As I’ve written before, I’ve often wondered what it was like to see a free country slide into authoritarianism around you — and in the past 18 months, I’ve got to see exactly what it’s like. Australians, like the rest of the world, have been herded like frightened sheep by a power-drunk cabal of little-Hitler premiers and paternalistic public health bureaucrats, abetted all the way by a delirious media.
Like a communist state, we have been subjected to daily blares of hysterical press conferences and a non-stop, neurotic counting of “case numbers” (meaning, in most instances, a positive result from a notoriously unreliable test, rather than people actually getting sick). Most people seem to have swallowed the incessant propaganda without question.
Like something out of an old War movie, goon squads have roamed the streets of major cities, placed under military curfew for the first time in Australian history, demanding papers and kicking down doors. Pregnant women have been cuffed in their own homes.
Finally, it seems, some Australians are finding their voices and kicking back against the police state they have found themselves in. Like hundreds of thousands of people across Europe, they are saying, “Enough!”
NSW Police will spend hours combing through footage of Saturday’s “freedom” rally to identify about 3500 protesters who flouted health orders and ran riot across the Sydney CBD over the course of three hours, resulting in more than 50 arrests.
The media are still kissing the state’s boots and peddle the Establishment narrative, of course. “Ran riot” appears, on the evidence, to really mean, “march in ordered crowds down city streets” — crowds which many are adamant far exceeded the official figure.
Protesters, the majority of whom were not wearing masks, waved Eureka and Australian Red Ensign flags and brandished signs with anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown slogans, while chanting cries of “freedom” and “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie”.
NSW Police Minister David Elliott slammed the protesters as “selfish boofheads” warning that it had the potential to become a superspreading event[…]
Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Saturday night that special task force Strike Force Seasoned had already begun the work of identifying those who attended the protest.
Remember when tens of thousands of BLM protesters marched in defiance of lockdowns? No-one was arrested, no-one even fined. Instead, police joined in the ritual humiliation of “taking the knee”. Public health bureaucrats defended the marchers. Left-wing politicians joined in.
Australians aren’t blind to the double-standards.
“It will only take one person with Covid-19 to turn to today’s event into a superspreader, so decent-minded Australians have every right to feel infuriated at such selfish behaviour,” he said.
Yet, we know that people with Covid attended the BLM rallies, with no “superspreader” resulting.
And which is more “selfish”? The majority of people who have nothing to fear from the virus demanding their freedom? Or the tiny minority actually at risk, demanding that everyone else give up their freedoms, indeed their very livelihoods, to protect them?
Because that’s the reality facing Australians at no real risk from the virus and, unlike the police and politicians, and the elderly who are at risk, not guaranteed publicly-funded salaries and pensions: obey draconian, useless lockdowns — or go broke.
A man dressed in high-vis and a hard hat, who refused to give his real name, told The Australian he was a construction worker who had been stood down during the two week shut down.
“I need to work, I need to feed my family and pay the mortgage,” he said. “Trust me, there are more of me”[…]
Another said: “We’re not anti vaccine, we’re pro choice”.
The Australian
Naturally, the media ignore the majority of such protesters, simply demanding the right to go about their lives, in favour of the fringe minority of nutters. Every protest attracts its share of loonies, and these seem to have drawn crazies from across the political spectrum: gibbering about “the patriarchy”, “Zionists”, Trump or carbon dioxide.
But while the media gin up a handful of loonies, thousands of Australians are finally saying that enough is enough. They face virtually no risk from the virus, compared to a very real risk of losing everything under ineffective lockdowns. They are giving the finger to authoritarians who face no risk to their livelihoods from their own policies.
As for those who will whine about the virus, no-one’s stopping them from voluntarily staying home and avoiding public contact.
That’s the difference between freedom and tyranny: one lets sovereign citizens decide whether or not to take the sort of risks people take every time they drive a car or get on a plane. The other demands that citizens surrender their rights and obey the diktats of incompetent politicians and unelected bureaucrats.
Let’s hope more Australians finally live up to our reputation and choose the former.
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