In Australia, the state of Victoria, with more than six million people, has been put into lockdown because of 18 cases. Yes, you read that correctly. There are now 12 million Australians confined to their homes due to fewer infections than you’d find in the average British pub.
We’re publishing a guest post today by Steve Waterson, the Commercial Editor of the Australian. This piece originally appeared in the Weekend Australian, but Steve has given us permission to republish it.
So away we go again, hunting to ground the absolute beast, the out-of-control killer virus that runs rampant at light speed, vaulting from customer to customer in a fleeting cafe encounter.
Contact tracers scramble tirelessly to chase down the asymptomatic covidiots, while their masters, responding to the hour-by-hour health advice, are forced against their will to impose a snap lockdown, perhaps a circuit-breaker, to flatten the curve towards zero transmission, but for no longer than necessary.
Regrettably, they may have to slam their state borders shut (only as a last resort) so medical facilities will not be overwhelmed, to save lives and keep people out of harm’s way in this unprecedented, existential war. After all, they’re simply following the science, and they make no apology for that.
Hasn’t it been illuminating, these past 18 months, watching the verbal gymnastics of our politicians and their supporting cast of advisers and enablers, as they contort language and meaning to support their twisted edifice of hysterical illogic? The banal retreat into cliche, exaggeration, oxymoron and jargon, all wind and no substance, largely unchallenged, it’s sad to say, by a media pack trying to outdo each other with doom-laden headlines.
No matter how much you might resent it, you have to admit the scaremongering has been absolutely first-class, judging by the results. Many of us have been reduced to whimpering sadomasochists, grateful for the beatings administered to our livelihoods, our relationships, our hopes and dreams, our self-reliance and self-respect, and quick to spank those with a different outlook on life.
We’re in a Fifty Shades of Grey scenario, or perhaps a Tarantino film: state premiers have us handcuffed to a chair and are repeatedly punching us in the face with one hand, then applying a soothing balm with the other, saying, “Look what you’ve made us do!”
Half the population are now imprisoned in their homes, not because of the tiny number of Covid cases, but because of the brutal overreach by the moronic authorities who can conceive of no other way of dealing with them.
Many observers, since this insanity began, have mounted a simple argument: identify those at risk, offer them protection, and let the rest of the country go about their business like adults. They will take what precautions they consider necessary, safeguarding or neglecting their health as is their habit and right. Some of them drink alcohol; many eat too much; others smoke; a few rash souls do all three at the same sitting. They will have the opportunity to receive a coronavirus vaccine soon enough, and some will refuse it. That shouldn’t bother the vaccinated.
But many Australians have succumbed to the terror rhetoric, and genuinely believe they are at extreme risk of death should they contract a disease that has a better than 99% survival rate. Look at India and Indonesia, they wail, there are sick people on stretchers outside their hospitals! It could happen here, they warn, without acknowledging that we have eight times as many hospital beds per capita as the subcontinent, four times as many as Indonesia, and immeasurably more sophisticated healthcare resources.
A previously unnoticed coterie of experts, relishing their moment in the limelight to ramp up the fear, project the figments of their imagination, confidently predicting what will or would have happened in their flawless reading of the future or an alternative present; and always, always focusing exclusively on case numbers and epidemiological data, as if those are the only things that matter.
For them, perhaps; but some of us live in the real world, where life comes with no guarantees. There are elderly people reading this who will not wake up tomorrow. Today is their last day on Earth, and it has been wasted by a government that forbade this weekend’s visit from the grandchildren. There are fading cancer victims who will now die alone, whose governments have denied them that last chance to hold a loved one’s hand, although they’d whisk them enthusiastically into the grave under an assisted dying law.
It’s increasingly difficult to see any humanity in our leaders’ actions and overreactions. They are like medieval theologians debating how many angels would fit on the head of a pin, losing sight of anything else. Critics say a lockdown is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but at least you want the nut cracked. What we’re doing is using a sledgehammer to do the washing-up.
Meanwhile, the real, ignored pain accumulates: surgery is stopped or delayed, rendering treatable conditions terminal; schooling is suspended, fostering another gullible generation of scientific illiterates and innumerates; mental health deteriorates, shattering families; and the dismantling of the backbone of our economy gathers pace.
Many of us have friends whose small businesses are going under, whose staff will soon find themselves unemployed, whose savings, built up prudently over decades, have all but disappeared. Some of them will lose their homes just as they should be enjoying the rewards of a life of diligent work.
It’s almost embarrassing to have a job that is relatively secure, though it means I’m on the hook for part of the official benevolence that has thrown in excess of $300 billion at this self-inflicted wound. My share of the debt is in the tens of thousands already. Call me picky, but I don’t feel I’ve got value for money.
