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Home » More COVID lockdown madness from Australia

More COVID lockdown madness from Australia

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow:

Out of a population of 25.8 million, fewer than 1,000 Australians have died from COVID-19 to date. The latest uptick in cases, which has sent the country into a panic, is still only resulting in less than 5 deaths per day. Yet the Australian government has responded with a return to its past harsh pandemic restrictions—and is now even bringing in the military to police its citizens’ lockdown compliance.

“The Australian military began helping to enforce Australia’s strictest COVID-19 lockdown Monday, as a surge in delta variant cases in Sydney continued to cause problems,” Voice of America reports. “About 300 troops have been sent to Australia’s largest city to help overstretched police monitor home quarantine for coronavirus patients, and potentially set up roadblocks. The troops will help the police on a door-to-door search to check if people who have contracted COVID are isolating, police commissioner Mick Fuller told reporters during a press conference. Senior officials have said the soldiers will not be armed, and do not have special enforcement authority, but will be assisting the police.”…

…[T]here’s a bigger lesson we can take away from watching such a totalitarian policy descend upon a Western, advanced society like Australia. If we are not vigilant, it can happen here.

Can happen? Enough has already happened. But Australia is just that much further down on the slippery slope into the sewer (is that a mixed metaphor? So be it.)

I would not have believed any of this possible just a few years ago, but we’re seeing it with our own eyes now and it cannot be denied. The West has lost its way and lost what had previously inoculated it against tyranny of this type.

Comments

More COVID lockdown madness from Australia — 50 Comments

  1. How does ever end in Australia?

    They could literally vaccinated 100% of the population and they still may more ‘cases’ than they do right now.

    Also, how long are they going to stay shut off from the world?

    Apparently it also kind of is a messed up version of ‘Hotel California’ in Austarlia where ‘you can check IN but you can never leave’.

  2. Good people everywhere should be denouncing what is happening in Australia. This is a removal of human rights using a nations own military. We saw it happen in China, but we know they are communists. We’ve seen it other nations, but Australia follows British common law as does the US, and this behavior by the Australian government is offensive to its citizenry.

  3. It is very curious indeed (Tucker has recently commented on this during the course of his important visit to Hungary) that it is the nations of the Anglosphere (Britain, Canada, Australia, NZ, and, of course, our own moribund republic) which have descended most rapidly into madness over the fake “racial reckoning” surrounding the death of the blessed martyr Floyd and over COVID hysteria. All of these countries were successful in producing free and prosperous societies founded on English ideas of liberty and free enterprise and due process, but all have been ever more rapidly corrupted by anti-rational totalitarian movements taking full advantage of the weaknesses inherent in free and tolerant societies.

  4. It’s still shocking to me the Aussies are putting up with this. I did see some pictures of demonstrations along with the military and police beating people back…very scary stuff from down under..

    With the lambda on its way, we may be in for the same thing.

  6. What j.e. said. – Exactly!!

    A partial (only partial) answer:

    “Science is the default god of a civilization without religion or shared standards of right and wrong. The pseudo-religion of diversity and multiculturalism, which undermines shared moral standards, in effect enthrones Science as god, since Science is the only authority widely believed to be value-neutral. The great god Scientia (to be distinguished from the actual sciences) is not in fact value-neutral, but in public she plays the part of a lady who loves the truth but is flexible when it comes to other moral principles.”

    Also: “The more credentialed people are, the more they cling to their membership in the tribe of the soi-disant educated. Educated people don’t trust their own intelligence; they trust what they have been taught by authorities approved of by educators. This is because their knowledge of what the right authorities say defines who they are and gives them status in the community.”

    More at: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/08/ten-things-i-learned-from-the-pandemic

    Paralleling this, from C.L. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength”:

    “Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
    All our difficulty comes with the others.
    When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
    He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
    He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
    about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.
    He is our problem.

    We have to recondition him.

    But the educated public,
    the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
    don’t need reconditioning.
    They’re all right already.

