investigation
Melbourne violence and Sydney lockdown: When will our two biggest cities heal from long COVID?

‘That’s the way it’s gonna be, little darlin’ We’ll be riding on the horses, yeah Way up in the sky, little darlin’ And if you fall I’ll pick you up, pick you up.” If there was one item nobody had on their COVID-19 pandemic bingo card it might have been this: protesting Melbourne construction workers singing Daryl Braithwaite’s classic “Horses” on the city’s West Gate Bridge. In a city best known for its progressive social views, abundance of coffee-shops and hipster tendencies, Melburnians have been, as one local academic put it, “shocked to discover this pocket of Trump-like libertarian zealots” living among them. Tradies pelted police with tap handles and stormed a war memorial, Victorian police fired rubber bullets and suburban vaccine clinics were reportedly vandalised as a series of protests this week erupted into violence. The wild scenes came in a week that saw Melbourne poised to become the most locked down city in the world next week, Victoria record its highest number of daily cases — 847 on Saturday — and as an AFL-mad city was forced to watch WA celebrate its big day Mother Nature added to the pile-on, shaking the city with a magnitude 5.8 earthquake. At the same time Sydney, some parts of which have been locked down since late June, is dealing with its own social divisions, thanks to a lockdown that has imposed different rules on different council areas. As a result some parts of the city, typically but not exclusively the more working class and racially diverse western suburbs, have seen a zero tolerance approach from police, including arrests at funerals, while the wealthier eastern suburbs have been granted greater freedom. Australia’s two biggest cities, with a combined population of more than 10 million, now face the challenge of recovering from their own brand of “long COVID” as residents struggle to heal divisions that, experts warn, could persist long after lockdown. Monash University associate professor of politics and Melbourne resident Paul Strangio said after previous lockdowns there had been a “sense of solidarity” and pride. This time, he said, it felt different. “There is still a sense of solidarity in the community but it now competes with feelings of frustration, impatience and lockdown fatigue,” he said. “The Delta strain has also changed the landscape in terms of defeating this outbreak of the virus. “Undoubtedly there is now a strong degree of lockdown fatigue in the community. One measure of this is that, compared to earlier lockdowns, compliance with this lockdown is lower, as reflected in mobility data. Even factoring in lockdown fatigue, this week’s protests have come as a shock in a city like Melbourne. The sight of construction workers attacking their union’s headquarters in protest of a Labor Government’s policies, being condemned by union leaders and backed by Pauline Hanson might have given those in one of Australia’s most left-leaning cities a bad case of cognitive dissonance. “I think to most Victorians it has come as something of a shock to discover that, within their community, there is a small pocket of libertarian zealots,” Professor Strangio said. “They give the impression of being our equivalent of Trump supporters: angry, alienated and irrational … However, this is a tiny minority that is not representative of the community at large.” Depending on who you ask the Melbourne riots represent either a groundswell of anger and frustration at the city’s sixth COVID lockdown, the infiltration of one of the country’s most militant unions by far right, anti-vaccination extremists or the actions of bored, angry men spoiling for a fight. The hashtag #faketradies did good business on Twitter this week, reflecting one view that the industry was being used by outside extremists. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union was forewarned that something like the events of this week might be coming in early September, when it condemned plans for an anti-vaccination protest outside its headquarters. In the process it also came out against mandatory vaccination on building sites. “We believe that vaccinations are the only way out of this pandemic,” it said. “The union supports choice, and it is up to the individual to decide whether the vaccine is right for them.” The protests went ahead anyway, fuelled by a Victorian Government ban on tearooms and, more significantly, mandatory vaccinations, and the CFMEU headquarters were attacked in the process. A decision to shut down the State’s construction industry for two weeks, at an estimated cost of more than $2 billion, sparked further unrest, including the storming of the Shire of Remembrance. With the speed of a child fleeing a polly waffle in a swimming pool, CFMEU boss John Setka distanced the union from the protests, he called “un-Australian”. “There is a minority group there (protesting) that are our members, a lot of the other people that are there are not our members,” he said. To put the scale of the riots in perspective, on Tuesday — the day of bizarre amateur karaoke scenes — the crowd was estimated at about 2000. On the same day an estimated 88,000 Victorians got vaccinated and by Friday protestors were numbered in the dozens. In Victoria, 75 per cent of eligible residents have now had at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 84 per cent in NSW and 62 per cent in WA. The protests may represent a minority of Victorians but there have been other, more muted, signs of discord. One Change.org petition calling for Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews to resign has gained more than 140,000 signatures, although signatories are not required to be Victorians; workers who lost their job because of pandemic measures have launched class actions against the Government; and Roy Morgan research suggests more than half of Melburnians now believe the ban on visiting close family should be lifted. Even so, the most recent Newspoll showed Mr Andrews has a 64 per cent approval rating, compared to 57 per cent