In Victoria, we have been locked down again without a whimper.
What have we become?
Are we a nation of milksops, acquiescing in obedience to laws limiting our livelihoods and our liberties, made without review, by the incompetent and the duplicitous?
Where are the politicians, priests, and professors who will stand on their pulpit to defend our way of life, who will cry out for righteousness?
Where is our ABC? On what program has it provided a critical review of these oppressive laws?
Or is the symbol of our resistance a poor, pregnant woman in pyjamas handcuffed in her own home for daring to state the bleeding obvious?
Credible comparative international data now indicates that lockdowns have been ineffective in controlling COVID-19 and have devastating unintended consequences.
What Vaclav Havel wrote about Czechoslovakia in 1978 is pertinent to our own situation.
"The legal code functions as an excuse. It wraps the base exercise of power in the noble apparel of the letter of the law; it creates the pleasing illusion that justice is done, society protected and the exercise of power objectively regulated."
To close our lives down, to shut our shops and restaurants and schools and entertainment venues every time there is a COVID outbreak is not sustainable.
We must demand to be free, to be treated as adults able to make our own decisions.
We must oppose these arbitrary, ineffective and counterproductive lockdown laws.
It is time for responsible citizens to rebel.
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For an analysis of the effectiveness of lockdowns see, for instance, Douglas W Allen, Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature, April 2021.
Douglas Ward Allen is a Canadian economist and the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
