“Where the bloody hell are you?” was the slogan in an Australian tourism campaign in 2006. It got banned in the UK…
Today, the Aussie tourism industry doesn’t have to wonder any more. The country simply shut down one of its most important industries altogether by locking tourists out of the country. But the lockdown didn’t stop there. Aussies are locked in as well.
“The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts,” wrote the late, great, Australian-born literary critic, Clive James, “but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”
The world watched with mixed reaction this year as Australia, in its quest to scrub the land Down Under of Covid-19, once again turned itself into a kind of penal colony.
With the possible exception of Wuhan, China, the Australian government implemented the strictest lockdown measures on the planet, with particularly harsh measures enacted in Melbourne, Victoria.
In this episode, expat Aussie Joel Bowman spoke with his longtime friend and colleague Dan Denning, the founder of both Southbank Investment Research and our Aussie affiliate in Melbourne too.
They ponder whether Australia was really a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world… and what the worrisome precedents set there might portend for individual rights and civil liberties elsewhere.
Listen to their conversation here.
Nick Hubble
Editor, Southbank Investment Research
Category: Economics