I thought I would post this here, in a... community, I guess, that would hopefully listen. I did consider including links to articles about the situation, but... Aside from say, The Spectator and maybe a couple of News Corp sites (The Australian and Sky News aren't too bad), everything else produced "locally" about what is going on is so fucking biased that it is just... Barely distinct from propaganda. :-/
So... Firstly, I would like to clarify that I am not anyone important. I'm not... Trained in anything relevant to this (though I am a biologist and statistician, but all that has really taught me is to be even MORE cynical). I don't have any power. I don't really have an "agenda" here, except to attempt to restore the personal freedoms that I thought, until recently, belonged to myself and my fellow citizens, and to... Honestly try to push back against this shit, before it kills me (the lockdowns and restrictions, not the fucking virus itself), and other young people in this country.
Australia is... Not a great place to be, right now. Hell, it isn't even "good". I'm not proud of my country, or what it is doing; how it is acting. Then again, I can't remember that many times in my lifetime when I have been proud of it, to any real extent.
I think, internationally, Australia is known as this... Rugged, individualist, "self reliant", conservative place. This is a myth. Outside of, at a significant stretch, rural areas, Australia has not been that way since at least 1972, and probably longer.
We are highly urbanised, deeply collectivist, entirely reliant on others (not to mention China and the US) for pretty much everything, weak, cowardly, extremely multicultural, and just... Honestly, a deeply divided, broken-spirited place. Our middle class is bloated. People are... "Privileged", in the sense that the standard of living (as bullshit as that may be) is so high, here, that people aren't willing to do anything, anything at all, which might jeopardise their precious picket fence, speedboat and four cars (generalising a bit).
The two biggest cities here, Melbourne and Sydney, are currently in lockdown, as you may know. Melbourne had something like... 10 new cases, yesterday. In a city of more than 5 million. Sydney had just over 100. That is enough to "justify" locking down nearly 11 million people, and closing nearly all the state borders.
But it's worse than that. Earlier in the year, our cities would close down over 1 (1!) case of the Delta/Indian strain. And people lapped it up. The media cheered it on. And the push polling they conducted called for MORE restrictions, not less.
Australia is not like America. We don't have a bill of rights. Our Constitution is fucking useless. And people here don't... Stand up for themselves. "Tall poppy syndrome", maybe. I really don't know, but doing ANYTHING against the prevailing mainstream, leftist narrative, at this point, is seen as bad. Victoria tried to ban anyone from ever displaying the Swastika again (no, I'm not a Nazi, but come on), within the state, in any context, just last year...
So yeah, those rights that I took for granted, like... Being able to leave the country, or just... Being able to go interstate. They're gone. Hell, the "right of return", to my home state, without having to give all my personal details, digitally "check in", and then, potentially be shoved into hotel-managed solitary confinement, has even been ripped out from under me, even if I was vaccinated (yes, we even "quarantine" the vaccinated in solitary, because we are insane...).
Protest, in Victoria at least, against these restrictions, is now banned. But not BLM or anti-white Australia Day protests. Nah, they're sanctioned by the state, and we are told that they "don't contribute to the spread" (see: Tim Pool, plus also the fact that fucking Victoria had 900 deaths, in the months after BLM poisoned our society last year)...
All of this shit. All of it. And we have only had less than 10 local deaths in nearly a year. All of whom were a) very old, or b) from the... Let's be honest, shithole, that is Papua New Guinea. Or on a ship and left to rot (kudos to the appalling West Australian Government for that one).
People will die, from these latest lockdowns, if they stretch for the months which they are planned to. Hell, I'm not sure I will make it to the other side myself. It is absolutely fucking disgraceful, and I've only touched on less than half of it, even just from briefly glimpsing at the "news" (read: propaganda), earlier today.
So yeah, there you go. Thought some of you might like to hear, from the belly of the beast, just how utterly fucked our test case for the "new world order" has been, and, to some extent, how it has effected me personally.
Giving up guns was a mistake. Now I see that it was a symptom, rather than a cause. I am sorry for you. That said: there is NO place getting it right, right now, since Trump stepped aside.
On the guns thing... I think that was only possible because the population, by then (1996) was already so demoralised, so apathetic, so comfortably middle class, not to mention old Johnny-boy having one the very recent election in a landslide, that all it took was one major massacre (<100km from where I grew up) to scare society into following through with that, and then, from there onwards, to lead them to shame any holdouts into complying, and giving up even the tools of their trade, at that point...
It's no coincidence that feral pest numbers (roos, rabbits, pigs, what you call mustangs, cats, etc), have since exploded, and it's also no coincidence that ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME THING happened in NZ, after Tarrant's little spree, a couple of years ago...
Different stripes of government, same shit.
Also telling that the worst terrorist attack in Australia in the last decade (Lindt Café siege) was carried out by a muslim who got his hands on at least one illegal weapon, and yet, there were very few calls, after that, to investigate how the flying fuck an obviously mad cleric got his hands on a very-illegal semi-automatic weapon, and carried it into the centre of Australia's financial district, without a single person stopping him, lol...
Anywaaaayy... Yeah, you're right, though I would very much argue that Sweden, Iceland, and hell, even Singapore, have handled this so much better than we, or the US, or any other Anglosphere country has... :-/
No argument AT ALL with Sweden's Covid handling. ... Their country will be well immunized for the foreign invaders they are not handling well.