily press conferences. His response to the protests? “Well, it’s a worthy act, but…”

Of course, the reason for all this is clear to anyone who knows Andrews’ modus operandi. ‘Getting tough’ on the coronavirus restrictions worked for him politically before, when people were scared and reliable information was scarce. Now, not so much.

Here in Melbourne, purple billboards with the Victorian government’s special COVID-19 branding still stand, like monuments to this spectacularly cruel exercise in political opportunism, complete with their exquisitely Orwellian slogan: ‘Staying Apart Keeps Us Together’.

To read the rest of Gideon Rozner’s message, become an IPA Member today.