26 August 2021

Protesters shot with rubber bullets. Teenagers chased off beaches by police helicopters. Rescue dogs shot dead. This is how Australia, once branded as a model for tackling Covid, is behaving 18 months into the pandemic. Covid panic has turned normal people into monsters and neighbours into spies. The world is starting to take notice. International media outlets spent most of 2020 filming

19 August 2021

If you live are one of the 4,060 people who live in Balclutha on New Zealand’s South Island, you are forbidden from visiting friends or family, sitting down at a café, taking your child to a playground or school, or going to work (unless you are a key worker). You can’t even get vaccinated, as New Zealand has briefly suspended its vaccine

19 August 2021

“The EPL is back” shouted commentator after commentator this weekend as cameras panned across sold-out, maskless crowds across English stadiums. The English Premier League is just not the EPL without fans. In Melbourne this same weekend, eight AFL teams played season-defining matches to absolutely nobody. No visions sum up Australia’s disastrous handling of the pandemic in 2021 better than those.

26 July 2021

The people of England should celebrate their newly restored freedoms. Ignore the Zero Covid fanatics imploring you to stay at home, mask up and pretend it’s March 2020. Australia’s lockdown plight shows what happens when you let the fear-mongers win. When many of England’s freedoms were returned on 19 July, more than 11million Australians were still unable to leave the house legally, except

2 July 2021

It is estimated that there are fewer than 300 active cases of Covid-19 in Australia. Yet over 12million Australians are currently living under lockdown – more than half the population. This is madness. And it is going to be the norm for Australia for a long time to come. Sydney’s two-week lockdown began on 26 June, after the state of New South Wales

9 June 2021

Melbourne’s fourth lockdown was supposed to finish last Thursday. After a week of restrictions, Melburnians were supposed to have their freedoms restored. But on Thursday, the state of Victoria, which is home to 6.6million people, recorded nine new cases of community transmission. This brought the total number of Covid cases in Victoria’s cluster to 54. Instead of relaxing restrictions, the Victoria state government

26 May 2021

Britain is returning to normal. Restrictions remain but friends are reunited. Pubs are open and the cultural institutions that make Britain Britain are open to the public again. Thanks to an impressive vaccination rollout, the British people know they are on the other side of the nightmare of life under Covid, and that the restrictions imposed in its name will soon

5 May 2021

The Australian government has made it illegal for its own citizens to return to Australia. In a crowded field of tyrannical power abuses by governments across Australia during the pandemic – shutting people in their homes for 23 hours a day, arresting a pregnant mother in front of her family over a Facebook post, among many others – this stands alone

29 April 2021

Pain heals. Glory lasts forever. And longer than that lasts the bill for hosting the Olympics.  Scott Morrison this week agreed that the federal government would stump up half the costs of the Olympics should Brisbane ‘win’ the right to host the 2032 games, just over an hour before applications to the International Olympic Committee were due. This means two things.  One, the International Olympic

19 April 2021

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