Our unaccountable premiers whirl about like headless chooks (although they still manage to run rings around the Prime Minister; how’s that national cabinet working out?), while claiming to follow the ubiquitous health advice no one else is allowed to see, just as the various Treasury cost-benefit analyses remain top-secret.
Governments pay millions of our dollars to generate this information; the suspicion remains that if there were any evidence that their virus-containment strategy is sensible and proportionate, they would be ramming the data down our throats. Maybe it’s too complex for the man in the street to understand, although if Dan Andrews can get his head around it I think one or two of us might give it a go.
Instead we are drip-fed pseudo-scientific gobbledegook, with fancy 3.5 degrees of lockdown and Greek letters for the variants, ooh, just like on Stephen Hawking’s blackboard. The “rocketing spikes” of infections are announced each day and added to the running total (it appears nobody recovers, not that we’re permitted to know whether they’re sick in the first place). Hundreds of thousands queue for hours to be tested, costing millions of dollars a day, when none of them have the virus. There’s the real measure of the success of the scare campaign.
So well done, pollies and bureaucrats, enjoy your lavish salaries and lick your lips at the pensions that await you. You are sinister monkeys dancing on the barrel organs played by medical nonentities, blithely stripping us of our freedoms as we stumble towards tyranny. But thanks for keeping us safe.
Now we have confirmed this pandemic is an existential war, let’s recall our response to an earlier deadly threat. Eighty years ago, as young Australians steeled themselves to fight and die in WWII, and Londoners endured months of bombing during the Blitz that claimed almost 50,000 Cockney lives, their governments understood their role was to encourage stoicism, resilience and defiance in the civilian population. Official histories record that far from sinking into panic and despair, Britain’s overall mental health improved, with citizens treating air raids as casually as inclement weather, referring to bad days as being “very blitzy”.
Contrast that with our modern leaders’ efforts, which they proudly declare are designed to terrify us simpletons. No “soldier on” or “keep calm”; instead we had Queensland’s next governor last year admitting school closures were unnecessary, but would communicate the gravity of the crisis: “It’s more than just the science and health,” she said, “it’s about the messaging.” Last month the NSW Premier, face contorted in agony, told us we were in the “scariest period” of the pandemic so far. Lord knows how frightened she and her advisers must be by now.
If you’re going to infantilise the population, then at least have the fortitude to behave like parents, who traditionally reassure their children in the night that there are no monsters under the bed, rather than scream that there are also monsters in the bedroom cupboards.
Imagine if Winston Churchill had followed this modern script, his sonorous baritone crackling over the wireless to address the Commonwealth, as the scourge of Nazi Germany ravaged continental Europe: “Oh my God, everyone, have you seen how many tanks and aeroplanes Adolf Hitler has got? And all those great big stormtroopers! It’s as scary as anything. I’ve changed my mind about fighting them on the beaches; let’s keep really, really quiet and fingers crossed they’ll leave us alone.”
Hide from the virus. Hide from the world, even as it opens up. This is what our leaders have condemned us to, seemingly in perpetuity. Our situation is beyond parody, and beyond pathetic.
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So what do we do?
I say set up a Lockdown Skeptics – Oz Edition.
We can send it to our Aussie Friends
Top 10 China flu FAILS by lying governments and fraudulent health “authorities”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-07-17-top-10-china-flu-fails-lying-governments-health-authorities.html
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Home Schooling – Ex-Primary School Teacher on Resistance GB YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5oS2ejye0
https://www.hopesussex.co.uk/our-mission
You have to stand up and be counted.
‘When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.’ – Thomas Paine
I hate the Covid/WWII comparison. Wars tend to not select who is killed and injured. Young, old, healthy and otherwise are victims, not the case here.
Lockdowns, unlike wars, do discriminate. Against the poor.
Well war (and flu) usually hurt the young far more but somehow COVID has become an episode of intergenerational warfare
One too many Boomers (and those not willing to take any personal responsibility for life) selfishly condemned our children to a far more deadly austere future
It’s a stain on society that will not wash, let’s not let it get any bigger
Don’t blame the Boomers. It’s across society, and includes many in their twenties and thirties.
I am sick of being blamed for this. It seems to me from what I see looking around me in town, that it’s the under 30s who are the most gullible. But why are you trying to cause division amongst the age groups? It’s just what they want to happen, and you are helping them by your mistaken comment.
