WA's divisive hard border policy still stands, but as Omicron gains a foothold its days may be numbered. What is it about this Australian state that has set it apart from the rest of the nation for so long?
The hermit kingdom. North Korea. West Australian exceptionalism.
These names and worse have been levelled at the state of Western Australia, one of the last jurisdictions in the world to see virtually no community spread of COVID-19 — until now.
Many attribute this feat to one key decision.
Right at the start of the pandemic, it took the extraordinary move of closing its gates to the rest of the country.
With an area of 2.6 million square kilometres and a vast desert between it and the rest of the nation, WA is no stranger to isolation.
Announcing the border closure in April 2020, Premier Mark McGowan said Western Australia was in a "unique position".
"We can take a different direction to the rest of the country, and indeed to the rest of the world," he said.
"Our isolation is now our best defence. We need to use it to the best of our advantage."
It is an experiment that led then-deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce to dub WA "a kind of hermit kingdom" and liken the state to North Korea, and it was due to come to an end on February 5.
But in a dramatic late-night press conference last Thursday, the Premier cancelled those plans.
He told WA the rise of the Omicron strain currently wreaking havoc on the health and supply chains of the eastern states meant reunification would be delayed — indefinitely.
The idea was to keep the virus at bay. And yet after almost an entire pandemic with single-digit case numbers — mostly overseas arrivals — an Omicron outbreak saw 24 cases recorded on Sunday, up from seven the day before.
WA now seems poised to succumb to the COVID-19 wave that has overtaken the rest of the world.
But before this incursion, what was life like behind WA's locked gates?
And will this pandemic outlier try to hold itself apart much longer?
Life in the 'hermit kingdom'
There have been just three lockdowns in WA — encompassing 12 days in total — not counting the nationwide restrictions at the start of the pandemic.
Outside of these periods, people have moved around largely mask-free.
It didn't start this way.
The state suffered through the first outbreaks and lockdowns like everywhere else.
WA recorded the country's first death from COVID — 78-year-old James Kwan — on March 1, 2020.
Initially the state placed caps on gathering numbers, including weddings and funerals, and restricted movement between WA's regions.
The casino was shut, the city centre deserted as public life ground to a halt.
There was uncertainty and fear, and panic buying began, just like everywhere else.
But WA differed from states like New South Wales and Victoria in that once it got case numbers under control, they largely stayed that way.
Any time an outbreak occurred in another state, the WA government enforced its hard border — restricting all but essential movement and mandating quarantine periods.
Slowly, surely, case numbers dwindled.
The Premier started talking about "COVID zero", and later, "crushing and killing" the virus.
By April 2020, numbers had slowed to a trickle of overseas arrivals who were not infectious in the community.
By May 18, WA moved to "phase 2" of restrictions, increasing gathering numbers and removing some internal regional borders.
Phase 3 from June 6 saw up to 100 people allowed to gather indoors, and up to 300 in some venues.
WA was also the first state to move away from the one-person-per-4-square-metres rule adopted around the country, replacing it with a 2-square-metre rule.
Life throughout the last half of 2020 was pretty normal. It was rare to see a mask.
In 2021, there were three brief lockdowns, the longest of them lasting five days.
By June 2021 even the 2-square-metre rule had been removed and large festivals were permitted again.
So confident was WA in its freedom, it went on to host the AFL grand final in September before a 60,000-strong crowd.
How different was it in the east?
Life in Victoria and Sydney contrasted sharply with this picture.
In December 2020, what came to be known as the northern beaches outbreak saw restrictions brought back into Sydney.
Case numbers grew and New Years Eve celebrations had to be curtailed to try to prevent the spread.
Face masks became mandatory in enclosed spaces in Sydney in January 2021.
Restrictions lingered.
NSW managed to bring the outbreak under control by February. But by March, another outbreak took off. This time patient zero was on the iconic Bondi Beach.
And then in June, a Sydney limo driver plunged the city into a 107-day lockdown.
