Anyone seen the crazy lockdowns going on there? Videos of protestors attacking police cars, police firing rubber bullets. Police tackling people and assaulting them for not wearing masks. Everything shut down completely. I saw a video of a cop choking a woman out, literally both hands around her neck, for not wearing a mask. Is this too far? Interested to see if everyone universally agrees in a forum like this... NSFW Language
I'd personally pass on making a judgment based on loose twitter and youtube clips without an in-depth understanding of context, they might be going too far, or maybe not? Perhaps we can @ some Aussie posters who have an understanding of what exactly is going on and get their opinions on it @WestendMassive is one I believe I may have seen comment on (sorry if I'm recalling incorrectly if so). What we can see conflict over is the attempt to prevent deaths by imposing lockdowns and restrictions Deaths per million from Covid-19 USA: 2,063 AUS: 47.3 They have, until this point, held their covid death rate nearly 44x lower. To put this into context, if America had the covid death rate as Australia, instead of having 685k die from covid, we'd have less than 16k. These numbers are expected to change as Australia's population continues to get exposed to the virus and more die, but their goal is to continue to use lockdowns until they can really boost up their vaccination rates in order to prevent mass deaths. Currently, they are 61% vaccinated with 40% of that being fully vaccinated. Is it too much, are they going too far, I have no idea. Just thought I'd bring a bit of context.
I appreciate the context, but I'd also like to see what it's doing to business as well, so that we get a more broad look at things. Definitely would be interesting to see what Aussie posters have to say.
As someone in Melbourne, it's interesting to see how it's portrayed overseas. I'll try and summarise it, because as much as we want to have one person to blame, there's a whole mess of blame to go around. 1. Federal Government - had a chance to secure a whole bunch of vaccinations last year. and didn't do it. Promised everyone would be vaccinated by earlier this year (obviously not going to happen). Our PM is a dud, and has made a habit of disappearing during crises (bushfires, pandemic x2 etc...). Also failed to build quarantine hubs, which is the responsibility of the federal government, which meant state governments had to build their own... 2. State Governments - on both sides of politics. Those of us in Victoria know lockdown well (200+ days and counting in Melbourne). Our second lockdown last year came after a quarantine hub leak by security guards. Finally got down to days of 0 cases, and were open for ages. Had a 5-day lockdown earlier this year to 'beat' Delta. Then New South Wales had a quarantine hub leak, and they decided not to lockdown, which spread rapidly into Victoria as well. That's the lockdown we are all currently in because of. Hopefully coming out of this by October, based on vaccination rates. 3. Personal responsibility - Lots of lockdown fatigue and frustration going around. People are getting sloppy with masks, social distancing etc... There's a belief that "we'll be ok" etc... All the data in the world can't really account for human behaviour under pressure. Those protestors are a very very very small (but loud) minority. They pissed on our Shrine of Remembrance, so they can all go to hell. On the day that there were about 1000 protestors, about 100,000 got vaccinated and did the right thing. I'll take those odds.
How can you really tell when the Aussies have "gone crazy"? I mean it's easy to tell when the Germans do it, but Australia just kind of sits at that borderline constantly.
Its pretty obvious whats going down. I liken this to the George Floyd nonsense. George Floyd was no saint (protestors) but what Derek Chauvin did (Australian Gov) was completely unacceptable. A clear abuse of power.
Or it could be like the capital riots. But IMO, what’s most likely is that it’s like neither of those in any comparable way that could possibly bring value to any useful discussion. I don’t it’s obvious what’s going down to the vast majority of people on this site, save the handful of Aussies following it all closely.
There's a really good documentary on the group of women that went feral in Australia, just a crazy phenomenon. Spoiler
Multiple extended lockdowns are going to crack some people and some of them turned violence is probably quite expected. George Floyd isn't it. 1/6 isn't it. This is an aggressive gov response to a pandemic that seems to have strong support initially but Delta broke through and boom. Social media shows some icky things going on there, but like you, viewing things through social media is asking for strong bias. One thing I find interesting is covid hesitancy there plummeted from ~30% to ~10% in 4m. Tying ease of restriction to % vaccinated did that. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...ets-to-ease-restrictions-20210824-p58lk5.html
