Edit: I cant reply to your thread. If you compare the rates of two like-minded Australian cities. (To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)
Queensland was known for its "immediate knee jerk reactions", if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbourne was known for its "reactive stance" if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbournes infection rate and inability to 'follow lock down procedures' was the root cause for their infection rate going through the roof. This further compounded because not following lockdowns created more infections which furthered more lockdowns.
Anyways, you'll take what you want from it.. Most of the links with values that I had have been removed. If I can dig up more I'll relink them here.
It's entirely likely that Australia's Covid rates had nothing to do with any particular action they took. Every Covid success story had exactly one thing in common: they're all in the same area of the globe, on the other side of the planet from Europe (where all the major outbreaks after Wuhan seem to have come from). It's about the only thing they had in common; there were vast differences in culture, political system, measures taken, and so on. Also, the main thing which seemed to determine whether a country or region was known for their "immediate knee jerk reactions" or their "inability to follow lock down procedures" was whether Covid remained under control or not, rather than the actual specific actions they took...
"(To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)"
As a currently residing Melbournian - I totally agree...
During the statewide lockdowns it was also interesting to see how the infections spread. At one stage Melbourne had near nothing. Then a removalist from NSW comes travelling and you could see the trail of COVID in the following media reports.
Maybe lack of guns meant less resistance to the authoritarian lockdown. But for ALL the people I know, education meant there was noone even wanting to resist.
Everyone knew that one person could wander around and wreck the lives of many completely unintentionally. And lockdown was the only decent tool society had until vaccines happened.
It sucked. For some more than others as you'd expect. Maybe it was because I was less affected, but in the same scenario I'd do it again no question. I'd be grumpy about the situation, but not the response.
Thank you for reading my post at face value, This was not about the 'Melbourne people suck' angle (as clearly Melbourne people do not suck), but the topic of government handling.
But yes, I personally think the difference in rates isn’t due to Australia being more authoritarian and that leading to success.