    They’ll believe anything.”

  7. Another point…

    I don’t think that the effect of the oxymoron otherwise known as “social media” can be underestimated, in terms of the level of collective irrationality sweeping much of the atrophying “West” and “First World”.

    Perhaps a future historian – that is, assuming that there are historians in some future century – will draw parallels between the effect of opium on China during the 19th Century, and, the synergistic effects of Facebook / Twitter / Snapchat / Tik-Tok / Instagram, et al.

    Perhaps this was distantly envisioned by Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, and Neil Postman.

    Or, to continue with the metaphor of science-fiction, “Where is Hari Seldon when we need him?”

    Because I think we will.

  8. None of this happens if social media didn’t exist.

    Or more broadly the internet.

  9. Been seeing how fast Australia has gone down the road to Marxism, but do they have any way out? They have gone Leftist for years so are they brainwashed and OK with this which history says can get much worse.

  10. Michael in Pennsylvania,

    “Science is the default god of a civilization without religion…”

    Excellent point but incomplete. A civilization without religion is a civilization founded upon State granted privileges. When the duly elected authorites deem it necessary, privileges can be rescinded for as long as is deemed necessary.

    You cannot have ‘rights’, “inalienable” or “human” without God because ‘rights’ then rest upon the consensus of the majority and what one majority may agree upon, a later majority may reject or amend into an unrecognizable form. Which turns ‘rights’ into revocable privileges.

    The West, in abandoning the concept of moral accountability to God has forfeited their rights and are now discovering how easily privileges can be rescinded.

    Strictly for the duration of the emergency… of course.

  11. From Crocodile Dundee to the land of the Cowardly Lion in 35 years. From James Bond to Walter Mitty. From John Wayne to Barney Fife. Yes, the Anglosphere is in decline.

    The people who used to live behind the Iron Curtain know what’s up. Tucker Carlson’s show from Hungary has been enlightening. Marxism is like cancer. Working within to destroy the healthy parts of the culture.

  12. The insanity continues.

    By the way, for those of you who think that Federalism and Subsidiarity are panaceas, Australian State and Local Governments are out-competing each other in the Insane Over-reaction Stakes. Would not be so bad in the USA because regional differences mean more and people are more individualist there, but still, a data point.

    I get the feeling, too, from reading news reports that there’s a big push on (the excuse being digital vaccine certificates) to get everyone to download and install their Android or iOS eGov apps. Doesn’t take a brain the size of a planet to figure out that Single Sign On for all government services will be used as a pretext to dilute the supposedly very strict legislated privacy firewalls supposedly preventing different arms of government aggregating too much information about oneself.

    I know it’s difficult for some to believe, but the Hong Kong Government intrudes far less into my daily life than any Western Government in 2021. Apart from one email reminder to file a tax return and a letter in the mail with a tax bill that’s pretty much all the interaction I have with it in any given year. As I’ve said before, there’s really only one category of public statement or activity could get me in political trouble — the list of pitfalls in the West is ever-growing and retroactive.

    As of this week, it has become even harder to fly out of Australia (already almost impossible to get *in*) — now even people who permanently reside and work overseas have to fill in some kind of online application to be approved or rejected by faceless bureaucrats. So it’s quite possible to fly in on a business trip or to visit a dying relative, do a fortnight’s compulsory quarantine and then be trapped in the country in a bureaucratic nightmare and unable to get back to your regular country of residence.

    I’m done with this crap. I’m seriously considering taking up PRC Citizenship (as Hong Kong Permanent Resident it’s not that difficult… all other avenues of adoption are strictly racially based) and taking my chances as a very small cog in a very large Borg. I’ll never be a Chinese and they’ll never see me as one… but they don’t actively hate me for being a Straight White Male per all Western Anglo governments. It’s that or a Bavarian-looking village in Brazil’s South.

