Posted on 09/21/2021 8:47:31 PM PDT by naturalman1975
I posted this as a mail to somebody who asked me what was going on here - and they suggested I post it here as well. This is just one person's view - others might well differ, certainly on some details. I've slightly modified it from the mail.
I've been here on FR about 17 years at this point. I've spent much of my life living in Australia, coming back to Victoria whenever I could - my time in the Royal Australian Navy took me all over the world and the country with postings in different states of Australia and some overseas as well. But this is the perspective of a long term Aussie and Victorian.
There's a lot of stuff going on here related to COVID. It’s a bit complicated.
First thing - it’s not the Australian government doing a lot of the things people are concerned about. That seems to be causing a lot of confusion overseas - our Federal Government, though certainly not perfect, had opposed most of the extreme reactions here by state governments - but under the Australian Constitution, matters of ‘public health’ are almost entirely in the hands of state governments, not the Federal government. The Federal government has very little ability to intervene in any matter involving public health. Likewise, while the Constitution prevents the Federal government from closing state borders, it doesn’t stop the state governments from closing their own borders.
Remember that - it's not Australia's Federal government which is broadly speaking conservative, lead by Prime Minister Scott Morrison who is doing this. Constitutionally all he can try and do is get the state governments to agree to a national plan, but they have all the power and quite a few of them are from the opposite side of politics. The Federal government does not 'outrank' the state governments - the states were almost sovereign before they decided to unify as a single country and they wrote a constitution that kept a lot of the power for themselves. And some of the Premiers are probably loving being able to be the ones really in charge of the whole country right now. It's not that the Federal government is powerless - but it only has power in its domains. It negotiates international treaties, it controls our defence force, it has primary control of most of the national budget.
But critically it doesn't have control of 'public health'. The states do.
What this means is that is happening in Australia has been very state specific.
I live in Victoria, which is the state with the biggest problems. We have a hard left socialist state Premier called Daniel Andrews and he’s the one making nearly all the decisions here. And he’s totally paranoid, on top of being an authoritarian. We’ve been locked down on and off for considerably over half of the last year and we’re likely to remain locked down for at least another six weeks before we even get close to back to normal. That’s down to his paranoia. You can’t leave your home except for certain specified reasons, there’s a curfew at night when you can’t leave at all (well, there are still a very small number of reasons), you can’t travel more than a short distance from your home even if you are allowed out. Most businesses are closed.
NSW which has a conservative government has also recently, over the last couple of months also imposed heavy restrictions (which go too far in my view) but they have only done it in the face of the worst COVID outbreak Australia has had and they are trying to get things back to normal as fast as possible - unlike Victoria. It’s a very different situation there - like I say, I think they’ve gone too far, but it’s nothing like Victoria.
The other states have occasionally had very short lockdowns that have actually succeeded each time in getting COVID numbers in that state back to zero. Personally I don’t think that’s unreasonable. They also close their borders to NSW and Victoria - which again, as we have nearly all the COVID in the country I don’t actually think is unreasonable.
There have been some protests against this, but not as many as some people seem to think there should have been. The main reason for that is - well, honestly, it’s hard to argue with the fact that we have been protected from COVID. We’ve only had just over 1000 deaths from COVID during this entire pandemic - people don’t want to throw that away by going to large scale protests that will lead to greater infection. The trouble is, in Victoria, especially we haven’t got a middle ground - some restrictions might have been reasonable but the degree is ridiculous but very few people think we shouldn’t have any restrictions at all. Most people would be happy to wear masks and social distance, and avoid large crowds.
