Without wanting to speak for the other member. What really concerns me is that every additional restriction added then adds more and more time to the unwinding of them. We have been told that restrictions will come off in a tapered manner - that's fine. I have no problem with that.
But instead of the first measure to be, for example, an increase in the number of people allowed to congregate outdoors, it will instead be something like a modification to the curfew rule.
Now some would argue that's just the natural order of things and that's fine. But what really keeps me up at night (irony as it is almost 2am as I post...) is that some of the recent restrictions don't really have any evidence to back them up. They are chiefly designed to make enforcement easier, not to improve the health outcomes. And making a false equivalence that "we don't know it doesn't work" is undemocratic and rather insulting to the people, in my view anyway. Another way to put it would be police state - the definition matches closely indeed.
Of course what is happening in the background here is that the majority of the population are doing the right thing, and are being punished the most. IF it is true that a funeral was held in Shepparton last week with hundreds of mourners including from metro Melbourne, some linked to an outbreak location of interest in the western suburbs, then those people have done the wrong thing.
I feel though there is a very real prospect the government in Victoria will tighten restrictions significantly tomorrow, particularly in Melbourne. Again, the vast majority here have done the right thing - and so the only result anyone should reasonably expect from these measures is a further erosion of trust in the government, and the unfortunate people at the front line who are left to enforce these rules. The long term consequences of a failure of the relationship between the community, the authorities, and the government could well be severe. Playing with it is like juggling lit torches. It could go very wrong, very quick. And maybe the fire was never needed in the first place.
