The poll showed a substantial majority of respondents broadly happy with responses to COVID by Australian governments.

A tiny and sobering number in the single digits thought that the responses were not good. The headline read: Majority of Aussies think COVID-19 lockdowns were “just right”.

FIZZER

Just right? Incredible, given the virus itself was a fizzer, the unnecessary vaccines don’t work and are dangerous, and the lockdowns, were a total waste of time, and much worse.

What on earth were the survey respondents thinking? Were they even thinking?

The survey stated: “Two-thirds of Australians felt the severity and duration of COVID-19 lockdowns were ‘just right’, a new study claims, although Victorians were most likely to view emergency pandemic orders as too restrictive.

“The University of Tasmania study, which surveyed 1162 people, revealed just eight per cent of Aussies thought lockdowns were ‘definitely too restrictive’.

“Another 11 per cent of people thought the lockdowns, which often required people to stay at home, comply with mask mandates and the drastic curtailment of access to non-essential services, were ‘probably’ too restrictive.”

Alas, this new poll simply reflects many others taken since early 2020. Here are some random headlines and findings from earlier surveys:

• Guardian Essential poll: Australians wary of any “living with COVID” strategy that would lead to more deaths.
• Australians trust in governments surges to “extraordinary” high amid COVID.
• Australians believe States managing COVID pandemic better than Canberra, study finds.
• The majority of Australians are satisfied with the government’s handling of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, according to the results of a new study by the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research at the University of Melbourne.
• Australians continue to be extremely confident in Australia’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, ranking Australia well ahead of five other countries included in this year’s survey, including China, the United States, United Kingdom, Taiwan and India. Almost all Australian adults (95 per cent) say that Australia has handled COVID-19 “very well” or “fairly well” so far. The proportion that say Australia has handled COVID-19 very well has jumped from 43 per cent in 2020 to 65 per cent in 2021 (the Lowy Institute).
• The Australian: YouGov virus response poll “very good for government”.
• New research: Australians’ trust in government rises sharply through COVID-19 pandemic.

The last is especially unnerving.

The polling over the two years also reflects the generally positive outcomes for COVID governments which have so far faced the people.

ELIMINATED

Western Australia, which was both vicious and separated the State from the rest of the country, all but eliminated the Opposition.

Queensland returned the supposedly much abhorred unspellable Premier with a handsome majority, an equally strong reward for fighting a virus that never really threatened Queenslanders, again, with unjustified border closures and vaccine mandates.

For many Victorians, the unspeakable Daniel Andrews remains a demi-god, and with the Liberal Party in Victoria the way it is, MelDanistan is likely to remain in Labor hands post November this year, probably with a handsome majority.

Certainly, the South Australian government was thrown out, but there is much to explain this apart from COVID management.

Just like ScoMo. There was a lot going against him, and very little for him. And he had, in any case, outsourced most COVID management to the States and territories.

How to explain these results? What is going on? Which of these best sums up the polling results?

Australians:

• Are, to put it at its kindest, low information types?
• Do not, after all, place a high value on freedom?
• Were bought off by ScoMo’s money machine grants to the under-employed?
• Simply had a very good COVID, what with WFH (work from home), booming real estate, Deliveroo, the end of tedious commutes and ghastly work colleagues?
• Swallowed whole the heavily plied COVID kool-aid?
• Are just not aware of all of the amply measured and experienced harms done by the lockdowns and COVID mandates to individuals, families?
• Don’t care much about the impact of policy on people other than themselves (like those who were not allowed to see their dying relatives or who lost their jobs, careers and businesses because of COVID totalitarianism)?
• Don’t know their history (and aren’t familiar with the likes of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism)? Maybe Australians want to go along with what they think the popular answer will be?

Perhaps, all of the above. It was retired judge Stuart Lindsay who said that Australians only care about Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate…

Depressing for the freedom movement and those who sought public office on its behalf, but perhaps true. There is much work to be done in extending knowledge about the true story of the COVID State.

You do have to be very careful of polls, as anyone familiar with the fictional Sir Humphrey once explained to Bernard Woolley. There are survey questions, and survey questions, and all sorts of biases lurking.

CENSORING

Much more analysis of the analyses is needed, clearly. Serious work on this, beyond vox pop style surveys, awaits those (perhaps few) Australian scholars interested in finding the truth of things.

And the freedom movement is heavily disadvantaged by the COVID media, the censoring of dissident views and the selective reporting of COVID matters.

Australians in general don’t know what they don’t know. COVID is a little like climate change.

There is a giant scare over nothing, rational arguments have been parked and ignored. There is massive low information. Dissidents are ridiculed and otherwise maligned.

The world’s problems are serious and growing, and policy making now hovers between jingoism and farce. This is a mighty worry for all of us.

According to the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker: “Looking back to the “before times” – meaning before the middle of March 2020 – we were all quite naive about liberty, technology, the mob, and the State. Most of us had no idea what was possible and that the dystopia in movies could become real in our times, and so suddenly. The intellectual parlor games were over; the fight spilled over from the classrooms to the streets.

“It’s even difficult for me to recreate the thinking behind my exuberant confidence that we faced a future of peace and progress forever, times when I could not conceive of circumstances that would disable the whole trajectory. I was previously sure that the State as we know it was melting away bit by bit.

“The experience has changed all of us, making us more aware of the depth of the crisis and teaching us lessons we can only wish we did not have to learn.”

We need far more Jeffrey Tuckers to reflect upon what has occurred, what has been done to us, and why, and how in God’s name we fight back.

Tucker admits now to an earlier naivete, perhaps typical of optimistic libertarians who assume good behaviour by all in a free society and a minimalist State.

And to rational consideration of issues by people who now, at least in theory, have access through the internet and alt-media/indie media to good information from a range of sources.

Tucker observes: “The speed and abundance of information actually amplified error.”

Not to mention the censorship by the fact checker class and their puppeteers that previous dictators would simply marvel at.

TRUTH

Tucker overestimated the capacity and willingness of “scholars” to be truth tellers.

As we now know, Davos Man (aka Bill Gates) has simply bought off much of the world’s media. Just search online for any number of “researchers”, institutes and media organisations and you are two clicks away from funding by the Gates Foundation.

Here is Tucker, again on the money: “But the existence of correct information was nowhere near enough. It turns out (and this is perhaps obvious now) that it is not the information availability as such that matters but people’s capacity to make sound judgments about that information. That is what was lacking all along.

“Localised fear, parochial germophobia, general innumeracy, superstitious trust in talismans, meaningless ritualism, and population-wide ignorance of the achievements of cell biology overrode rational argumentation and rigorous science. It turns out that floods of information, even when it includes that which is accurate, is not enough to overcome weak judgment, a lack of wisdom and moral cowardice.”

Not to mention all the big corporate-big government cronyism.

The profit-taking. The capitalist greed. The political class’s venality and self-interest. The unleashing of the mob.

You know, like the female shoppers of a certain age and disposition in Bunnings who tell you to place your mask over your nose.

Curtain twitchers of both sexes and perhaps all ages. COVID dobbers and virtue signalers all.