(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

If Australia’s business community was casting around for a passionate, articulate and effective advocate for opening borders sooner than the government’s mid-2022-if-you’re-lucky deadline in the budget, look no further than Virgin CEO Jayne Hrdlicka.

Yesterday she strode to the podium of a Queensland University of Technology “Business Leaders’ Forum” and declared: “We need to get the borders open for our health and for the economy … Some people may die but it will be way smaller than with the flu … We’ve got to learn how to live with this.”

Putting aside that Hrdlicka thinks COVID-19 is less lethal than the flu when its mortality is multiples of that of influenza, or that somehow only the virus, not flu, will circulate if the economy is completely reopened, her line “some people may die” is now the poster slogan for a business community that throughout the pandemic has demanded that business profitability (they prefer to emphasise jobs) be elevated to a higher priority than it has been when governments make decisions about public health.

It’s hard to think of a better way to convey an image of uncaring business eager to boost profits at the expense of lives than to offer “some people may die” in your case for reopening.

Sections of the business community have pushed for the reopening of borders pretty much all the way through the pandemic, backed by News Corp and The Australian Financial Review. At no stage have they made headway in the public debate. Despite News Corp whining about the “populism” of Labor premiers, border closures have proven a massive electoral winner.

Indeed, so attractive a political model is border closures that Scott Morrison — once happy to attack state premiers for slamming borders shut at the first cough — has joined their ranks, pushing back the reopening of Australia’s international borders into the middle of next year, criminalising Indian-Australians seeking to return, and suggesting that even a fully completed vaccination rollout might not be enough to allow a return to normal international travel.

It’s the borders equivalent of Morrison and Josh Frydenberg’s fiscal reversal. Just as the Coalition’s commitment to fiscal discipline and small government has been completely junked, so its business-friendly commitment to free trade, globalism and open borders (for business people and workers, not refugees) has been flipped to a long-term commitment to being a hermit kingdom.

Just as the “debt bomb” headlines have disappeared, you don’t see too much lamentation from News Corp about border populism now, funnily enough.

The lamentation from business will persist, and the complaint that the party of business is making the lives of business harder. But Labor isn’t offering any easier options.

The hospitality sector, which includes some of the biggest victims of border closures, is a major source of donations to both sides of politics, but the Liberals’ biggest donors — resources companies, banks and the big four consulting firms — have been coining it during the pandemic, so there’ll be no financial squeeze to accommodate the likes of Hrdlicka and her Qantas counterpart, Alan Joyce.

Last August we noted that business would have to convince Australians they would benefit from opening borders — even though the benefits would primarily flow to corporations and shareholders. Not merely have they failed to achieve that, they’ve gone backwards and lost the federal government. Hrdlicka’s “some people may die” is hardly going to help matters.

It seems that for all the millions lavished on business peak bodies, for all their lobbying and public campaigning, big business doesn’t know how to actually influence public sentiment. They’ve tried for decades to convince Australians that we need to overhaul our industrial relations system in the name of “flexibility” — and failed. They lobbied desperately for a massive corporate tax cut — and failed. And they’ve pushed hard for the economy to reopen — and gone backwards.

In each case, the product has been rotten. But so has the lobbying and marketing.

To repeat the point: it’s only by getting Australians to think about how they would benefit — not corporations or “jobs” — from reopening borders that business will make any headway.

At some point, ordinary Australians will indeed start chafing at border restrictions that prevent them from holidaying overseas, or seeing loved ones they could only reach through a screen since March last year. It will be a slow burn, but it will grow more heated as more and more people are vaccinated, herd immunity nears, and Australians wonder why they still face communist bloc-style prohibitions.

In the meantime, the challenge for business is to avoid alienating people too much over the issue.

Jayne Hrdlicka, take note.