[everettp]

Moreover, it appears to be an optional way of allowing returned travellers to serve out their quarantine period at a place of their choosing rather than in a state-run, guarded, hotel room, or without regular police visits to their home. I would have thought HN would regard this as a sensible and efficient use of technology.

[umvi]

> rather than in a state-run, guarded, hotel room, or without regular police visits to their home

Ah yes these are totally normal things for a democratic country to do

[ehnto]

The borders are closed so it's a choice you have made to enter the country and require quarantine, you know what you signed up for it is made abundantly clear.

I think if you asked the majority of Australians they would say that they are happy people have to quarantine at the hotels and that they be guarded, since most of our outbreaks have been from quarantine breaches. So as far as a democracy goes that's right on track. Democratic doesn't mean individuals can do what they want, it means the whole community is involved in setting the rules for the community.

They weren't guarded by police at the start, but non-compliance and malpractice from the regular security guards had the community complaining about having such lax security.

[throwawayfear]

So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

What would have been the case if you asked the majority of Germans what they thought about certain restrictions in the 1930s?

Democracy is more than the "whole community setting the rules for the community." It is the rule of law in preserving the rights to life, liberty, and justice for all people. In the form of negative rights and the freedom to live as an individual unfettered by a mob of the majority. What you are describing and proposing is mob rule that subjects the 49% or fewer to tyranny.

And actually, what you're describing will subject 99.99% to tyranny because you are building a system of enslavement that will serve just the cream of the crop and crush everyone else.

Say it out loud. "They should have listened and the regular security guards should have been complaint! Now we need to use military officers to patrol and enforce." Say it out loud so you can hear what you're actually saying.

[plugger]

> So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

FFS. So you're ok with hundreds of thousands (660,000 so far in the US) of people dying for your freedoms compared to the 9 (YEP, NINE) deaths we've had in Western Australia from Covid?

Democracy isn't some mask off individualist system where your perceived individual rights trample the rights of the wider community to stay alive, despite the deep throated bellowing coming from a media more concerned about stirring controversy to drive revenue.

You keep your freedoms. You freedoms to shoot each other rampantly with all your guns; your freedoms to have your police shoot and kill you without repercussion. Your freedoms to not get vaccinated and die from a virus that has an easily sourced vaccine readily available.

We'll take our sane approach to zero community spread of Covid and our two years of billions of budget surpluses. Who would have thought that having no community spread and a wide open economy would result in such financial windfalls? /s

All this app does is allow for people to self-quarantine without the cops being required to physically check that you're doing so. It's voluntary and allows the police to actually focus on their job instead of constantly checking on self-quarantining returned travellers. You can take you tyrannical Nazi German hot takes elsewhere, we're 100% not listening with our community free of Covid.

[belltaco]

>So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

How dangerous do you think covid is? Is it just a common cold like the recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said? [1] Or just a flu like Fox News kept saying[2]?

Are these scenes in Russia[3] and India[4] made up, or are those acceptable when only a fraction of people were infected, and no lockdowns would mean a much worse situation?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/rush-limbaug...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kbNGR7XjrY

[4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s

[Handytinge]

> So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom

Yes. Simple as that. Most of us are happy with the trade off of freedoms in this scenario.

Your viewpoint of what defines totalitarianism or miscarriages of liberty are fine, and you’re welcome to keep them or even share them. But you don’t get to don’t get to dictate to others why your fiercely individualistic ideals are definitively are better than the community trade offs being made.

[sadfinger]

Thanks, I appreciate you care about us. Australia has been on this path for a while now but similar changes are happening everywhere. It does feel like a frog being slowly cooked. I would still choose an app at home compared to paying for hotel quarantine though. There are more serious and permanent changes happening with surveillance (every phone number is attached to a government ID, metadata is saved for years, number plates are scanned and logged at state borders etc), indirect crimes (you did something a criminal might do, so that's a crime) or extremely petty things like the defamation law or carrying a 'sharp object' or even not being able to pull the tab when you fill gas to needing an ID to buy a knife from the supermarket. It's not just that they seem to be able to pass whatever weird or overreaching laws but there seem to be little to no legal safe guards or limitations about what they can be used for or when they can be used. There are limited means to civilly object as things instantly become crimes. Is Australia really considered a 'very free' country.

