Victoria has endured one of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world. With very low case numbers by world standards.
This is largely down to our socialist state premier, Daniel Andrews. He is an old style socialist and an authoritarian and, unfortunately, because our constitution only really limits the federal government, not the state governments, he’s able to get away with a lot legally.
A lot of people (not me) think he’s doing a great job. He’s managed to convince a lot of people that somehow he’s saved them from huge numbers of deaths. This is despite the fact that decisions he took last year lead to the worst outbreak Australia has faced in terms of deaths - but somehow he engineered a judicial inquiry that found nobody was to blame for that decision - in fact, it failed to properly identify who actually made it.
The thing is - while lockdowns seemed to be working, he got away with a lot. What has changed now is despite him putting us back into a heavy lockdown over two weeks ago, the numbers keep going up. It’s clear that what he’s ordered isn’t working anymore, if it ever did, so even a lot of his supporters are now questioning it. And that’s what we’re starting to see on the streets here.
Personally, I think we do need some limited restrictions - we don’t want things to get out of control as they have in other countries. We’ve still had less than 1,000 deaths from COVID across the entire country and that is a good thing. But the restrictions need to be proportionate to the danger, and in Victoria, that just hasn’t been the case. With very low numbers, we’ve had some of the strictest restrictions in the world.
And it is mostly down to this one man. He broke his back at the start of this year and was out of action on medical leave for months, leaving his deputy in charge as Acting Premier. During that period, things were running a lot more smoothly and reasonably. But as soon as Dan came back...
Trouble is, our state opposition (conservative Liberal/National) is utterly hopeless - so Dan is still likely to win the next state election (late next year) and as long as he remains popular enough to lead Labor to victory, they probably won’t replace him.
In a lot of ways, Victoria is the least democratic state in Austalia. Labor governments have gradually eroded a lot of the traditional controls on governments exceeding their authority and the left-leaning media and judiciary have let them.