New Catallaxy

Guest Post: MatrixTransform – Melbourne Hotspot Tour

Melbourne Hotspot Tour today. 180km round trip — All 100% permitted within the restrictions.

Carrum, Werribee, Taylors Lakes, Mill Park, Carrum. Two of us didn’t go to Lilydale because that site was already inspected. Another bloke did though.

Dunno why I’m posting this … just to give Vic Govt the shits I suppose.

Bloody hell there’s a lot of building going on.

The roads between Werribee and Taylors Lakes where there were once just paddocks, is now like 15km straight of new development.

And road works everywhere of course.

Roads are not chockers but busy enough. Punters everywhere.

Regional shopping centres which, is what we were looking at, of course, they’re full of shoppers coming and going. Carparks were as full as they ever were and today discarded facemasks were blowing through carparks like tumbleweeds.

Deadly stuff.The thing is … if the COV thing is so contagious and deadly … why aren’t I dead yet?

What is apparent is that there isn’t really a lockdown at all; there are people like me travelling all over the joint. Legally. All the time.

What we have here is the most idiotic govt public policy that cannot possibly have the desired outcome of stopping the spread of a virus. All they’ve done is imagine up a scenario where curtailing some people’s trade or travel will magically slow ‘the virus’ down. But, at what cost? And, by the way, how could they possibly measure if it worked?

What they’ve done is imagine a lockdown, and market a lockdown, and legislate a lockdown … but it really isn’t a lockdown at all.

I literally haven’t stopped doing this for nearly 2 years of the ’emergency’.

All these bastards have done is cause damage. If you listen to their press conferences or the MSM, they continue to spew forth that the damage is unfortunate but necessary.

Traders have gone to the wall in the city … but in the burbs, they’re going on as normal. Though, there are plenty of exceptions out there. The Chicken Shop and Donut shops are fine, but gymnasiums are dead. How do you even find a travel agent these days?

Kids are locked up and going mental. I listened to a woman yesterday tell me about her daughter in year 4 of a 5year engineering degree who has decided she is pretty dumb for not getting HDs lately. She’s ready to quit.

Mums and dads without a valid reason to leave are locked up and going mental. How do you explain this to a 2 and 4-year-old?

Even middle-aged Crazy Old Nannas like Mrs Transform are going mental…she can’t visit kids, or go near the University … but she can shop as long as it is essential and within 5km.

It’s alright for me, I can just go to work like normal. In and out of buildings and sites.

Meetings here, meetings there. The only thing between us and certain death is a piece of blue fabric and an impassable 1.5m gap.

Up and down lifts … chatting with the concierge.

Drink some beers at the back of a truck at the end of the day with others just like me.

What? FFS. Pete and I just spent 8 hours working on the plant room side by side … we come out of the building and stop at the back of the truck for 1/2 an hour … that it’s become illegal to actually do so is just pure lunacy.

After that beer, I’ll drive for an hour before getting in the door to give the missus a peck on the cheek and pat on the arse.

Is that the moment infection happens and we all start to turn our toes up?

Or is it when I have to hold her and comfort and reassure her until all the tears stop?

Today coincidentally, the missus went to visit daughter #3 after something like 3 months of isolation.

She actually has a medical certificate that a normal, sensible caring doctor wrote last year. Yep, she made a special appointment out of despair. Fat lot of good that certificate would do if the polis stopped her en-route.

Multiply this insanity by a million in your head … can you see it yet? The stupidity?

All govt policy and emergency measures have achieved is across-the-board anguish and inconvenience. They’ve divided communities, families, and economies. It’s two-speed and it doesn’t work.

Yeah sure, this may all be a logical fallacy – an Argument from Incredulity.

The only thing that remains full-speed is the production of bureaucratic gibberish … and that’s a fact.

Mater

15 responses to “Guest Post: MatrixTransform – Melbourne Hotspot Tour”

  1. CharlieP Avatar
    CharlieP

    If you can be bothered with yet another story that illustrates the idiocy of Covid restrictions – my partner and I volunteer as gardeners at a large (2 acres) local property in Melbourne.

    Today we were informed that we would need ‘work permits’ to continue our activities even though we live within 100m of this property and have gardened there for almost 20 years. Not only that but we are to be permitted to be at the property only one at a time even though we live in the same house. Never mind that OH&S regulations stipulate that people working on the property must not work alone for obvious reasons including use of sharp tools, mowers, mulchers etc. Insanely stupid, bureaucracy gone mad.

    Victoria has deteriorated to the level of rules for the sake of rules. But hang the rules if they don’t suit the next set of rules. Yet people I know express their gratitude to our premier for keeping them ‘safe’. Meanwhile our grandchildren miss months of school, our state is full of busted businesses and the prospect of anything resembling a sensible life is weeks if not months away. Wokery and sheer lack of common sense go hand in hand.

    19
  2. Megan Avatar
    Megan

    I consider myself a tough old Nanna as well, and I’m struggling. Not with fear or depression but with white hot rage. I actually was awake for two hours last night in the wee small hours desperately wanting to smash something and plotting various nasty ends for the plethora of utter imbeciles responsible for inflicting this insanity upon us.

    My health is suffering as I have my ‘keep me moving’ activities have all stopped although I do get my daily walk in, weight gain is also a consequence of these limitations. My osteo appointment, also a ‘keep me moving’essential, was cancelled today with no possibility of an appointment until November. The whole idea of vaccine passports is making me itch and feel like I am being choked by these clueless also-rans that thought their gifts to the world would be best offered by politics.

