In my country we had over 10,000 cases yesterday and I will be going out for after work drinks at the end of this week to socialise.
Does Australia just overspend on its military budget or am I misunderstanding why Australia is going to these extremes?
Australia had 923 COVID deaths total, for a population of 25 million. That’s 36 cases per million.
For comparison, the US has 1,887 deaths per million. Most European states aren’t much better, or even worse, per capita.
Now, you can argue if these extremes are worth it, or not, but it seems clear that what they are doing is saving lives.
(Would be good if someone had a calendar recording this)
australia's use of a few lockdowns and draconian border resitrictions eliminated covid within the country and meant there's been little restrictions for anyone for most of the pandemic.
Australia quarantines internally, which is comparable, if not more difficult, than countries that close their international borders. Imagine if LA was quarantined from the rest of California. That's the closest analogy I can make to the subject of this thread.
And yes Australia is a large island but if you take the briefest glance at a population density map, you'll see that the vast majority of the population is concentrated in a few coastal regions and particularly around Sydney and Melbourne.
Lockdowns are not 100% effective, but just an attempt to slow down the transmission rate. Think of it as a type of defense-in-depth. Australia (and New Zealand's) true advantage is their natural isolation from the rest of the world and their ability to control/track who is coming into the country.
Arguably the US would have it easier to control, since half its population is in low density rural and suburban environments that significantly reduce social contact.
Although 170 cases is a lot less than 10,000 when you view it as a pure number, from an economic and lifestyle perspective the difference between 0 cases and 1 case is effectively more significant than 1 case and any number of cases greater than that - zero cases means that you can not only end restrictions, but also that people who normally wouldn't leave the house as long as there was any danger at all can go out and spend money without any fear of the virus.
So that's why there's so much emphasis on locking down even with only 170 cases - it's about trying to get back to zero ASAP.
There is an argument to be made for the fact that we'll have to live with covid eventually, but: 1. Vaccine numbers remain low 2. Given that people have seen lockdowns succeed in essentially ending covid before, and blame the government for both not locking down quickly enough in this outbreak and for the vaccination rollout, committing to living with covid now would be political suicide
When you have a small number of cases, you still have to take precautions to keep the reproduction rate below 1.0.
It's up to each society to decide which strategy it wants to take. Australia has chosen eradication (zero cases) over suppression (a low and flat number of cases). The former lets you have periods of pre-pandemic behavior punctuated by short but extreme lockdowns, the latter means you get a constant set of restrictions until enough people are vaccinated.
So they went ahead and used the strategy again, but this time (because delta is much worse) it didn't work, but they can't stop because the politicians who back this would take a hit if they admitted it. So they do the only thing they can, which is go at it, but harder.
This is basically the US Vietnam war situation.
Your country has decided to live with covid and adjust its response gradually.
I've not seen this explicitly articulated but I think it may be linked to their long-standing onerous biosecurity rules for plants and animals, e.g. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/import/arrival/pests/plant_di... . If Australia can be free of certain plant diseases, why not of human diseases? The result is a low death toll and really heavy lockdowns.
When you have to use military to enforce your policies you've lost the plot it's really that simple.
I'm not familiar with the "bad takes" happening in the Anglosphere, but it should be noted that the French Gendarmerie is not exactly the same thing as "the military".
Until recently they were, technically, military, as in they were attached to the Defense Ministry. This has changed a few years ago, and are now attached to the Interior (Home) Ministry, like the "regular" Police. But this isn't what I'm arguing.
Even before the change, the Gendarmerie was intended to police the citizens, even though they would sometime take part in external operations. They are basically "the police outside of cities". This is in contrast to the "regular military" whose goal is to operate outside of France.
What is unusual is the "Operation Sentinelle", where actual soldiers are patrolling the streets of French cities in an effort to fight terrorism.
But note that pretty much every action by the actual military inside of France is seen as exceptional, and there really aren't that many.
For example, during the height of the Covid crisis last year, when hospitals were overflowing with the sick, the military transported some people from one hospital to another. This was considered fairly out of the ordinary, much more so than the national rail company preparing special TGVs (high-speed trains) for the same.
If you think this is the point of the military then we just have two very different opinions about what it says about a governments ability to manage the mess they made themselves.
The use of coercion is a sign you've failed regardless of the outcome.
The ADF's stated mission is "to defend Australia and its national interests in order to advance Australia's security and prosperity.", and further goes on to state one of it's purposes is to "defend Australia and its national interests through the conduct of operations and provision of support for the Australian community and civilian authorities in accordance with Government direction."
Supporting state government and local police during a time of declared emergency is clearly within that scope.
Further, the ADF personnel deployed to assist with the lockdown will not be armed and will not have law enforcement powers - each ADF member will be paired with a regular police officer, and the police will be performing checks as they have for the last however many months [2]. This is simply to alleviate staffing and logistical issues, and is entirely ordinary. No one's getting a rifle squad kicking down their door because they didn't wear a mask.
>The use of coercion is a sign you've failed regardless of the outcome.
There is no coercion, and the whole point of the lockdowns are to prevent failure (that is, uncontrolled community transmission of COVID).
[1] https://www1.defence.gov.au/about/at-a-glance
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-30/adf-soldiers-to-arriv... - quote extract from NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller
Given that we know people are ignoring lockdown, it would be a failing of the government NOT to do something about it given the grave consequences to both individuals and the security of the nation as a whole.
>why did you have to use military to coerce people
The ADF are not there in a military capacity. They are assisting regular law enforcement with a labor shortage due to the scale of the outbreak.
And again, it is not coercive for police officers to enforce the law, including public health directives. Unless you consider all law enforcement to be coercive, in which case I no longer have any time for your opinions and would encourage you to expatriate yourself to a country with a more "relaxed" legal system as soon as you can. I hear Mogadishu is nice this time of year.
If you can't at least understand why people are opposed to the lockdown of course you think "boots on the neck" is a justified response.
Most people luckily do know the nuances and do understand the consequences of lockdown taken to the extreme of what we see in Australia.
That's why as I said we should probably just agree to disagree, I am not convinced about your justification for coercion no matter what semantic and rhetorical games you throw at it.
extreme | ɪkˈstriːm, ɛkˈstriːm | adjective
1 reaching a high or the highest degree; very great: extreme cold.
• not usual; exceptional: in extreme cases the soldier may be discharged.
• very severe or serious: expulsion is an extreme sanction.
• (of a person or their opinions) far from moderate, especially politically: groups of his more extreme supporters rioted in front of parliament.
• denoting or relating to a sport performed in a hazardous environment and involving great risk: extreme sports like snowboarding.
2 [attributive] furthest from the centre or a given point: the extreme north-west of Scotland.
It fits every option, other than the extreme sports.
Edit: formatting.
It seems that it is normal for Australian soldiers to be deployed in Australia as they are not in Afghanistan. This article has just taken advantage of it for the headline and news content.
> Australian Defence Force soldiers will undergo training on the weekend before beginning unarmed patrols on Monday.
When has this happened before 2020?
Surely you remember the ADF helping out with the bushfires not too long ago? There were the big news items like civilians trapped by bushfires being evacuated by the RAN off of Mallacoota beach, but the ADF also provided an incredible amount of assistance with logistics, engineering, and so on... it is deeply unfair to assume the worst of them just because it's enforcing a lockdown.