Do you believe the Australia government’s dystopian response to the pandemic was Chinese propaganda?
No. I believe that what you have been told - and apparently believe because you've just accepted what you were told - is largely Chinese propaganda. Put simply, you - and a lot of other people, especially in America - have accepted a mostly false narrative.
Please read the following with an open mind. It's not easy for people to accept they've been lied to and they've swallowed the lies, but that is what has happened here.
I need to start with a basic statement about Australian constitutional law. Australia consists of six states (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania). There are also two significant, largely self-governing territories (the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory) which are kind of semi-states - they have slightly less autonomy than the states.
Australia federated as a single nation on the 1st January 1901. This was a voluntary federation of six, largely self-governing colonies (now the six states). Those six colonies had had control of most of their affairs (the British government in London still handled defence policy and foreign affairs - basically everything else was handled locally) and they didn't want to give up all their power to a federal level government. So the Australian constitution was written to create a weak federal government, and strong state governments. And there are a few particular areas where the state governments have virtually all the power.
One of these - arguably the most important - is public health.
What this meant is that during the pandemic (and not just during the pandemic but that is what I am talking about here), the federal government actually had very limited power over what was done to try and 'deal with COVID'. The state governments had all the power.
People outside Australia - not surprisingly - generally don't understand the intricacies of Australia's constitution. So a lot of people seem to have just assumed (and also, have often been lead to believe) that reports they saw out of Australia during COVID related to actions by the Australian government. In most cases, they didn't. Actions that were taken by specific state governments, were presented and seen as being taken by the Australian government.
The Australian government during COVID was headed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is a genuine conservative (and a devout Christian to boot). He wasn't a particularly effective or strong leader in a lot of ways but one thing he did do was treat the constitution with respect.
The state governments on the other hand were a mixed bag. I'm not going to describe all of them here, but, in essence, some were controlled by the conservative Liberal/National coalition, and some were controlled by the socialist Australian Labor Party. And, as I've said, the constitution gave them virtually all the power in dealing with COVID, because it was a public health matter.
At least one (I would argue two but the second case is somewhat less clear cut - I will probably address that at the end of this message) of the state governments (that of Victoria) did respond to COVID in what I would describe as a despotic and dystopian way. That certainly happened, and just saying that happened would not be propaganda. But where the propaganda comes in, is when the actions taken by the hard-left socialist leader of one state in that one state, are presented as being actions taken across the entire country by the conservative federal government lead by a conservative Christian Prime Minister. To try and put this into terms that are easier for Americans to understand - imagine if California, and the government in California, was presented to the world as representative of the entire US government and American culture in general. I think most Americans would agree that wouldn't be an accurate depiction of the country as a whole, and I think most conservative Americans would find it quite disturbing to find that your entire country is being judged based on what happens in one left wing state.
Now, what happened in Victoria? Victoria's Premier (that is, the elected leader of the Victorian government - state level equivalent of the Prime Minister, in the same way Governors can be seen as state level equivalents of the President in the United States) during COVID was a man named Daniel Andrews. Daniel Andrew is a hard-core socialist - he's proud of that label, it's not something he's ever concealed. He is also, in my view, extremely corrupt, both on a political and personal level (Victoria's toothless - because he made it that way - corruption commission has made numerous findings of corrupt conduct against his government - and there is also serious suspicion that he may have successfully evaded police action after a car accident in which a car, allegedly driven by his wife, seriously injured a young boy).
His personal response - and that of his government - to COVID - was extreme. He put Melbourne (the capital of Victoria) into the world's longest lock down - after the virus escaped from a hotel quarantine that his government completely mismanaged. The Victoria Police acted as his puppets in enforcing his rules in a way that, quite honestly, went well beyond any reasonable action that would normally be expected of an Australian police force - but that's hardly surprising at this point to anybody in Victoria - Andrews basically corrupted the normal ways the police are meant to be managed by government, that almost seems to have turned them into an arm of his party, not just the government.
