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.
Shit, you don't work for Atlassian do you??! If so, you poor, poor sod, haha.
Yeah, Australians at large tend to have a certain arrogance and patriotic narcissism that comes with having had things very easy for a fairly long time... Like, I guess that's the norm in a lot of other countries, too (the US is the stereotype, but also the French, English and, I would argue, the Scots, tend to have the same pathology), but it's particularly jarring when you know that the whole "best country in the world" schtick couldn't be further from the truth for most people right now...
I suppose you could argue that arrogance and narcissism played a role in me making this post, too. It is, after all, about myself and my experiences. But... I dunno. At least I recognize it. Anyway, it is ironic that a country that prides itself on "We're not American, we're not British and we're not New Zealand. We're better.", has the same pathological complex of not being able to handle criticism, and attacking anyone who dares dissent from the norms, or question what the hell is going on right now...
There was a book published in the 1960s over here called "The Lucky Country", that explains Australia's pathology pretty well. Essentially being blessed with mineral wealth means that we can be weak, lazy and corrupt, and yet still get away with being incredibly rich, off the back of digging shit up and selling it off, at the same time (to China, which ties in to what you said, there...).
Anyway, just wanted to apologize on behalf of thinking Australians for the conduct of my countryman/your boss. And to say that I totally agree.
For Australia, I think the destabilising force is likely China, and also the Islamic sphere of influence (we do have the largest Muslim country in the world directly to our north, don't forget). For you guys, and for Europe, I honestly think the role of Russia is underestimated. However I did see a graph on Twitter last night that showed that, in the last 20 years, literally 70-80% of global trade has shifted from the US to China, and most countries in the world now have China as their main trade partner, supplanting the US... And that has all happened in that 20 year timeframe, which lines up nicely with a lot of this clown world/woke insanity. So you may be onto something...
Finally, just look at Stupidpol on Reddit! They critique identity politics (and I suspect at least some of us here are refugees from that space, lol), but yet, when it comes to China, the Baizuos literally block their ears, say "la la la" and pretend that the Uighurs don't exist, and China is the great saviour of the world, lol... So even they've been infected by the same propaganda. :-/
I appreciate your perspective on here. I otherwise do not hear much from Australia and my perspective from Australians is pretty much limited to Youtubers Dave Jones and Sydney Watson, and Watson doesn't even live in Australia anymore.