for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and 56 per cent for Sydney’s Gladys Berejiklian. In Sydney, which made its own headlines for ugly classes between protestors and police just over a week ago, relative order appears to have been restored, even as NSW topped 50,000 COVID cases. From tomorrow capacity limits on its own construction industry will ease and a significant lifting of wider community restrictions — especially for the fully vaccinated — is likely to come into effect in October, with Ms Berejiklian signalling on Friday the State was “galloping” towards its target of having 70 per cent of residents double jabbed. Throughout the Delta lockdown, residents in south-west and western Sydney have had to contend with the harshest conditions in NSW, while their eastern counterparts enjoyed greater freedoms, making it very much a tale of two cities. And while some of the restrictions on hotspots have now been lifted, bringing them into line with the rest of Greater Sydney, others remain. For example, workers from the 12 Sydney council areas identified as hotspots can only leave their local government area for work if they are vaccinated. That is a source of frustration for Canterbury-Bankstown mayor Khal Asfour, who says the Government has effectively mandated vaccination for people in some suburbs but not others, regardless of whether they are working together. “All these things created a stigma for our community,” he said. “Then we start seeing pictures of the eastern suburbs and police are not enforcing masks, whereas in my community we had checkpoints being set up. “We had people breaching the rules and being arrested at funerals but people breaching the rules at beaches were not being arrested.” His community has been one of those hardest hit by the Sydney lockdown because of the high number of cases. Those numbers, he said, reflect the fact that many locals are authorised essential workers servicing the rest of Sydney. He said Sydney’s streets may be quieter than Melbourne’s this week but divisions are real and will take time to heal. Just how hard hit Sydney’s western suburbs have been was illustrated at a virtual economic summit hosted by the Labor Opposition this month, which showed job creation was down 54 per cent in the western suburbs, versus 29 per cent in the east and small business turnover fell 35 per cent in the west but rose slightly in the east. Frustration and resentment is easy to see when it is wearing high-vis, waving a flare and murdering Daryl Braithwaite’s best. But the anger stirred up by 18 months of lockdowns, restrictions and a growing sense that even widespread distribution of life-saving vaccines will not return Australia to pre-COVID life, does not just flow one way. Trawl through social media and it becomes obvious that many of those in lockdown who have been doing the “right” thing are furious with those caught breaking the rules. Psychologists say it is natural for those following health directives to feel frustrated when others do not. The Australian Psychological Society went so far as to publish an information sheet to help those struggling to see rule breakers. Most people, the APS says, do the right thing, it is just that the rule breakers get more media attention. It recommends people remind themselves that those who break the law will most likely be caught and fined. It also warned against expressing frustration and anger in a “non-respectful, blaming” or “humiliating” way. “We know this can reinforce their resistance and worsen a situation — even to the point of violence,” it said. What will life look like on the other side of lockdown and what does the path back to a united city look like for Melbourne and Sydney? Both NSW and Victoria have walked away from zero COVID and will instead progressively lift restrictions as they hit vaccination targets, with some freedoms reserved for the double vaccinated. Professor Strangio said there was “more potential for discord” than after previous Melbourne lockdowns because of “the stark divide between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated”. “With the latter likely to be denied freedoms enjoyed by the vaccinated, it has the potential to create two classes of citizen and to breed resentment between the two groupings,” he said. Deakin University senior research fellow Josh Roose, who researches conspiracy movements, suggests part of moving beyond the events of 2021 will be tackling the “far right nationalists, anti-vaxxers, libertarians and conspiracy theorists (that) have come together over COVID, and capitalised on the anger and uncertainty simmering in some sections of the community”. “They appear to have found fertile ground particularly among men who feel alienated, fearful about their employment and who spend a lot of time at home scrolling social media and encrypted messaging apps,” he wrote in an article for The Conversation this week. He said getting workers back to work was one critical step but politicians also needed to “think hard and fast about what they can do to help rebuild trust in them, in government and in our institutions”. He added society should “think carefully” about social media and potentially regulation, given its role in spreading conspiracy theories. In Sydney, one indication that the road back to normal will be a long one came this week when the City of Sydney cancelled its New Year’s Eve harbourside fireworks display for the second year in the row. The State Government has not ruled out stepping in, with Ms Berejiklian saying the fireworks were “always a sign of hope for the new year”. Mr Asfour believes a unified Sydney is again possible but warned it will not happen overnight. “This is going to take some time,” he said. “We’re not going to forget the way we’ve been treated. There will need to be time to heal as a city ... to bring one Sydney together. We won’t forget but we need to rebuild relationships and rebuild trust.”

investigationMelbourne violence and Sydney lockdown: When will our two biggest cities heal from long COVID?

investigation
Melbourne violence and Sydney lockdown: When will our two biggest cities heal from long COVID?