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 :)
You talk as if this is reasonable and will end.
It all comes down to a logical succession of events which made it easy to take over an entire country and lockdown her defenseless people. Gun confiscation > virus > masks > riots > lockdowns > mandates including forced jabs, and so on. And in the USA the same pattern except we still have 2A. Democrats and their MSM sycophants even tried to get us to buy 2-3 year old garage door pulls as NEW “nooses” and now they’ve got another whopper. I saw a video about their claim Border Patrol agents used “whips” on illegal aliens and them being slammed for it, and you can check it out in crawler link top of page at Whatfinger News. Horse reins are a known thing too and again are corrupted by the left via a deceptive picture to suit their agenda. Now that the male union members are on the front line Aussie notsee ‘cops’ are realizing they can’t just beat up 70 year old women any more.
The only two times I’ve seen the faux cops back down there are 1) the truckers blocking the roads, and 2) the male union members who just got ‘police’[sic] to back their cars up out of there quickly. If Aussies still had their gun rights this would have been over before it really started.
Yes, I’m confident it will end.
I have faith in the robustness of the protections that do exist in Australia law, the constitution, and common law.
At the moment, we have states of emergencies declared in various states. If that wasn’t, the state governments wouldn’t be able to be doing what they are doing either. When the pandemic ends, those states of emergencies will be lifted.
If that doesn’t happen, then the Federal Government would have the power intervene. So would the courts.
Thank you for your local insights.
As an aside, i am always amazed and pleasantly surprised at the reach and scope of Free Republic.
This is a real virus but it is not lethal on it’s own. It has replaced fly as what ‘takes people out’ who are already ill or old, or both. And leftists have taken advantage of that for a global power grab. The marches in France and Australia are great, but if folks elsewhere had 2A rights it wouldn’t have gotten this far. They are going slower in America because they know once that line is crossed the **** is on. Lots of folks here aren’t going into those camps they are building (like in Washington State, where they are advertising for guards).
Thank you. A question...what percent of population has died from Covid?...and how does that compare to freer states/provinces?
Thank-you. Nothing better than getting it from the horse’s moth.
Which is why I’m ‘eating right’ and ‘working out’ and praying I stay healthy. And if you do need surgery then talk to your doctor about ‘banking’ your own blood ahead of time. We can’t trust the blood supply any more either (’vaccine’ contaminated).
Watch what’s about to happen at the Shrine of Remembrance they are lining up the police are right now.
https://facebook.com/100004608812201/videos/573364103817746/
“When the pandemic ends,”
That may take war
Bookmark
Very interesting about the construction unions. What are people doing for money since they can’t work? Is there an amnesty on paying rents, bills, utilities etc? How are people managing to survive?
how is the freedom of movement in Victoria?
Do they restrict movement between metro Melbourne and areas outside of the metro area?
Do they lock down the entire state or just the region with new cases?
This looks ominous.
Do Aussie cops carry guns?
Let’s compare to the United States - the US has about 13 times Australia’s population (328 million versus 25 million).
According to what I find on the internet (and I’m not going to check this in detail unless somebody seriously tells me its wrong), the official death tool from COVID in the US is about 679,000 people.
1/13th of that number is 52,000 more or less. In other words is Australia’s death rate was the same as that of the United States, we’d have lost 52,000 people at this point.
The actual number is currently 1,178 - America per capita has lost 44 times more people than Australia.
To answer your question - about 0.005% of Australians have died of COVID versus about 0.2% of Americans.
Predicting what the numbers would have been if things had been done differently is always, in part, a guessing game. But I honestly don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that what has been done in Australia has saved a lot of lives from COVID.
I think we needed to do some of it. But I don’t believe they needed to do anywhere near all of it.
Comparisons within Australia - it’s complicated because part of the reason Victoria and NSW have the most restrictions is that they have had by far the biggest outbreaks. But I don’t think anybody could sensibly argue the outbreaks were caused by the restrictions. In the case of Victoria our worst outbreak happened because of a single known failure in hotel quarantine - we know that. In NSW, their government had very low restrictions in place before their outbreak and tried very hard not to introduce restrictions before finally reaching what I do regard as a panicked stage - but they did try to avoid it to begin with.
......”What this means is that is happening in Australia has been very STATE specific”.....
Interesting to know and good writing so we can better understand what’s really going on in Australia.
Thanks for posting.
There were a bunch of amnesties on various bills and things to begin with, but most of those have now ended.
Basically people are surviving on special payments. People who can’t work because of COVID restrictions can get $750 a week from the Federal government (smaller amounts if they’ve only lost some hours). State governments also provide various levels of support - in Victoria, businesses that can’t operate are entitled to various payments.
It’s not enough in all cases but a lot of people can manage. A lot of businesses have closed though, and even more probably will when it’s all over - many are probably no longer viable long term but are being kept alive in a zombie form by government support and won’t recover.
Yes, Australian police are generally armed.
But they are actually pretty well trained to avoid using them compared to some places.
If any of them lose it though, yeah, it could go very bad very quickly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.