I'd say that in general Australians are more trusting of their government than our American friends. I often see poeple on Twitter like Joe Rogan and friends expressing total shock about how compliant Aussies are with what seems like draconian lockdown rules, but I think that misses the point. When our government says we can only go outside for an hour a day, there's a general sentiment that this is a shame but we understand these kind of things are necessary to get a handle on the pandemic. We don't assume this is an effort from our government to exert control, and believe this is a temporary measure in our best interests.

That being said, each time I read a headline like this I get slightly more concerned that if one day this trust is ever abused, it'll be all the worse because we never fought hard against these measures.

Yes, mostly they do support to varying degrees. The current SA state government has increased in popularity over their handling of the pandemic. Popularity doesn't make something right of course and there are people who disagree but I would argue it isn't a failure of democracy at least as far as local state politics go here.

Covid is a fact of life elsewhere but we have no cases so to sell opening up the state to more visitors the government has to show they are able to control the transition and keep our hospitals working well. We still have comparatively low vaccination rates here as we have been supply constrained so we are going to lag behind what is happening elsewhere.

In a small state like SA people care more about their own families than the rights of people to freely spread an infectious disease. A few days of enforced isolation for someone with a highly infectious disease isn't all that contentious for most people. The alternative to home detention with an app for verification would be putting them in a secure hotel which does not scale or home isolation with spot police checks which wastes a lot of resources. Things will change as we catch up on vaccination rates and see what the real health impacts are.

People are naturally scared of COVID and the 'unknown', they've never experienced anything like this in their lifetime so they don't really know what the limits should be and when to say no.

So it's hard to ask whether the people support it in such a state.

We should be very very careful relying on crisis moments to make major decisions. Which is always going to be a drawback in democracy (all systems have flaws). There will always be long term consequences as these things never have time limits. Any new capability adopted should be assumed to be permanent.