Every government in Australia made mistakes in their virus response, but only one state is dealing with a crisis that threatens the entire nation, writes Joe_Hildebrand
The last big research essay I did at Melbourne Uni was on housing commission blocks. This was partly because I was one of the few student socialists who had experienced poverty involuntarily and partly because there was a shortcut through one of them to my pot dealer’s house and I needed to know if it was safe or not.
In fact the one thing that has stayed with me more than anything else was a number of photographs he unearthed proving that the working-class families of Depression-era Fitzroy and Flemington were in fact uncommonly decent – even as their picture was being taken to demonstrate how desperate they were.
It was literally a sledgehammer approach. Block after block of old workers’ cottages – which, in the ultimate irony, would later be highly sought after by the inner-city gentry – were demolished and replaced with these towering Stalinist-style monoliths. Still, even the most pessimistic progressive would have been hard-pressed to predict that some half a century later a Labor state government would find a way to make them even more unbearable.Daniel Andrews’ decision to lock public housing residents in their meagre flats is extraordinary and unprecedented but to be fair these are extraordinary and unprecedented times.
The first and most obvious is why a second spike of COVID-19 has emerged only in the one state that was more hard line than any other in its restrictions.Source:News Corp Australia Nothing so encourages disrespect and disobedience than the perception of unfairness or double standards, a perception that certainly wasn’t helped by the Victorian Deputy Chief Health Officer’s bizarre and idiotic tweet likening the coronavirus to Captain Cook.
And then there is the question of how a supermarket worker who tested positive for coronavirus was released from quarantine and allowed to return to NSW without being tested again.
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