In the last couple of days we have had large protests in Melbourne but they aren’t quite what some people seem to think - this is not a general uprising against the restrictions. As I said earlier, most industry in Victoria has been largely shut down for the last year and a half, but there was one big exception to that - the construction industry was allowed to continue, mostly because Daniel Andrews, a socialist Labor Premier, derives a lot of his political power from union support - so he was keeping them happy, while not caring about anybody else. In recent weeks though, construction sites have been the source of most new infections in this state, so finally he started putting restriction on them - some, I think were reasonable (no gathering inside in crowded rooms to have lunch), but he also mandated vaccines for them. And that triggered their first protest (where they actually attacked their union leaders rather than the government). He then ordered the construction industry be shut down for two weeks - and that’s lead to them starting widespread protests over the last two days. There are some other people with other concerns joining them but mostly this is a bunch of socialist trade unionists who are angry that the socialist state government is no longer giving them special treatment.
The media hasn't helped - most of it is left wing and supports Daniel Andrews because of that (though that might shift a bit now the unions are angry) and nor has social media - a lot of nonsense is being spread. Australia is not under martial law. We are not forcibly vaccinating school children. There aren’t police hitsquads chasing people down and sticking needles with vaccines into people - all claims I’ve seen repeated (possibly in good faith by people who believed them) on FR in recent weeks. When things get exaggerated or lies or told, it actually becomes harder for us to focus on the real problems here.
But there are real problems. Some state governments are going way too far at times, the Federal government is constitutionally limited in stopping them. State police forces are being asked to enforce a lot of dumb laws with massive fines and now we have more and more protests, some police decisions do seem heavy handed - but not all.
We really didn’t need an earthquake on top of it :)
Read the original post I want. I explain what is actually going on here. That was the point.
You are apparently swallowing whole a lot of misinformation and being manipulated.
“You are apparently swallowing whole a lot of misinformation and being manipulated.”
Nice try. You re-read your own post again. Notice all of the equivocations on your part.
For reference: Netflix, Rake
Yes, we're having some demonstrations here - but they are nothing compared to what happens far more often in America.
There are reasons for them - as I've said, there are some problems here.
No, most of the videos you see aren't illusions - but voiceovers that get added to them often severely distort the truth. People who attacked police officers get described as 'just shopping'. Police who are chasing down people who pelted them with bottles, get described as 'mobile vaccination squads who hunt down Australians and forcibly inject them.' Far left socialist trade unionists are suddenly described as freedom fighters - it's amazing how many people on FR suddenly seem to love the communists of Australia's Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CMFEU - I know that should have two Ms but it doesn't) - those are the people currently protesting in Melbourne...
The spin put on video by the reports that accompany them can be very misleading.
We have real problems here. I know what they are. I don't think you have a clue.
It’s called honesty.
Not everything is black and white.
The first fact to consider is that the City States are not America. By disavowing federal law, they have effectively seceded from the Union.
Australia has 1178 deaths from Covid. Lockdown seems like an extreme response for so few deaths. The US has so many deaths because of how Covid deaths are measured. Everyone who tests positive and dies is a Covid death whether they die of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, etc. You don’t die FROM Covid, you die WITH Covid.
You cannot stop Covid by locking down. Everyone will eventually get it. Countries like Sweden just accepted that.
But how many deaths would we have had if nothing had been done. That’s the big question. Nobody really knows the answer.
And we count the deaths pretty much the same way.
Just as the China virus hit the world my son came back to Florida after working in Sydney for a year.
He says he is grateful for getting back to sanity and Florida just in time.
Here we have Governor Desantis who has allowed us to make our own decisions thankfully.
Thanks for posting, good job.
You aren’t stopping Covid. You are postponing it. Covid is a weaponized virus. It will get to everyone. I am immunized, I practice social distancing and I contracted Delta. It’s that contagious.
Remember, the Delta variant hit here in June. Warm weather made it worse. Covid is not causing the lockdowns. The government is doing that.
Good luck...
You’re right. However people from other countries have different cultures and values even if they speak english.
Thanks for the info and insight!
We actually do understand that. Even the people making the lockdown decisions understand it. The assumption is that eventually nearly all Australians will be infected. But vaccination does seem to give a great deal of protection against serious illness from COVID. It dramatically lowers the death rate.
