Not sure where he lives but this isn’t the Melbourne or Victoria I live in currently.Normally I wouldn’t comment but this type of blatant falsehood-laden garbage requires a response and makes me wonder what the media is showing the rest of the world. I was even astonished to listen to Joe Rogan call us a police state. I nearly spat out my cappuccino I bought while taking my kids for an ice cream and to walk the dog! Terrible living in this police state!
For context, I moved to Melbourne a few years ago now and work in the Healthcare on the frontline. I’m acutely aware of how many beds the hospital system has available and in particular beds in ICU plus ventilators.
I’m aware that fellow Quillers may be unaware of who Bolt is, but he’s the mouthpiece of Rupert Murdoch and the Australian Tory party known as the “Liberal Party”. For shits and giggles, google Liberal Party corruption in Australia.
Anyway, I’ve added my response in bold to his merde. My comments are in bold - his are italicised.
Bolt Spews
Back in the summer, as the rest of the world was opening up, state after state in Australia started to impose new restrictions to deal with a handful of Covid cases. It turned us into a global laughing stock. No one is laughing now.
Time was when, even in Melbourne, we could chuckle at the absurdity of our Covid rules. We were told we could remove our face masks – still mandatory indoors and outdoors – in order to drink a coffee, but not to drink a beer. We were also told that if we lived with five other adults, we were not allowed to all leave the house in one group. Indoors, we were no risk to each other, but outside we were apparently a viral petri dish.
Laughter has since turned into anger. After over 230 days of hard lockdown, whatever was left of Melbourne’s social fabric has gone. And the city has been rocked by weeks of protests and violence.
What utter shite. There’s been 2 days of protests that petered out by day 3!
On 17 September, the Victorian government announced that it would be mandating vaccinations for the construction industry. It gave construction workers six days to get their first jab or be banned from working. Unsurprisingly, not all construction workers were pleased about this. They took their anger out on their union the following Monday by protesting outside its offices. The union bizarrely claimed that the protest was made up of far-right and neo-Nazi agitators.
Nothing bizzare about this, it was also a magnet for the anti-vax nutters too.
Just as bizarrely, the Victorian government then decided to close the entire construction industry for two weeks.
Because the construction industry is highly mobile, various trades move between different sites throughout the state as evidenced of COVID popping up in towns hundreds of kilometres from each other. Bit of a coincidence, no?
Even the vaccinated were banned from working.
Because no Covid safe plan was yet agreed. No Covid marshals nor QR codes for contact tracing.
The protesters were back in bigger numbers the next day, drawing in people from many other walks of life.
Yes, more antivaxxers. But the numbers dropped dramatically by day 3 to perhaps 200 at most, due in no small part to public contempt for them. Odd, Bolt doesn’t mention this(!)
The police took a very hard line. Videos of police brutality have swept the world. An old lady was pushed to the ground and was pepper sprayed in the face.
Who turned out to be a 36 year old male in a wig there to provoke a response for the cameras.
A man peacefully talking to police officers at a train station was tackled from behind by another officer, his head smashing into the hard ground.
Yes, and he’s been suspended while they review the entirety of the footage and not just that clip.
Police have fired rubber bullets at protesters, too.
Especially after they pissed all over the Shrine of Remembrance and started ripping parts of it up and throwing it at the cops.
The violence hasn’t only come from the police, though. Another video circulating online shows just a single line of police officers standing shoulder to shoulder, attempting to stop an unruly crowd of hundreds. The crowd broke through. Numerous officers were hospitalised following the chaos that day.
This is the price of our ‘victory’ against Covid. Yes, our Covid deaths are low – far lower than the rest of the world.
Almost as if the Lockdowns worked!
But how much longer can we live like this?
Well, Melbournians have been ordered to live like this until 26 October at the earliest. That’s when Melbourne’s sixth lockdown is scheduled to end – though you would be lucky to find a single person who thinks it will actually end on that day. By then, Melbourne will have been locked down for longer than any other city on the planet.
We got to this point because our leaders have been chasing the goal of Zero Covid. The successes of 2020 went to their heads and they believed they could do what no other country has done: eliminate the virus. This mindset was what drove Melbourne into lockdown on 5 August after recording just eight cases. It has been in lockdown ever since.
We are now at almost 1500 cases a day. These cases are not all in quarantine so expect these numbers to rise exponentially in the coming weeks. If we had no lockdown our health care system would become overloaded and thousands would die. This is not an exaggeration, this is the modelling the Doherty Institute discovered, and then gave the various Governments with Australia…but you already know this.
