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.
People keep pointing to New Zealand, and saying it's worse, so I just thought I would clarify that:
It isn't. For several reasons. Yes, Ardern is bad, but restrictions here are, and have always been, significantly tougher than over there. In short: New Zealanders can leave their country. They were never blocked from doing so. In fact, there was a period of time where, bizarrely, New Zealanders could come to parts of Australia for a holiday/to see family, but we weren't allowed to travel over there... In fact, that may still be the case in the states that are currently "locked down" - New Zealanders can come (albeit knowing that they won't be able to travel back without quarantining), but people from those parts of Oz can't go over there. So yeah, that's strike one.
Strike two: the New Zealand lockdowns, in particular the completely unnecessary, election-delaying Auckland one late last year, were never as restrictive as the lockdowns Melbourne has had, or the one NSW is in now. Sure, I get it, all lockdowns are bad, particularly politically-motivated ones, and it is like "Would you rather we chopped off your hand or your foot?". But NZ never had curfews. It never stopped construction, or banned cleaning contractors from working. Even at its very worst, New Zealand has better protections for citizens and for citizen journalists, so you wouldn't, for example, see quite the same level of crazy shit like pulling people out of their car, tackling them on the street, or indeed charging the producer of FriendlyJordies with "stalking" a politician who had hurt fee-fees. So yeah.
Strike three: due to a slightly different history, and NZ having something like 1/5 the population of Oz, NZ DOES NOT HAVE STATES. They don't even have independently-governed provinces like Canada (the equivalent is regional councils, but they don't have the power that say, Alberta's government does). What this means is, sure, a city (Auckland) can go into lockdown. Ardern can prevent Aucklanders from leaving their homes, and from going outside the Auckland REGION. But for those OUTSIDE of Auckland - there is nothing preventing them from travelling about. So, say, you wanted to go from Wellington to Christchurch, you can, because, unlike here, there are no real, legally-enforceable borders to close, and no state governments to stand in your way, and tell you "nah, maaaaatttteee". The worst you are likely to encounter is some highly aggressive Maoris blocking roads, but what they did was technically illegal, even if condoned by Ardern, so... Eh.
Finally, because, again, there is no states, there was no capacity to put up a "ring of steel" to prevent city people from, at the very least, going out into their surrounding REGION. So like, even in lockdown, provided you got out of your house, and got out of the city before the police asked you where you were going, you could, at the very least, travel in the surrounding Auckland REGION, which includes rural areas an tourist islands, and not just the city itself (provided you could get there, of course). This is important, because it doesn't apply in Australia.
Also, NZ cops aren't (usually) armed, boys. They can't actually threaten to shoot you, your kid or your dog, like here.
Australia isn't like England, or NZ, in that respect. Hell, we're not like most other modern, smallish Western states. ALL our cops are armed. Guns and tasers. And they are increasingly militarised like in the US. So what this means is, when a cop threatens you, and believe me, I've been threatened before, you really do feel it, and know the power they have over you... I know that sounds... A little paranoid, but my point is, I'm just not convinced that "threat", as it were, exists, to the same extent, "across the ditch". So yeah, I hope that maybe enlightened some people on the differences, and why Australia is, very possibly, the worst Anglo state for virus enforcement, this far into the "pandemic"... :-/