For various reasons, Australia's vaccination rollout has been much slower than it should have been - we're still at less than 50% of adults having had two vaccine doses. That's a long way behind other similar countries. And it is mostly down to supply issues - not reluctance to be vaccinated. On current numbers, we should reach 70% in about a month, and 80% in early November. At those points, it's considered safer to open up even if lots of people wind up infected after that.
Now, as I've said, I don't support most of the lockdowns. And I do think we should be pretty much opened up already - but even the people who are making the lockdown decisions, even paranoids like Daniel Andrews, have pretty much accepted the reality we have to open up more at 70% and then even more at 80%. There's still some question as to whether they'll be willing to accept we might never get much higher than that (polling and studies here suggest 80% of adults are likely to agree to be vaccinated, but not much more than that) and what they will do then - hopefully they will accept reality, but even if they don't it will be much better than things are now, and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Even getting these paranoids to this stage has taken huge effort.
When I was at Woomera I worked hand-in-hand with the RAA and RAAF. In fact, my rating officer was RAAF. WE only had one RAN but I didn’t work with him. Great guy, though!
The skill, professionalism and attitude of the typical Australian soldier/sailor/airman has my endearing respect. And they’re great friends and some of the funnest people I’ve ever met.
Salutes to you, mate!
I will say this. I don’t think COVID is ever going away. Not in Oz, not in the USA.
I do believe it will get less deadly as medical science figures out ways to treat it, as long as politics doesn’t get the way. Even so, eventually, positive treatments will prevail, even if it’s a totally new class of drugs or horse paste.
If Australians are trying to get to that point—where positive treatment “cures” the infection so few will die—then that is good.
If however, this disease is going to swing from one variant to another and still kill people, and no effective cure is found, then no amount of quarantine or lockdown will have an effect UNLESS that lockdown is permanent, which would be absurd, no?
That effect appears to be both temporary and highly dependent on the variant. Add to that the diminishing returns of booster shots and it appears that the vaccine buys you about six months.
Now that's not a bad thing, provided you get covid during that six month period that your risk is slightly attenuated and acquire longer lasting immunity.
Are the police federal or provincial or what? Clearly, there is a problem with the culture (for lack of a better word) of the police.
This is what a federal police force looks like folks. It’s what our FBI looks like in the USA, corrupt as hell leadership in pursue of violence for political ends.
COMPROMISED AT THE HIGHEST OF LEVELS - AUSTRALIA
https://www.bitchute.com/video/lEb9ATQg1ddz/
I have a huge respect for American servicemen as well. As far as I’m concerned, we’re at least cousins and it’s nice to work with professionals. I didn’t have as much contact with USN as some others but I had a bit over the years.
I’m no Doctor and I don’t pretend to be. But I do have friends who are, and also some in medical science, who I trust and they say the aim here is to get COVID to the stage, that it’s basically just something similar in terms of risk to the seasonal flus we get each year. And they think that’s achieveable by next year - provided that, yes, we don’t get a worse variant. That’s the wild card - as you quite rightly point out. But for the moment, they are proceeding on the basis that won’t happen because if it does, everything will have to be rethought anyway. And, yes, at that point, I definitely hope even the paranoids will accept reality.
I’m not 100% certain if they are talking about reaching that level of risk with or without treatment. I do know at least one of them is part of the team working on things like that. He was also on the team that was developing our own vaccine last year - it was proving promising, but unfortunately it also turned out to create false positives on HIV tests so they pulled the plug - with other promising vaccine candidates having emerged by then, there didn’t seem any point in proceeding with a vaccine that would make it harder to protect people against HIV in the future by muddying testing.
Your low population density and climate largely is responsible for this, and likely your case fatality rate of 1.3 (slightly higher than Sweden, Switzerland, etc.) would be the same without much restrictions.
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