Guy Rundle [$]: “The desperation of the right is an obvious response to the continued widespread public support for state government measures erring well on the side of caution. That support has held up into what is now the pandemic’s six month. There’s a lot of grousing, but no actual protest, save from the growing number of Australian QAnon crazies, which is the direction in which the whole right is heading. So the only way in which the pandemic measures can be attacked is to utterly mischaracterise them. … Victoria is a parliamentary democracy which empowers its leaders to make collective decisions but is akin to the restrictions placed by East Germany, a cold war dictatorship. The inconvenient fact that the Andrews government enjoys widespread support despite its blunders? This, according to Uhlmann, is ‘pandering to the mob’. So you’re a dictatorship betraying the country by pandering to what people want done, viciously imposing on them what they enthusiastically support. Very rational. … The COVID-19 crisis in Australia has revealed, utterly, how deep the priority of ‘positive freedom’ over ‘negative freedom’ runs here — and everywhere. The lockdowns and limits here are based on a rational understanding of the need for collective measures.”
19 August 2020