Coronavirus: Australia’s covidiots and scofflaws are nothing more than more of the same

Eve Black shared a video on Facebook of her talking her way through a Victorian Coronavirus checkpoint. She has since been arrested.

Feel the need for a Big Mac meal and a sundae? Why not drive 320 km from Melbourne to Wodonga and hit the drive thru?

Tested positive for covid but don’t want a pesky viral pandemic to cut into your busy social life?

Perhaps you have a party to attend, a sweaty danceathon where social distancing begins and ends with the swapping of bodily fluids only for the wallopers to arrive, leading to scenes not unlike the Roman raid of the headquarters of the People’s Front of Judea in The Life of Brian where the rebels hide very badly.

With Victoria commencing Stage 4 lockdowns this week and a night time curfew imposed, the media has been feasting on yarns of non compliance, driven either by unfathomable stupidity, gross negligence or calculated anarchy.

In the late, great Southern City there have been a total of 800 out of just over 3000 individuals who have tested positive for covid but thought quarantine was optional and instead strode out into the community with hacking, dry coughs.

Have Australians changed? Are we a bunch of criminally negligent scofflaws thumbing our noses at authorities?

Earlier this week, a 38-year-old woman allegedly assaulted two young police women after she was seen not wearing a mask at a shopping centre in Frankston in Melbourne’s south east. The alleged assault was so serious one of the police officers was treated at hospital for “concussion and significant facial injuries.” The 38-year-old woman reportedly has no criminal history.

Sovereign citizens and an imaginary Constitution

What on Earth is going on here? Victoria Police report they have encountered pockets of the sovereign citizen movement, a loose coalition of ultra libertarians who claim they have the right to opt out of the state’s laws whenever it suits them.

Aside from their amusing waffling about the Australian Constitution that they could not possibly have read or selective citing of the Magna Carta that they also have not read, events in Victoria show just how dangerous these people can be and how quickly noncompliance of temporary Covid laws can escalate into violence.

Both in the US and here the SovCit movement poses a significant threat to law enforcement. In the US, police officers have been murdered while undertaking routine traffic stops.

The FBI lists the SovCit movement as a domestic terrorist group.

Dangers, and rise, of SovCits

Senior police in NSW received briefings five years ago on the rise of SovCits which were estimated at 300 dedicated scofflaws statewide back then but in the midst of a pandemic with government imposing laws on social distancing, the numbers are bound to have risen.

The answer is to train and skill up police at the coalface so they can recognise SovCits and act accordingly.

VicPol Chief Commissioner Shane Patton reported that officers have had to break driver side car windows on a handful of occasions, one spectacularly involving the grinning covidiot, Eve Black who had been filmed refusing to disclose personal information while gloating at police at a checkpoint.

Eve Black. Source: LinkedIn

Black drives through checkpoint crossing in Melbourne. Picture: Facebook

O’Brien’s windscreens are said to never have been busier.

For all that, I question that COVID-19 has changed the nature of our society in any permanent way, despite the covidiots who flout laws and regard wearing a mask as a fundamental breach of their human rights rather than an imposed measure of community obligation.

SovCits might be as mad as cut snakes but they remain in the absolute minority. They may be an alarming and growing group but they do not reflect the national character which oddly now is less of the anti-authoritarian and more of the docile and compliant kind.

With police forced to smash windows to apprehend anti-maskers, O’Brien’s windscreens have never been busier, says Jack the Insider. Picture: Suzan Delibasic

During the Second World War, PM John Curtin railed at Australians’ unwillingness to support rationing of clothing, food, petrol and booze.

Almost every household had access to black markets. Many used them for special purchases or when the drinks cabinet was starting to run ominously dry.

The arrival of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919-20, a disease that swept across the globe killing millions, had eerie similarities to that of COVID-19 in that it first appeared in the summer months in Australia. The second wave was more lethal, largely driven by political intransigence at state level. Sydney locked down three weeks earlier than Melbourne and then as now, Melbourne bore the brunt of infections and deaths.

By September of 1919, it was all over.

One story you probably won’t hear down at the War Museum is the only reason Australia was beset with a viral infectious disease was that returned service men from the First AlF jumped quarantine, spreading clusters of infection wherever they went.

Wearing a mask was compulsory in NSW for several months in 1919 but the rules were drawn up with gaping, noodle-scratching inconsistencies. Churches were locked down but Sydneysiders huddled together in trams to get down to the beach. They could pack in like tinned anchovies at the footy, too, but not the races. Go figure.

It is probably worth noting, too, that the decade immediately following World War One led to spikes in violent crime, serious assaults and murder the frequency of which the country had never seen before and would never see again although the 1980s came perilously close.

Then again if a pandemic struck in the 1980s, NSW police detectives from that era would have taken prevention into their own hands and whipped Sars-CoV-2 out past the heads for a spot of fishing.

Three men and a virus go out. Three men come back. Old Kooka, mate. Don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Australia’s national character has not changed very much and probably not at all.

Groups of scofflaws have always been here. In times of pandemic, their frankly oddball views of the world have received greater coverage and more scrutiny than these ratbags can handle. Nevertheless, the times we live in and the challenges we face with this pandemic make them far more dangerous than they’ve ever been.