Not in my name do they lockdown, restrict, abuse ( and it is abuse) the young. I have 5 granddaughters and have seen what chaos this madness has caused in all sorts of ways. I would never have locked down – if necessary (and I’m not sure it ever was) I would have self isolated if it meant that they could go to school and activities as usual.
It’s not a direct comparison, but just a good example of how different politicians and citizens behaved in the past to a real and serious threat versus the current exaggerated one.
It’s even more insane, because it’s the less-dangerous Delta variant that is spreading. All of two people have died: one in their 80s, one in their 90s. More than 300 people die per day from all causes in greater Sydney.
The Delta variant is clearly less dangerous simply by looking at deaths in the UK. Cases are now back up to the same levels at Jan but deaths are not rising significantly. Heck, the ASMR is lower than the 10 year average. Sure, the vaccine will be having an effect but the low death cannot be attributed to just that.
We’ve just had a discussion in our local WhatsApp group discussing the rising cases locally. But nobody knows of anyone who is actually ill with Covid…
Something just doesn’t add up.
When “cases” are identified based on ultra-accurate detection of DNA fragments and obsessive mass testing, at very low disease prevalences the “casedemic” effect becomes very important.
Ultra sensitive rather than ultra accurate?
Nothing has added up since March 2020
A glimpse at what life might have been like if the zero covid zealots of the Labour Party had been in office in 2020.
Socialist Campaign Group Calls for Urgent New Strategy to Save Lives . #ZeroCovid #Covid19UK
But (leaving aside the then vital Brexit issue) that might have actually been better for us, overall,on a “the worse the better” basis.
Just possibly, the “Conservatives” might have opposed the zero covid lunacy from the real world side of the issue. We might have had actual organised political opposition. And the Labour zealots might have over-reached, triggering the kind of mass uprising against lockdown that we desperately need, with a general acceptance that “never again” must this kind of policy, or the scaremongering propaganda that led to its acceptance, be tolerated.
Agree, the damage would have been greater, but maybe, just maybe, there would have been a way out.
Now, there isn’t.
When have the Conservatives seriously opposed anything the radical Left have done?
Well they were eventually shamed into sort of partially opposing the European superstate.
That kind of partial resistance to the coronapanic would have been lightyears ahead of what we’ve actually had.
Judging by what is happening to us in NZ (same as Oz but on steroids) our supposed centre right opposition is equally, if not more so, Covidsteria as Labour. They only criticize the Government for not trying harder and being more effective at keeping to Zero covid. It really is the twilight zone.
– Queensland’s next governor last year admitting school closures were unnecessary, but would communicate the gravity of the crisis: “It’s more than just the science and health,” she said, “it’s about the messaging.” –
FFS!
When will the penny drop that this approach will never succeed in the long term.
I’m not a specialist at all in any of this but common sense suggested this was not a sustainable approach. They put all they eggs in the vaccine basket but they have one of the lowest vaccination rates on the planet. Beggars belief. It was always going to be very hard for them to go from “No Covid” to “Some Covid”. They, like, us, have been so brainwashed by the media and government that it’s understandable they are scared of their own shadows.
Many a lockdown advocate pointed to Aus, NZ and Isle of Mann as examples of what we should be doing. Thank goodness we didn’t – we might have had some excess deaths and it’s been a bad year (although ASMR rate is <10 year average right now so that’s questionable) but we do stand a chance of learning to live with it.
Very sad really.
Absolutely, any action taken should always be based on a cost/benefit analysis in the short, medium and long term.
The “Zero Covid” strategy would fail miserably once wider health and economic factors are brought into consideration, and would increasingly get worse over time.
Focused protection would likely fare best in the longer term, and therefore it’s not surprising that every country favoured this strategy prior to March 2020.
Climate scare nonsense would’ve failed too but that didn’t stop them.
Yeah, great stuff (I heard it in my head in an Aussie accent), but I’ve been reading similar pieces for far too long.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/07/gary-d-barnett/the-reason-for-the-indoctrination-and-dumbing-down-of-americans-is-now-obvious-there-is-no-pandemic-only-fear/
All part of the plan.
“…the NSW Premier, face contorted in agony…”
How can you tell?!
She’s certainly what we up north would call a sinner.
With strong features, as my grandma would have said when talking about those not fair of face.
The 16 comments so far miss the point. This virus is simply the headline, the carrier. Public health is only to be affected in a negative way. The aim is fear and control. For those that live a few years beyond the injections serfdom for the lucky and slavery for the rest.
Can we STOP nattering about the fictional virus and consider the real agenda?
There is no “real agenda”, just spine- and compassionless professional politicians looking backwards in order to predict what will cause them to win the closest elections. The majority of the active electorate is in or close to being in a COVID “high risk” group. And that’s the end of the story, as anything else can go to the wall if only the “important” voters survive.