    Seems Rootless Cosmopolitanism is where it’s at, after all! 😛

  13. Learn about Natural Law, which our Founders referenced and understood. “Rights” given by states and/or persons can be granted, then snatched away in a moment. Moses with his stone tablets understood, though God did not allow Moses to see his face, but secularists have no clue, have ignored our long Judeo-Christian heritage and are pissing it away because they are suckers for BS charges like “systemic racism”, and lap up neo-Marxism.

    Secularists are all Progressives in disguise, delusionally counting on mankind’s ability to perfect itself. Eventually. After close to 100 million human deaths in the past century, Progressivism marches on, unabated, leading us all straight into Hell.

    J. Budziszewki, a philosophy prof at UT-Austin(!), a convert from atheism to Catholicism (just to indicate his journey), has published extensively on Natural Law. He is a most remarkably well-read man, a true scholar, with several books on sale at Amazon. You might try “Natural Law for Lawyers”, which I will give my lawyer son now I’ve finished it.

  16. Listen to the premiers & state health officials in Oz give their daily press briefings.
    It’s frightened “old women” shrieking into the darkness they themselves have created.

    GB (as usual) nails it: “A civilization without religion (I’d argue without Christianity) is a civilization founded upon State granted privileges. When the duly elected authorites deem it necessary, privileges can be rescinded for as long as is deemed necessary. You cannot have ‘rights’, “inalienable” or “human” without God…”

  17. @Cicero:

    Re: The 80 year-old genesis (Geddit? Geddit?) ex nihilo of that ancient philosophical-political heritage known as Judeo-Christianity

    *dresses up in drag like to look like one of the secretary birds in Mad Men*

    “Good Morning Mister Tully! There’s a Mister Saphir and a Mister Whorf waiting for you in the Conference Room and a Mister Bernays on hold for you on Line 3. Looks like it’s going to be a busy day. Hold on to your head!”

    😀

  19. Zaphod,

    Not to be obtuse but exactly what metric is that graph referencing?

  21. Zaphod, i am doing to the prc what i did to australia england america, says god.

    Prep first. Stay away from dams fire and coasts.

  22. Romans chapter 1 is starting to make more sense to me now…the “ madness” , or at least the removal of the guard rails that prevent madness, seems to be part of Divine judgement.

  23. @JB:

    Verse 22 Sums it up nicely:

    Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

  25. Theoretically if one day we get a pandemic with a virus as contagious as COVID but with a death rate of 50%, would conservatives then support government mandates and lockdown. It seems to me that conservatives are against lockdowns no matter what regardless the death rate. Will there be a threshold of contagiousness and death rate that will make you say “this is serious matter, may be we need to let the government completely take over and use whatever means necessary to save mankind?

  26. @ Dave “It seems to me that conservatives are against lockdowns no matter what regardless the death rate.”

    It seems to me you have a reading comprehension problem.
    I have never read anything indicating any “public conservative” (pundit or politico) ever said anything like that.

    We have discussed past pandemics here, some with substantially higher death rates, as have other bloggers and pundits, including the government responses and the public’s reaction.
    Neo has posted lots of articles full of data and analysis.
    Did you look at any of those?

    However, your theoretical question is worth debating.
    You give your threshold first – 50% dying, lower, higher?

    And there are separate ranges of contagiousness and death; what’s the balance point between them?

    And define “take over completely” and “any means necessary” and “save mankind.”

    We’ll wait.

  27. Aesop…just to hazard a guess…
    I’m going to say that any time government “takes over completely” “mankind” is surely in danger of not being “saved” because they will use “any means necessary” to save themselves & “F” the rest of us.

    But…I could be wrong.

  29. The elected Australians were elected by Australians prior to Covid. Some of the exceptions who were elected since may have been re-elected, having been first elected prior to Covid and, with inertia and familiarity, are still in office.
    So, what did they seem to offer prior to Covid? Why were they elected? Did anything like this appear in them, albeit potentially? Even nearly invisibly?

    Is this where “good and hard” is deployed?

