Australia to prevent citizens ordinarily resident overseas from leaving

One alternative is preventing citizens who've traveled to other countries from returning home to Australia. Presumably this isn't legally/politically feasible because it violates a citizen's right to return home. Hence the government's decision to restrict people's ability to leave instead.

I would hope tat getting an exemption is as simple and easy as "here's my lease and paystub in {COUNTRY}", but it remains to be seen how smooth and painless the process is.

Which might be a defensible stanve if there weren’t various incoherent and knee jerk policies and exceptions all around.

I’d like to say, “well look, they’re simply doing the best one could given all the known and unknown unknowns”. But they aren’t even doing that.

Sad to think they might be doing the best they can. Australia’s gone from a strong sensible start to utter incompetence.

I don't think the data supports the idea that the US healthcare system handled the pandemic better than socialized healthcare systems.

> Somehow the USA with it's private system was able to scale and accommodate massive amounts of patients without collapse while these other countries were invoking the worlds longest lock downs and basically shutting down everything to try and save a healthcare system that barely functions under normal conditions (Canada as an example, visit any Toronto Hospital).

I am not aware of any collapse faced by the public healthcare system in my country (Austria).

It’s because scotty from marketing is very literally worse than useless, wants to appear strong, and visibly brutalising minorities makes the lib and nat electorate very happy.

As for the U.S. Overall, despite how many others here comment based more on kneejerk emotional dislike of the U.S. government than substantive argument, i'd agree with what you mention: the U.S did scale surprisingly well considering its enormous population, numerous autonomous internal jurisdictions (the states) and diverse social dynamics. Of course it has many deaths, but for a country of 330 million people that is to be expected.

In terms of death ratio compared to many other countries, the U.S hasn't been among the very worst, and has managed to avoid disasters of both the economic and clinical saturation kind (whether by luck or administrative aptitude, or a mix of both across different states) decently enough. That it managed to not do worse than almost 3 dozen other countries without resorting to the kind of draconian bullshit that Australia's government is trying to normalize is a point in favor of the United States

How can they justify the 50+% tax rate to pay for "free" healthcare?

Socialized healthcare isn't the problem. We aren't trying to save the healthcare system we are trying to save lives and stop people getting a disease which often has permanent effects if they do survive it.

Now aside from our COVID response we've become a clown world police state I'll give you that. Our laws about being able to press software engineers into becoming spies for example, or our stance on encryption, or the way the NSW police keep strip searching everyone all the fucking time.

But to suggest we are doing too much to prevent the spread of COVID seems fucking insane to me

Also, US deaths per 100k: 187.3, AU deaths per 100k: 3.6

[ ] human rights [ ] press freedom [ ] privacy

It's more or less the same, except taxes here are higher.