An article from an independent Australian news site that I haven't seen before run by John Stapleton - worked as a general news reporter for The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald for more than 20 years. The article does a pretty good job of outlining the situation in Melbourne.
John Stapleton has also written a book called Hideout in the Apocalypse
Here's the Amazon blurb:
Edited to fix quote boxes.
Melbourne Meltdown
Every single day, seemingly without end, more than five million people in Melbourne are suffering through the harshest lockdowns in the world.
Metropolitan Melbourne residents may only leave their homes for a “valid” reason and must comply with a curfew between the hours of 9 pm and 5 am.
All Victorians must wear a face covering when they leave home, no matter where they live.
For three weekends in a row there have been wild scenes as police carpet the city in increasingly violent suppression of protesters, including police chasing down protesters on horseback.
Against a backdrop of extreme tactics, amidst multiple claims of police brutality and striking scenes of riot police throwing protesters to the ground, the Covid story itself, the justification for this insane brutality, has disappeared.
The Covid story has already unraveled for a government which shamelessly sowed panic and confusion into the general public for their own purposes.
Senior epidemiologists around the world now say that Covid-19 is no worse than the common flu and the lockdowns and concomitant societal destruction have all been in vain; at best misguided, at worst a wanton and deliberate destruction of the old order. The quadrupling of the national debt, the shutting of borders, the destruction of the Federation, the crashing of industries, the introduction of what is tantamount to martial law, that all of it was for nothing.
Despite numerous stories and considerable visual evidence, including one man who ended up in hospital in a coma, Premier Daniel Andrews has claimed there is no culture problem within Victorian Police.
That sounds about as sincere as his claim that he hadn’t watched the video footage, which has been viewed millions of people around the world, of a pregnant woman being arrested in her own, in front of her children, for making a Facebook post.
Or when asked by a reporter what his response to being called “Dictator” by The Washington Post. His response? He doesn’t read The Washington Post.
The media hunt in packs. And the pack has turned.
Every night for months Sky News has been pounding on about the insanities of lockdowns, conveniently sheeting home blame to State Labor Premiers rather than the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who allowed it all to happen.
Conservative firebrand Alan Jones is now calling for a national advertising campaign to inform the public that they have been lied to.
The chattering classes find it easy to dismiss Sky News as being right wing, a creature of the conservatives.
Which is why the significance of mainstream, left-leaning journalist Chris Uhlmann, coming out opposing lockdowns in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, should not be underestimated.
Uhlmann writes: “The Victorian solution punishes the many for the few. It preferences the very old over the young, mortgaging the future of the entire school and working age population. It is hard to imagine how you could design a policy that is more profoundly unfair or damaging to a society.
“Nowhere in this often-opaque democracy has a less transparent court system, bureaucracy, police force or government than Victoria. The people there have been badly served, even as some revelled in the servitude. Its systems of power have combined to deliver the wanton destruction of its vibrant society. Its government has condemned its people to a poorer future, to higher unemployment, more poverty and less opportunity.”
There have been numerous developments over the past week, not least of which was the very public resignation of Treasury official Sanjeev Sabhlok.
I served your government as an economist till 10 September 2020 but have resigned to protest your Police State. I did not come to Australia to be a slave of whimsical government. There comes a time in life when you need to take a stand based on your principles. I did not come here to live in a socialist society. I came to live in a free society.
On Sunday protesters, facing almost certain arrest, sang a classic song by Australian singer Johnny Farnham:
We’re all someone’s daughter
We’re all someone’s son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun?
We’re not gonna sit in silence
We’re not gonna live with fear
Behind him is a hapless Federal Government desperately trying to escape the odium of their Covid fiasco, now being called “the biggest mistake in history”.
Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, is on the face of it an out of control regional despot making a fool of himself on the international stage, while destroying the lives of millions.
What happens when millions of people realise that they have been utterly, completely, totally lied to?
“You dictators are ruining the country,” one protester said as he was being arrested. “This is not Victoria,” one clearly angry woman said as she fronted police. Others screamed as they were being shackled.
That people are being viciously attacked for exercising their democratic right to protest is making demonstrates to everybody that a once largely peaceful country has been destroyed in a matter of months.
What happens when they realise that Covid-19, as epidemiologists around the world are now saying, is no more deadly than the common flu?
What happens when they realise that their livelihoods, their businesses, their jobs have been destroyed by a megalomaniacal push to control every aspect of Victorian lives?
What happens when the public realise that the truly staggering multiple incompetencies of Australia’s political class has destroyed not just their own lives and futures, but the lives and futures of their children?
That in the cruelest and most vicious way possible Covid-19 has been blatantly used by Australia’s ruling classes to feather their own nests, while at the same time grotesquely expanding the power of the state.
Revolution. Rioting in the streets. A city, a state, a country, burnt to the ground.
John Stapleton has also written a book called Hideout in the Apocalypse
Here's the Amazon blurb:
Hideout in the Apocalypse is about surveillance and the crushing of Australia's larrikin culture.
In the last three years the Australian government has prosecuted the greatest assault on freedom of speech in the nation's history.
The government knew from international research that when it introduced the panopticon, universal surveillance, into Australia it would have a devastating impact on the culture.
When people know they are being watched, they behave differently. Dissent is stifled, conformity becomes the norm. This is the so-called chilling effect.
Hideout in the Apocalypse, in the great tradition of The Lucky Country, takes Australia's temperature half a century on from Donald Horne's classic cautionary tale.
Now the future has arrived. Forced by a plethora of new laws targeting journalists to use novelistic techniques, in his latest book veteran news reporter John Stapleton confirms the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction.
Hideout in the Apocalypse takes up the adventures of retired news reporter Old Alex, first encountered in the book's predecessor Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost. But as befits the times, this book is more fantastical, intimate and politically acerbic in its portrait of his beloved country.
Alex believes believes he has been under abusive levels of government surveillance since writing a book called Terror in Australia, and as a natural empath can hear the thoughts of the surveillance teams on his track, the so-called Watchers on the Watch. Alex also believes he is a cluster soul sent with others of his kind to help save the Earth from an impending apocalypse, and has the capacity to channel some of history's greatest writers.
Australia might have the worst anti-freedom of speech laws in the Western world, but how can you sue a character like that?
Stapleton's essential theme: a place which should have been safe from an impending apocalypse, the quagmire of religious wars enveloping the Middle East, is not safe at all.
Ideas are contagious, and the Australian government is afraid of them. Australia is a democracy in name only.The war on terror has become a war on the people's right to know, justifying a massive expansion of state power.
Alex's swirling head, lifelong fascination with sociology, literature and journalism, and his deep distress over the fate of the Great Southern Land, makes him the perfect character to tell a story which urgently needs to be told.
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