    Or has Oz built a bureaucracy so powerful both formally-lines of authority–and informally that elected officials cannot prevail against them?

    If an Aussie complained about something to the relevant elected official, can the latter even ask the ‘crats a simple question?

    What percentage of the population is hysterical?

    Again, this is a personal observation based on a feeling imputing unconscious motivations to others: Some people like being hysterical in such situations . Some people like being seen as hysterical by others in such situations.
    A normal person cannot be this nuts. But how many of them are left?

  30. Richard,

    WUWT has documented the “madness” in Oz regarding climate change for the many years prior to the pandemic. Despite Joanne Nova, Oz has been descending down the leftist slope for awhile if its government’s proclamations regarding the climate is any indication.

  31. Dave, heart disease killed more people in the United States last year than Covid. Should we let the government “ completely take over” and control everyone’s diet and exercise? Should we all have to wear mandatory exercise watches hooked up to the internet that monitors our exercise and reports us for not doing enough? Should our meals be mandatorily planned by the government ? https://usafacts.org/articles/preliminary-us-death-statistics-more-deaths-in-2020-than-2019-coronavirus-age-flu/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ND-StatsData&msclkid=459da82de937137bf567c92365a2428b

  32. Dave,
    Heart disease and cancer killed more people in 2020 than they did the year before. How many heart and cancer procedures were put off because of decisions by the government to ban “ non emergency” procedures during Covid? In many areas, hospitals literally laid off workers because they had nothing to do, and people who needed procedures sat at home.

  33. physicsguy
    I read WUWT. Sometimes I think I need some kind of new lens to read their graphs.
    There are times when a subject looks so grim I can’t read about it any longer. Your reference is one of them.
    But that brings back the question…how did these clowns get elected if not by Aussies? And how did the Aussies get to be so nuts? “good and hard”.
    And the other question…did the permanent staff take over power from the elected officials?

  34. Goodbye Australia. They will be locked down forever once they realize that vaccinated people can get covid and pass it along.

    In Israel and England 70 – 80% of the people in hospital or under treatment now for covid are already vaccinated.

    According to Peter McCollough the CDC is not asking/reporting on status of vaccination for those currently in hospital or under treatment which is why our everyone assumes the unvaccinated are the ones that are sick.

  36. I don’t trust any of the numbers but of my own knowledge, I now know 7 people that were down with COVID that received the shots and 5 who did not. 2 more people, children-no shots, got it from their parents who did receive the shots so 14 people in total. Anecdotal of course, but accurate. As for exposure the prevalent narrative that those not receiving the shot are responsible for those who received them getting COVID is unprovable. In the 7/5 ratio I have, the 7 came down with it prior to the 5. Doesn’t mean anything data-wise, it just is. No one has been hospitalized but were/are sick.

  37. Walmart wants its customers to wear masks. I didn’t know and went into the door to get some milk. The nice greeter asked me if I wanted a mask. I said, “no thank you, I am vaccinated”

    The only reason I got the vaccine was so I didn’t have to wear the damned mask. And now they are back. I have to wear one at work. ARGH!!!

  38. jon baker,
    Heart disease, stroke, and cancer are the three constantly leading causes of American deaths.
    The fear of COVID is truly irrational.
    Our governor has just re-imposed a mask mandate. He is a trial lawyer, doesn’t know squat about masks, virology or medicine. He ignores the plentiful medical data that show that masks are useless in preventing virus spread. And of course our churches, under the teaching to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, are not fighting this.
    What I might term the “Australia Syndrome” is spreading throughout the Western world. It is one sign of our impending ruin.
    A death rate of 4/1000 for Aussie COVID and the country shuts down? Insanity, truly.

  39. I wonder if they have banned “ non emergency medical procedures” in Australia?

  40. Often, The same people that scream loudest wanting shutdowns are the same people who think there should be long studies on any therapy before it is used on Covid. Except ventilators were apparently studied in long studies for Covid before Covid. ( sarcasm on that last part).