I disagree – there is clearly an agenda that has nothing to do with health.
The human brain is a highly efficient pattern recognition device and prone to detecting patterns even if there aren’t any. That’s the rationale behind Occam’s razor: If there a multiple, competing explanations, chose the simplest one as it’s the one were it’s most likely that it actually “is” and not just something the mind made up.
If you think that the response of SAGE over the past 17 months has followed the science, I have a bridge in London that I’d like to sell to you.
This is a virus that doesn’t kill 99.9% + of the population. In response, governments across the world want to inflict an experimental jab on everyone (even those who are not remotely at risk from the virus).
You might believe that this is a rational response over a minuscule health risk, I don’t – and anyone who does is living in denial. I believe that you cannot accept the enormity of the planners’ actions – that is exactly what the planners are counting on.
All of the statements you’re trying to assign to me contradict the one I originally made.
Yet you wrote ‘there is no real agenda’. I believe that there is and so does Dr Yeadon:
https://wwwDOTlifesitenewsDOTcom/opinion/former-pfizer-vp-why-are-we-being-lied-to-about-covid-theres-no-good-reason
There most definitely is a ‘real agenda’. All of what is happening has been planned very meticulously and carefully over the past few decades, maybe longer. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise the slow move towards total control: censorship, coercion, manipulation, relentless propaganda etc etc. they have even factored in sites like ‘Lockdown Sceptics’ and people speaking out. They know what they are doing and it’s quite horrific. I’m afraid to say that your original comment is quite disingenuous. You are missing a lot of the subtext of this debate.
I tend to agree with you. A conspiracy at this scale would be unlikely to survive. A cock up on this scale is much more feasible.
There are multiple feedback loops: governments following governments; governments scaring the crap out of people and then acting on polling which suggests that people have had the crap scared out of them; news channels that thrive on apocalyptic click bait.
I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I did. This is very depressing, and I am worried about what the future holds for my children.
No agenda eh?
How about President Trup imposing billions of dollars in tariffs on Communist Chinese goods to protect American jobs?
How about he CCP giving the Biden crime family 1.5 billion dollars to install their senile puppet Joe in the White House?
How about the CCP “accidentally” releasing a flu from the Wuhan germ warfare lab which was financed by Fucchi and his pals?
How about a stolen election?
Are they enough parts of an agenda?
There is an agenda. Agenda 21 and 30. Please look it up.
Yes, approximately 80 per cent of those posting on here haven’t woken up yet. It’s quite frightening.
Australian and NZ are going to have to face it one day. As JavIds current covid infection shows the vaccines are not going to prevent all infections. They may well reduce the symptoms and perhaps reduce the number of infections, who knows really, but as the populations of these 2 countries are mostly terrified of covid and have been driven to this by their governments, I would guess it’s going to be a real challenge for them.
Brilliant article but sadly its like reading a review of Rockefeller’s Lock Step document in a scary reality way. May god and the universe give us the strength to resist tyranny on our children’s childrens planet.
A friend was telling me about holding a dying parent’s hand and speaking words of comfort. The idea of denying the dying such comfort actually really really repulses me.
For those of you keeping score at home, there have now been a total of sixteen subsequent state-based lockdowns in Australia since the Big One of 2020. That’s the flip-side of ‘Zero Covid’ for you. At portentous pressers, state Premiers, flanked by their police and ‘public health’ lieutenants, gravely announce, with ‘heavy heart’ and a ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’ gravity that, reluctantly, we are going to have to lock you all up again to keep you safe.
“When Covid is like the flu, we should treat it like the flu, and that means no lockdowns”, said Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, in early July on behalf of National Cabinet (the federal and all eight state governments) when announcing their agreement to a four-phase plan for exit from the yo-yo lockdown cycle. Did this mean that he had finally run up the white flag in Australia’s damaging, quixotic quest for ‘Zero Covid’, ditching that fantasy policy goal in favour of accepting that the virus will be with us forever, an endemic seasonal respiratory virus that we manage like all the others? Well, I think we have the answer in the negative with the current lockdown spasms of Australia’s two biggest states, NSW and Victoria.
Seems like the state Premiers’ wheels are still spinning in the mud of ‘phase one’ of the grand exit plan (the ‘Zero Covid’ status quo of suppressing the virus through costly closed borders, ruinous lockdowns and the frantic sport of trace-and-test-and-isolate). State and federal political leaders have all been too politically and psychologically invested in ‘Zero Covid’ for too long to now seamlessly change course and tell the Aussie punters that ‘well, some (non-zero) level of cases in the community is now acceptable’ because that would implicitly admit that ‘everything that we have done in response to the virus has all been for nought and wrought havoc on society’. Won’t be happening. Knee-jerk lockdown is their security blanket.
