Scott Morrison's insistence on a physical meeting of Parliament from August 24 poses increased danger to the roughly half a million people of the ACT and surrounds. Particularly the elderly.

Even with precautions, safety cannot be absolutely guaranteed.

It's heightened local risk, for no local reward.

And for this reason alone, it should be reconsidered.

Which state government would allow this sitting to proceed in its backyard, given a choice?

The sitting is not only a flagrant disregard for the citizens of the Australian Capital Territory - the bulk of whom have no involvement with Federal Parliament - but represents poor pandemic practice, nationally.

Think about it.

A jurisdiction that has no active COVID-19 cases, will host possibly hundreds of people (ministers, MPs, staff, officials, lobbyists, journalists) from other parts of the country that do. Or might. And this during a deadly second wave.

And each of these visitors will then leave, returning to their myriad locales, potentially increasing a broader geographic dissemination risk.

More pointedly, some of these visitors will be coming from a jurisdiction so besieged it has been declared a "state of disaster" by its own government and recognised accordingly by the Commonwealth.

Melburnians cannot attend work, or the pub, or church. They cannot interact with each other, and are barred from even leaving their homes after 8pm each night.

The state accounts for more than half of all of Australia's COVID-19 deaths, and the vast majority of infections.

Of the roughly 21,000 confirmed cases, Victoria accounts for almost 15,000 on its own - most of them recently.

Of the 313 deaths nationally, 228 have occurred in Victoria. The next nearest is NSW with 50, and it is not virus free either, which is why Queensland has declared NSW (and the ACT) an unacceptable infection risk, closing its border.

If there was ever a justification for delaying face-to-face parliamentary sittings earlier in the pandemic, that case appears, if anything, to have strengthened.

Yet here we are, contemplating a material increased risk in which the people primarily carrying it were afforded no say.

Yes, the machinery of democracy matters, but persisting with the theatre of representation when it is against the interests or indeed the wishes of the represented is, frankly, a ludicrous contradiction in terms.

Besides, government is not an end in itself.

One thinks of the farcical Yes, Minister exchange over the need to protect MPs and senior officials even before safeguarding those being served.

Sir Humphrey: "There has to be somewhere to carry on government, even if everything else stops."

Jim Hacker: "Why?"

Sir Humphrey: "Well, government doesn't stop just because the country's been destroyed! I mean, annihilation's bad enough without anarchy to make things even worse!"

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There are other problems too. Special pre-isolation requirements attaching to the attendance of Victorian MPs only make sense if states like Queensland (and presumably Western Australia) force their MPs and staff to self-isolate for two weeks upon returning to their electorates.

For example, it is currently impossible for a resident of COVID-free Canberra to travel to Queensland without then serving the fortnight hotel quarantine requirement upon arrival.

Yet even with whatever restrictions are set up in Parliament House, Queensland parliamentarians will be sharing some spaces with Victorian and NSW MPs, as well as myriad others.

Victorian MPs have also been given the option of serving two weeks of home "iso" before they leave, but how do they get to Canberra after that? Teleport?

The PM says there will be tight arrangements around even that option, which is reassuring, but presumably they'd have to travel to Canberra (post-iso), meaning they could do everything right and still contract the virus en route.

Capital Hill's breezy disregard for the local population is nothing new.

But this threat is anything but business as usual.