In Victoria, lockdowns in 2020 included controversial restrictions that prevented 3,000 tenants from leaving nine public housing towers for five days without warning, something the Victorian ombudsman later found had violated human rights.
Melbourne entered a six-week lockdown in July 2020 and restricted movement between local government areas.
Face masks became mandatory, and an 8pm to 5am curfew was later imposed on residents.
Other states that at times employed hard borders with infected neighbours, such as Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, experienced fewer lockdowns and maintained lower case numbers.
Admittedly, these states along with WA benefited from much lower population numbers and density.
Sydney and Melbourne also grappled with high numbers of overseas arrivals as Australians scrambled to get home.
WA's war on COVID
Siri Solumsmoen opened her new restaurant 10 days before Perth went into lockdown in March 2020.
The veteran restaurateur said it was like nothing she had faced before.
"It really did feel like wartime," she said.
"[I] felt very lonely, scared, you know. For your children, for the business, for everything."
After establishing a successful pasta chain, Ms Solumsmoen and her partner wanted to open a dine-in restaurant with a relaxed, social vibe.
Hermanos en Cantina was born — a quirky Tex-Mex-style bar and restaurant offering a huge variety of tacos and cafe-style food.
But then suddenly COVID-19 restrictions swept across the nation, including in WA.
Under phase 1 of the lockdown, cafes and restaurants were restricted to only selling takeaway food.
"[We] had to just change dramatically," Ms Solumsmoen said.
Takeaways became the restaurant's main business during lockdown, and remain an important component.
"I just basically made many phone calls and said 'you've got to hurry up, hurry up to get us online'," Ms Solumsmoen said.
The couple were forced to let staff go, get on the floor themselves and "build everything from the ground up".
Back then, Premier McGowan also compared the situation to a war.
He told the ABC in April 2020, "We are trying to deal with this in ways that protect people … to make sure we have less people in our hospitals and less spread of the virus".
"To do that, you have got to do some very unconventional and unprecedented things."
Ms Solumsmoen has managed to grow her business despite the pandemic.
"Without a doubt, the money stays in the state," she said.
"And people have been getting on with things, and their life."
Australian Hotels Association (AHA) WA chief executive Bradley Woods said the state's hospitality members had done reasonably well compared to their counterparts in the east.
"Perth and WA hospitality hasn't faced the long-term lockdowns that we saw particularly in Melbourne, and then in Sydney," he said.
"West Australians have not been able to leave the state … so it's meant that hospitality, accommodation, resorts have done considerably well out of that."
Announcing WA's almost-complete relaxation of restrictions out of the first lockdown, Mr McGowan said the state would have the "most open, the most active, the most vibrant economy in the country by not just a country mile, 100 country miles".
"We are miles and miles in front of the other states and we are able to do that because we have the comfort of knowing that we can protect our citizens from infection from elsewhere," he said.
What do the numbers say?
The normality experienced by many West Australians is backed by hard economic numbers.
Business investment in WA has grown over the past two financial years, accounting for 19.2 per cent of Australia's total in 2020-21.
University of Western Australia economics professor Peter Robertson said once it became apparent WA was able to keep COVID-19 out and avoid the lockdowns that hurt the national economy, it buoyed consumer confidence.
"People have … been able to live a very normal life without masks 90 per cent of the time," he said.
"Through 2021, the economy really boomed. People's confidence was high, investor confidence was high, the export sector continued to thrive despite the tariff bans by China."
Professor Robertson said part of that story had been high minerals prices and investment in the manufacturing sector.
The state accounted for 56 per cent of Australia's goods exports in 2020-2021, with a value of $222.1 billion.
Of that, $150.2 billion was iron ore.
"You can't really understate the importance of that sector, not just for Western Australia, but the whole Australian economy.
"Had COVID got into some of those mining sites and forced closures and delays, that could have hurt the national economy substantially."
The risk behind 'another year of closed borders'
But Professor Robertson warned WA's border had diminishing economic returns — particularly for a small city like Perth that needed foreign students, skills and investment for future growth.
