Here we go again. Again. Again. Again.
It’s getting so that I could just re-schedule these posts every couple of months: Victoria is in lockdown again.
For all Daniel Andrews’s bragging about “superior standards” and sniping at Gladys Berejiklian, Victoria has the dismal distinction of being Australia’s most-locked-down state. Not coincidentally, it’s also Australia’s worst Covid performer, by a country mile.
But now, Dictator Dan is hitting the lockdown button over figures that would barely rate a mention anywhere else.
Victoria has recorded six locally acquired cases of COVID-19, as the state enters the first day of a one-week lockdown.
Two of the new cases were reported yesterday and are linked to the Al-Taqwa College teacher who tested positive on Wednesday.
The six cases are all linked to previously reported cases but were not in quarantine during their infectious periods, health officials said.
The cases were detected from among 29,631 test results processed on Thursday.
So out of 30,000 tests, just six returned positive results. Positive results, it might be emphasised: not people actually sick.
In announcing the lockdown on Thursday, Premier Daniel Andrews said wastewater testing results around Wangaratta in the state’s north-east were one of the reasons why the lockdown included regional communities.
ABC Australia
At this stage, if Victorians aren’t marching on Spring Street with pitchforks and flaming torches, it seems safe to assume that they’ve been completely cowed by pandemic hysteria. Melbourne’s CBD is a previously unthinkable wasteland of empty shopfronts. If it weren’t for the federal government blindly propping the state up with generous welfare, it would have collapsed months ago.
But it may be that Dictator Dan indeed smells something ominous in the atmosphere over Victoria: hence his sudden backpedalling on the Woke State’s “progressive” agenda.
80s rock band Little Heroes might have sung that Melbourne Just Isn’t New York, but Andrews, from Labor’s Socialist Left faction, is doing his best imitation of Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo.
From “safe-injecting” rooms to the odious Queer Theory recruitment program, “Safe Schools”, Andrews has swung legislative weight and taxpayer money into every far-left cause imaginable.
But this week it stopped. Two socially progressive policies – somewhat less controversial than those aforementioned – stalled.
Until this week it was widely believed the Labor government would introduce new cannabis cultivation and possession laws.
But Andrews not only lost confidence in the power of the Weed vote: the porch atheists are being put on the backburner, too.
In a second political retreat, Labor persuaded crossbench MP Fiona Patten to delay a vote on whether the Upper House should stop the ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of each sitting day.
True socialist that he is, Andrews had previously backed Patten’s anti-Christian agenda, and replacing the Lord’s Prayer with some boilerplate woke fluff.
But, when the opportunity presented itself this week, Labor refused to guarantee support.
Instead, government MPs were denied a conscience vote on the issue, binding them to the party’s current stance to continue to support the prayer being read at the start of each sitting day.
But the fact remains that Andrews owes Porch Atheist Patten: without the support of the so-called “libertarian”, the socialist premier would not have been able to pass legislation extending his dictatorial “emergency powers” for… well, as long as he feels entitled to them.
Andrews may have got away with his rainbow agenda so far, but backing the blatant anti-Christian push from Patten seems to have finally woken Victoria’s Christians. (Maybe that, and a year of being forced to retreat to worship in tiny groups in their homes, in a flashback to pre-Constantine Rome.)
In the lead up to the Lord’s Prayer debate this week, MPs in both houses were inundated with correspondence from constituents after the Australian Christian Lobby orchestrated a campaign, which it claims mobilised 10,000 Victorians to pressure their local representatives to oppose the proposal.
Some MPs reported receiving more emails on the prayer than they ever received about lockdowns[…]
While the Andrews government remains ahead in the polls, its primary vote has slipped, particularly in Melbourne’s west, once Labor’s traditional heartland.
The Age
Like the Democrats in America, Labor in Australia has long been accustomed to assuming that certain groups are “theirs” by default: namely immigrants.
But Andrews’s rainbow flag-waving has alienated many socially-conservative immigrants. His unabashed targeting of “culturally and linguistically diverse” suburbs (it’s not polite to call it “the wog vote” anymore), to try and deflect blame for lockdowns, hasn’t gone unnoticed, either.
It’s far too early to write off Dictator Dan yet — or to underestimate the masochistic appetite of the people of Dandrewstan for self-inflicted punishment. Still, Andrews is clearly feeling vulnerable and with no appetite to cop a good kicking.
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