So what is going on in Australia? View from an Australian Freeper

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.

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.

Just to come back to this.

This is a really thoughtful helpful post. But let’s not minimize the fact that police have beaten protestors

While I believe some of the demonstrations have been justified, I don't believe all have been. And some of the ones that haven't been have turned violent. More police have been seriously injured than protestors. I've seen one incident where I believe went too far in dealing with a protestor and it wouldn't surprise me if there's others. But there's a lot of cases where the police were simply themselves from attack.

jailed people who broke curfew

I don't know of any cases where somebody has been imprisoned for breaking curfew. It's a fine. Now, that's not a good situation, but it doesn't need to be exaggerated into something worse than it is. As I say there are real problems here - but it's harder to deal with those when we're also having to deal with shadow problems.

not to mention that freedom of movement both within and outside the country has essentially been banned.

The latter part is close to being true - there's quite a few exceptions to international travel but for the average person in the average situation, yes, that's fair. The former part does apply only in some places - in most of the country, people can move over a wide area.

One wonders if the populace would have willingly accepted these horrors if their weapons had not been seized a couple of decades ago.

Already addressed this in a previous post but I want to add to it. There was a buyback that took a minority of weapons out of the community. In most cases people could have kept those guns. Very few guns were actually confiscated and they were mostly taken from convicted criminals (and even then most of them were paid for the weapons because it was easier to get them to comply). Millions of guns remained in private hands, and there are actually more guns now in private hands than there were then. It doesn't make a difference to what is happening. Things haven't reached the stage where anybody is likely to want to use them.

I note that in the United States, the people who protested at the Capitol in January generally did so unarmed. Just because guns exist doesn't mean they need to be pulled out at every level of protest.

Australia's vaccination rate has been slower than most other wealthy countries for a number of reasons - it's a supply issue. Currently we are at just under 50% of adults considered fully vaccinated.

The rate matters because that is the core of the plan here. It is pretty much accepted here (I know some people disagree) that vaccination does reduce the chance of getting infected but more important significantly reduces the risk of becoming seriously ill - very few cases in Australian hospitals now involve vaccinated people. Even they get it, hardly anybody who is vaccinated is getting sick enough to need hospital care. So the aim is to open the areas that do have active cases when vaccination levels in those areas reach certain thresholds. That's actually already started happening.

By the time we reach 80% vaccination levels (which in my state is projected to be early November) things will be much less restricted than they are now - I still think the state government is being too paranoid at that point, but we won't be under lockdowns of any sort anymore and what we'll be dealing with is most things being open with capacity limits. Most of the country is already at that stage.

Some restrictions have already lifted here (and we are the worst area in terms of restrictions), and more will when we hit the 70% vaccination mark (which I think is in about three weeks). It's glacially slow in this state but it is happening, and as I say we are the worst case - most of the country is much closer to normality than we are, and coming out of things faster. But our state government is still paranoid - less paranoid than they were, but it's still a pretty high level.

Exactly what will happen after that hasn't yet been decided - the plan is to eventually be living without any restrictions but they will look at the data then to work out when that will be, once we reach the stage of being more opened up. If, as is expected, very few people are getting seriously ill at that point, it could happen quickly. If the numbers go badly, I wouldn't what to predict what will happen. I am fairly confident, absent a new and very virulent strain of virus (which would change things) we will be back to normal by the end of next year at the latest. Best case scenario I can see at the moment is Christmas this year - January or February next year seems more likely.

Understand we have tried to do this before. We were pretty close to back to normal from the first part of this year, before Delta came along. That's the wild card. New strains that are more dangerous.

Again, this seems like a fallacious argument to me.

I'm not sure where you've got your '94%' figure, but I've no reason to doubt it. But of course, most transmission has been in homes - we haven't been able to go anywhere else for long periods during this pandemic. But it isn't always that way.

I'm not a supporter of the extreme restrictions imposed. But I have the advantage of living here and I'm familiar with the patterns we've seen and how the outbreaks we've had have generally started. When we are opened up, we're fine while there's no COVID in the community but as soon as something brings it again, we immediately do have clearly identified community transmissions. One of the advantages of the numbers being so low is that in many cases, they can actually trace the exact infection chain quite effectively.

