Isn’t it funny how Covid ended? Talk about not with a bang, but a whimper. Australian governments at all levels have been quietly dismantling their onerous Covid restrictions and mandates. Even the Hermit King of Western Australia and the Dictator of Dandrewstan have almost stealthily wound back some of the harshest restrictions in the world. No fanfare, no daily press conferences announcing the great news, just an almost shamefaced sliding back to something resembling normalcy.
Of course, it’s not all quite over. Fear Central, the ABC, is still yammering about “cases” on a daily basis. The Mask Dicks are still parading in public with their virtue-muzzles. Across the Tasman, Jacinda Ardern is still pfaffing about with that country’s incomprehensible “traffic light” system.
Still, Australians are finally free to leave their country. We’re no longer the North Korea of the South Pacific. We should thank our Dear Covid Leaders for their small mercies, I suppose.
Talk about governments of all colours tip-toeing away from the most draconian measures inflicted upon Australians in our history, and hoping that no one will notice. That no one will ask – what was that all about?
Ooh, ooh! I know the answer to that one! Control.
But, as de Tocqueville first observed, the most dangerous time for tyrants is when they start to lift the iron heel. With the first whiff of freedom, the horses bolt for the gates. Give them credit: our own tyrants have worked out a smarter way to back themselves out of the Covid corner.
The NSW Premier even spelled out the Covid escape strategy of the political class, when speaking of his fine, unexpected bromance with Daniel Andrews […]
Why not work together to neutralise each of the sources of disapproval?
The feline is out of the bag. Our butt-covering leaders came up with the perfect plan, initially hatched by the Prime Minister in his rolling out of the mutual protection racket also known as the National Cabinet. It has been seen consistently over two years in the endless displays of support from one Covid fascist leader to another. Police brutality, met with silence. Curfews and military helicopters? Met with silence. Closed borders? The occasional murmur of disapproval and a soupçon of mild political point scoring, at worst. Banning weddings and funerals and preventing you from saying goodbye to dying loved ones? They all did it. Handing over control of our surprisingly delicate democracy to unelected public health tsars who got just about everything wrong? Ditto. But Perrottet actually ’fessed up to the plan.
Yet, the latest Ooga-Booga Variant of Covid is the most virulent yet, at the same time that is the weakest. So, why relax restrictions now, when “cases” are running at all-time highs?
Politics.
The big three all face elections in the next twelve months. They have quite brazenly placed their own electoral survival ahead of the welfare of Australians. They have chosen to minimise harm to themselves by hiding behind bureaucrats and the cover-all ‘we are all in this together’.
Despite occasional suggestions that New South Wales (under Gladys) was the stand out liberal beacon among the states, this theory ended up going nowhere. No, they were all differently awful. Victoria had the vicious coppers (inevitably) and the salivating ogre-Premier. Queensland had the (now completely unnecessary) quarantine centres for the unvaxxed and its dictatorial craziness in the midst of very few cases. The weird-guy in the Territory rounded up recalcitrant Aborigines. The out-of-control man in the West decided on the insane Zero Covid.
They all had vaccine passports (for a time) and vaccine mandates that still, alas, persist in various forms. By remaining silent on the sins of the other jurisdictions – they couldn’t very well bag the others given what they themselves were doing to their own people – they enabled the bullying and the gaslighting to go on for two whole years. And now, all of a sudden and without the remotest coherent explanation, almost all the rules are vanishing.
At the same time as elections are looming, the public has (mostly) just stopped being scared witless. Besides, they’ve got Vladimir Putin to be scared of, now. The media fear-porn circus has moved on.
It’s no coincidence, either, that leaders like Andrews and Ardern began quietly dismantling their Covid states in the immediate aftermath of the greatest public unrest and the most vicious state-orchestrated violence. For all the finger-wagging of the media-political class, there’s no doubt that the sight of rubber bullets at the Shrine of Remembrance, and fire-hoses and batons in the gardens at Wellington, shocked the public of two countries who’d grown up telling themselves that that sort of thing only happened elsewhere.
Because, even if Andrews and Ardern haven’t read de Tocqueville for themselves, you can bet at least some of their advisers have. And so, they slither quietly back into the shadows. No explanation, no accountability.
Real politicians like One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts, among others in these pages, have demanded a royal commission into Australia’s Covid decision-making fiasco. No major party has accepted its need. Mark Steyn in the UK has suggested that the Brits need one too.
Spectator Australia
Don’t hold your breath.