Shameful, fearmongering leaders should pay for Covid lockdown insanity
As a stunned world looked on, Australia was plunged into a violent and totalitarian abyss. A book extract recalls violent, abusive, authoritarian, and provoking scenes.
In 2021, Australia descended into its darkest days, a full totalitarian tilt into the abyss of government maladministration, a frightened, disoriented, confused population imprisoned in their own homes, and distrust everywhere.
While a deluded and misinformed Australian public endured what on the face of it was a mass Psyop operation – a deliberately terrified population herded in one direction, towards mass vaccination and a singular loss of personal liberties – Australia’s international reputation as a freedom-loving, easygoing holiday destination was being trashed.
In August, that final month of winter, as the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, plunged the state into its sixth, world record-beating lockdown, the world’s most successful podcaster, American Joe Rogan, lamented of Australia: “There’s some crazy shit going on right now where the army is trying to keep people inside in Australia. They have full-on government lockdowns where the government is flying helicopters over streets saying ‘go back indoors, you’re not allowed outside’.”
Subsequently on Instagram he wrote: “Australia had the worst reaction to the pandemic with dystopian, police-state measures that are truly inconceivable to the rest of the civilised world.”
The lockdowns so beloved by Australia’s politicians were already being decried by academics around the world, and would come to be seen as one of the greatest policy failures in the history of public health. Hostage to vaccine manufacturers and their government collaborators, most of the mainstream media disparaged or ignored the gathering freedom movement around the country.
Across Australia, protesters faced walls of police.
At the same time, the land of kangaroos and koalas, dangerous reptiles, cockatoos, budgerigars and surfers – that Australia of fond myth and legend – was being annihilated.
The international coverage was excoriating. The Qatar-based Aljazeera news, for example, under a prominent picture of protesters carrying a banner reading “Country in Distress”, recorded that there had been nationwide protests on August 21, 2021, with more than 250 people protesting against coronavirus lockdowns in Australia having been arrested and many others facing fines for defying health orders.
“At least seven police officers were treated for injuries after skirmishes broke out at some of the demonstrations on Saturday, which took place in multiple cities nationwide. The largest and most violent protest was in Melbourne. Many were organised by people in encrypted online chat groups.”
In Melbourne, police arrested 218 people and issued more than 200 fines, each for $5400, an extremely punitive level. Six Victoria state police officers were hospitalised and three people remained in custody for allegedly assaulting police. Officers used pepper spray on several people, saying in a statement they were left with no choice.
In NSW, police said they arrested 47 people and fined more than 260 in relation to demonstrations across the state. They also issued 137 tickets after stopping about 38,000 vehicles that approached the city. NSW Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon said police expected to identify more people through security cameras and social media footage.
In a piece badged “Insanity Down Under”, one of America’s most popular broadcasters, Tucker Carlson at Fox News, gave his take on Australia’s Covid Regulations.
“One thing about Americans, they love Australia,” he told his million-plus followers. Most Americans have never been there, it’s an awful long way away, but when Americans think of Australians, they imagine a freer, tougher version of themselves. Steve Irwin, Crocodile Dundee – that kind of thing.
“So there is a huge reserve of affection in the United States for Australia, its culture and its people. It’s also possible that most Americans, us included, have not updated our assumptions about Australia in a while and the modern reality is a little different from what we imagine.
“Australia looks a lot like China did at the beginning of the pandemic, that’s the sad truth.
“At the time, our public health officials told us that nothing like that could ever happen in our country or in the West, but that was wrong, because those things are now happening in Australia.”
Carlson then went on to play several clips of scenes in Melbourne. The first is of a wild street melee of running protesters and police. The next clip shows fully kitted out policemen with shields and helmets aggressively punching commuters as they try to enter a train station.
“There is a lot of footage like this from Australia,” Carlson said. “In just two years, the Australian police went from raiding newsrooms to beating people in the streets, so maybe the lesson is, things can change very quickly. One moment, the English-speaking world is mocking China for being dystopian and autocratic; the next moment, they are aping China and hunting people down.”
In stark contrast to the messages of concern and empathy flooding in from around the world, the NSW government went hell for leather to terrify the population. Then police minister David Elliott – a plump, self-satisfied man characteristic of the breed – declared: “There is no doubt that these are the darkest days the people of NSW have had to face in nearly a century. But the high rate of vaccination means there is a pathway, a pathway of hope.
