I was with about twenty-five year nine students when my phone pinged with the news update: ‘Snap five-day lockdown for Victoria’. I was accompanying the students as a chaplain on a class retreat day. The year twelve leaders smiled as the news broke: it meant Monday’s assessment – their first year twelve certificate task – would be postponed. But after the initial wash of relief there was, or so it seemed to me, a longer pause. Might the promise of a ‘COVID-normal’ 2021 be illusory?
Two weeks earlier, Western Australia went into its own snap lockdown. Late last year South Australia did the same. Although in the latter case the lockdown was cut short, lasting only three of the six expected days. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if Victorians received the news of their lockdown differently. Last year Melbournians experienced 111 days in ‘hard’ lockdown, on top of the months of lockdown experienced across Australia earlier in the year. The strategy to subdue was successful, but it was also suffocating.
In December, feeling emancipated from fear of the virus, I went to Sydney. I was amazed by just how relaxed the feeling was. People hugged and shook hands, where in Melbourne we elbow-tapped at best. On trains and in shopping centres almost no-one wore masks. In the carefree harbour city, the whole atmosphere was different. The gulf in experience gave rise to a different outlook, a different way of being present and interacting with others.
Each of us has our own experience of the first COVID year. We do all share, though, some of the best results in supressing the virus anywhere in the world. We are not bearing the extraordinary levels of death and sickness, the long-term effects of which are unknown. We are not being communally scared by such catastrophic lack of social cohesion and government incompetency to manage the health crisis. Although we have taken an economic ‘hit’, we are better off than other western countries where the virus has been allowed to ‘let rip’.
Talk, though, of social cohesion and government competency is loaded here in Melbourne.
Take, for example, a message I shared to the family WhatsApp group on that Friday afternoon. Frustrated, I lashed out at the impending lockdown. To me, in the moment, it felt undeniable and matter-of-fact. But when it was met with apparent hostility, and the reply constituted of ‘better locked down than sick’, it was only because of what was, to another family member, also undeniable and matter-of-fact.
'We need to get better at being able to name what the virus is doing and how we are responding, to articulate as full a picture as possible, without howling each other down.'
It’s not surprising. We feel this crisis personally, and often if we’re honest, viscerally.
This isn’t political theory 101, this is our lives. The vast majority of Victorians, or Australians, have never experienced this level of government intervention. For those 111 days, we lived under a set of government-mandated directives unprecedent in their curtailment of the whole population’s civil liberties. And, here in Victoria, we lived under them again.
I can feel the bristle at that suggestion of civil liberties curtailed, but it is true. Whether the lockdown, in its severity and length, was necessary to avert the health crisis, whether it could have been avoided by better governance, these are ancillary questions. We need to get better at being able to name what the virus is doing and how we are responding, to articulate as full a picture as possible, without howling each other down. Everyone who questions the decision making and actions of the Victorian Government is not a Murdoch acolyte. Everyone who recognises the difficult circumstances all government leaders have operated in is not an apologist for bad government.
We need to be able to recognise and articulate how well our society, and the various communities that make it up, has done in curtailing this virus. There is no doubt that governments, including Victoria’s, have been the largely successful coordinators of virus suppression.
But we also need to think carefully about the relationship government has with the society and communities it serves. Or ought to. There has been, necessary or not, a major shift in the way that government interacts in the lives of its citizens. Just as social cohesion offers opportunity, so uncritical responses to government risks squandering them. All our leaders ought to be open to rigorous, but fair, scrutiny without need of emotive campaigns to shield them from critique.
After watching students pack their bags with everything they might need for a period of home-schooling, and doing the same myself, I drove home last Friday along busy inner-city Bridge Road. Every pub and bar was heaving to the curb. No-one wore facemasks, consistent with the rules. There were, no doubt, many more who had gone home, cautiously starting lockdown early.
It was a reminder to me that we experience times like this differently. Some take the time as respite; some, concerned for their health, are grateful for the cautious approach. Others, returning to the swing of a new year, with diaries full of activities, rankle at the change.
We do well to recognise how much this is affecting each of us, how much it will do so differently for each citizen, and how much these lockdowns are changing our understanding of the role of government. We do well, too, to register that some Australians experience government’s hand in this way all the time. We might find some greater measure of empathy and understanding for them.
Julian Butler SJ is a Jesuit undertaking formation for Catholic priesthood. He previously practiced law, and also has degrees in commerce and philosophy. Julian is a contributor at Jesuit Communications, a chaplain at Xavier College, and a board member at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Flinders Street station under Stage Four lockdowns (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)