One recent example is that one of our recent outbreaks in Melbourne was sparked by a small group of 'furniture removalists' (in actual fact, they were a cowboy operation - if they'd followed the, in my view, fairly reasonable procedures for actual furniture removalists we might not have had a problem) who infected people at an apartment block. A person from that apartment block went to to the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground), Melbourne's major sporting stadium where he watched a football match with about 80,000 people - as I say, this was at a time when we pretty open so they were allowing crowd at football matches.

From there, teachers at two different schools (one of which is literally next door to the school I teach at) started infecting students and staff in their school.

And they infected people in their households. Basically now if anybody in a household gets it, everybody is likely to, so in the end yes, lots of the cases are in households, and because by this stage we are locked down again that's pretty much all likely to be until we reopen again.

"I'm not sure where you've got your '94%' figure, but I've no reason to doubt it....And they infected people in their households. Basically now if anybody in a household gets it, everybody is likely to, so in the end yes, lots of the cases are in households, and because by this stage we are locked down again that's pretty much all likely to be until we reopen again."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/11/24/nation/what-does-it-mean-when-youve-got-covid-19-you-dont-know-where-or-how/?p1=Article_Feed_ContentQuery, another study found that in household transmissions individuals with symptoms were more than 25 times more likely to infect household members than those without symptoms at the time (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774102; https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/university-researchers-find-almost-no-covid-19-transmission-without-symptoms-in-households/) And the rate of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html)

Closing parks, forest trails, beaches etc. and exhorting "shelter in place" and requiring masking whenever outside is not only unwarranted but fostered/fosters lack of exercise and increased weight, and often contributes to being hypertensive[8] and having high cholesterol, all of which are primary factors in Covid-19 deaths,[9] besides having compromised immune systems as with the aged, especially in seclusion. Also, a NIH study of 2015 found that being inside with increased CO2 levels significantly degraded cognitive function.[10]

"A person from that apartment block went to to the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground), Melbourne's major sporting stadium where he watched a football match with about 80,000 people - as I say, this was at a time when we pretty open so they were allowing crowd at football matches. From there, teachers at two different schools (one of which is literally next door to the school I teach at) started infecting students and staff in their school."

I see this case of tracking of "patient zeros" to be dubious in its conclusions.

First of all, it's the state Premier that is doing this - not the state Governor. I only point that out because the difference is significant - it's not just semantics, it's very relevant. I'll get to why at the end of this post.

Speaking with specific regard to Victoria - not Australia as a whole - the courts have only a very limited power to intervene, unfortunately - and may also be hopelessly politicised at this point. Part of the problem is, as I outlined in the original post, the distinction between Federal and State power in Australia. The High Court of Australia does have a specific and explicit role in addressing 'human rights' concerns - it can, and will, sometimes overturn government decisions if it believe human rights have been abused. It's also the Court that rules on Constitutional issues. But it's a Federal level court, so nearly all the times it does that, it's dealing with the Federal government and Federal law and the Australian Constitution - not state law. Australia has no Bill of Rights - the rights we have are based on common law inherited from the United Kingdom (mostly from England) dating back as far as Magna Carta. This does give us a lot of protected rights and the High Court can interpret those in the final analysis. Within Victoria (as in other states) the state Supreme Court is the highest court. And state Supreme Courts do not have the same ability or tradition of making rulings that go beyond the letter of the law. Their rulings are meant to be based on black letter interpretations of the law - of the law of their state specifically. And in Victoria, unfortunately, we do have a 'Bill of Rights'. I know to Americans, the concept of a Bill of Rights seems very important and is generally seen as a good thing - but that's because of the particular form of your Bill of Rights, the fact that it was basically the work of patriots and great thinkers. Unfortunately what we have here in Victoria is the 'Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities' which was created by a socialist government in 2006. It lays out a list of twenty specific rights - and most of those are good rights - but there's two problems. The first is that because there is now a list of twenty rights, anything not specifically in the list is now considered less important than those twenty rights. The second is that the Charter specifically says that rights can be suspended during a 'State of Emergency'.

Until last year, there were provisions in place in Victoria that no State of Emergency could last more than six months - but those provisions were themselves part of an Act of Parliament and so Parliament could amend them. Labor controls the lower house of the state Parliament, and was able to get three minor party MPs (one Green, one Animal Justice, and one Reason Party (which until recently was called the Sex Party)) to support them in the upper house giving them a majority there in extending the State of Emergency. Since then, these three MPs have consistently backed Labor's oppressive policies 'in the interests of public safety'.