    I try hard to keep Churchill’s words in mind. Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision. Courage is all I have left.

    16
  3. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    State premiers (most of whom have never had a real job and have never run anything more complicated than a social media campaign) are congratulating themselves for sending the Australian economy into recession.

    And nearly two years of lockdowns have proved only that lockdowns don’t work, with the number of cases now exploding.

    That’s because, even though Kung Flu was weaponised in a laboratory, it is still just a mutation of winter influenza, which the incompetent government health zealots in charge have declared they want to abolish — as if human conditions like the flu and the road toll can be abolished.

    Only in university humanities departments are there Marxists (who’ve also never had a real job and never will have) who have convinced themselves they’re gods who can perfect human nature.

    Which is what this nightmare is all about: incompetent public servants trying to abolish the common cold, with no regard for or stake in the real-world economy and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Australians that are being destroyed. It is pure, unalloyed Year Zero communist hyper-idealism.

    It also explodes the myth that public servants work for us. They simply regard our taxes as money they’re entitled to without any KPIs. And the media is allowing politicians to disown responsibility for their decisions by handballing it to (incompetent) public service “experts”.

    Kung Flu has turned the media into the enemy of the people. The 6pm nightly news is as unwatchable as it was in the Soviet Union prior to its demise. Most of it simply repeats government instructions and threatens retribution against dissenters.

    12
  4. Roger Avatar
    Roger

    Kung Flu has turned the media into the enemy of the people.

    I beg to differ, Tom.

    The media has been an enemy of the people for a long time now.

    The Chinese flu just made it apparent to people who still had a residual trust in them due to upbringing and habit.

    Happily we have alternatives like the Cat (thanks dover!).

    11
  5. rosie Avatar
    rosie

    I called into Eastland a couple of weeks ago, it’s a ghost town, only the supermarkets are really open, even most of the takeaway coffee places inside were shut, I had a phone problem so managed to get help at the telstra shop.
    Same with closer by shopping centre.
    I think the government closely monitors car commutes which is why innocuous venues like auto car washes and storage facilities are now off limits to the hoi polloi and they started demanding people have work permits again.

    If you work in the chosen few essential industries life is a bit closure to normal but not really.

  6. Wally Dalí Avatar
    Wally Dalí

    And road works everywhere of course.
    Of course.
    VicRoads, paid for by Your Super. Unstoppable. Who needs paddocks, market gardens, or any Australian farms, come to think of it? We can just pave the hinterlands and pipe in the insect protein for the piped-in proles..
    Our belt-and-road linked dogbox commute routes are our strength!

    2
  7. Thefrollickingmole Avatar
    Thefrollickingmole

    Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t Vic roadworks run by the union bruvvahs?

  8. Rabz Avatar
    Rabz

    wanting to smash something and plotting various nasty ends for the plethora of utter imbeciles responsible for inflicting this insanity upon us

    If even 50,000 of us in Sydneystan acted on these impulses, to paraphrase Colonel Kurtz, our problems here would be over very quickly.

    5
  9. Rabz Avatar
    Rabz

    aren’t Vic roadworks run by the union bruvvahs?

    Of course, mole. The best roads $1.1 billion of other peoples’ money can’t buy.

    1
  10. Zipster Avatar
    Zipster

    In a just world, there would be retribution

    5
  11. Megan Avatar
    Megan

    Just got back from Click and Collect at the local library. Not one of the 5 reasons to leave home, but hey, they’re offering…so they are in breach right there. But not to worry, took me less than 2 minutes.
    On the way out of the park where library is located, large black clad, hi-vis plod appears from between two cars and makes his purposeful way across to the two miscreants having a chat across their parked cars.
    He’d obviously called for back up as the PlodMobile turned into the carpark seconds later.
    Much purposeful scurrying of people in various directions into the developing gloom.

  12. Timothy Neilson Avatar
    Timothy Neilson

    Maximum Leader’s “plan” was that:
    (a) I get injected with an experimental substance that’s already killed and caused serious harm to numbers of people;
    (b) in return I’m allowed out of my home for 3 hours a day instead of only 2, but only for the existing government-approved purposes, and I’m allowed to travel 10 k’s instead of 5 but still can’t visit friends or relatives (and everything else is closed down anyway).
    It’s the most pathetically inadequate, downright insulting, proposal put to inhabitants of this State since John Batman offered the Aboriginals beads and trinkets.
    Happily it seems to have been met with as much welcome as a fart in a lift.
    Maybe Maximum Leader will be forced to turn to science. No, not to alleviate anyone’s suffering, but for political purposes.
    My prediction is that at all costs he’ll keep us locked down till the warmer spring weather causes the annual disappearance of severe respiratory symptoms, then he’ll claim that it was his lockdowns that did it. But maybe then he’ll be forced by public opinion to “give” us some small degree of freedom back.

  13. a reader Avatar
    a reader

    I said this the other day: I never thought I’d live in a society where we had to come up with creative means to break the law to maintain sanity

    2
  14. Bar Beach Swimmer Avatar
    Bar Beach Swimmer

    And the media is allowing politicians to disown responsibility for their decisions by handballing it to (incompetent) public service “experts”.

    Most of the media cohort are looking for media jobs in the government and vice versa when the government changes. Too close; too cosy.

  15. Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Border Closure Avatar
    Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Border Closure

    Excellent post!

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