What makes the stupidity even more galling is the second helping of arrogance that has come as side dishes to the main course of government hubris.
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It doesn't matter how much common sense has been thrown at the NSW government over the absurdity and overtly discriminatory nature of its closed-border regulations, its track record so far has been not to budge.
Don't tell me about boats, the TV insurance ad from a couple of decades ago went.
IN OTHER NEWS:
And now picture this: NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian steps off the pier, into the drink.
Seriously, we know she has to be serious. We know all governments have to be serious.
We're not stupid.
The saturation - and yes, as a result often dispiriting - coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic means no one is sitting under a toadstool in some dark, dank forest from a Grimm's fairy tale.
Occasionally, some have been willing to acknowledge that, even if Victorian Premier Dan Andrews at first tried to make everyone else feel guilty rather than admit fault.
At least we now know that 99 per cent of Victoria's second wave is due to his hotel quarantine fiasco. Clearly the occasional idiots thrown-up on social media are a (quite insignificant) sideshow.
But if ever there was a story that deserved to told as an example of government and bureaucratic bloody-minded intransigence it's that of Burrowye farmers Mark Cheshire and Shirley Sprenger.
They wanted to take their sheep to the Corowa saleyards, but were just outside the border zone.
And then it came. The advice, the piece of Animal Farm-inspired dribble that masqueraded as the "solution".
Grab your mob, they said, fly to Sydney airport, double-on back to Corowa.
Forty sheep, on a plane. Perhaps, given the experience of expatriates trying to return home, the girls might have had to go business class to guarantee a seat.
That the government might be about to show a change-of-heart is beside the point, the very substantial point, that no one should be treated with such cold-hearted indifference.
It's just deserts that the government might well be left with so much curdled egg on its face.
