Byron gets the blues

Second, in an age where everything is politicised, so is this virus. Hence at-risk locations like Byron with direct pipelines to voter-rich Sydney cannot be allowed to let their people live normal lives. Political lives are at risk, too. Politicians now measure their electoral stocks by the relative lack of Covid cases in their jurisdictions, while they continue to ply us alternately with Covid theatre, fear and fiscal rewards. And it doesn't help that the premiers who govern the rugby states of Australia, and who so often butt heads, play their own contemptible political games with calamitous outcomes for our livelihoods and our freedoms.

Third, the Covid policy objectives of governments have shifted, without anyone telling us and, given the fact that both the legacy (corporate) media and every opposition party in the country have decided not to do their jobs, without any real debate. We once were attempting to control the timing of the spread of the virus in order to better marshal public health resources to deal with any pandemic that might occur. Then we shifted to a policy of zero covid. This must be the new policy goal. Nothing else explains our sheer panic over a single case in Byron, and for the equally hysterical border shutdowns by various State Governments.

Mercifully those of us who live in regional Australia have been spared the worst of the Covidmania obsessions – with distancing, with cultural maskism, with house arrest under lockdowns, with Covid paperwork. Not for us gasping for air behind a mask on a Sydney bus or at the shops, or being stopped from walking the dog in suburban Melbourne, on pain of harassment or a brutal arrest by VicPol. Like everyone, we have suffered the endless tedium of propaganda in the media, but people in the bush have generally had a pretty good Covid, as Covids go. That is, until the Covid dictators came for Byron.

You never know. Perhaps we in the Northern Rivers are simply being punished for being the anti-vaxxer capital of Australia, in this apparently endless, evil war on a pedestrian virus.