It is incredibly sad to say, but this terrible situation that many of our citizens now find themselves in is the logical consequence of the ethics of pandemic management that has been advocated by the loudest voices in Australian society (including many Christian leaders).
Over the last year in the face of the COVID crisis our nation has had to address the question of The Common Good in way we have not had to do in decades. The answer that was quickly accepted as gospel was simple – the truly moral position to take was that infections must be minimised At All Costs. It was not enough to focus on measured care and protection of those most at risk such as the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, and (it would later be discovered) the obese. All infections were created equal, and thus the preventative measures would be universal and unalterable. Compliance was to be mandatory rather than voluntary. Schools and businesses MUST close. State borders MUST be shut. Masks MUST be worn, even in communities thousands of kilometres away from the last “local” infection. This, we were told, is what Loving Our Neighbour looks like.
Because infections of any kind were deemed to be a moral issue, when they did occur (as the nature of viruses dictates they eventually would) these were treated as moral failures by those in charge. A case is transmitted through quarantine staff? The Minister is responsible! Several cases in a nursing home? The administrator has blood on his hands! Even though our rates of infection have been among the lowest in the world (and death rates have subsequently been correspondingly low), the possibility of any new infections was not just a practical or medical emergency but a Moral Emergency.
Therefore, if strong measures were instituted these were For The Best, and it is therefore IMMORAL to question them. Think your children would be thriving better back at school rather than learning at home? “How selfish!” Concerned that your neighbour’s business has probably had to close permanently with financial consequences for her family? “How can you raise material concerns when human life is at stake?” Believe that the risks are manageable enough for life to get back to normal? “That means you are prepared to let Grandma die for your right to get a haircut!” The Most Certain Measures have been accepted as the categorical imperative. Whatever strategies Government put in place were For Our Own Good and must be adhered to if we do not wish to be regarded as immoral, unloving, and even sinful. We MUST knock in the 2 inch nail with the 10 pound sledgehammer to make ABSOLUTELY SURE the job gets done. Sure, doing it that way will bang up the surrounding wall a bit, but we can ignore the damage for the time being, and why take the risk of using smaller and more targeted approaches?
In short, the only good was the Collective Good, and a quite specific form of it to boot. Concern for individual liberty or circumstances were, in reality, vices masquerading as virtues. In the broader scheme of things, all we were being asked to endure were minor inconveniences in pursuit of the most noble of goals.
Which brings us to the extraordinarily painful and difficult of moral circumstances that Australia finds herself in today. Against the backdrop of the terrible spread of a COVID variant in the nation of India (a situation which gives me great personal heartache) we have the plight of thousands of Australian citizens stranded in that nation who are being refused permission to come home. Cue the outraged commentary across the social spectrum. How could the Government refuse to bring these people back? They are Our Responsibility and we have a collective duty to make sure that they are not left in harm’s way. How can it be justified to abandon them in the heart of one of the world’s biggest outbreak sites at a time when the medical systems there are breaking down and while we have the capacity to care for them here?
Which is, of course, a pertinent question. In my opinion these citizens of ours should be brought home, and fast! Loving our neighbours begins with those with whom we share the bonds of familiar and social connections. We cannot (and indeed must not) allow a nation which is much poorer and more deeply impacted in the current crisis to bear the burdens if our own people were to be infected when we have an abundance of capacity. To leave our fellow Australians in this predicament is morally reprehensible.
However, if that were to happen, if the Government were to bring them home tomorrow, it would require a communal recognition that the ethical framework that has governed our public policy for the last year has some not inconsiderable holes in it.
For to bring these citizens of ours home would be an acknowledged public risk, which is something that we have been assured must be avoided at all costs. Over the recent Easter holidays the entire city of Brisbane was locked down and the rest of Queensland and parts of New South Wales were put on social restrictions because of a “community transmission” case involving close contacts of one household. The Bluesfest in Byron Bay was cancelled with only 24 hours to go because a “hotspot” was declared over a single solitary case, leading to huge financial losses for dozens of individuals and businesses who had been planning for the festival to go ahead for months (not to mention all the people who had their holidays ruined). Some people were heard grumbling that it was a bit thick when footy games at the MCG and elsewhere were going ahead without restrictions, but the answer came back that it was Better To Be Safe Than Sorry. The possibility of infections was an unacceptable moral risk, so everyone had better be prepared to suck it up and move on.
Well, now we are looking at a scenario of THOUSANDS of people who have been living in an area ravaged by a highly infectious variant being allowed back into the country and being put in quarantine arrangements where there have been breaches in the past. The chances of these citizens passing on infections to somebody with community contacts is quite high. So, it follows that if these citizens were to be allowed back into the country it would be in direct conflict with the ethical reasoning that has driven policy up to this point. The kind of judgment that has seen politicians on all sides being labelled as incompetent or morally corrupt if any case has slipped through the net. The imperative that anything lower than No Risk is akin to deliberately allowing the most vulnerable in our society to perish.
How could we expect our leaders to now act differently when we have insisted on such an ethical position?
The problem is that our blessed position here in Australia which has given us advantages against crises of these nature has allowed us to accept premises in public ethics which appeared to be admirable but when the crunch came have demonstrated themselves to be more than a little self-serving. We assumed that this was a crisis that could be defeated rather than managed. We did not want the risks of personal burden that we have seen across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and were prepared to allow restrictions on liberty that deeply impacted our neighbours and then shamed any who spoke out about it. We accepted that Government Must Know What Is Best. We used sledgehammers to knock in nails over and over again without checking what collateral damage (practical and philosophical) we were doing.
Above all, we insisted on Law rather than Grace as a means to an end. And so today, when an extra measure of Grace is required and risk to be assumed for the good of some of our own people in desperate need, we find it as a nation hard to act. To do so would be to admit not that the aversion of infections was not good, but it was not the only good with which we should have been concerned. We were so concerned on maintaining our survival (particularly those of us in comfortable, educated, middle-class homes) that we did not question who was bearing the costs in other areas. We cannot avoid these matters any longer in the face of the quandary that presents itself to the national conscience this week.
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