The tension towards covid rules is growing

There are plenty of stories of the seeming confusing of the conflicts created by unravelling public health policies — pronouncements of obligations to meet various testing requirements, or rules that just don’t make sense any more — but we’ll start with this one, because it has strands that go into so many other shambles just now.

Every state and territory now has their own rules. But it also raises the question of why we still even have border restrictions in place.

As the former head of the Department of Health, Jane Halton, told 7.30 this week, the value of the restrictions is questionable when the rate of COVID infections in Australia is now higher than in the US or UK. (As of January 12, 397.4 per 100,000, compared to 234.4 in the US and 221 in the UK, according to the Financial Times coronavirus tracker.)

Closed borders aren’t working anymore

Closed international borders were one of the first things governments did to “keep us safe”. But they aren’t working anymore. Now their main effect is keeping out a lot of the workers we have traditionally relied on to fill jobs, even before the shortages created by people getting sick from COVID or being forced to isolate. According to this week’s numbers, there were 400,000 job vacancies in Australia in November.

Maybe we could add an obligation to BYO RATs to the existing requirement — for those who are currently allowed to come here — to prove that they are double vaccinated.

Rapid antigen tests have suddenly become the key to society functioning, and the best symbol of how the whole “government getting out of your face” thing seems to have gone so spectacularly awry in the past six weeks.

That messaging just happened to coincide with the arrival of Omicron, a development which required perhaps the biggest gear shift in policy so far.

At his post-national cabinet press conference on last Thursday afternoon, the Prime Minister observed that national cabinet’s policy objective was “a constant daily process of balancing the need to keep people at work and to protect our hospitals”.

The only problem is howthe government seems to be little failed to manage this balancing task.

National cabinet — that’s the states as well as the federal government, of course — agreed on Thursday to further relax the “close contacts” rules requiring members of the same household as a COVID case to isolate for seven days.

With the potential for up to 10 per cent of the workforce off work, according to the PM, but with some industries suggesting the rate in their businesses is up to 50 per cent, it was an understandable move.

The hinge on which this whole thing works

The new regime will mean workers in the transport, freight, logistics, emergency services, energy, water, waste management, food, beverage, telecommunications, data, broadcasting, media, education and childcare industries will be allowed to return to work immediately after a negative rapid test.

The rapid antigen tests are the hinge on which this whole thing works. Yet the lack of tests said much about the way governments collectively not only seem to have (not) planned, or anticipated, the likely demand for the tests.

The federal government was buying tests for places within its responsibilities like aged care, the PM said, and the states and territories were doing the same. The idea that someone might have done some sort of stocktake of the collective national supply and worked out where the holes were seemed to be too much to expect.

Instead, governments announce rules about who can, or even “should” be at work, without feeling any apparent obligation to provide the tools it is obliging people to use — RATs — to do so.

Small businesses and the unions are calling out the response as inadequate, and further, calling for RATs to be free for all, in the interests of both helping the economy to function and stopping the further spread of disease and people getting sick.

The disconnect between the lived experience of most ordinary people and the pronouncements of government only seems to grow.