The pandemic is revealing more uncomfortable truths by the day, like our willingness to abandon our freedoms and traditions at the first whiff of grapeshot.
Governments mistrustful of citizens have been too quick to respond to risks to public health with coercion, rather than simply appealing for a civic-minded people to do the right thing.
In Australia there has been a level of official control seldom seen since the convict era. There has been barely any opposition. A people once prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of lives in defence of liberty is surrendering its freedom on the pretext of saving lives.
Pandemic Poetry: Acros... Buy New $7.99 (as of 03:16 UTC - Details) It is teaching us that when we dispense with the checks and balances that make democratic governments better than they otherwise might be, there is an exponential increase in the number and scale of state-induced blunders.
Exhibit A is the state of Victoria, where Covid-19 has recently spread through the community in what might be called a second wave if there had been a first wave, which there wasn’t.
When Britain, the US and much of Europe were struggling with mass outbreaks in April, Australia and New Zealand had the virus under control thanks largely to the prompt closure of borders.
It might have stayed that way but for a breach of quarantine security in Melbourne, where inadequate supervision of returning Australians in hotel quarantine allowed infected people to escape.
The loss of life has so far been slight: around 40 deaths per million in Victoria and fewer than 15 in the rest of Australia, compared with around 700 in Britain and around 500 in the US.
Yet the elevated risk was enough for Victoria’s premier, Dan Andrews, to declare a State of Disaster for only the second time in Victoria’s history. Andrews, incidentally, was responsible for declaring both of them.
On Tyranny: Twenty Les... Best Price: $5.00 Buy New $5.79 (as of 03:22 UTC - Details) Victoria became an autocracy overnight, granting unfettered power to a premier unaccountable to parliament and freed from the rule of law. The police have turned from citizens in uniform to the enforcers of ministerial declarations, most of them quite absurd.
Melbourne has become the first city in Australia to fall under a curfew. Andrews’ predecessors felt no need for one during the First World War, Second World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic or the 1923 police strike when violent mobs rampaged through the city and overturned a tram.
Yet the outbreak virus from China which currently kills a small proportion of those it affects in the general population, and a negligible percentage of people below retirement age, was considered grave enough to suspend democracy and the rule of law.