In a stunning indictment of the state of governance in the Australian state of Victoria, an unidentified senior bureaucrat classified citizens according to their compliance with the government’s Covid diktats. This is the state whose capital Melbourne suffered through the world’s longest lockdown (267 days!).

Yet, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Victoria had the worst overall Covid mortality outcome between March 2020 and the end of September 2023, with a standardised death rate of 16.1 per 100,000 people compared to the national average of 12.4. New South Wales was the second worst with a rate of 13.5 and Western Australia the best with 7.7 deaths per 100,000 people. But rather than concern about mismanagement of the pandemic, peoples’ compliance score was of more interest to the government than investigating the scientific validity, factual basis, collateral harms, and the net cost-benefit equation of their Covid interventions. …

Thus the government was using taxpayer money to commission research from a private consultancy into grading people according to their Covid compliance score, in order to devise a strategy to persuade them into following government directives and obey government orders. Addressed chiefly as a public health matter, the primary concern would have been the health and safety of the people. Instead the primary motivation was clearly political control and moulding public opinion for partisan advantage.