Elections are coming, though not just in the United States. Well before that, in just under a month, Australia will vote for its next parliament and government. Or, rather, Australia must vote. Voting is compulsory, and fines ensue for those who don’t show up to cast their ballot.
This absurdity is but one curtailment of freedom down under. Australia’s conservatives, led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have been turned into tyrants over Covid. With extreme irony, their “Liberal Party” has imposed one of the most draconian curbs on democracy in all of Western civilization, with state governments largely following suit. Australia’s Waltzing Matilda has fallen down the ditch of autocracy.
As case counts soared, Australia adopted a “Zero Covid” strategy, intolerant of even a single case of the Covid in the country. Isolated from the world by land, the Australian government closed its borders to everybody, including its own citizens. Australians who wished to return home were turned away, out of fear they could spread the disease. And those in Australia could neither leave their country (without an often-denied exemption), nor travel freely within it – a right taken for granted virtually everywhere else. In the state of South Australia, a mandatory contract-tracing app, combining facial recognition and geolocation, was imposed on those returning from visits to the states of New South Wales and Victoria. The app would randomly text those required to be in a 14-day quarantine, giving them 15 minutes to respond with a selfie to prove they were at their homes. Otherwise, the police would be deployed. During this period, Australian police have also arrested people for being on unauthorized walks and protesting lockdowns. At one point, the Australian military was even sent to enforce lockdowns and curfews. Daniel Andrews, Premier of the state of Victoria, was emblematic of this mindset when he justified imposing a curfew in 2020: “It is not about human rights. It is about human life.”
Apart from the sheer travesty of Australia’s measures, imposed under a nominally conservative government, the Australian response illustrates a rather important difference in conservatism across the West. Whereas America’s political heritage comprises the Constitution, individual rights, and free markets, such is not the case elsewhere. In Australia — as in Canada, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom — conservatism is rather staid. Theirs is not the philosophy of freedom, but one of Toryism: of authority, hierarchy, and deference to the state. In the crisis of Covid, these base elements have been resurrected and manifested, with terrible results. If Morrison loses the upcoming election, he and his Toryism will deserve their loss.