Zero Covid man

Morrison and his peers see “no appetite” for any change to the current stifling regime, a regime of international travel bans only otherwise elsewhere embraced by Cuba and North Korea.  (Pleasant company indeed).  The appetite for freedom in Australia has been suppressed by a government-led and media supported campaign of deceit, exaggeration, half-truths, propaganda, endless repetition of messaging and fearmongering.  Even rusted-on leftists like Naomi Wolf see this.

The state created a moral panic over a, for most, utterly harmless virus from which the few who actually experience symptoms, let alone severe symptoms, completely recover.  Most of those who have “little appetite for change” do not know these things.  The evidence from the UK suggests that people there have a misinformed and hopelessly exaggerated sense of the actual threat posed by Covid.  Similar polls, were they to be done here, might well reveal similar ignorance.

Of course, there is no appetite for change.  The low information voter has been tricked into jumping at shadows.

Both India and the emergence of new variants of the virus have proven immensely rewarding for the political class and for all those who are now far more broadly recognised to be benefiting from “Forever Covid”.  These have proven to be aces in the hole.  Bodies in the streets have allowed follower-leaders like Scott Morrison to insist that Australia’s Covid luck, occasioned by a range of factors that have very little to do with government policy, is something not to be “traded away” under any circumstances, by re-embracing freedom, normalcy and international openness.  Talk about killing globalisation, including good globalisation with all its economic benefits, with fortress isolationism. 

 “Fortress Down Under”, indeed.  Here we have bad populism defeating good globalisation.  Whereas Brexit and Trump represented good populism defeating bad globalisation.

Painting the rest of the world as “India” is palpably dishonest as well as absurd, as is Morrison’s baseless claim that “the pandemic is going nowhere”.  What happened to the saviour that was “Scotty’s Jab”?  The jab was yesterday’s silver bullet.  Now the answer is endless isolation and “The Fortress”.

The world isn’t India.  India isn’t necessarily even India, the India portrayed hysterically by the appalling fourth estate.  India’s failings in treating the epidemic of Covid relate to India, not to Covid.  Tell the people of Florida that the world is “India”.  Much of the world, especially the countries now moving into their northern summer, and with the much-hyped assistance of (admittedly, variably performing) vaccines as well as their populations’ rapidly developing immunity, know only good news stories.  India is not a nothingburger.  But it is irrelevant to Australia’s Covid policy drivers.  It is yet another stick with which to beat weary, cowed Australians. 

But, unlike, Scott Morrison, I wonder for how long the lack of appetite for freedom and normalcy will last.  Will we ever wake up, rouse ourselves to righteous anger, and storm the fortress that is built on quicksand?  Otherwise, this is forever.  Only relentless public action in support of freedom will work.  We know what changes politicians’ minds.  They are in the blissful position, though, having duped their people with self-serving subterfuge, of not ever having to justify their wicked actions.

Morrison says that “once you let it back in, you cannot get it out”.  Really, this is what he says, and professes to believe.  As I have argued before, we needed Churchill, and we got this guy.