Andrew P Street
Who knew that our Prime Minister was such a fan of Joseph Heller?
There’s a moment, late in Catch-22 where protagonist Yossarian is told by the odious Colonel Korn that he had a choice to publicly support his incompetent superiors and be sent home a hero, or to keep flying bomber missions until he was killed.
It was summed up with the straightforward explanation: ‘You’re either for us, or against your country. It’s as simple as that’.
Thanks to the new plan of ‘Living With The Virus’, adopted in part, because of growing fears that the spread of COVID-19 in NSW has passed the point of being contained, Morrison’s comms team have clearly decided that the best way forward is to present Australia’s immediate future as a binary choice between enjoying vaguely defined but glorious-sounding freedom, or staying in lockdown forever and ever. And ever.
And look, despite the current rhetoric, nobody wants to keep living like this. No-one wants to attend family funerals on Zoom, or meet their new nieces and nephews on Facetime.
Everybody wants to get to a post-crisis pandemic where we can be confident that community expectations, and our increasingly stressed and exhausted medical systems, are able to handle an ongoing endemic virus.
We even have a path forward: vaccinations, and more vaccinations, and then more vaccinations – until a significant percentage of the population has some degree of
immunity.
And even then, stopping the spread means a future of masks, and social distancing, and capacity limits, and step-by-step travel to countries with well-contained virus numbers.
That, however, isn’t the conversation the PM is interested in having.
Instead, he’s quite brilliantly forcing us into the uncomfortable position of either pulling together for the success of a pandemic strategy designed around his re-election campaign, or… what… hoping for the sickness or death of thousands of Australians?
By Morrison’s manipulated logic you’re either for him, or you’re against your country.
That’s not a choice anyone should relish, yet here we are.
Going by the most recent polling, however, it would appear that Australians are looking at the rising case numbers and hearing the pleas of over-stretched health workers and thinking that any talk of opening up the country is a teensy-tiny bit premature, especially while the accelerated vaccine rollout hasn’t yet come close to reaching 50 per cent of the population.
People definitely need hope in these difficult times, but pretending things are rosier than they are is at best counterproductive and at worst needlessly cruel.
The approach that Morrison appears to be taking is that we should stop stressing about rising case numbers, because the situation is what the situation is, and that we have to make the best of it.
And that would sound a lot more reasonable if the person making that case wasn’t also largely the person responsible for said situation, with the Delta variant escaping Australia’s porous and half-arsed quarantine system (responsibility – the federal government) into a community with a sluggish vaccination rate, thanks in large part to inadequate vaccine supply (responsibility – federal government).
And we can do both: we can hold the government responsible, AND we can make a smart plan for the future based on case numbers and vaccination levels rather than what month would be ideal for a federal election campaign.
Spoiler: in Catch-22, Yossarian goes AWOL instead of taking the deal. Australia could yet do the same.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
