RE: It was actually an overextension of Victoria’s supposed human rights laws. And that’s one reason why calling it martial law is incredibly misleading. Martial law (it isn’t called that, but the concept does exist) can only be declared by the Governor General at a federal level
OK, let’s dispense with this canard once and for all before we continue talking past each other. I’ve never said that Australia or even Victoria is under martial law and you can read my previous response and you should get what I already said.
What I’m concerned with are the LEGAL CONDITIONS that allow Police to check people’s whereabouts, making sure that they’re only doing certain approved things that ordinarily would be considered normal.
BTW, before we continue, let me tell you that I am quite familiar with Australia ( Victoria and South Australia specifically ) because my Information Technology work has taken me to your country many times. I estimate the total number of months I’ve lived and worked there total 5 years.
I rented a flat in the suburb of Glen Waverley for 8 months while working in Melbourne.
I have numerous friends living there and I can go to Australia now ( if I am not quarantined and refused entry for being non-vaccinated ) and I have many places to live. Such are my ties to your country. That is why I do not want to see it go the way of VIRTUAL ( I did not say actual ) martial law.
Everything I’ve learned about Australia during Covid, I learned from my friends living there. Melbourne has been on hard lockdown for over 200 days and is only now easing but that is not even a guarantee with Omicron on the horizon.
Are the police checking whether you are going beyond a certain number of kilometers from your home? Are they disallowing Jews from gathering for worship even during their holiest day of the year of Yom Kippur? I was told that MOUNTED POLICE actually went to the suburb of Ripponlea to patrol the neighborhood to prevent going to a synagogue. Do you have to apply for permission to leave the country? Are you allowed to see your dying relative? Do you have Covid checkpoints?
Why am I asking these questions? Well, my friends - VICTORIANS ALL are telling me that it is happening in your state and in the neighboring state of NSW.
So, let’s not call it martial law ( and using my other analogy, let’s not call it a divorce ). But what you have IN EFFECT is similar to martial law.
I was in the Philippines when President Marcos put the country under martial law and what I’m being told is no different than what I saw in Metro Manila then.
You better be concerned with this because once your government can get away with what they’re doing without consequences in the next election, there’s no telling what they can implement next. My friend in Adelaide is telling me that they’re developing an app to prove people are staying home while required to. The app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes. If a person cannot successfully verify their location or identity when requested, The Health Authorities will notify the Police who will conduct an in-person check on the person in quarantine.
I don’t know if you mind this being implemented nationwide, but for me, this smacks of too much government intrusion into our lives.
RE: Not much. Because of state law - Victorian law - that says human rights can be suspended during a declared state of emergency.
And who determines the state of emergency? do you agree that what you have in Victoria is a state of emergency that validates what the government is doing? My friends don’t. They tell me it’s like telling people NOT to live life for an epidemic akin to the flu ( which for some reason, has disappeared altogether recently ).
RE: Protests probably had a little effect but not that much. What mattered was vaccination numbers.
The it goes back not to what the people want but to what a few people in parliament decide by committee. In other words, I, Me, DAN ANDREWS, decide on the basis of MY WISDOM what is good for the rest of Victoria.
1) Vaccination rate is a moving goalpost. Andrews might that we’ll open up when 70% are vaccinated, really? Israel said that too, then they upped it to 80%, then 85%, still the case rates did not go down. Now what’s happening is those previously vaccinated are NOT considered fully vaccinated until they get boosters.
Gibraltar, South of Spain, is almost 100% vaccinated and still, they are locking down for Christmas.
And let’s say you reach your ideal vaccination rate, then comes Omicron which threatens to evade every vaccine developed so far. What are you going to do? Remain locked down?
How the hell will someone sitting in Parliament know what rate is good enough for people to live normal lives?
You said you prefer the Australian way of voting, well and good, you have an honest voting system that makes you confident that the leaders you choose is exactly what the people want. And you have to be thankful that you still have the power to choose your government.
The question is — WHAT DO VICTORIANS WANT? Do they want Dan Andrews party to still be in control after Labor has already signaled what is in store? Or will you choose a different government?
