How the COVID neurosis eroded Australia

 This is an updated version of my published article in Spiked.

 

Australia is in a unique position in the world, as it perhaps leads the West in its neurotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this massive experiment of governmental lockdowns and mandates, ironically in a country used as an open air prison, we have become the canary down the mine regarding how easily liberties can be eroded in the name of safety.

 

Take the state of Queensland, which locked down its borders hard. So hard that it beguiles any normal understanding of compassion or sense in this tough time. For instance, in 2020, a young pregnant woman from northern New South Wales was denied emergency care in Queensland, even though she had birth complications with her twins. Instead of the 160 km trip to Brisbane, she was forced to wait 16 hours and travelled 600 km to a Sydney hospital, and lost one of her unborn babies.

 

Only days later, the Queensland government, so adamantine to young mothers in need of medical care, opened their doors with open arms to over 400 players, staff, and family members of Australian Rules football players, who flocked in from every state to participate in the grand final. Not only were they allowed in, they were filmed poolside, mingling and drinking cocktails at a resort as part of their ‘quarantine’.

In August 2021, grieving interstate family members of a baby Queensland girl who sadly died when her mother tripped and fell as a magpie attacked were denied funeral exemption, meaning that if they travel interstate to Queensland they will have to spend a fortnight in lockdown, missing the service.  

Baby Mia sadly passed away

In October 2021, the Queensland government denied a six-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, who had just returned from the US after undergoing major surgery, to quarantine at home. The handicapped boy who need a wheelchair and his father are forced to be stuck in a hotel room for 14 days.

 

Celebrities, on the other hand, are treated differently to the plebs. The various state governments are more than indulgent to the stars, bending rules for them in oleaginous manners befitting any feudal sycophant. Hollywood celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, Mark Wahlberg and singers like Danii Minogue have all skipped ‘mandatory’ hotel quarantines and went straight home to their mansions. Hence one thing that came back to Australia with a vengeance during the pandemic, and perpetrated by the government, is class divide, whereas compassion has seemingly been thrown out the window.

The $6.5 million mansion that the Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban quarantined in

 This gross double standard is also observed in Victoria, with its capital Melbourne being the most locked-down city in the world. In early 2021, the state government decided to let in 1200 tennis players, staff, and VIPs from around the world to attend the Australian Open. The hypocrisy is palpable in the fact that at that time, there were more than 37,000 Australian residents stranded overseas and unable to return home due to the ‘danger’ they posed on the quarantine system. The Victorian government even denied entry to residents from neighbouring states while it let in COVID-19 positive visitors for the sporting event. The right of citizens to return home is supplanted.

 

The blatant double-standard extends to the fundamental right of protest. When the Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, 10,000 people amassed in Melbourne, directly against the health directives, and despite more than 7,000 cases having been reported at the time. The government was awash with understanding, so much so that they decided before the event not to fine any of the protestors.

 

More than a year later, having endured more than 250 days under lockdown, and facing overarching mandates for vaccination at the threat of losing their jobs, many Melbournians took to the streets to protest the seemingly evermore authoritarian government and unreasonable policies that have been extinguishing their lives. Unlike the BLM protestors, they were faced with armoured riot police, often more numerous than the protestors, armed with rubber bullets, truncheons, and pepper sprays. And the police tried to ban media coverage of their actions, which are often unnecessarily aggressive and brutal. Free speech is gagged.

 

A functional liberal civilization is a difficult thing to make, and once established, needs careful nurturing. It is something perhaps best described by Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie: “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.” As the late Christopher Hitchens liked to remind us, we are mammals whose frontal lobes are too small and adrenal glands are too big. The great neurosis has allowed the base mammalian instincts of those in power to bubble up, overriding carefully balanced laws and established checks and balances, and to reveal to us that they do not in fact understand what and why they govern.

 

Australia should be a warning to all people who treasure fundamental rights and freedoms on how easily they can be elided.