Not so funny story. My area came out of a lockdown yesterday. Apparently we have had no positive COVID cases for a week. Yet now that my local government area (LGA) is out of lockdown, and the closest major regional centre is not, we’ve been told by our local council that we cannot go there for work or grocery shopping or we will need to undergo a stay at home order for 14 days. But when we were both in lockdown many people would have gone to that major regional centre to do those very activities.

Now there is a technicality to insert there. You are not supposed to leave your LGA when in lockdown. My LGA consists of a number of small towns across a large geographical area. None of them have a lot in the way of facilities. Two of them have what you could generously call a supermarket. Nothing like the sprawling supermarkets that most people go into every week. So technically one has to go to only those small towns to do all of your food shopping. If that were to be the case, those two supermarkets would have been out of stock of lots of stuff very quickly and very consistently over the period of lockdown. Now if I needed to visit a bank branch, well, you can just forget it. There isn’t one in our LGA at all.

Now why even mention all of that? To show how unprepared, how nonsensical and how downright stupid are the policies of our elected Governments. Both State and Federal.

Let’s start with Federal.

Australia is an island nation. Surrounded by water. A fucking lot of water. Not bloody likely anyway will swim here. And we hear countless amount of chest beating bollocks over how our borders are protected from illegal migrants all the time. So one would imagine if we also used the Quarantine processes that Australia has been so proud for for the last hundred years or so we’d be just fine and dandy.

But no. We cannot do that. It will inconvenience business and cost them money. And since we cannot have international tourists here during a pandemic we need to throw a lifeline to the multinational Hotel industry that can now have no customers by using inner city hotels as places of strict quarantine.

What the actual fuck.

Ever seen a movie about Ebola? Or any other highly contagious disease? Do they lock patients up in 4 and 5 star hotels? That isn’t fucking quarantine.

According to dictionary.com quarantine means “a strict isolation to prevent the spread of disease”. Strict. Isolation. That doesn’t equate to any accommodation I have ever been put into. Especially the ones with ducted air conditioning and room service. Funnily enough we already have one of these places that actually is a proper quarantine centre in the Northern Territory not far from Darwin. Now it is in use. I saw our Olympians using it recently. You know when they came back from Japan. You know, to compete for medals. No, not to visit dying relatives or something important. But for fucking sport. The only culture this country has.

And there is vaccination. Oh yes, that clusterfuck. Because of our excellent geographic location (see the earlier bit of being surrounded by a fucking lot of water) we didn’t need to hurry with our vaccine commitments as we were protected by our quarantine. Err, maybe not then.

Lucky we placed orders with all of the big pharmaceutical companies to get vaccinated in case COVID got into the community right? What? You told Pfizer to fuck off because we didn’t need them? Oh yeah, great, thanks. Umm, shit. AstraZeneca anyone? Remember AZ? The one that had a study that our media went apeshit over when it turned out you had a 1 in 500,000 chance of getting some potentially fatal blood clots. Seriously for a moment here, that is pretty tough to take if you know or even worse are, one of those 1 in 500,000 people who have the bad reaction. But those odds versus the odds of being very, very badly ill with a much higher chance of dying from COVID – I know which call I am making a 100 times out a 100. AZ thanks.

Now I’ve had AZ, 2 doses of it. Booked in the first day I could. Had a day of major fatigue where I just slept a lot after the first shot. I had a sore arm after the second shot but that was more from the guy who gave me the needle looked like he took a run up went he put it in my arm. We were talking about the media coverage before he gave me the shot and was sounding very frustrated and I think I copped some of that. Not a mistake I’ll make again. Next time (if they do boosters) ask AFTER the shot. Back on topic now my wife got a very sore arm with some localised swelling for a few days. I have had some mates who were a bit poorly. One of my old football teammates was apparently quite sick for a day. That’s it. But the media drummed it up to be “we’re all gunna die from AZ” and people got nervous. Anti-vaxxers (or as I refer to them ‘fuckwits’) had a field day, and people avoided the jab.

But in the meantime the jabs we did have available, where did they go? We originally got told “into our most vulnerable” like aged care homes. So when COVID Alpha hit Sydney and Melbourne it went through the aged care sector like a bad curry. A lot of older Australians died. And to be fair some would have died regardless of vaccinations. But that some is a very small percentage of those who did. I don’t know where those vaccines went. I know our politicians got jabbed very bloody quickly. But then COVID got into the hospitals. And nurses started getting ill. Now I am going to say ‘what the fuck’ again. And here begins the Grumpy Plan to protecting an island nation from a Pandemic.

