If there is one nation that has gone insane with COVID, it’s Australia. It’s scary because their lockdown protocols mirror what Dr. Anthony Fauci and other COVID panic porn manufacturers want to do here. Blessedly, we have a Bill of Rights in our Constitution. Australia does not have one which is how their invasive enforcement measures have been able to withstand legal challenges. The nation has become a police state. The cops can arrive at your door at any moment if you do not respond to a government-directed text to your smartphone detailing your location. Oh, and this app must be downloaded. It’s accompanied by facial recognition—all the fixings of a national database for a virus with a 90+ percent survival rate. You cannot leave your home. You cannot leave the country. You cannot enter the country; the borders are closed. It’s a democracy but with the mindset of North Korea. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic had a good piece about the land down under and how it sacrificed its liberty for security. Ben Franklin is often quoted as saying that any nation that pursued such a policy deserved none. Friedersdorf doesn’t get into that, but more pointedly asking whether the country was still a liberal democracy (via The Atlantic):
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy.
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Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.”
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Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
Now, Friedersdorf added that lockdown measures early on were defensible since we knew little about COVID. There are now vaccines, which the Australian government has fumbled the ball miserably when it comes to enacting a solid vaccination program. He also noted that keeping everyone locked up has led to an astronomically low death rate, only four for every 100,000. The problem is the ‘COVID zero’ policy is the makings of a forever pandemic and its accompanying police state apparatus.
“It is not about human rights. It is about human life,” says Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Well, that declaration justifies the government’s position to keeping everyone locked up forever. Australia may be heading in that direction. Friedersdorf noted that Australia is in the same neighborhood as China and Singapore, two authoritarian societies of varying degrees. Maybe that infection finally island-hopped, huh? If so, that authoritarian bug will do more damage than COVID ever could.
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