“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously wrote. Australians, by and large, are quite ignorant of their history. They have been condemned to repeat it, in the 2020s. After 230 years, Australia has reverted to being an island prison. And, in an echo of the Rum Rebellion, a cabal of secondary officials have seized power from the central authority.
You could find no better illustration of the authoritarian lunacy into which Australia has descended than the stark fact that the Prime Minister cannot travel through the country he supposedly governs. Like Governor Bligh languishing under house arrest, Scott Morrison is being held virtual prisoner in Canberra on the whim of a gaggle of premiers and unelected public health bureaucrats.
He could return to Sydney but that would mean being trapped in a lockdown that shows no sign of ending. With the ACT deemed a hotspot by every other jurisdiction, he cannot travel interstate without running the gauntlet of a rats’ nest of restrictions. These are likely to persist until Christmas, but could last well into next year.
Even his movements within a territory constitutionally contrived to exist solely for the purpose of housing federal Parliament are being limited by the orders of that jurisdiction’s Chief Health Officer. This last indignity is the final act in Australia’s Theatre of the Absurd. The ACT government has no power to decide whether federal Parliament can sit but, if it has its way, will stop next week’s sitting.
Like Bligh in 1808, Morrison might technically be in control, but, thanks to Australia’s Federation, he is held hostage by power-hungry premiers and bureaucrats. The latter have staged an unrelenting and dismayingly successful propaganda campaign to keep the populace terrified and cowed. Goebbels must be weeping with envy in Hell.
But Morrison accedes to every excess because he is convinced that he cannot win a head-to-head battle with a state leader. He is probably right. So conditioned by fear are Australians to accepting the notion that COVID-19 is equivalent to the plague, the majority have learned to love Big Brother and hate dissenters.
“The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive”
Ernst Röhm
You might call it a form of Stockholm syndrome, except that Sweden chose another path. Here, of course, the cognoscenti decried it as a failure because over 14,000 died of the disease. But how are we defining success? In worldwide mortality charts Sweden does no worse than some nations that enforced swingeing restrictions, while our pursuit of the fool’s errand of COVID Zero has seen us level every liberty, destroy educations and livelihoods and shut ourselves off from the world.
As noted here before, it took us 230 years, but we finally managed to perfect the prison colony. We have even invented a perverse new “Covese” lexicon where “freedoms” are not rights, but gifts bestowed by premiers and where the police complain of “illegal family gatherings”.
Among the most depressing aspects of this supine acceptance of rank authoritarianism is the role of the media. Much of it has become a cheer squad for the blunt instrument of lockdowns and a moral hall monitor that polices thought crimes. The same organs that ritually hyperventilate about the detention of asylum seekers are the loudest voices in advocating imprisoning entire states.
As I have previously argued, that the Covid dictators can talk about a “return to normal freedoms” shows, ipso facto, that we are not free.
Australians have been conditioned to regard basic human rights as “selfish”. Perhaps worse, New Zealanders are sternly warned not to talk to their neighbours.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
As much as it pains me to admit it, even The Economist, stopped-clock that it is, is right for once:
The Economist has noted that the only countries persisting with a COVID elimination strategy are islands and dictatorships. We are now both.
Australians may be largely ignorant of their history, but how will history judge Australians (and our locked-down cousins in New Zealand) of today?
This column noted at the outset of this crisis that one day we would debate which was worse – the disease or the cure. It has argued that we should not have reversed the historic balance of interests to favour the old over the young. It has said politicians should not outsource their decision-making to doctors and that there is such a thing as bad expert advice[…]
But we can’t keep doing what we are doing. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca noted 2000 years ago: “Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum.” To err is human, but to persist is diabolical.
The Age
History’s judgement on us will be equally diabolical.
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