A roundup of recent skirmishes on the Covid front Downunder.
It’s not going well for the Free-Range Humans but all is not lost.
On with the party dresses, Citizens!
The Covid Resistance, Antipodean Branch, struck on New Years Eve in Western Australia where some three hundred partygoers breached the state’s restrictions by holding a private party in a Perth bar called The George. The revellers were all maskless and had destroyed all the venue’s QR-code posters, whilst the bar had blacked out all its windows and locked all its doors but the mini-Maos who patrol the city streets for just this sort of counter-revolutionary hooliganism and public health sabotage got onto the cops who raided the joint half an hour before midnight by scaling a series of walls to force entry through adjacent doors.
This is what civil disobedience looks like – and all done in party dresses! Punishment will be exemplary, however, as the owners of The George face a quarter million in fines and risk losing their liquor licence over the “illegal event” (nightclubs, music events and dancing are all currently banned under Western Australia’s Covid tyranny, while only seated service is permitted in bars). The attendees will also be slugged big fines.
Meanwhile, across the border, in South Australia, the Covid cops are threatening a 19-year-old teenager with two years jail (or a $20,000 fine) for having a night on the town after having tested positive (but not being ill in any way, or infectious, course). He had been had been refused bail but is now released pending his fate. Two years out of his life and a criminal record forever. For going to a nightclub.
This is what you get when civil disobedience is isolated. Mass civil disobedience, on the other hand, would really change things.
Nevertheless, that’s one more bar and some 300+ more ordinary citizens to add to the honour roll of the Resistance. The Covid-crazy, power-drunk authorities can’t hold back this sort of tide forever.
Just when you thought it was safe to go down to the shops again ….
South Australia’s insipid ‘Liberal’ Premier, Steven (Marshmallow) Marshall, has determined that the populace of his state are becoming too complacent (i.e. realistic) about the bug, especially it’s mild-mannered Omicron variant which is not exactly living up to the SARS-CoV-2 reputation as the destroyer of worlds.
So he has triggered a raft of kneejerk ‘restrictions’ because of the rise in ‘cases’ and patients in hospital ‘with’ (of course, just ‘with’) Covid in response to the renewed testdemic. “We've got to swing into action to save lives”, said Marshall. “We’ve got to be seen to be doing something that pretends to save lives because there is an election due in March next year” is more like it.
I’d like to say that all this has gone down like a bucket of cold sick with the great South Aussie public but the Covid trance is still hegemonic. There are, however, growing numbers of those who are utterly tired of the farce, which will make the state election interesting. Team Marshmallow leads the Labor ‘Opposition’ only 51% to 49% (the ‘two-party-preferred’ vote under Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system), with the 12% of the electorate rooting for Independents/Other as their first preference (which includes some spicy anti-lockdown/anti-mandate parties) holding a strategic electoral hand. A smart, principled Labor party would pounce on lockdown tiredness and cut a path to victory through the marginal electorates by orienting to the anti-restriction/mandate political demographic but ‘smart’ and ‘principled’ don’t come to mind when thinking of SA’s Labor Party. Hence, Marshall’s finely calibrated tilt towards more restrictions to appease the perpetually-Covid-terrified but without going full stay-at-home lockdown.
The Test-and-Isolate formula gets tweaked (for politics, not science)
Following an international trend (and why not? International groupthink has characterised the Covid nonsense since the get-go), Australia is freeing up its tight reins on testing and isolation of Covid ‘close contacts’. As our internal borders slowly open up (after two years of border closures by dumb politicians who think that an already-endemic virus can be contained by restricting human movement), interstate travellers are now moving about freely (but only if they are double-jabbed because we have medical apartheid) but are also required to be tested (and return a negative) before and after crossing state lines (because our rulers obviously don’t think much of the purported ‘vaccines’ to stop infection and transmission).
The result has been massive queues at the testing sites and a run on do-it-at-home tests, and, as even Blind Freddy could observe, the consequence of this increase in testing is a rush of (false) positives or the detection of old flu-cold virus remnants (because the PCR test can’t tell the difference between any of them and SARS-CoV2). So, healthy, unsick Covid ‘cases’ therefore increase as once-‘Zero Covid’ Australia is now chalking up tens of thousands of ‘cases’ (meaningless positive tests) a day in a mighty testdemic.
