Australia’s political and social derangement grows worse with every passing day.
With hundreds of thousands of businesses having been destroyed, with millions of people still in lockdown under the harshest and most truly insane Covid response on the globe, overseas news outlets and commentators are looking on with savage disbelief. How is this even possible?
Two centuries ago Australia was the harshest and most remote penal colony in the world.
Now the country has returned to form, locking up its own citizens, issuing hundreds of fines every day, blanketing suburbs with military and police, with a daily blitz of confusing information or disinformation, for without context much of the scare campaign over Covid is meaningless, and every day the country inches closer and closer to a complete social and political collapse.
Here’s a sampling of world commentary. What has happened in this country simply defies belief.
Australia is Falling Apart. By Guy de la Bédoyère
As an historian, what really strikes me now is how brief the Covid crisis has been so far. Yes, I know it seems like 500 years since we were last able to travel freely and not hear about the pandemic on the nightly news. But in historical terms this is nothing. What will define the era is the social, political, and economic fallout and, trust me, that’s barely started. Governments are going to fall, millions of people are going to be ruined while others make fortunes, and some countries are going to disintegrate. But when, where or how is yet to be seen. This will take years – decades – but I think you can see the signs of fragmentation and epic change already – almost all self-inflicted as a result of the hysteria that has consumed us since early 2020.
My fear is that Australia, of all the developed modern democratic states, has set out down a path that could in extremis result in the country breaking apart.
To read the full article go here.
Australia’s Leaders Need To Be Told: “Go!” By Steve Waterson.
Two weeks ago I watched people having their behaviour shaped at Bondi, as two mounted police rode their large horses south along the middle of the beach, stopping at the towels of two young mothers and their four toddlers, tiny beside the horses’ hoofs, to order them to pack up buckets and spades and leave the beach. Thanks for keeping us safe.
The madness toggles between sinister and comical. Especially hilarious are the comedy stylings of the bullying dolt who is turning Victoria into a post-apocalyptic wasteland: it’s acceptable to remove your useless mask to drink coffee on the street, he declares, but an offence to do so to drink alcohol. It must be excruciating for black-clad Melburnians, paralysed indecision warming their espresso martinis.
To read the full article go here.
OFF GUARDIAN
By Kit Knightly.
Australia is going full Fascist …but resistance is growingThe Australian government been leading the pack on Covid-based tyranny from the beginning, but are they pushing their citizens to breaking point?
Covid19 has been used as an excuse to increase government control of pretty much everything, pretty much everywhere.
It is, without question, the greatest campaign to seize power, and greatest assault on personal freedom, of my lifetime. With countries seemingly in a contest to outdo each other’s clampdowns, lockdowns, quarantines and surveillance programs.
From the beginning of the “pandemic” three countries, in particular, have set the pace on this – Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Since last spring these three have been one-upping each other in a race to the fascist finish line. And right now, Australia is putting a sprint in to pull away from the pack.
Cities are going into full lockdown for just one positive test. Some Australian cities and states aren’t just under total lockdowns, but also ever-extending curfews. The details of which read like a dystopian novel.
People are not permitted to leave the state, let alone the country. They’re not even permitted more than 5km (~3 miles) from their home. They’re not allowed out at all after 9pm or before 5am. Masks are mandatory everywhere for everyone. Outdoors and in. No religious services. No weddings. Shoot stray dogs, just in case.
To read the full story go here.
UK CONSERVATIVE WOMAN
The tragedy of Australia. By Paul Collits
The now familiar litany of harms that have been done, not only to the body politic, but to our core values, indeed, to our very sense of our country. Our place. They include the impositions of lockdowns that do not work but cause harm beyond telling; the ‘wildly inaccurate’ modelling that predicted catastrophe and instead merely delivered fame and riches for those involved; the succession of non-medical interventions with no basis in science and without popular understanding that this is the case; the low information voter; the punitive policing; the absence of real leadership in the crisis; the incoherent messaging from the top; the disaster that is ‘National Cabinet’; magic money tree economics; the relentless announcables; the Covid cronyism; the entrenching of power by the political class.
To read the full story go here.
NEW YORK POST
Australia’s insane COVID rules are a warning to the rest of the Free World
The 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the idea of the panopticon, a prison designed to allow all the prisoners to be observed by one guard.
What even Bentham couldn’t conceive of, despite his creative musings about schemes of perpetual surveillance, was a society like contemporary Australia.
Once an honorable member of the Free World, Australia has lurched into a bizarre and disturbing netherworld of bureaucratic oppression in the name of public health. Australia’s lockdown mania has been so all-consuming that one assumes much of it would make Anthony Fauci blanch.
Lockdowns have cut a swath through the norms and conventions of an advanced Western democracy, from the suspension of a state-level parliament, to the banning of protests, to military enforcement of the COVID rules.
To read the full story go here.
THE ATLANTIC
Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty
How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?
n a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens.
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy.
To read the full story go here.
NATIONAL REVIEW
When a Western Society Goes Insane
To read the full story go here.
SKY NEWS
2GB
JAPAN TIMES
Australia’s ‘authoritarian’ COVID-19 response
Critics are calling the nation’s anti-virus measures inhumane.
Australia is ‘hollowing out entrenched practices, principles and institutions of democracy and parochial state premiers have heavily diluted Australia as one nation, fragmenting it into several different states and territories that have frequently closed off their borders to other Australians’.
One of Australia’s best-known public intellectuals, the late Clive James, once said, “The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”
To read the full story go here.
UNHERD
What’s the point of Australia?
As the Covid-19 pandemic grinds past the 18-month mark, Australians would be justified in asking: what is the point of Australia? This question is not intended to be facetious or provocative: Australia no longer seems to function like a country and Australian citizenship has been largely drained of legal and practical meaning.
Thousands of Australian citizens remain stranded abroad, unable to return due to strict caps on spots in hotel quarantine, which are set by state governments. Frequent domestic border closures — also decided by state governments — have effectively fragmented Australia into eight separate countries. Last month, Australians were treated to the surreal spectacle of the Australian Defence Force patrolling the border between Queensland and New South Wales.
Across the country, citizens have discovered that reserve powers are largely the prerogative of state governments, and are being exercised in ways that routinely exclude other states’ residents, as if they were foreign nationals. For example, Western Australia now requires that people living in New South Wales have at least one shot of the Covid vaccine to enter the state. In one of the most callous examples of exclusionary state politics in practice, last year the Queensland government denied a 14-year-old double-lung transplant patient from NSW access to his specialist doctor, declaring that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.
To read the full story go here.
Right now, with a dispirited, disempowered and despairing population, most of whom are still enduring the world’s most draconian lockdowns, the entire situation, and the resultant world ridicule, is about to get a damn sight worse.
Farewell my country. Farewell Australia.