“Unfortunately, there will be some obstacles on that pathway and one of those obstacles is the need to restrict public gatherings. So anybody who attends a protest tomorrow is going to be facing the full force of the NSW police force. You will also be endangering the lives of your loved ones. And prolonging this lockdown.”
Conveniently for the authorities, the right to protest had been abolished. A fundamental democratic right gone with the stroke of a pen. And a massive taxpayer-funded fear campaign.
Elliott said he was “sick to death of people flouting the rules”. He told media outlets that it was no coincidence that there had been a “spike” in cases three weeks after thousands of people attended protests in Sydney’s central business district on July 24.
“There is no doubt in my mind at least some of these cases that we are seeing at the moment had their genesis at the protest,” he said. “Which is why, if they try to do it again, the police, with the assistance of any other agency we need, will make sure that the response is the same.”
That is, violent, abusive, authoritarian, and provoking scenes that were now making headlines around the world, so utterly deranged were they.
On August 16, the entire state, not just Sydney, was plunged into lockdown. Tiny hamlets such as Come By Chance, population 167, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, were equally afflicted as crowded western Sydney suburbs.
Bush poet Banjo Paterson immortalised the town with the words:
“But my languid mood forsook me, when I found a name that took me,
Quite by chance I came across it – ‘Come-by-Chance’ was what I read …”
The joke about Come By Chance was that one half of the town didn’t speak to the other. That’s because there was a cemetery on one side of the road.
Locked down. There wasn’t much else to do there but go to the pub, and you couldn’t do that anymore. Under the new measures, random checkpoints were set up along key streets and roads in Sydney and more riot squad and highway patrol officers descended on the suburbs.
Singles who might want to scratch an increasingly lonely itch had to formally register their “bubble partner” with the government. If they were in a local government area “of concern” they also had to live within 5km of each other.
And there would be absolutely no travel to the regions without a government permit. People who fled Sydney for their holiday homes or to visit friends and relatives in the country were turned back to the city.
The state, the citizenry, everyone was haemorrhaging money. The insanity was everywhere; on the south coast police were knocking on doors to ensure that no one was escaping their places of residence in the city to seek shelter in their beach houses; sending them back to their miserable flats if they were sheltering in place, a place such as their second home.
The rationale? The logic? There was none.
Sprawling suburbs right across western Sydney, ultimately covering millions of people, were all declared to be “of concern”, including Fairfield, Blacktown, Burwood, Liverpool and Parramatta. There were $5000 on-the-spot fines for a “quarantine breach”, up from $1000. A $5000 penalty also applied for lying on a permit, or for lying to a contact tracer.
The blizzard of announcements included $3000 fines for anyone exercising with more than one other person.
Shopping, exercise and outdoor recreation could be done only in a person’s local government area or within 5km of home.
Random security checkpoints on key roads were also increased. Helicopters hovered overhead, ensuring that people were complying with the curfew orders.
It looked like what it was – martial law.
Police handed out more Covid fines in August 2021 than they did in the previous 17 months – 25,687 fines worth $23.9m.
Lanyon declared: “Stay at home unless absolutely necessary. Tomorrow we will have over 1400 police involved in an operation to prevent those people who want to conduct an unlawful protest from doing so.”
The statement from the minister and the commissioner was sent out in a social media message badged NSW Police Force: Poena Premit Comes Culpam. Punishment swiftly follows the crime.
The mass vaccination of the population was never justified and nothing to be proud of. But the perpetrators of this farce – those who used their public office to spread falsehoods, limit liberties and create panic in the population – never faced any penalty.
As history would prove soon enough, the vaccines were neither safe nor effective, nor did they prevent transmission, and nor were they a public good.
They were, however, a massive source of profit for the pharmaceutical companies.
Who knew? And when did they know? They would be the most significant questions as the repercussions sank in, and the recriminations began.
Along with many of his fellow perpetrators, from the premier to the health minister and down the ranks, soon enough Elliott would be giving his valedictory address.
Indeed, mea culpa, David Elliott should have been expressing shame, guilt, regret, remorse. And a heartfelt apology.
No such luck.
This is an edited extract from Australia Breaks Apart, by John Stapleton, published this week by A Sense of Place.
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