This testing mania is having a nuclear-fission-like effect on the economy. As the PCR test is total rubbish, and the RAT even worse, the testing crapshoot results in thousands of ‘positives’ who are, of course, contacts of many thousands more who must also test and isolate when they draw the booby prize of a positive result and resultant home isolation.
Track-and-trace was always going to be a non-starter as a ‘control’ device for an infectious, swiftly endemic coronavirus but it gave the rulers something to do and a set of figures to plot in Excel (taking credit for the ‘donut days’ when testing came up empty for Covid). They were profoundly stupid in actually believing they could ‘really beat this thing’, as South Australia’s Premier, Steven Marshall, put it early doors, and saying, later doors, ‘let’s really get on top of thing’ as he put it about controlling escalating Omicron ‘cases’ (how my South Australian heart sank at the unscientific folly of these words).
One of our Covid rulers’ stupidities was to believe that quarantining vast numbers of healthy working age people for two weeks at a time (the so-called ‘pingdemic’ – text messages telling contacts to go home and stay there for 14 days) would not affect the economy by taking lots of people out of the workforce (where ‘close contacts’ for testing purposes abound). But the political imperative of ‘being seen to be doing something’ as Covid hysteria raged, overrode their other base political instinct of ‘putting the economy first’ (which means, to the political right and to the centrist left, protecting profits at all costs). Just when we wanted politicians, whose bread and butter is worshipping Mammon, to honour their real God, they failed.
Now they are trying to make up for their dereliction of Mammon-worshipping duty by trying to lessen the impact of test-and-isolate by changing the terms of engagement – a shorter quarantine period, a reduced testing schedule and less reliance on the PCR in favour of home RATs/LFTs.
Thus did Australia’s insipid Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, respond with “It is important that we move to a new definition of close contact that enables Australia to keep moving, for people to get on with their lives”. So now a “close contact” of a Covid ‘case’ has been downgraded to “someone who has spent four hours or more with a confirmed case in a household or household-like setting, such as a residential care facility” who will now only be required to quarantine for seven instead of 14 days and only take a home-RAT once, on day six of isolation. The same applies for travellers.
This policy adjustment is also being motivated in Australia by the looming federal election, due sometime in the next 4-5 months. Morrison’s Liberals are trailing badly in the opinion polls, largely because of restriction-fatigue amongst small/medium businesses (business owners vote!) and workers (workers vote!). Even though the Labor-Green opposition would be even worse on all things Covid, the federal Liberals have been the incumbents during the lockdown/restriction era and look like being punished for it unless the thoroughly modern totalitarians relax their iron grip a little on testing and quarantine. Play out a little more of the leash without actually letting go of control.
Still, at least we can hope that The Science is solid on all this changing of definitions and protocols because Mr. Clever Virus is a sentient organism, able to adjust its incubation period and identification-by-testing to align with the latest bureaucratic fiat, spelled out in exquisite and soul-numbing detail by the infectious diseases ‘Experts’ and public heath bureaucrats, just as old clever-clogs virus can tell the difference between someone who is standing in a dining establishment (and must therefore be masked) and someone who is sitting (and therefore does not need to be masked). Isn’t it amazing how the virological ‘Science’ is so easily amended to ride on the coat-tails of what is politically necessary.
Divide-and-Rule
Corporate Australia is running amok. Although there are state-government-imposed No-Jab-No-Job Covid vaccine mandates in operation for most of Australia’s states, the proportion of employers who have acted on their own initiative, with their Pontius Pilate premiers washing their hands of the matter, is shockingly high. Six in ten of all employers are making the Covid vaxx mandatory for at least a portion of their staff and most of those are making it mandatory for all staff.
The same proportion (six in ten) say that vaxx status will influence their hiring decisions. This is where it could get tricky. Many of the HR managers said they were “worried about skills shortages and recruitment problems”. They are gung-ho about sacking good, experienced, skilled staff, yet they can’t easily replace them with equally meritorious staff, particularly as the pool of reserve labour is going to be flooded with the unvaxxed miscreants whom they will not hire.
