A recent arrest of a pregnant woman, now facing 15 years, shows how badly Australia has succumbed to public health tyranny
Gideon ROZNER
It was the image that shocked Australia and soon went global. A pregnant woman, handcuffed in her own kitchen, in front of her children, as police officers seized every computer, tablet and cell phone in the house before frog-marching her off to the station.
It’s the treatment that Australians are used to seeing meted out to drug traffickers, suspected terrorists and child pornography rings. But in Zoe Lee Buhler’s case, her ‘crime’ was a Facebook post.
The most remarkable thing, though, is it’s taken until now for some sort of protest movement to emerge. Melbourne—Victoria’s capital city—has been under some form of lockdown since March. When the coronavirus first hit, the premiers governing Australia’s eight states and territories descended into a kind of unspoken competition to see who could take the ‘toughest action’ against the virus—that is, which leader could close the most businesses, destroy the most jobs, and stifle the most liberties in the name of being seen to be ‘doing something’ about the virus.
If this shatters your idea of Australia as a rugged, relaxed, irreverent wonderland, then I apologise. That Australia died long ago, to the extent it ever really existed at all. Australia has no First Amendment, and its political culture is closer to continental Europe than the U.S. Fundamental freedoms have been largely left to conventions inherited from the British. They have proved fragile, though nobody ever imagined that they would be this fragile.
Daniel Andrews knows this, and exploits it. Somewhere along the way, he picked up the playbook of Democrats who preside over dysfunction, poverty, crime and thinly-veiled corruption, and make up for it all by wheeling out some woke gimmick every so often—almost always involving vast sums of public money. The coronavirus has given him the best talking point of all: ‘The economy versus human life.’
The media response is—with a few exceptions—fawning and uncritical, but it’s the only real check or balance we have: The state parliament has barely sat since March, and coronavirus restrictions have been made by executive fiat under dubious ’emergency powers.’
All that said, Andrews’ hitherto insurmountable hold on power is slipping. The lockdown has wrought enough joblessness, business closures and outright despair that people are starting to take notice. Even in the People’s Republic of Victoria, the mood is turning against the man now widely derided as ‘Chairman Dan’.
But in the meantime, Melbourne’s lockdowns continue. Andrews sought an extension for his emergency powers, which the parliament inexplicably gave him. And over the weekend, he announced a convoluted ‘roadmap to reopening’ which basically means that Melburnians will enter Australia’s sweltering summer under house arrest, and will be holding their Christmas dinners via Zoom.
It’s a cautionary tale, and then some. For the sake of a nasty strain of viral pneumonia, Victorians eagerly cashed in their freedoms for the promise of safety. In so doing, we have turned one of the greatest cities in the world to a dystopian hellscape with no end in sight.