All this happened in Victoria - but the vast majority of it only happened in Victoria. It is not representative of what happened across Australia in general, and it wasn't done by the federal Australian government. In fact, the federal government openly opposed most of it - but unfortunately, didn't have any constitutional power to stop it, because it was a public health matter, and those are reserved to the states.
Yet, outside Australia's borders, people seem to think it must have been the federal government doing it, because (1) they don't understand the Australian system(s) of government - and (2) there was a hell of a lot of propaganda being pushed, especially in the US, that deliberately avoided explaining this. That what was happening in one small area of Australia wasn't typical, and wasn't the norm across the country.
Who was responsible for this propaganda? I can't prove it, but I firmly believe that the most likely source is China. They have the most to gain, from making Australia look bad in the US, with the hope of splitting one of the US's closest alliances.
(It works the other way as well - Australians have been subjected to a massive amount of propaganda about the US, particularly about the Trump administration and events subsequent to the 2020 US election. Again, where is that coming from? Again, I think China is a big part of that).
It seems possible to me that, as well as pushing the propaganda angles, China may have possibly (and I only state this as a possibility) actually helped manipulate what happened in Victoria. It is public knowledge that Premier Daniel Andrews sought an unusually close relationship between his Victorian government and the Chinese government. One example of this that he openly attempted to sign Victoria up to China's "belt and road" initiative -
Fortunately that related to foreign trade and investment, which is (unlike health) something the federal government did have the power to overrule Victoria on - but Andrews was trying to sign his state up to a Chinese government program that is designed to give China immense influence over projects in foreign countries.
Andrews also had meetings in China with Chinese government officials, where he deliberately chose not to allow Australian media easy access.
Daniel Andrews returns from media-free China trip as opposition vows to pursue unanswered questions
I can't say anything for certain - but part of me has to wonder how much of Andrew's reaction to COVID that helped make Australia look bad in the United States, to the benefit of China - may have actually been manipulated by China.
One more thing to add on that - the head of ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation - our counter intelligence service) recently publically announced than a 'former Australian politican' was a foreign agent. He won't say who it was. But the announcement came not very long after Daniel Andrews suddenly stood aside as Victoria's Premier and left politics.
Australia: Former politician became foreign agent, nation's spy boss says
I'm not saying this foreign agent was Andrews... in fact, I think there's a better suspect. But I do think it's interesting, and I do wonder how much of what Andrews did was actually at least influenced by his odd contacts with the Chinese government.
Again, all of this is at state level - and does reflect Australia in general. There is something specifically rotten in Victoria (and I'm saying that as somebody who has spent more of his life in Victoria than anywhere else). This is a broken state, and we saw just how broken during COVID when it became basically a police state.
Now, besides Victoria, what else happened and what else do I regard as propaganda.
I see a lot of stuff out of America that has tried to claim Australia had COVID concentration camps... there's just enough truth in that for it to be turned, by propaganda, into something that's basically not true.
There was one location in Australia during COVID that, just about, could be described in those terms.
By chance, the Northern Territory government had recently taken over a former mining camp just outside its capital of Darwin - it had been built to house workers who had constructed a liquid natural gas pipeline, and when the pipeline was completed, it was just sitting there unused.
Because they had this modern, state of the art, mass accommodation facility, the Northern Territory government did choose to use it to house some people in quarantine.
But it was one place in one small part of the country. Again, it wasn't typical of Australia in general, and again, it was not the Australian federal government that did it, but a local jurisdiction.
(To be fair, Daniel Andrews did spend a lot of money building a similar facility in Melbourne, and probably would have used it, but it didn't actually get completed until even he'd stopped trying to lock people up).
And, I said, I'd get back to another state - the socialist government in Western Australia is the other one that I would say went way too far in dealing with COVID. They basically sealed their internal borders for months not letting anybody in and out of the state. That was less dramatic than what happened in Victoria, but was still a massive overreach. But again, one part of the country, not the country as a whole.
(Other states besides Victoria and Western Australia did have short lockdowns, and did close borders for short periods - but those types of things also happened in parts of the United States.)