"We've had boom times in WA … but I don't think anyone thinks that we can just carry on like this," he said.
"Increasingly with low unemployment in the state, there's going to be a skill shortage. It's already showing up."
In June 2020, the WA unemployment rate was the second-highest of all states and territories, at 8.5 per cent.
But by December 2021, it had fallen to 3.4 per cent, the lowest in the nation.
Professor Robertson said it would lead to wage pressure and inflation.
He also warned if WA did not have an exit strategy, it faced attracting sovereign risk concerns.
"Already people are looking at WA from abroad and saying, 'well, what's going on there?'," he said.
"It's damaging our international reputation I think as a place to live or come to, or do business with.
"How long you can carry on with these kind of closed borders and not do too much damage to the economy is an open question … I don't think we want another year of closed borders."
Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA chief economist Aaron Morey said the state needed to recognise the world would be emerging from the pandemic at some point.
He said it was also important not to lose sight of businesses that suffered from the hard border closure,saying it might be masked by the strong performance of the mining sector.
"When mining is 47 per cent of your economy, it's very easy to lose sight of those businesses that have suffered," he said.
"They get lost in the big numbers."
The fault in WA's stars
In 2018, Gavin Parker launched a business taking people out for late-night picnics and stargazing under the state's iconic clear skies.
He took his guests to a vast tract of desert studded with strange rock formations known as the Pinnacles — a truly unique WA experience. The concept quickly took off.
Come Christmas 2019, he remembers saying he needed the business to stop for a little while, so he could catch his breath.
"And then, we start hearing rumours about this flu-like thing in China," he said.
At that point 80 per cent of Mr Parker's business was international visitors. Australia closed its international borders on March 20.
"I thought, 'that's going to be difficult'," he said.
"But I thought, 'well if people in Australia can't go overseas, we'll get more of an interstate market coming here'."
Some 15 days later, WA shut its doors to the east.
"So I thought, 'well we're screwed now'," Mr Parker said.
The business hung on, with the federal government's JobKeeper helping them keep their staff until March 2021.
After that, Mr Parker and his wife ran the business single-handedly.
They developed a local tour of a camel farm, offering gin and wine tasting and a picnic under the stars to Perth locals, but it proved to be a drop in the ocean compared to their previous business.
The blow of losing WA's visitors
Curtin University professor Mingming Cheng said Perth-based tourism businesses like Mr Parker's bore the brunt of the losses.
"For the regional areas, we don't really see a big drop, because we have strong demand from people within WA," he said.
Despite interstate visitors making up just 5 per cent of total visitors in 2019, they represent 19 per cent of all spending in the sector, because they travel further and stay longer.
Professor Cheng said businesses would benefit from certainty once the borders opened, along with targeted assistance from government.
"If there's a COVID case, what should we do next? Otherwise for them, if they have no people for 10 days it's definitely a great loss for them. They can't recover from that," he said.
Border opening may sink some
With the inevitable opening of the border at some point, Mr Parker expected things to get worse before it gets better.
"If we look at what's happening in the other states, as soon as they open the borders, they get lots of COVID coming in," he said.
"No matter what we do, we're going to get people on the bus with COVID."
With no other drivers left, he'll have to shut down for two weeks every time.
Mr Parker said online booking agencies charged a commission, so even if they had to cancel tours they could lose about $4,000 over two weeks, something that was not sustainable.
A question of money and freedom
Despite the damage to his business, Mr Parker said he supported the borders being closed.
"The economy is really strong here," he said.
"Do I think it's fair to sacrifice that and our freedoms so that my business can survive?
"No, I wouldn't. I never put my hand up and said the borders should open."
But he would like to see targeted support from state and federal government for businesses like his.
"I didn't feel the load was shared very evenly."
Credits
- Photography: Marcus Alborn, Rebecca Trigger, Hugh Sando, Gian De Poloni, Virat Shah, Deborah Hewton
- Production: Rebecca Trigger
- Supervising editor: Scott Holdaway