The truly shocking finding is that Australian workers, who used to stand by their mates, have become Covid-demented and vaxx-happy, with 85% of them agreeing with the No-Jab-No-Job policy for their company.
Has no one heard that the vaxx does not protect against infection or transmission? This is all about compliance and stigmatising the unvaxxed.
In better news, the miners’ union has successfully taken the ‘Big Australian’ (BHP) to court and had the company’s vaxx mandate for coal miners overturned by the full bench of the Fair Work Commission which ruled that BHP’s vaccine mandate on workers at the Mt. Arthur thermal coal mine in New South Wales was unlawful and unreasonable (albeit only because of a lack of prior consultation). Other unions are looking to build on this precedent, including the Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineer’s Association at Qantas airlines.
And now, the sports report
The traditional Test cricket series between England and Australia (currently three matches into the scheduled five) is threatening to come unstuck because, under Australia’s hyper-strict Covid ‘control’ regime, the last two games, in Sydney (at the Sydney Cricket Ground – SCG) and in Hobart, may not proceed because seven members of the England (non-playing) camp have tested positive to Covid (none are sick or symptomatic, of course) and must isolate. The Australian batsman, Travis Head, has also come up positive (which would make all his Australian teammates ‘close contacts’ and due for isolation).
Now, this poses a conundrum in sports-mad Australia because cricket (especially the England-Australia Test match rivalry) is a secular religion and cancelling the games under rigid ‘Covid protocols’ would be tantamount to blasphemy. The New South Wales Health Minister, Brad Hazzard, is one of the most Covid-mad politicians in Australia and he is a harsh disciplinarian concerning Covid ‘restrictions’ yet even he says that “the SCG Test is sacred”, signalling that the Covid God must not prevail against the Sport God.
The politician who has no interest in, or feigns no interest in, footy or cricket is dead meat in Australia. Covid (both the super-duper harbinger of the End of Times we have been led to believe it is, as well as the restrictions – sorry, ‘protections’!) has, however, been a state religion now for two years, as well. Any politician who is not seen to be doing the utmost to ‘keep people safe’ is likewise dead meat. Covid v cricket - this could be a bigger religious schism than Catholic v Protestant.
My money’s on sport winning out with a workaround being found that allows the games to go on. Expect a lot of Rapid Antigen Tests until a lucky negative pops up for the affected personnel. There will also be bubbles, bubbles and more bubbles. And, inevitably, more masks. And reduced crowds. And every other pointless bit of hygiene theatre.
On one thing, their own self-preservation, politicians aren’t stupid. Dumb as fence-posts on the behaviour of viruses, they know how to look after No. 1…..
What we learn from all the above: Free-Range Humans v Battery-Hen Humans
We Free-Range humans are unjabbed, untested, un-QR-coded, unglued from the TV … and unafraid of a run-of-the-mill virus because we haven’t outsourced our thinking to the enemies of freedom who are in a mad frenzy of vaxx-stabbing to cover up their monumentally disastrous decision to shut down society, deep-six civil liberties and place human freedoms on ice in order to be seen ‘to be doing something’ against a virus which most people will never get because of pre-existing cross-immunity from related coronaviruses (including the common cold) and for whom most of those who do get infected will be asymptomatic (aka healthy) and for whom a majority of those who are symptomatic will experience only mild-moderate symptoms (because what they really had is the common cold whilst the vast majority of those who do have more severe symptoms (its probably the flu but may be Covid – who knows. The PCR test doesn’t!) will recover a long way short of death, a fate which is reserved almost exclusively for the aged, unhealthy, institutionalised population with multiple comorbidities in the prime of their immuno-compromised senescence who would likely have succumbed to any other routine seasonal respiratory virus (sad, of course, but neither tragic nor exceptional).
The Battery-Hen humans, on the other hand, are cooped up in a fear-prison of their own imagination, and thus abjuring human revelry and sport and recreation whilst turning on the dissidents by getting them sacked for disobedience to the Holy Vaxx) and doing untold damage to their bodies and their psyche in the process, and all for nought.
I know which team I want to be on.
Here in sunny Queensland, where the natives tend to get a little rambunctious, when the plod turned up to shut down a cafe in Ormeau a couple of hundred people turned up and formed a human shield to repel them. People 1, plod 0.