April 1, Market Street, Newcastle, a 21-year-old man is eating a kebab on a bench. It's the third time he's been spotted out and about. Boom. That's a $1000 fine.
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The same day in Scott Street, Muswellbrook, a man and a woman "sitting in a car": "Following inquiries, officers attached to Hunter Valley Police District found neither the 32-year-old woman or the 27-year-old man had a reasonable excuse not to be at home." Both hit with fines.
At 4pm, two men, aged 41 and 44, sitting together at Caseys Beach Reserve, Batehaven, having a drink. When officers spoke with the pair they "became abusive and claimed they were exercising". Infringement notices issued.
The daily list of fines handed out by the NSW Police for going outside without an excuse is Orwellian. Muswellbrook, population 12,000. Batehaven. We're not in Bondi now, Toto.
Without understating the seriousness of the disaster playing out in New York, Italy and Spain and the absolute necessity of avoiding this for Australia, NSW seems to have embarked on the literal enforcement in a way that will only alienate and marginalise. And this is done in the context of a law that is itself less than logically coherent.
The Prime Minister tells us we are allowed outside to exercise and to shop for what we need - food, but also booze, and jigsaw puzzles, a haircut - so long as we don't gather in groups of more than two and we keep our distance from others.
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NSW, frightened by crowds on Bondi, decides on a literal interpretation but with a nevertheless fuzzy piece of regulation behind it.
You can't leave your home without a reasonable excuse, the regulation says, and it offers "examples" - obtaining goods and services, travelling to work or education that can't be done at home, exercise, and "medical or caring reasons".
These examples beg closer definition. What, for example, constitutes exercise? Must I be constantly on the move? Wearing my gym gear? Can I pause? What about fishing?
Presumably, these interpretations are in the hands of police on the beat, and you'd have to hope they are flexible.
The penalty up to six months in jail, $11,000 fine, and further $5500 fines each day if you don't comply.
It's a law that sees young people with nowhere to go. No pubs, no clubs, no movies, no gyms and so it must be. But now no parks, no beaches, no outside seats.
Ask yourself. Who is outside without excuse? Not the decision-making class who still have jobs and are inside in their home offices.
Not the well-off who have plenty of space inside and probably a backyard to boot.
The police are outside clearly in considerable numbers.
And they're chasing down the people who are always easiest to chase down, the unemployed, the unengaged, the young, the people who don't have the luxury of their own indoor space.
The people who can't afford the fines. Ain't it ever so.
We watched in horror at pictures of Wuhan buildings being welded closed and people being dragged away for quarantine or non-compliance.
Those pictures brought home the seriousness of what China was facing and the brutal steps the country was prepared to impose to deal with it.
That is not happening here and NSW would say its lesser measures are necessary to control the virus before it gets out of hand.
But there is arguably a much more nuanced way to handle it.
Close Bondi if necessary, or mark out the beach to limit numbers. But the guy with the kebab in Newcastle? The couple in a car?
The flip side of Australia's response to the coronavirus is Scott Morrison and his team, who have flipped classic conservative small government on its head to embrace measures that even the Greens might only have parked under the heading "aspirational".
Morrison tells us it is no longer about politics of the left or the right and it is no longer about "entitlement".
It is about working together for the common good and making sure everyone gets what they need.
The question he will face is, how does he unscramble this most lovingly produced egg.
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Just as unemployment goes up fast but is much more difficult to bring down, policies that give are very difficult to taketh away.
Look at the trouble Bill Shorten had a short year ago trying to remove generous tax concessions for property investors.
It will be a few election cycles yet before a government dares touch negative gearing.
Or John Howard's fateful 2001 decision to give retirees a tax refund on their shares.
That one, too, looks to be baked in, as do the generous gold cards and other veterans' entitlements.
Morrison and a line of stony-faced ministers resisted calls to increase the manifestly inadequate Newstart for so long, despite calls across disparate sectors. Now, they have doubled it overnight.
This is probably the most important of the structural changes in the government's rescue package and will also probably be the easiest to discard once the crisis is over, given the limited electoral value as far as the Coalition is concerned in an unemployed person.
Free childcare might be tougher to undo. As Dan Tehan said on Thursday, the entire existing childcare system has been mothballed. Gone.
In its place a much more simple universal free childcare. Going to millions of voting families. There is, though, one trick in the new childcare system that means it can't simply roll on post-coronavirus.
It funds childcare centres at just 50 per cent of the current rate, clearly not enough. The shortfall is made up via the new universal wage subsidy, the $1500-a-fortnight Job Keeper payment to staff.
When that goes, the childcare sector will need another restructure and may, perhaps, return to where it was before this week.
The undoing of the omelette will also be determined by the severity of the recession that Australia experiences and the challenges restarting businesses when lives and habits are fundamentally changed.
Assuming the virus crisis is resolved within a year with the advent of a vaccine, Australia will then be just a year out from the election, adding an extra measure of difficulty to the unscrambling.
And you have to wonder, given the no-questions-asked happy alacrity with which Morrison and his ministers are unlocking and distributing billions upon billions of dollars, whether they might find that all this generosity feels too good to easily let go.
- For information on COVID-19, please go to the ACT Health website or the federal Health Department's website.
- You can also call the Coronavirus Health Information Line on 1800 020 080
- If you have serious symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, call Triple Zero (000)
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