The world has come to see the country through that lens - through the actions of its blinkered politicians. “There is an explicit insularity and parochialism that now dictates debate.”

“We might be looking at the country turning the clock back on itself,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a political theorist at the University of Sydney. But the road ahead may not be smooth - as shown by protests this week over a vaccine mandate - and state leaders are still insisting that they will go it alone. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind a plan to reopen when 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated. Some states are trying desperately to hold on to what worked before, while New South Wales and Victoria, home to the country’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are being forced by Delta outbreaks to find a more nuanced path forward. The confidence and pride of 2020, when lockdowns and isolation brought Covid outbreaks to heel, have been replaced by doubt, fatigue and a bitter battle over how much freedom or risk should be allowed in a Delta-defined future. In the words of Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie, ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken’.Australia is at a crossroads with Covid. That is being undermined in Australia, as state authorities impose one law for ordinary citizens and another for the rich and famous. A functioning liberal society is a difficult thing to create and, once established, it needs careful nurturing.

The police even tried to censor coverage of their own actions – which was hardly a surprise given their track record of aggressive and brutal policing.Īustralia should stand as a warning about how easily fundamental rights and freedoms can be eroded. Unlike the BLM protesters, however, they were faced with riot police armed with rubber bullets, truncheons and pepper spray. Having endured more than 250 days under lockdown, many Melburnians took to the streets to protest against the ever more authoritarian controls over their lives. Yet the state government was so sympathetic to their cause that police decided before the event not to fine any of the protesters.Ĭontrast this with what happened a year later. They did so in direct contravention of health directives, at a time when there were thousands of Covid cases in Australia. When the Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world in 2020, 10,000 BLM protesters gathered in Melbourne. Such inconsistency has also affected the right to protest. While those involved in the Australian Open were welcomed into Victoria, Australia’s own citizens were turned away. The Victorian government even denied entry to residents from neighbouring states. At that time there were more than 37,000 Australian residents stranded overseas and unable to return home due to the ‘danger’ they posed to the quarantine system. In early 2021 the state government decided to let in 1,200 tennis players, staff and VIPs from around the world to attend the Australian Open. The hypocrisy has also been clear to see in Victoria, whose capital, Melbourne, is the most locked-down city in the world. It seems that Australia’s class divide has widened during the pandemic – and compassion has been thrown out of the window.

Australia lockdown 2021