The arrival of the Covid ‘vaccines’, however, has potentially disrupted this static policy framework and looks like being the politicians’ political face-saver, the tool for the politicians to dig themselves out of their lockdown hole. ‘Get jabbed! Get jabbed!’ they always conclude their pressers.
And enough virus-terrified Australians will be brainwashed, bribed or bullied through a Vaccine Passport to take a swig of the pharmaceutical hooch to enable the federal and state governments to declare mission accomplished. The vaxxed will be relieved of their social obligation to get tested at the drop of a hat or work requirement, the ‘case’ count will fall and, voila, the pandemic (which was only ever a ‘testdemic’) will be declared at an end, and we can all get back to normal – and spend the next few decades repairing the economic and social damage of lockdown, and the health damage from the vaxx.
Lockdown, masks and all the other exhibits from the Great Virus War, however, will not be retired, as they should, to a Museum of Political Folly for coming generations to ponder with amazement at this example of modern witchcraft but will remain on the books of the public health junta, who have grown alarmingly fond of their new power-trip, for future use because they worked so well last time, didn’t they?
That’s what it looked like would happen here: once the vulnerable and those who wanted it were jabbed, things would get back to some semblance of normal. And that’s what we were told when the vaccines arrived. But it hasn’t worked that way so don’t bank on it!
“No-one is vaccinated until everyone is vaccinated”
Top 10 China flu FAILS by lying governments and fraudulent health “authorities”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-07-17-top-10-china-flu-fails-lying-governments-health-authorities.html
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Home Schooling – Ex-Primary School Teacher on Resistance GB YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5oS2ejye0
https://www.hopesussex.co.uk/our-mission
A “tour de force”, thank you Mr. Waterson for describing this whole mess so comprehensively.
We are going to reclaim our lives and all of our human rights and freedoms, and the criminal psychopaths who are attempting to impoverish, enslave, and genocide us worldwide using data fraud based Covid and climate policies as false flags are going to be put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity, and that will come about sooner than you think, because people have had enough and are rising up everywhere.
OK, enough is enough. You can NEVER get to zero Covid. It’s like saying we’re going to eradicate the common cold. What’s more they, the lying government, know this. They just want the excuse to lock down whenever they like moving to a point where you are locked down permanently. Australian brothers and sisters take back your freedom, be strong and use that Australian ‘can do’ to change this. This is evil. If you don’t push back and resist this, soon you won’t be able to do anything without the say so of the government. They are deliberately making your life hell and all for what? Lies and manipulation to coerce your compliance and exert control over every aspect of your lives. Resist! Love n’ hugs from the UK
This reminds me of Tom Penn’s short story “The Palinopsia of National Resilience”: a brutal attack on whats going on, that offers no concrete solution until you’ve read it and realise its obvious – you just withdraw your consent.
18 cases in an average British pub? Not now, with herd immunity reached (a sum of both naturally and vaccine induced) and the virus at a pretty low level you’d need a very big pub to have enough people in for 18 to be infected. Maybe 18 infections in your average UK supermarket at peak time though. Ofcourse, any pub which tries vaccine passports will have zero infections in it, not because the vaccinated can’t be infected, they can, but because such a pub will be utterly boycotted, by the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.
So many phrases here which resonate in GB. Terror tactics, inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, biased data, tyrannical so called experts using their hopefully fleeting moment in the limelight to terrify, oppress and control their fellow citizens. The inhumanity of concentrating all resources on covid; everything else ignored, , people dying alone with no loved one there,(wonder if the Aussie Stasi have stopped mourners hugging at funerals?) totalitarian control over someone’s slightest movements, economic ruin, nothing else matters to the covid zealots. One day I hope there will be a reckoning, but it will come too late for the millions terrified, ruined, mentally scarred, and tyrannised by these mad fanatics.
Unreasonable expectations of nobody dying with covid19 have totally hamstrung the administration. You look at the Old Country and all the dead there and shudder. But be aware that we made little effort to save the vast majority, denying them cheap early use therapeutics and calling for expensive new things that didnt work very well but paid a lot to their shareholders perhaps. It doesnt have to be like this, Aussies. Ventilation and sunlight are your friends, and the new tech in the form of far-UVC lamps can make indoor settings and transport and hospitals almost perfectly safe, at a reasonable cost. Masks are irresponsibe knowing what we know.