Dan Andrews just announced Victoria's "roadmap" out of lockdown. It's fucking stupid, if you ask me.
Let me first say that it actually ticks all the boxes for "me", personally. It allows singles to see each other in bubbles, which obviates the 5km travelling restriction. That's all I need as it allows me to see friends/dates and to go on walks/exercise dates with them. Also enables me to see my family.
But our retail and hospitality won't open for another 6-8 weeks, till daily cases average 5-10 or less. Think about this...you currently have non-essential stuff like liquor stores open, but poor Jane who works at a department store or who is a hairdresser can't open for another 2 months until we've eliminated the virus? How stupid is that?
We already know where the virus is spreading. It's spreading through hospitals, aged care centres and a handful of suburbs. We could get exactly the same results by locking down those suburbs and families of those workers. Instead, Dan is making all of Melbourne suffer from industrial pain solely for the benefit of optics.
And Dan's stated reason is that he wants us to be covid-normal by Christmas....under our current plans we'll have indoor gatherings of 20+ people and outdoor gatherings up to 50-100 people by Christmas.
What the fuck! Who CARES about having massive Christmas parties? Doing that, getting there, takes such an enormous economic toll on retail and hospitality in the months leading up to Christmas. Dan is essentially saying that seeing your grandma on Christmas day is worth more than the wages of retail workers.
It's poor reasoning, and political points scoring at its worst.
I'm somewhat grateful that singles have now suddenly been given a raft of overdue exemptions, but I think the big picture is sorely missing.