[ehnto]

To be part of a society there needs to be a compromise. I agree not to not to steal things in exchange for knowing people aren't allowed to steal things from me.

That I understand, and the same for the quarantine rules. But things have been getting really complicated lately. As you have pointed out, these agreements aren't feeling like community decisions and technology has been making the application of law humanless and arbitrary.

If I forget to pay for a loaf of bread, walk out the store, and then go back to pay immediately, it would just be a human misunderstanding nd everyone would be happy with that outcome. Societal dues paid.

But if instead a facial recognition camera tracked me leaving and the security gate detected the item unpaid then the matter goes into an automated system and even if I realise my mistake and pay my societal dues the system doesn't care. If we aren't careful it could elevate the system above the society, and lose its original purpose of helping resolve social conflits. Instead it would just apply law without the capacity to fully appreciate it's role of societal mediation.

There are things in Australia that are already like that. Expired registration cameras for example. A police officer can suss out the situation and see if you just forgot to do it this morning, or if you are constantly driving without insurance. The camera can't figure that out, so a simple mistake can cost you.

[amanzi]

"The pandemic is not deadly enough..." I'm curious to know how many more deaths would be required, in your opinion, for it to be considered deadly enough?

[hilbert42]

Right, 'The pandemic is not deadly enough' argument quickly degenerates into a 'how much is a human life worth in dollars?' one. This then leads us down the slippery slope to us losing our humanity.

It seems to me that much of human misery down through the ages can be put down to a small percentage of humanity who thinks this way and we'd all be better off if they had bigger more highly tuned amygdalas to boost their empathy for other human beings.

(This question has always intrigued me, it would be very informative to see sets of normal distributions for given dollar amounts for the population.

Also, given that we're living in COVID times, distribution figures for a virus's infection/replication rate vs death rate per capita, etc. would be informative. Knowing when fear gripped everyone to such an extent that say 95+% of the population would be clambering for vaccinations would be useful if for no other reason than to put vaccination resources to best use. For example, if the death rate for COVID or any virus were one in three as it was for the Plague/Black Death in the Middle Ages, would we then reach a figure of 95+% vaccination rate? Surely such figures would be of great interest to medical professionals and behavioral psychologists.)

[throwawayfear]

I don't know.

[ehnto]

You're extrapolating the pandemic situation out to the rest of societies problems and rules and we just can't have a good discussion like that.

There are ways in which I agree with you about Australia's future and reducing freedoms, especially around technology and tracking. But the pandemic is not trivial, look at countries like India and America that essentially had it run free, that is a lot of death, and it wasn't just covid patients. A health system full of covid patients can't help anyone else either.

The thing is that we have a plan and a path out of this, and it relies on controlling outbreaks until we are all vaccinated. To make that happen, people have to quarantine for 14 days. People thought their happiness was more important than the community and the community disagrees so we had to enforce it.

The community also thinks you can't let rodents live in your restaurant kitchen, and that you can't drive while drunk, etc. Laws often protect the community from the selfish and that is what happened here too. We tried to let people be adults but they left the hotel and caused untold damage to the community, so now they get babysat.

[syshum]

People need to look alot closer to the data in America before they simply blame individual freedom for the deaths

A HUGE percentage of the deaths in the US are from people institutionalized in government facilities. They had no freedom..

Another HUGE percentage of the deaths were people that were already unhealthy, and what I know about Australia you guys do not have them levels of general unhealthy people.

America also has a much high percentage of the population over 65, a group that makes up the majority of COVID Deaths

There is more to the story than simply "American did not impose enough tyranny on the citizens to combat COVID"

[ehnto]

I do agree, the last paragraph wasn't quite what I was suggesting. I honestly doubt you could ever have controlled American citizens enough to curb the spread anyway, much like India had no hope either. I feel it was inevitable. But for whatever reason it was able to spread, the result was that it was deadly to hundreds of thousands of people.

I don't think we gain anything by trying to qualify exactly who it killed, since over 65s are still people, as are institutionalized individuals.

[swiley]

It doesn’t matter why, stop rationalizing this bullshit.

[dang]

Hey, can you please stop posting flamewar comments? You've been flaming up a storm in the last few hours and we ban accounts that do that. I'm not going to ban you right now because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please stop now and please don't do it again. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ehnto]

Stop rationalizing it? So we should make rules based on our feelings instead? Of course it matters why. There is no freedom at all costs, because at all costs would be a lawless badlands. You're already knee deep in a society full of rules that you willingly follow and benefit from every day, now society has a new problem and we're navigating how to figure it out, that's going to take some rationalizing.

