CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Tasmanian health authorities have made the understandable decision to keep in place a restriction on Victorian tourists this weekend, as the Dark Mofo winter festival begins in Hobart.
Even though restrictions have loosened in Melbourne, their residents are still banned from entering any states except for NSW, in what some would argue is a rational response to the Victorian government’s very irrational lockdown earlier this month.
Victoria’s 17th outbreak was first detected on May 24 and within the week, the Andrews government revealed the state had recorded enough community transmissions to almost fill a mini-bus.
In response to this now fairly common spot fire, the powers that be decided to run another week of terrifying press conferences and authoritarian restrictions that harked back to the scary days of the 2020 second wave.
While Victorian Premier Dan Andrews can usually rely on an army of noisy inner-city Twitter users to rush to defend his draconian on-and-off approach to shutting down his own economy, the most recent lockdown appears to have tested even the most deranged inner-city Labor nerds.
Fitzroy woman Betty Portsea (49) is one of these self-confessed Andrews Loyalists, but after missing out on a long-awaited weekend of spooky art and mediocre wine – she admits that it’s getting hard to stan Dan.
“I just, think, you know… There’s gotta be a better way of doing this” says the part-time graphic designer who spent all of 2020 blindly defending the actions of her Supreme Leader.
“I mean, you look at the other states and they just force people to wear face masks on public transport and ramp up their contact tracing”
As Betty points out, it’s not like she’s ‘one of those people’ who suffers financially during a lockdown – but missing out on Dark Mofo really did make her question this political approach.
“I’m starting to maybe, possibly consider that there are alternative ways to deal with these kind of small outbreaks”
“You know, without wiping an entire month out of the calendar for people like me”
“It’s just that, I was really looking forward to dipping some vaginal yeast bread into the pigs blood fountain”
MORE TO COME.
