I live in Victoria. We have certainly given up all of our freedom. Our Premier has suspended parliament and now rules by decree. Citing fabled 'health advice', which is never made public nor provided when queried, to justify anything he does. That's why we have a 9PM curfew that has done nothing to stem the spread, punitive 'alchohol must be drunk through a mask' rules and playground closures. Those were not legitimate public health measures, but punishments for Victorians risking his re-election strategy of 'beating the virus' after spending the weekend outside in the sunshine.
Police harass citizens for the crime of taking a rest on a park bench while on their 1 hour of allowed outside time per day. I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents. I have had friends unable to travel interstate to see their dying parents. My own grandmother died in our lockdown so the last 12 months of her life were spent locked in her own home.
This is not a successful strategy, and anybody reading Australia's low deaths and case numbers need to realise this. We have myopic politicians who are suffering from an obsession with a particular metric, neglecting everything else enabled by a population of unthinking zealots who genuinely believe a single death is a policy failure.
Locking down this severely is neither clever nor demonstrates a particularly high level of consideration. It is the most blunt and basic response to the virus and it's only possible in a country of docile livestock who are content to cede every right if the person they're ceding it to promises it will make them safer from a virus, or in the case of these new national 'security' measures pedophiles or terrorists.
All of your freedoms and rights? I imagine someone will be along to arrest you for sedition shortly then?
That sounds horrendous but honestly little different to what we went through in the UK at various points in the last year and a half, and the death rates are very low in comparison.
> I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents.
Im somewhat neutral on most of Australia's restrictions: my opinion is that theyre unnecessarily draconian, and that some of them are not in accordance with pretty well-established science (1 hour of outdoor time is ludicrous).
But this is a relatively low-confidence belief, as I don't have a strong rebuttal to those championing the minimal-Covid-until-vaccinated strategy and its relative success. I wouldn't pick the same spot on the freedom/safety spectrum, but I have no basis for claiming those who do are "wrong".
But how on earth do the restriction apologists justify forbidding _leaving the country_? It has, by definition, zero safety justification. Plus, forbidding people yo leave a country is quite reasonably considered a violation of international human rights law. With respect to this specific policy, what on earth are policymakers thinking?
Yea of course, but it's trivial to just ban returning without quarantine. This policy also has the advantage of not potentially violating international law
has there ever been anything remotely resembling justification for nighttime curfews? I've tried to find any reasoning for it and completely failed to do so.
Police harass citizens for the crime of taking a rest on a park bench while on their 1 hour of allowed outside time per day. I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents. I have had friends unable to travel interstate to see their dying parents. My own grandmother died in our lockdown so the last 12 months of her life were spent locked in her own home.
This is not a successful strategy, and anybody reading Australia's low deaths and case numbers need to realise this. We have myopic politicians who are suffering from an obsession with a particular metric, neglecting everything else enabled by a population of unthinking zealots who genuinely believe a single death is a policy failure.
Locking down this severely is neither clever nor demonstrates a particularly high level of consideration. It is the most blunt and basic response to the virus and it's only possible in a country of docile livestock who are content to cede every right if the person they're ceding it to promises it will make them safer from a virus, or in the case of these new national 'security' measures pedophiles or terrorists.