{"id":4339,"date":"2020-08-15T20:13:57","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T00:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4339"},"modified":"2020-08-15T20:13:57","modified_gmt":"2020-08-16T00:13:57","slug":"police-state-australia-victoria-australias-covid-autocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4339","title":{"rendered":"Police State Australia: Victoria &#8211; Australia&#8217;s COVID Autocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><br>https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/2020\/08\/13\/victoria-australias-covid-autocracy\/ <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Victoria: Australia\u2019s Covid autocracy<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Freedoms, once surrendered, can be impossible to recover.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/author\/nick-cater\/\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tNick Cater\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<br>Columnist\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t    \n        13th August 2020\n    \n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t    \t    \t\t\t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.spiked-online.com\/website\/images\/2020\/08\/13105240\/victoria-lockdown-800x480.jpg\" alt=\"Victoria: Australia\u2019s Covid autocracy\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\n\t    \t\t    \t\n\t    \t\t    \n        Share\n        \n    \n        \n            Topics\n                            <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/topic\/free-speech\/\">Free Speech<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/topic\/politics\/\">Politics<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/topic\/world\/\">World<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pandemic is revealing more uncomfortable truths \nby the day, like our willingness to abandon our freedoms and traditions \nat the first whiff of grapeshot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"300\" height=\"250\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Governments mistrustful of citizens have been too quick to respond to\n risks to public health with coercion, rather than simply appealing for a\n civic-minded people to do the right thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/tag\/australia\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Australia<\/a>\n there has been a level of official control seldom seen since the \nconvict era. There has been barely any opposition. A people once \nprepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of lives in defence of liberty \nis surrendering its freedom on the pretext of saving lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>It is teaching us that when we dispense with the checks and balances \nthat make democratic governments better than they otherwise might be, \nthere is an exponential increase in the number and scale of \nstate-induced blunders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Exhibit A is the state of Victoria, where <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/tag\/coronavirus\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Covid-19<\/a>\n has recently spread through the community in what might be called a \nsecond wave if there had been a first wave, which there wasn\u2019t.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/podcast-episode\/why-the-working-class-turned-tory\/\">\n                        \n                \n            \n            \n                \n                    Podcast\n                    Why the working class turned Tory\n                    spiked\n                \n            \n        <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Britain, the US and much of Europe were struggling with mass \noutbreaks in April, Australia and New Zealand had the virus under \ncontrol thanks largely to the prompt closure of borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It might have stayed that way but for a breach of quarantine security\n in Melbourne, where inadequate supervision of returning Australians in \nhotel quarantine allowed infected people to escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The loss of life has so far been slight: around 40 deaths per million\n in Victoria and fewer than 15 in the rest of Australia, compared with \naround 700 in Britain and around 500 in the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet the elevated risk was enough for Victoria\u2019s premier, Dan Andrews,  to declare a State of Disaster for only the second time in Victoria\u2019s  history. Andrews, incidentally, was responsible for declaring both of  them.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/2020\/08\/07\/racialising-the-crisis-in-policing\/\">                                                                                                          R<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Victoria became an autocracy overnight, granting unfettered power to a\n premier unaccountable to parliament and freed from the rule of law. The\n police have turned from citizens in uniform to the enforcers of \nministerial declarations, most of them quite absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Melbourne has become the first city in Australia to fall under a \ncurfew. Andrews\u2019 predecessors felt no need for one during the First \nWorld War, Second World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic or the 1923 police\n strike when violent mobs rampaged through the city and overturned a \ntram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet the outbreak virus from China which currently kills a small \nproportion of those it affects in the general population, and a \nnegligible percentage of people below retirement age, was considered \ngrave enough to suspend democracy and the rule of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The bridge over the River Murray on the Hume Highway linking the \nVictorian city of Wodonga and Albury in New South Wales has become \nAustralia\u2019s Checkpoint Charlie, the free world on one side and tyranny \non the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Those tempted to swim across should know that police and army \nreservists are patrolling the Murray\u2019s northern banks assisted