[ephextom]

Quarantine has been used in all kinds of societies for thousands of years during times of infectious outbreak. It’s described in the Bible, and it was used in the USA during the Spanish Flu. What is the point of quarantine without systems to ensure it is obeyed?

[shirro]

Used in the US and around the world for cholera and typhoid as well. For many years. There are a lot ruins of old quarantine facilities and several islands around New York were used for the purpose.

People don't understand how isolated some states of Australia are, even from the other states. Some parts of this country were barely touched by covid. It was just about the least dystopian life you could imagine apart from driving through the Mad Max landscape.

[hilbert42]

Exactly, for the life of me I cannot understand why some people just don't understand that. It's tragic really because many people have lost their lives through the bloodyminded actions of those who who've callous regard for others.

[throwawayfear]

Your post could word for word be used for the opposite narrative too. Many people have lost their lives through the bloodyminded actions of those clamoring for a totalitarian regime and its systems of enslavement.

[ephextom]

Nobody is using it for the opposite narrative. Quarantine has nothing to do with enslavement. You’re being histrionic, but also inconsistent when worrying about loss of life through totalitarianism but not loss of life through preventable illness. You’ve said elsewhere that the pandemic is not deadly enough to justify the actions we’re seeing, and I somewhat agree (population-wide lockdowns have been excessive), but hospital systems everywhere, including in Australia, have been pushed to beyond capacity. Australians can accept some limits to their freedoms to keep the medical system functioning. They won’t accept it forever, and regardless of any malicious intentions, governments can’t afford it forever.

[throwawayfear]

You have no power over them if they choose to keep it this way forever. Especially in Australia. What are you going to do to the contrary? And how can you guarantee they won't choose to keep it this way forever?

The quaranting itself is not the enslavement. It's how they are going about it and what kinds of systems they want to build.

[tarboreus]

The word quarantine comes from 40 days, though. They weren't indefinite and endless.

[jeeeb]

Good. This isn’t either. This is for 14 days or until you test negative from COVID.

[ephextom]

In that context it was 40 days for each returning ship. Australia’s quarantine is only 14 days for returning travelers.

[throwawayfear]

Those systems will not go away once they are implemented. Power will consolidate. It is a system of enslavement.

[ephextom]

Whatever their intentions, governments can’t sustain these measures forever economically or politically.

[throwawayfear]

Yes they can. Especially in Australia where people don’t have means to defend themselves and are falling for the “vaxed vs unvaxed” narrative. Pit sides against each other and they’ll clamor for the state to protect the peace and establish order. And that it will do with increasingly invasive measures like arresting pregnant women for making anti-lockdown Facebook posts or locking residents of an entire apartment complex in their homes with no one allowed to leave.

Imagine being told in 2018 this would happen a short time later - the government there arresting or locking people in that way. Would you have believed it could happen?

Could you see it becoming worse, particularly if the media narrative about us-them continues until one side gets dehumanized?

Why rest in this blind faith about how much they can sustain? When they have already been sustaining this stuff for going on two years with no signs of letting up. If anything it seems to be getting worse per the OP, with even more idiotic systems being built “because of the antivaxers” or whatever convenient justification is peddled by media to divide the people and consolidate power towards the top of the top.

sigh

I don’t want to be right. I want to be WRONG.

[ephextom]

> Imagine being told in 2018 this would happen

Every possible scenario would have been alarming. 50000 deaths and a collapsing hospital system would have been unthinkable too. Australia has chosen to avoid that nightmare, and has chosen a different, also highly undesirable but marginally preferable path.

People are getting whipped up into a frenzy about all this, based on mental models of government and population relations that may apply elsewhere but don’t apply in Australia.

In truth:

- there is heavy pushback on government by the media and population, acceptance of lockdowns is in rapid decline, and governments are being forced to change their polices week by week.

- We don’t have a heavily militarized and hostile relationship between police, military and the population, it has always been egalitarian and cohesive, like pretty much everything else in the country.

- Australia has been ranked in/near the top 10 freest countries in the world for a long time, and little of what has happened during the pandemic would warrant that changing.

[rossy]

> When they have already been sustaining this stuff for going on two years with no signs of letting up.

