What’s Happening in Austria Now Should Shock Us All

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Melbourne was once called the world’s most livable city. Now it is more properly known as the most lamentable city – or the most laughable. No other place on the planet has experienced such harsh, irrational and despotic lockdowns and tyranny. But sadly it is now serving as a model for other power-hungry state leaders.

If you want to know why tens of thousands of ordinary Victorians are protesting in Melbourne; if you want to know what the logical conclusion of health fascism and ugly discrimination looks like; if you want to know about the brave new world we are headed in; and if you want to know about the lessons of history that have not been learned, then simply look at Austria.

Many jurisdictions around the world are turning into full-tilt health dictatorships, but Austria seems to be leading the way at the moment. While Victorians have known all about draconian lockdowns and the loss of liberties, Austria has now gone a step further in placing all the unvaxxed under house arrest. The next step will be the concentration camps it seems for these new lepers.

Before looking at this in more detail, let me remind you that if the Victorian Dictatorship For Life bill gets passed, then we will find the very same thing happening here. Indeed, Victoria under the power-drunk despot Dan Andrews has already known more than most of the world what this health tyranny looks like, but it will simply get much worse if this bill goes through.

That is why we must learn from history, and why we must see what other nations are doing. That is why we must discuss the really scary stuff that we now find happening in Austria. Here is how one report puts it:

Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg on Sunday announced the country is placing millions of people who aren’t fully vaccinated for COVID-19 on lockdown starting Monday. About 65 percent of the Central European nation’s population is vaccinated, according to government data. Under the measures revealed on Sunday, unvaccinated people are ordered to stay at home except for limited reasons.

The rules, the government said, will be enforced by police officers who will be out on the streets carrying out spot-checks on people who are in public. Unvaccinated people are already excluded from entertainment venues, bars, restaurants, and similar venues and businesses.

Here is one report on the situation there:

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. . . . It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line…

It feels like a bit of a stand-off. The vaccine issue has become a show of strength, a test of principles. As Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, tells me: “When some of the anti-vaccine people said, ‘we are ready to defend our freedoms’, the basic message of the Government was, ‘Okay, let’s see what price you are ready to pay for them.’ The idea of this measure is to make people uncomfortable.”

He concludes:

Good people who in any healthy, confident culture would be cherished and celebrated. Allowing them, and millions like them, to drift into a caste of untouchables, separated from the mainstream, all for the sake of a marginal gain against a virus that is rapidly becoming endemic, may prove to be a grave miscalculation with effects that will be felt for years to come.

Thankfully many Austrians have marched in protest against this medical apartheid. In fact, there have been protest marches in places like Paris, as freedom-loving citizens fear that other parts of Europe will follow in Austria’s footsteps. And one top Austrian athlete has spoken out:

Austria’s most successful Olympian, Felix Gottwald, has accused the government of discriminating and dividing by introducing a strict lockdown for the unvaccinated, causing the country’s Sports Minister to defend the measures.

Around two million Austrians who have not yet received their Covid vaccinations have been subject to the ten-day measures, which have been implemented as their country faces a rise in cases and strains on its public health system.

In an open letter voicing his disgust at the move, three-time Olympic and triple world champion Gottwald has resigned from his role as chairman for popular sports while denouncing “division, agitation, [and] discrimination”, which he claims are “the government imperatives of the hour”.

We in Australia need to learn from this. And it is not just Victoria that is ever so close to the madness that we find in Austria. Many others are all too eager to follow suit. NSW just came close to it: the cabinet had decided that emergency powers there would last till 2023!

But a backbench revolt immediately ensued, and Premier Dominic Perrottet had to assure folks he would NOT head down the path proposed by Health Minister Brad Hazzard: “We don’t want to live in a police state, the police don’t want to live in a police state.”

And in a case of much too little too late, our Prime Minister has finally made a halfway sensible statement on health mandates: