South of Sydney there is a road which winds its way from the glistening emerald waters of the Pacific Ocean, through lush dairy farmland and up a pass which marks one of the southernmost rainforests in Australia. It links the coastal expanse of the Illawarra to the cooler climate and extended countryside of the Southern Highlands. The scenery is enjoyed by those in cars and on bikes alike, and it is the latter I use regularly when most are still cocooned comfortably in their beds. The beauty of the dense greenery complemented with the soft melody of native birds can’t help but solicit a calming peace but, as I approach a sign welcoming me to the Wingecarribee Shire, I shudder involuntarily and my stomach churns. More on this later. For now, my mind drifts towards a lunch my wife and I attended nearby at a majestic manor busy with the bustle of interesting people. One such person was Amir. A man who, accompanied by his wife, was flying overseas when the global lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 hit and halted their progress, or so I thought.

We begin with a discussion on different cultures but quickly move on to the topic of travel, and I ask what it was like to be stranded. His response surprises me. ‘We were never stranded, if it looked like a country was going to lockdown, we left. There were always plenty of options.’ I looked a little confused and he laughed. He elaborated by saying that Australia had draconian measures not experienced anywhere else. ‘We flew into Iceland and merged into a gathering of multi-millionaire and billionaires who flew in with luxurious jets. There was no quarantining, social distancing, or face masks. We quickly realised that the rich and famous were not affected in the same way as the working class, particularly in Australia.’ The story progresses onto the friends they made and continued to cross paths with on their travels.

‘Many in Australia think Russia is an oppressive place, but that wasn’t our experience, unlike Australia.’ Amir becomes thoughtful and the conversation shifts. I ask what those with wealth and influence he met thought of Australia. ‘They expressed disgust at a country which would abandon its citizens and prevent them from travelling home.’ He went on, ‘Imagine if it was your daughter who could not get back into the country and had no means to earn an income to survive. Do you understand how desperate things were for these people?’

Disgust does not even begin to describe the type of person who would consider such a policy, yet this is what our leaders did. It would appear even the elites have some standards. What does this tell us about the character of our politicians and health experts?

Were Australians OK dividing people into classes? Home versus abroad, vaccinated versus unvaccinated, rich versus poor? Amir tells me we have seen this before and, sometime later, hands me his father Dov’s biography detailing his experience growing up in eastern Europe in the early days of the second world war. A sentence jumps out: ‘Neighbours, once their friends, stood by both sides of the road gloating’. It took only hours after the arrival of the German soldiers labelling them ‘dirty Jews’ for people to change. An observation supported in the analysis Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, albeit from a German perspective.

We shouldn’t be surprised by Amir’s story. The wealthy and powerful seemed to operate under a different set of rules to the average person from 2020 to 2022, when Australia became something akin to Shutter Island, rendering the whole travel restriction regime pointless. This included our former prime minister in September 2021 travelling by private jet from Canberra to Sydney to see his family while the residents in NSW and ACT went stir-crazy, marooned in their ‘local government area’, or LGA. A term our bureaucratic elites were enamoured to use – as if that made lockdowns seem more palatable. Lunatic government autocrats may have been a more accurate definition. While Scott Morrison enjoyed warm hugs and the emotional reassurance of touch from his family, the taxpayers he was appointed to serve ‘enjoyed’ the cold glow of a two-dimensional image projected from a flat screen bearing a visual likeness of loved ones with none of the emotional connection.

Not to be out-done, ‘Australia’s richest man’ upon returning from a lengthy international trip, was ‘allowed to skip quarantine in notoriously strict Western Australia despite the billionaire mining mogul having tested positive to coronavirus’, according to the Daily Mail in January 2021. In an encore event Twiggy Forrest set out unmolested, on his private jet, again in October 2021. First meeting with Premier Palaszczuk in Queensland, followed by a brief detour to Canberra for the National Press Club, then a meeting with Premier Perrottet in Sydney, before flying to London and onto Glasgow. In something akin to a game of Where’s Wally?, he was then sighted in Paraguay in November before making his way back to the Prison Island. The fortunate few began being granted restricted parole in December of that year.

The stories of jet-setting Australian and international celebrities are numerous and include a March 2021 New Daily article reporting, ‘Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch, who arrived into the country aboard their private jet last Sunday and headed to quarantine at a private location’ with Nicole Kidman completing her stint at her vast Southern Highlands estate nearby.

July 2020 saw the aptly name Who magazine write, ‘Dannii Minogue avoids hotel quarantine after US trip’. She was holed up in her palatial Gold Coast home – if only we were all so lucky. Her locked-down location was more exclusive than most people’s holiday destinations.

Their experiences were certainly different to those at the other end of the social and economic spectrum, as ABC News reported in December 2021: ‘Teenagers from remote NT community arrested after escape from Howard Springs Covid quarantine facility’. The group were from the Binjari community and had tested negative for Covid-19. The scene, I can’t help but think, would not have been out of place if it appeared in Dov’s biography. According to the ABS, the Binjari median weekly household income is $537, whilst the Financial Review reports Twiggy Forrest earns $2.3 million per day. I don’t begrudge the actions and outcomes of the rich and famous, but it raises doubts about the true nature of the pandemic – after all, how can wealth and influence affect the consequences of a disease? If it was the death sentence portrayed by our governments, health bureaucrats and media outlets, why would we risk allowing in extra disease vectors?

While our local royalty enjoyed the trappings the world had to offer, I experienced nausea. The sign marking the beginning of the Southern Highlands also marked the boundary of my prison cell in 2021. I could have ridden past it but who knows how we were being tracked and what some in the police were capable of during those turbulent times. I love going to the area, but I wonder how long my body will react the way it has now been programmed to. It also gives me pause to consider how many other people will be experiencing the effects of the decisions of the expert class long into the future.

Still, I count myself blessed. I have a family who stayed with me during the journey. The support we gave each other was immense. Others were less fortunate. The US Surgeon General recently released a document, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, stating the obvious.

So, were the elites locked down? To assess this let’s apply a process called ‘targeted selection’. It is a well-established employment practice which uses past actions, rather than hypotheticals, as a predictor of current and future decisions, or looking at was done rather than said. The words used in response to the epidemic were cataclysmic. The action from the elites and those connected with government was to continue to travel. Evidence suggests that access to a private jet granted unrestricted choice of destination. You would have to imagine that had this group, with ready access to influence and information, really believed their lives were in peril they would have isolated to their estates. They didn’t. It was ordinary people who bore the brunt of the restrictions and consequent health and economic effects. Or perhaps the Covid-19 virus is so intelligent that it can select who it infects by social class. The first woke virus. @JasonStrecker