1. Close the fucking borders. Not a little bit. Close them. Any passengers come in go into REAL quarantine. Not a 4 star hotel. A fucking quarantine station where people are isolated. It’s not a holiday and it’s not supposed to be. Ever been to the Q Station on North Head? Ever hear how the migrants when they arrived by ship back then were treated? Quarantine is NOT a holiday. And anyone who leaves the country DOESN’T GET BACK IN. Not for sport, not for meetings to influence whether the Great Barrier Reef goes onto an Endangered list or not, not for anything. Life and death here buddy. Don’t give me any poli speak about ‘the tough decisions’ because there is one our Federal Govt did not have the balls to make.
2. Vaccinations are to be done. They are compulsory unless getting it will kill you. No “I choose not to” unless you hand me back your Medicare card for LIFE. None of this “I don’t know what is in it” bullshit. You don’t know what is in your coffee, your fags, your beer, your burger, your tofu, your smashed avo on toast so don’t try and play the fucking molecular biologist with me. When you can supply me the chemical formula for your morning latte I’ll think about giving you vaccination choice. Until then, fuck off. (see point 1 and tough decisions)
3. First cab off the rank for the jab is Medical Staff, Police, Ambulance, Firefighters, Customs and Quarantine staff and the entire Logistics industry (truck drivers, warehousing, cleaners, etc). Not politicians. You wait until the rest of us get it you self serving bastards. After that first group comes aged care residents and anyone working in aged care. At that time you also do any other care groups like disability homes, mental health, domestic violence refuges, etc. People who cannot look after themselves or under such intense stress that any infection will have a greatly enhanced effect. Also school teachers and child care staff. Then the aged amongst our general population and those with underlying health conditions, especially those who have more difficulty breathing since we know COVID affects your breathing in particular.
4. Jabs continue happening as we go through the age groups. Hopefully the younger people will be more resilient if any COVID gets into the community. But if it does somehow, despite the excellent REAL quarantine measures and much improved dynamics around vaccination, get into the community we do lockdowns. The very lockdowns that Victoria did to snuff out COVID Alpha, admittedly at the tragic cost of lives that it took because no one enacted the above plan.

Enough Federal bashing for the moment, even though I love doing it – let’s go after the State Govt of NSW now….

And then along came Delta. Not Goodrem. With a highly infectious vector COVID was now spreading like wildfire through our porous hotel quarantine system (admittedly not the NSW State Govt’s fault), our ridiculously soft and ineffective partial fairy lockdowns (totally their fault) or as one wit cleverly called them “mockdowns” and our hesitant on AZ vaccination (thanks to media blitz on blood clots) and largely unvaccinated community. Daily reported cases were rising rapidly, hospitals were being put under intense pressure and ambulances forced to queue for over an hour to discharge patients. Eventually real lockdowns happened but initially only by LGA’s. So when it all started the affluent Eastern suburbs did not get a lockdown. A watered down ‘behave yourself’ note was basically what they got. When it hit South Western Sydney, a far less affluent area, they got full lock down, police and military personnel walking the streets asking why you weren’t at home. Mounted police too. And a curfew. And while that happens they see footage on the news of the Eastern Suburbs populace walking their dogs on the beach while they have to entertain their children in an apartment because playgrounds are closed in their local area. Here is another ‘what the fuck’ moment.

A tale of two cities? You betcha. Then it got into Western Sydney proper, where I grew up. Then they get lockdowns. Not sure if they got curfew too. I didn’t see that. But the largely diverse communities of SW Sydney got the full gamut of measures.

And then the worst of all. It got into Regional NSW. Largely thanks to dickhead Sydney people doing the wrong thing and not staying at home like they were supposed to. And for those who could legally move about for their work, not wearing masks, etc. They also took it to Victoria. And Canberra. And eventually NZ. But in the regions we don’t have the health facilities. And when it gets into seriously disadvantaged communities, especially predominantly Indigenous communities, it is a recipe for disaster. And that is what happened in Wilcannia. A largely Indigenous community between Cobar and Broken Hill. There is literally nothing for hours in any direction in terms of infrastructure other than roads and power cables. So when COVID hit Wilcannia that was the ultimate evidence of the incompetence of the State Govt and their so called ‘plan’ to keep us safe. And the fact that they totally ignored the pleas of Wilcannia’s own Maari Ma organisation that pleaded with them more than 12 months earlier to take steps to be prepared should COVID come to Wilcannia. Pleas ignored. Utterly shocking. In my opinion it is criminal negligence. But I’m no lawyer, just a good judge of a shit show.

So there you have it in a nutshell. The Grumpy Plan to have avoided this mess. No 20-20 hindsight required there. All of it was spelled out by experts long before I wrote it up. But all of that expert advice was ignored as it wasn’t politically expedient, it was going to cost business too much, it was going to cost the Government too much, it was too risky for votes or it was just too fucking sensible and obvious to anyone with half a brain. Which leaves out the Govt groups I mentioned earlier who would be lucky to be able blow their nose collectively if brain cells were dynamite. Such chronic failures in planning, intelligence and courage should lead to criminal prosecution and political oblivion at the Ballot Box as well. Should. But I’ll sadly end with this.

Won’t.