I can’t answer that for you. But please don’t tell me you don’t have martial law “officially”. That doesn’t impress. The fact is you officially don’t have martial law, but by what my friends are telling me, what has happened the past few months in Victoria and NSW is not dissimilar to what’s happening in countries that have martial law.
You may not have said Australia is under martial law, but plenty of people have. And they're wrong. And we haven't even been under anything close to that.
Now, I accept you, unusually for people here on FR, do seem to have a reasonable understanding of Victoria and it's culture. I won't argue against that - but I will address the parts of the post I think are significant.
That is why I do not want to see it go the way of VIRTUAL ( I did not say actual ) martial law.
And I would agree with that. But I believe the misrepresentations I am seeing and complaining about actually make it more likely that will happen rather than less likely. They are making it harder to actually address the core issues.
Everything I’ve learned about Australia during Covid, I learned from my friends living there. Melbourne has been on hard lockdown for over 200 days and is only now easing but that is not even a guarantee with Omicron on the horizon.
I agree, more or less, but - well, the 'only now' bit is a little misleading in my view. We've been out of lockdown, hard or soft for over a month at this point. I agree that there are no absolute guarantees we won't go back into lockdown. But I'd be extremely surprised if we did at this point. Even Andrews is saying he doesn't want to do it anymore except in the direst circumstances. It's not supposed to happen again.
Now, I'll be clear. I'm not saying it cannot happen. I'm saying in my judgement it's extremely unlikely and my judgement on this has been consistently correct throughout the pandemic. Why? Because I know a fair bit about what's going on behind the scenes as well as what is out in public. I can't talk in detail about all of that. But I do know. And so many times here on FR I've had people telling me I was wrong about this - being told "They'll never let you out" when I've actually had accurate information that's panned out.
Are the police checking whether you are going beyond a certain number of kilometers from your home?
No. But that was happening at one stage.
Are they disallowing Jews from gathering for worship even during their holiest day of the year of Yom Kippur?
No, but that was happening at one stage. It was happening to members of every faith. None of us could attend worship. Do I believe that was wrong. Yes, I do.
I was told that MOUNTED POLICE actually went to the suburb of Ripponlea to patrol the neighborhood to prevent going to a synagogue.
I haven't heard that but I don't have any reason to doubt it at all. But I wonder at the emphasis on MOUNTED POLICE. It's always been common to use mounted branch for things like this, because they don't have the same assigned duties as other branches and so can be more easily diverted to additional duties. You make it sound sinister in a way that I don't think it is.
Do you have to apply for permission to leave the country?
Yes. And that's one of the few areas, that the Commonwealth government does have control over.
Are you allowed to see your dying relative?
Yes. And have been throughout the pandemic. Seeing less seriously ill people in hospital has sometimes been restricted.
Do you have Covid checkpoints?
We don't have anything I'd call a COVID checkpoint anymore, but it really depends on what you mean by that term.
Why am I asking these questions? Well, my friends - VICTORIANS ALL are telling me that it is happening in your state and in the neighboring state of NSW.
If they are talking about what was happening up until mid October, it looks fairly accurate. Just outdated at this point.
So, let’s not call it martial law ( and using my other analogy, let’s not call it a divorce ). But what you have IN EFFECT is similar to martial law.
No. I don't believe it is. I know what martial law would look like in Australia. I've seen it at Bowral in 1978.
I've also seen martial law in three other countries first hand. I didn't see the Phillipines, so I can't comment on what happened there. But, no, if we had been under martial law here, it would be a very different situation. This isn't just semantics. It's significant.
Superficially at least, martial law would look more severe, but we'd actually have better legal protections. This isn't about martial law being less severe than what was actually happening - in a lot of ways what we've endured is worse.
You better be concerned with this because once your government can get away with what they’re doing without consequences in the next election, there’s no telling what they can implement next.
Believe me, I know. I've spent most of the last month involved in efforts to limit Daniel Andrew's new "Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Bill 2021". It actually passed Parliament about an hour ago. We managed to delay it and take out the worst provisions he was trying to put into it, but it's still not a good bill. The trouble is, the lies and misinformation actually made it harder for to fight it. If we hadn't had to deal with all that crap, we might have achieved even more. And that's one of the reasons the exaggerations and lies irritate me so much. They actually make things harder.
