Sydneysiders, as a Victorian I know how red with anger you all are when your Premier gets up day after day to respond to — not answer — questions from “media.”  

She, like Daniel Andrews (for the fifth time), promises to make no promises, blames you for the situation you’re in, then trots off to figure out which decisions to pawn off to her health bureaucrats. 

The thorn that sticks in your side the most, I’m tipping, is the constant insistence that this is a “global pandemic” and, well, there’s not much we can do about that. 

Global pandemic? Premier, the global pandemic is over.  

This is an Australian-exceptional epidemic, and the virus is fear and tyranny 

Despite having limitless access to information from around the world in real-time, the government is either choosing to ignore other Western nations’ opening up, or they’re harbouring some other agenda we’re not privy to.  

Looking at the data on COVID-19 Government Response stringency, collected by the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, they rate government restrictions on a scale of 0-100. The higher the number, the more draconian…er, stringent that country’s response. Anything north of 60 is at risk of sharing schnapps and Stasi lists with Erich Honecker. Note that the “strictest national sublevel” is applied to the entire country. 

The United States is at 23.61. France is at 41.2. Spain, which is now open for tourism, is at 48.61. Celebrating “Freedom Day” as lines snaked around nightclubs at midnight Monday, the United Kingdom stands at 51.39. Singapore, which recently admitted they will treat COVID like any other endemic disease, is at 50.93. Israel, which has a vaccination rate of 60.4%, is at 29.63. Our trans-Tasman cousins in New Zealand are basking in a wondrous 22.22.  

Australia stands at a dismal 68.06. 

If we’re being crippled by a global pandemic, Australia must not be part of the same globe anymore. What’s assured is that our elected “leaders” are not living on the same planet as us.  

The premiers’, indeed, the Prime Minister’s reality-distortion vortex can only hold for so long. Even the dimmest bulbs among us have an Instagram account, and they can see foreign relatives literally rubbing shoulders with fellow football fans, partying in the streets, and gasp, having friends and family over for summer barbecues. I guess we have to start disbelieving our own lying eyes. 

Yes, some of these countries have higher vaccination rates than Australia. (New Zealand is behind us, if you can believe it.) But they still have case and death rates at orders of magnitude greater than ours – the UK recorded 39,950 cases yesterday (AEST) and 68.5% of the population is fully vaccinated. And we’re freaking out when we find 0.01% of that number each day? Come on, man! 

It also helps when nations have also developed herd immunity to CCP bullshit: the UK’s recent wave of pro-lockdown wumao pleading for renewed mask mandates and lockdowns is being ridiculed, and rightly so. Twitter is about as far from reality as Lord of the Rings is from our own; no wonder the Left love it so much. 

If these risk-averse midwits insist on locking us down, muzzling us with masks, and keeping us all at arm’s length — stop insulting our intelligence by saying we’re living through a “challenging” global pandemic. 

If we are truly living through a ‘global pandemic’, let’s act like decent global citizens and fall in line with the rest of the world.