There are some signs of hope, however. Victoria’s state premier, Daniel Andrews, has acknowledged that the Delta variant is too virulent to be eliminated. He now says that Victorians will have to learn to live with Covid.
Andrews’ words are promising, but his actions do not match them. Melbourne is not learning to live with the virus – it is learning to live with authoritarianism.
Oh bullshit you Tory bastard. Go live in China or North Korea if you want authoritarianism. In Melbourne the Public Health directions are far from this. Yes children are home schooling but they have started heading back to face-to-face learning already. The hospitality industry has been hit hard but the Government and both State and Federal level have provided ample financial resources to assist through this. Most other industries are still working as normal.
Living with the virus means being allowed to gather in groups, to be with other humans, to enjoy all that life has to offer: music, art, film, sport, going out at night. All of these activities are still either heavily restricted or outright banned. On what planet is complying with a 9pm curfew ‘living with Covid’?
The curfew would not have happened if certain morons had not decided the rules did not apply to them and go on a pub crawl, spreading the bloody virus far and wide again!
Those who support the restrictions always say that we have not given out enough vaccines to be able to live with Covid yet. But Victoria likely won’t meet its vaccination targets until some time in November. Only then will people be able to go to each other’s houses and take off their masks in public.
Especially when people are prone to vaccine hesitancy after watching your Murdoch mouthpiece spout shite regarding them!
While the dream of Zero Covid is dead on paper, we are still trying to contain Covid at all costs. People who have already been pushed beyond the brink are still suffering under draconian restrictions on every aspect of life.
As Australians see their fellow countrymen being pepper sprayed, surrounded by shuttered businesses, they despair at the legacy that Zero Covid has left for their once-great nation.
It still is a great place, and I notice you pick only on the Labor led state of Victoria and not New South Wales controlled by your cronies in the Liberal Party (Tories by another name in Australia). Funny that, considering the Delta outbreak and several others before that originated in the Liberal Party controlled state of New South Wales.
Incidentally, the Premier and Vice Premier of New South Wales resigned yesterday when the Independent Corruption watchdog announced investigations into their dodgy dealings.
But you won’t find Bolt critiquing them.
James Bolt is a producer with Sky News Australia.
⏩Steven Are is a bloody annoyed ex-Pat who is sick of Tory lies regarding the state of affairs in Victoria!
Oh bullshit you Tory bastard. Go live in China or North Korea if you want authoritarianism. In Melbourne the Public Health directions are far from this. Yes children are home schooling but they have started heading back to face-to-face learning already. The hospitality industry has been hit hard but the Government and both State and Federal level have provided ample financial resources to assist through this. Most other industries are still working as normal.
Living with the virus means being allowed to gather in groups, to be with other humans, to enjoy all that life has to offer: music, art, film, sport, going out at night. All of these activities are still either heavily restricted or outright banned. On what planet is complying with a 9pm curfew ‘living with Covid’?
The curfew would not have happened if certain morons had not decided the rules did not apply to them and go on a pub crawl, spreading the bloody virus far and wide again!
Those who support the restrictions always say that we have not given out enough vaccines to be able to live with Covid yet. But Victoria likely won’t meet its vaccination targets until some time in November. Only then will people be able to go to each other’s houses and take off their masks in public.
Especially when people are prone to vaccine hesitancy after watching your Murdoch mouthpiece spout shite regarding them!
While the dream of Zero Covid is dead on paper, we are still trying to contain Covid at all costs. People who have already been pushed beyond the brink are still suffering under draconian restrictions on every aspect of life.
As Australians see their fellow countrymen being pepper sprayed, surrounded by shuttered businesses, they despair at the legacy that Zero Covid has left for their once-great nation.
It still is a great place, and I notice you pick only on the Labor led state of Victoria and not New South Wales controlled by your cronies in the Liberal Party (Tories by another name in Australia). Funny that, considering the Delta outbreak and several others before that originated in the Liberal Party controlled state of New South Wales.
Incidentally, the Premier and Vice Premier of New South Wales resigned yesterday when the Independent Corruption watchdog announced investigations into their dodgy dealings.
But you won’t find Bolt critiquing them.
James Bolt is a producer with Sky News Australia.
⏩Steven Are is a bloody annoyed ex-Pat who is sick of Tory lies regarding the state of affairs in Victoria!
Steve - nothing like getting riled to bring the sharpest out!! Would love you to write more
ReplyDelete