My friend in Adelaide is telling me that they’re developing an app to prove people are staying home while required to. The app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes. If a person cannot successfully verify their location or identity when requested, The Health Authorities will notify the Police who will conduct an in-person check on the person in quarantine.
Again, true but misleading. The app (which I doubt will ever be completed at this point, but that's just down to government IT incompetence) would make it less likely the police just turned up in the first place. It's intended to reduce the level of interference and involvement in people's lives. It wasn't going to be used randomly, but only people in quarantine and would have allowed more people to quarantine at home, rather than have to go to hotels. It'd be a step forward, not a backwards one.
And who determines the state of emergency? do you agree that what you have in Victoria is a state of emergency that validates what the government is doing?
The state of emergency is declared by the government. Now until the pandemic, there were rules on how long a state of emergency could be extended for. Andrews managed to persuade enough members of Parliament to change those laws so it's gone on now way longer than it should have. Parliament can do that. Do I think they should have? No, I don't. But legally they can and did.
I think some orders issued under the state of emergency regulations were defensible. I don't think most were. I never have and I've worked to oppose them consistently. But misinformation and exaggerations has made that much harder than it should have been and that's why I oject to it. It also masked the fact (pun intended) that what was happening in Victoria was unusual and wouldn't have been allowed in most of Australia - and that made it even harder for us to get attention focused on it properly. People were routinely blaming the wrong government and making it look like this was a conservative government turned fascist, rather than what the actual problem is - autocratic socialism.
1) Vaccination rate is a moving goalpost. Andrews might that we’ll open up when 70% are vaccinated, really?
No, it's not really a moving goalpost. That's the point. The plan was expressly and clearly set up with set numbers from the start - "This will happen when 70% of people have their first dose. This will happen when 80% of people have their first dose. This will happen with 70% of people were double dosed. This will happen when 80% of people were double dosed, etc." They weren't moving goalposts, they were set standards and they have been followed. Daniel Andrews in Victoria has stuck to them. In NSW, they have gone faster. But nobody has gone slower.
The last part of it is a bit more nebulous, but the 70% and 80% single and double dose targets were clear months ago and have been adhered to.
What are you going to do? Remain locked down?
Well, we're not locked down and I don't expect us to be again. Certainly not on any significant scale or for any period of time. Could it happen? Yes. Do I expect it to? No, because I know what's going on and I know what the plans are. And I've been right on this whole time, because I'm getting good information.
The question is — WHAT DO VICTORIANS WANT? Do they want Dan Andrews party to still be in control after Labor has already signaled what is in store? Or will you choose a different government?
We don't know. The next state election is in November next year (we have fixed terms in Victoria now which I regard as an American influenced abomination that should never have been allowed to infect our local system - but the socialists here wanted it, and forced it through, and American conservatives - just like with the pseudo-Bill of Rights we have here - told me I was wrong to oppose it. C'est la vie. It's done deal now).
At the moment opinion polls say the Andrews government is likely to be returned - but it's nearly a year away and most opinion polls in Australia have been skewing severely left for the last few years - the pollsters still rely way too much on old landline survey methods. According to the same polls, the conservatives were meant to lose the last Federal election - we didn't. So it's hard to know.
Personally I don't think Andrews is doing anywhere near as well as the polls say. But he does have a very large majority right now, holding 55 of the 88 seats of the lower House to the oppositions 27. Winning back 18 seats is a big number. But we'll have to wait and see.
And there's a few wild cards there as well - if evidence emerges - and it could - that shows Andrews was responsible for certain decisions he's so far avoided responsibility for (and which I think he is responsible for) things could change rapidly. There's two potentially very large scandals hanging over him. I'm not saying he's definitely guilty in either case but if he is, and it does become clear, that will change things. There's a few more minor issues as well.
But fighting Andrews isn't made any easier when misinformation and lies is masking what has really happened. It's made harder. It makes conservatives look like lying idiots to a lot of people.