The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and…

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IhSI02Ww0r

It’s a beautiful schematic, from the ABS, showing the ‘lockdowns’ in Australia. What should jump out at you is that we spent most of the past two years not locked down at all. Look at all that white space. And the ‘NSW Lockdown’ was only some suburbs of one city, mostly. /2 https://t.co/MdruqmFF0N

Politicians deliberately conflated lockdowns with basic public health action, like contact tracing and the suppression of individual localised outbreaks. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers living through most of this time with my ‘freedoms’ mostly unaffected. /3 https://t.co/WS55rhjjlQ

Compare with today, where infection is almost universally present, causing crises in healthcare and schooling, and disruption to businesses in almost every sector, with astronomical levels of sickness. How is this an improvement over how we were living in 2020-21? /4 https://t.co/V5JHt1WuDR

Simple. It isn’t. Some will say ‘but international borders were closed’. Actually they were never really closed, they were selectively open. We could have continued a simple public health response of isolate, contact trace and suppress outbreaks with international borders…/5 https://t.co/pDD5U7rseE

…open too. If the previous government had organised more extensive quarantine facilities, as has been the practice for centuries. They didn’t do it. That could be the tour t-shirt for their entire time in office, really. ‘Getting government out of peoples’ lives’…/6 https://t.co/yOyC53LvXW

…unsurprisingly means government does pretty much nothing. Now core public, social systems like education, healthcare, food production and distribution etc. are repeatedly paralysed by mass infection. And this is the sleight of hand, because we were much more ‘open’ before. /7 https://t.co/TLgrcC8TJ6

Before we ‘opened up’. This takes us to the root lie if the political belief systems that forced this shift in Australia. The neoliberal, libertarian idea that government intervention ‘restricts freedom’. We just lived 2 years disproving that lie. /8 https://t.co/FKE1vRv6N4

The public health stringency studies globally show the same. That those nations who used the most extensive public health measures were MORE free, more open, more ‘economically’ healthy, than those who didn’t. The reason is obvious. Government done well creates freedom. /9 https://t.co/AdNQlaGNP4

It’s why we invented it, it was never imposed on us. To give ourselves, as individuals, more freedom to do more things, through the economies of scale of collective organisation. This is the true Covid battle line, these core political beliefs. /end