  43. But Dave is asking a very pertinent question: just how and when and what would or should we be doing as a society and under government direction if the disease is distinctly more lethal than Covid-19? We have the history of 1918 and other (near?) pandemics to guide us, and several factors would impact the actual behavior.
    1) what is the impact on our medical and other support systems with nonlethal infected persons?
    2) what is the population most impacted – age, “race”, sex, mixed, etc.?
    3) how quickly can we/ did we isolate and quarantine the infected?
    4) what vaccines and/or therapeutics are available? By when? Qty?, etc.
    5) would it matter if it was explicitly recognized to be the result of accidental vs. purposeful vs. natural sources? Governmental or nongovernmental actors?

    Etc. etc. etc. But we might hope someone somewhere between Congress, the CDC, FDA, med schools, et al. is asking or has asked and generated a national response plan of some sort. I would have thought that was what the CDC and the discipline of epidemiology was all about, but we have seen very little beyond what appeared to be ad hoc responses (and very mediocre modeling at that) rather than a logical pattern matching to previously developed prospective scenarios.

    Clearly a very complex problem that can’t and won’t be asked and answered in a blog post or comment. But as a thought experiment, if we back down from Dave’s 50% to 10% or 5%, might we still expect and justify rather significant government mandates and controls? Decline to the 3%, 2%, or 1% level of lethality and maybe more attention is given to logical waivers, etc.? I suspect we would tolerate higher levels of impact on mature adults and seniors, but react more radically if children and youth are the main group of causalities. Or child bearing age women over older women or men in general.
    YMMV.

  45. @ R2L “But Dave is asking a very pertinent question: just how and when and what would or should we be doing as a society and under government direction if the disease is distinctly more lethal than Covid-19?”

    You gave a thoughtful response, but Neo has covered all of that territory many times, and what she hasn’t considered, many others have.
    See John Tierney and Kevin Roche in the punditry class, for links to the actual epidemiologists who address your questions.

    I don’t see any reply by Dave yet.

  46. Dave’s scenario has been, almost, run in real life. His presumption, planted axiom, is that the government’s SEVERE ACTION would be, you know, competent.
    This, in the face of a Chinese Fire Drill response to a far less difficult problem.
    Can you increase incompetence exponentially, or only by a factor of a couple of digits?
    The studly heroes running China’s response can’t even keep their coverups covered up. And they have The Power. And they don’t have a political party whose best idea was that anything, no matter how useful, promoted by its opponent must be slagged and prevented by any means possible.

  47. Zaphod wrote, “I’m done with this crap. I’m seriously considering taking up PRC Citizenship …”

    And where else would you seriously consider? Any thoughts on Japan, Botswana, Uruguay, Iceland ?

  48. Apple Betty:

    Saint Helena, good seafood? Elephant Island, only seafood? Easter Island, lots of other big heads to keep him company.

  49. @AppleBetty:

    Botswana? Surely you jest. You *are* aware, I hope that Botswana is a subsidiary of Anglo-American (DeBeers) masquerading as a Nation State? Do you think they will be able to run things behind the scenes forever and that it won’t revert to being African? 🙂

    It’s possible to run this type of charade better than the United Fruit Company ever did… but nothing lasts forever. Africa Always Wins.

    I love Japan in small doses. It does get a bit hard to fit in for the long haul. Perhaps Hokkaido — they’re more relaxed there. But frozen six months of the year.

    Uruguay: Zaphod like! The aim, after all, is to live out one’s days being Bypassed by History. And for giving one’s progeny a fighting chance might be the ticket too.

    Iceland: No. Bjork. God no!

    Despite all the above and my view that benign tyranny is the best we as humans can hope for (CCP less dangerous for Chinese People in 2021 than USG is for US People in 2021 because CCP has passed through adolescence. US techo-tyranny is just being born with lots of screams and blood and shit flying around. Early Days. Wait until it’s a teenager.)… despite all this. I hanker for a villa in Chiangmai and a Durian Tree in the yard.

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