In the litany of monstrous authoritarianism that is the Andrews government in Victoria, it’s often forgotten just how “Dictator Dan’s” mania for lockdowns actually started. I guess it all got lost in the numbing months and years of military curfew, rubber bullets at the Shrine of Remembrance and cops beating down grannies in the streets.
One person who hasn’t forgotten is the one person outside 1 Treasury Place (the Premier’s office) who probably knows more about the government’s corruption than any other.
Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass has delivered a stinging rebuke of the Andrews Labor government for a “failure to apologise” to public housing residents locked down without notice in breach of their human rights more than two years ago.
What Dan Andrews did in that case was unprecedented in Australian history – and simply astonishing that he got away with it. In mid-2020, thousands of people, mostly African and Asian migrants, overnight found themselves under literal house arrest. About 3,000 residents in nine public housing tower blocks in inner Melbourne were, without notice, placed under “hard lockdown” and banned from leaving their homes for a week.
At a book launch on Tuesday night she revealed that the government’s response and lack of apology left her “so incensed” that for the only time in her career, she felt compelled to say something more after her report into the lockdown. And she warned that “the impact of lockdowns on mental health, the young and very old is yet to be … understood, yet to be measured”.
The tower block lockdown was in some ways a taste of what the rest of Victoria was about to be dealt, but in other ways, much, much worse. Because, while the other inmates of Dan’s Gulag were at least grudgingly allowed an hour in the exercise yard, the residents of the tower blocks were simply barred in, as if they were in downtown Wuhan.
“We all went into lockdown soon after and we all had a chance, didn’t we, we all had a few hours at least to go down to the supermarket and get our supplies even though the virus was running rampant. What would have been the reaction of the other five million people in Greater Melbourne if we too had been locked down without any warning whatsoever?”
What was even worse – and, astonishingly, completely, conveniently ignored by the usual suspects who can sniff out imaginary “racism” a mile away – was the tacitly racist scapegoating.
“What followed was much, really quite ugly public commentary to the extent that of course they had to lock everyone down, so no one escaped and that would endanger all the rest of us.”
As I wrote at the time, the not-so-subtle message from the government was: it’s those bloody wogs. Government media releases were keen to stress that the hotspots were “Melbourne’s multicultural suburbs”.
A key recommendation from the Ombudsman’s investigation, tabled in parliament in December 2020 was that the Victorian government should apologise to the tower residents and the many who were without food, essential medical and other supplies, no access to fresh air and surrounded by police.
“The response [by the government] was they made no apology for saving human lives [and] we will never know the rationale for the actual decision because the Premier declined to release cabinet in confidence documents … but what happened looked like a security operation not a public health one,” Ms Glass said.
Australian Financial Review
Of course they didn’t apologise. Because they’ve never been held to account. All it ever did was encourage the bastards to go further. Why settle for locking down a tower block when you can lock down an entire state?
If Victorians elect to keep on kissing the boot that crushed their necks, well, they deserve all they get.
