Extract from ABC News
Analysis
For someone whose parents were both sick with COVID thousands of miles away in Mumbai — with no other family to care for them and too terrified to go to an overflowing hospital — Mickey was incredibly calm.
He had called in to the show at my invitation: it was time to take the airwaves away from the politicians and hand them over to the Indian diaspora in Australia to paint the real picture of the COVID humanitarian disaster there – what Arundhati Roy more angrily declaims as a crime against humanity.
Mickey wanted to go to India to care for his parents. He didn't mind how long he had to be away; he didn't mind if leaving meant he couldn't come back to Australia for months — six months even. He would wait his turn. But his parents had no one else to care for them and he was desperately worried.
But he had applied twice to federal authorities for permission to leave Australia — and twice he had been denied — with no particular reason given. So his parents are there, amid horror. And he is here.
Restrictions feel so cold
The restriction on people leaving this country during the pandemic has never made sense to me. Planes were flying out, and if another country was prepared to accept you then what problem did it cause authorities here? Especially when it seems there has never been any sense of urgency about getting home thousands of stranded Australians.
The rule has confounded legal experts who have pored over its legitimacy.
But
Mickey is stuck, and his parents must now live – and I fervently hope
they live – through the kind of COVID conflagration the world had hoped
to avoid.
Now, in that country's greatest time of need, we are slamming the doors shut and banning any arrivals from India until at least mid-May, with eight repatriation flights already paused.
From a public health perspective, the decision is understandable, but it also feels so cold.
That coldness, that unfeeling judgement, has been one of the most troubling characteristics of Australian life during the pandemic.
Life doesn't travel in a straight line
I could not possibly count all the calls and texts from listeners over the past year condemning fellow Australians for being overseas in the first place, for wanting to travel to see a dying parent, for wanting to be with a long separated partner. So many have so little empathy for their plight. Shut the doors, they say. Why didn't you come home earlier, they ask, as if life ever travels in one straight line.
The bloke whose wedding trip to India kicked off the country's last brief lockdown in Perth would have been feeling a bit of that.
This view is a pretty rough way to consider the needs of fellow Australian. And it's a judgement that attempts to deny a fundamental truth about us all: that we are a country of people who ordinarily get our first passport around the same time we get our first tooth. We live across borders and across seas.
It's time we made proper provision for the reality of that.
Rather than slam the doors shut on vulnerable Australians in the horror that is India, how about we instead fix our hotel quarantine, and build it outdoors, air-spaced and make it work. Finally.
This weekend we have further analysis of India's COVID tragedy; a guide on how to reach down to friends who have fallen down the anti-vax rabbit hole (not to be confused with entirely legitimate vaccination hesitation) and can I invite you to enter the shimmering world of Clarice Beckett, one of my favourite Australian artists and someone whose greater time has surely come.
Have a safe and happy weekend. If you're floating by the Sydney Writers Festival this weekend come say hi as I interview the mighty John Bell on his fascinating thesis that all the leadership lessons you'll ever need can be found in Shakespeare. And the sword fights are good, too.
I'll leave you with this profoundly moving and enthralling new song and video from British singer Little Simz — personal, political and cinematic in its scope: "the top of the mountain is nothing without the climb."
I think this will be one of the songs of the year.
Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and the former co-host of ABC News Breakfast.
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