We wake up each morning and check our state’s infection numbers, then compare them against the other states’. We’ve created cults of personality around our respective state premiers, the most visible faces of the pandemic response. We watch them argue about vaccine allocation like it’s a zero-sum game, like giving more to another state battling a significant outbreak will mean we are less protected regardless of the case numbers in our community.

In Melbourne, a lot of it has also been due to the shared experience of our long lockdown last year — the prevailing sense that it was Victoria versus the rest of Australia, and the feeling that those in other states didn’t really get what we’d been through.

I’ve noticed this state-based parochialism flare up again recently, as many in Melbourne seem to be watching the lockdown in Sydney with horror, but also with some degree of schadenfreude.