For what it's worth (you've revealed in another comment that you're not Australian, so you might not be aware,) in the period between the 2020 lockdown and the delta outbreak this year (approx. October 2020 to June 2021) things had almost returned to normal. I was back at work and at sport. Beaches and shopping centres were packed. State borders were open (a friend went on a camping trip to Queensland.) It was remarkable how quickly things returned to normal once the number of new cases dropped to zero, and it was surreal to watch international news and see that not everyone was able to live like us. This outbreak is more severe, but I have no reason to believe things won't be like that again once case numbers drop.

[hilbert42]

"Facebook posts or locking residents of an entire apartment complex in their homes with no one allowed to leave."

This IS the correct procedure during a disease pandemic. To halt the process of a disease it's been a common and effective practice throughout the centuries and across many countries to isolate those infected along with their close contacts for a period of time until the disease is over/can no longer propagate.

What do you specially find wrong with it and why? Sure it's inconvenient for those involved but it's the least harmful action for everyone - all of society benefits this way.

Clearly you don't know your history or you'd realize it was common practice. For example, until quite recently Sydney had a quarantine station at North Head for well over a century until the Government stupidly shut it down and turned it into a hotel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Head_Quarantine_Statio...

Clearly, isolating people like this is new to you. Get used to the fact that it's not a new practice and the fact that you'll likely see it again in the future.

The same goes for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. Unvaccinated people are threat to the life and health of others so society has the right to isolate them for its own safety. This practice is not new either, it's been practiced ever since vaccination became common practice.

The them and us problem is simply solved by 'them' not being so damned selfish and getting vaccinated like the rest of society.

Please note: the matter of coercion with respect to public health matters is NOT like other forms of government coercion or government surveillance for political reasons. They are two completely separate matters - or they ought to be. If any of these COVID measures are later abused by Government then the citizenry has full rights to object in every way possible. Government has absolutely no right to take advantage of this tragic heath problem and it is incumbent on citizens to ensure that it does not.

[shirro]

A lot of people on the Internet aren't so much pro-democracy as anti-government. Strong competent democratic government must be a challenge to their view of the world. Personally I would prefer a competent democracy to mob rule or the dictators that inevitably follow.

[rossy]

Mandatory quarantine is an absolutely reasonable thing to do during a pandemic, and it's not new. Australia did it for the Spanish flu as well.

[moistly]

A global pandemic that overwhelms healthcare resources is not a normal thing for a country.

[throwawayfear]

Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...

Ahhhhh joy, the choice between a state-run guarded hotel room, or in-home surveillance with random pings that send the police to your house if you don't respond within 15 minutes.

What a sensible and efficient use of technology!

[amanzi]

Given the choice, I think most people would choose the app option and to isolate in the comfort of their own home.

[throwawayfear]

That is a false choice / false dilemma. "Which poison would you rather take" is not a meaningful choice.

And what comfort? Facial recognition in your home? GPS tracking? RANDOM pings that send police officers to your house for an in-person quarantine check fi you don't respond within 15 minutes?

Stop pretending to think about what most people would choose, and wake up to the reality staring you in the face.

[layoric]

Mate, it is clear you are not Australian by your other comments and you are projecting fears about "most people" with little to no idea what you are talking about.

Yes, we have less individual freedoms in Australia than places like the USA. Some of them are trade offs that have been pretty widely accepted, even though they might have been unpopular at various points. Australian's generally have more trust in our institutions than other countries, and the handling of the pandemic in 2020 is a good example as to why that might be. This is an app provided by a state (not federal) gov, that is open source, and there are various other gov mechanisms to verify how the data is being used. If it ends up being poorly implemented/used/abused, very likely it will be found out and become politically unpopular to the point where it will be quickly dumped.

[amanzi]

Not sure where you live, but here in NZ we have similar systems and approach to Covid as Australia. Lots of people have been calling for a system to be implemented to allow people to self-isolate at home instead of a managed isolation facility. So when I say that most people would choose the option to isolate at home, I'm not pretending to think on others' behalf - I'm basing that statement on my experiences here in NZ and in discussion with others here in NZ which is fairly similar to Australia.

Having an app on your phone that lets authorities check if you're self-isolating sounds totally reasonable to me. When you've finished your two weeks isolation, you just uninstall the app and move on with your life. No big deal.