In the past 20 years a lot of the friends that I have made as an expat are Australian. This has a lot to do with the generally laid back nature of Australians (at least the ones I have met) and probably even more to do with the fact that Australia is relatively close to the places I have chosen to live in the past two decades.
When the "tradies" started to kick the lockdown / covid / vaccine protests into a totally higher level, the Australians that I know all support them and are experiencing a mix of excitement with a tinge of fear mixed in.
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Australia has endured a lockdown the likes of which the rest of the world hasn't even come close to over the past 1.5 years and this has been particularly true in the major cities like Melbourne.
I don't know the specifics of the lockdowns but they haven't seen a great deal of relief and in my completely unscientific opinion the idea behind total prevention is a dumb one that you can no possible achieve and even if you did so, good for you! Now you can never let anyone in or out of your country ever again since it has been shown that vaccinated people are still getting and transferring the virus to other people some of whom are also vaccinated.
What's the end-game plan here? Keep the country in perpetual lockdown until forever? It's just impractical and I don't understand the mentality of a person that can support this sort of thing, especially if they are being subjected to it while living in Australia.
My friends who live here in Vietnam, some of them started to investigate travel back to Australia only to discover that they can't. There is a massive queue of people waiting to get back in (I can't imagine why they would want to) and a very limited number of flights. The flights are also 10x as expensive as they would normally be due to (I think) restrictions on how many people can be on each flight and how close they are permitted to be to one another.
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So when a group of working-class people stand up to what I consider to be abusive authority, I support it and was kind of delighted to find out that all of the Australian people that i know also support it. The one thing they are concerned about is that they don't want this to turn into something like BLM or Antifa where the mob just starts smashing and burning stuff "willy nilly."
In case you don't know "willy nilly" means without regard or consideration or in this case (and Antifa / BLM) businesses and homes that don't actually have anything to do with what the mob is angry about.
I did find out that the opinion is different for people that are actually living in Australia and a lot of folks are not on the side of these or any other covid protesters. The reasoning being some sort of "we need to be in this together or it isn't going to work!" type way of thinking and while I do not agree with that, I suppose I can see some logic in this.
I think that sort of mindset is kind of like a business that keeps spending more and more money to stay afloat and the reason that they spend money to stay afloat is because they have spent so much money to stay afloat and don't want that spending of money to stay afloat to have been in vain. It's a Sisyphean method of thinking IMO and one of first things that you learn in business management is that you NEVER consider "sunk costs" (money already spent) when thinking about a strategy moving forward. Of course this is government so they don't have to worry about costs but in this situation I thing it would be more of a "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result" type of thing.
My Australian friends here have indicated that the public support that exists for covid restrictions and lockdowns in Australia is because of the fact that the media there, just like in the USA, is propaganda for the most part and that a large portion of the population buys into it. I dunno, I'm not Australian so my opinion doesn't matter. I've watched a few Australian news show clips and find it entertaining just because of the language differences.
I support the protestors and also hope they can manage to keep the violence at a minimum. It was just kind of neat to find out that all of my Aussie friends that do not live in Australia support anyone that is going to stand up to the government. I think it doesn't happen very often there.