by \nhelicopters and drones. Up to six months in jail awaits those without \npapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Melbourne residents who leave their homes between 8pm and 5am face a \n$5,000 fine, imposed by police not the courts. Fines will also be issued\n to anyone who, a) is caught without a mask; b) exercises for more than \nan hour; c) wanders further than 5km from home; d) is judged by police \nto be shopping excessively in the small number of shops allowed to stay \nopen; e) gets married; f) overnights in the house of someone other than \ntheir designated intimate partner; g) goes fishing; or h) plays golf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Like the villain in a dystopian novel, Victoria\u2019s democratically \nelected premier is interfering with citizen\u2019s private lives in a manner \nmost will have imagined impossible in a nation settled by the heirs of \nMagna Carta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his masterful book on the Anglosphere, Dan Hannan praised \nAustralia as a country where the libertarian philosophy of John Stuart \nMill was made flesh. Hannan might care to revisit that bit, as Victoria \nbreaks record after record in the contest of illiberalism, employing all\n the available instruments of modern surveillance to keep its citizens \nin check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>If the premier and his officials know how many cases of infection can\n be tolerated they are keeping it from the citizens. No one knows how \nlong the lockdown measures will end or what comes next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The consequences for the Victorian economy, which accounts for a \nquarter of Australia\u2019s GDP, are growing exponentially. The price of \nshutting down business today is the loss of future opportunity. The \neffects of this recession will be felt for a generation at least. The \nmost deadly effects of the virus may be reserved for the elderly and \nsickly, but the biggest losers will be those in the prime of their life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe width=\"728\" height=\"90\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Much of what we are losing cannot be counted in dollars and cents. Freedoms, once surrendered, can be impossible to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We dishonour the victims of early tyrannies to make comparisons, tempting as it might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The assumption of emergency powers to fight a real or exaggerated \nthreat is the oldest trick in the manual of despotism. Countries ruled \nby tyranny are frequently those from which millions long to flee, just \nas they do in Victoria right now, if only for a holiday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The erosion of democracies typically begins with the indefinite \nsuspension of parliament, as the Victorian state parliament has been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Autocrats are drawn to centrally planned economies, with the \ninevitable mismatch of supply and demand. Residents of Victoria, the \nfood bowl of Australia, face shortages of meat and other essentials and \nthe prospect of rationing for the first time since the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Autocracies are notorious for the proliferation of permits and the \nchecking of papers. In Victoria a permit is required to travel, to work \nor cross the border. Military are being used as auxiliary police, police\n powers have been drastically increased and punitive fines introduced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Citizens are encouraged to act as informants against their employer and also neighbours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There has not been one guarantee that all or any of these crackdown laws will be repealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those who grew up with pride in their country and its part in \novercoming the great 20th-century tyrannies are understandably shocked \nat how much we appear willing to surrender for benefits that are as yet \nunspecified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We shouldn\u2019t be surprised at the tacit compliance of the media, \nwhich, by and large, has not seen fit to challenge the measures. \nJournalists, like some politicians, have a professional interest in \nexaggerating the threat. \u2018All quiet on the Covid-19 front\u2019 is not a \nstory worthy of page one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With time, the Andrews administration\u2019s draconian and illiberal \nstage-four lockdown will come to be seen as a monstrous administrative \nmistake that has compounded the effects of the blunders that allowed the\n virus to run wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let\u2019s hope at least that the lockdown slows the general rate of \ninfection, since the government seems incapable of protecting \nnursing-home residents any other way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even if it does, we are bound to ask if the result was worth the \nmonths that will have been added to the recession, the swelling of the \nranks of the long-term unemployed and the shrinkage of the small \nbusiness sector, the engine of the economy. And the freedoms citizens \nhave been forced to relinquish, with no guarantee they will get them \nback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Nick Cater<\/strong> is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist with the <em>Australian<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>https:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/2020\/08\/13\/victoria-australias-covid-autocracy\/ Victoria: Australia\u2019s Covid autocracy Freedoms, once surrendered, can be impossible to recover. Nick Cater Columnist 13th August 2020 Share Topics Free SpeechPoliticsWorld The pandemic is revealing more uncomfortable truths by the day, like our willingness to abandon our freedoms &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4339\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2354,2136,2345,2357,2353,2355,2356],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4340,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4339\/revisions\/4340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}