The state courts - including the Supreme Court - have ruled on any complaints based on the letter of the law - including that Charter of Rights that is limited to specific rights, and which can be suspended according to the letter of the law. And, unfortunately, that's probably legally correct.

But even if it wasn't - Victoria's court system has become so politically correct after years of the socialist governments stacking it - if there's any grey area, it will always go to the left in its rulings.

Technically speaking, the High Court of Australia is the ultimate Court of Appeal and it can overturn state Supreme Court decisions - but only if those decisions were wrong under the law of those states - it's allowed to say 'The Victorian Supreme Court misinterpreted Victorian law', but it can't say 'Federal law allow us to overturn that state law'. It can overturn the laws of the two large state-like territories (it's one of the differences between being a state and a territory), but it's very reluctant to do so, and the worst violations have been in the states.

I said I'd get back to the distinction between a state Premier and a state Governor, because we have both, and the distinction is important here.

The Premier is the head of the state's elected government. They are the person who controls a majority of the lower house of State Parliament. They are the leader of the party that has the most members, basically (technically speaking that doesn't have to be true, but it virtually always is).

The Governor is the appointed representative of the Queen - Australia is a constitutional monarchy, and so are all six of the Australian states. The Queen of Australia is the same physical person as the Queen of the United Kingdom, but legally they are separate, and obviously the Queen lives in London - so she appoints Governors in each state, and a Governor General over Australia as a whole, as her representatives with all her powers. The choice is recommended to the Queen by the premier of the state, or by the Prime Minister in the case of the Governor General - but she does make the decision. In practice, the recommendation is virtually always accepted but it could be refused if somebody unsuitable was recommended. Because of that, most of the time, the person chosen is a good choice - they tend to either be senior military officers, or senior judges - people who have spent their life serving in a constitutional role. Victoria's current governor is Linda Dessau, a former federal judge, so she is from that type of background, and I can say personally, she's an excellent governor.

Theoretically, the Governor can overrule the Premier - because of that they represent the ultimate authority and ultimate protection for the people of their state. If a Premier does go too far, the Governor can overrule them or even dismiss them from office.

But this would involve overturning the democratically elected government. It would involve the King (because that is who the Governor is, legally) overruling Parliament in a democratic system. It's an extraordinary act, intended to only be used in extraordinary circumstances.

And unfortunately as bad as Daniel Andrews actions as Premier have been, it would be hard to argue they have reached that extraordinary level.

The Governor or Governor-Generals' power to dismiss a government has been used twice in Australian history - in the 1930s in New South Wales, when a state Premier seized the state's treasury illegally (he was a Labor Premier and he literally moved all the states gold and currency reserve out of the treasury building and into trade union headquarters to stop the Federal government forcing him to pay his states debts), and once at Federal level in 1975 where the Governor General dismissed the Labor government of Gough Whitlam after Whitlam couldn't pass a budget and told the Governor General he was going to order the Commonwealth Bank to illegally lend him money. And in both cases, the action was a resolution to the worst constitutional crises we'd experienced.

Things haven't got bad enough here for the Governor to be able to overtly act.

That doesn't mean she hasn't done anything - I strongly suspect she has, in private, told Mister Andrews not to do certain things that would force her to act. I think she probably has reined him in on occasion. But by convention this is done privately for as long as possible ("Premier, I must warn you that if you do (A), I will be forced to intervene." "Then, I won't do (A), Your Excellency.")

Are there situations that could force her to act? Yes, there are. One example that has been discussed recently is what would happen if Andrews tried to extend strong restrictions beyond the end of a State of Emergency (the current one is due to expire in mid-December, and at the moment, it looks like even his three tame upper house MPs would not extend beyond that date). If that happened, Andrews would clearly be violating the law, and I think the Governor would likely step in. But while he's been acting under the State of Emergency rules, as laid down by Parliament, she really can't.

It should be noted that most of the restrictions we were living under have now been lifted, and we have a timetable for most of the remaining ones to be lifted. When I wrote the original post here we were in a much worse situation than we are now. Things are getting back to normal here. There's no absolute guarantee that might not go backwards, and we're having to try and deal with a new type of power grab from Andrews, but it's a different situation than the one we were in in September.

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