Viral videos of militarised and aggressive police, misleading live streams and conspiracy theories have come together to form an online narrative of a dystopian Australia that’s fuelled protests in front of the Consulate-General in New York.
Last week Florida governor Ron DeSantis expressed this view and raised the idea of breaking off diplomatic ties with Australia.
“That’s not a free country. It’s not a free country at all. In fact, I mean, I wonder why we would still have the same diplomatic relations when they’re doing that,” he said at a conference in his state, which has had nearly 50 times as many COVID-19 deaths as Australia despite its smaller population.
“Is Australia freer than China, communist China, right now? I don’t know. The fact that that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails with some of this stuff.”
Fox News and other international right-wing media have targeted Australia since the middle of the year. Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino and Joe Rogan have criticised Australia’s strict public health measures that kept the death count far below the United States’ 700,000.
But online spectators who observed last week’s protests in Melbourne only through broadcasts from sympathetic live streamers and viral clips shared online have coalesced around #AustraliaHasFallen, a hashtag with thousands of people tweeting about a narrative claiming Australia has become a police state.
Many focused on the militarised police response. Sharing a clip of a large phalanx of riot police moving to a small, loosely organised group of protesters outside a Melbourne shopping centre, one user tweeted: “Grocery shoppers under attack. Suburban Melbourne. #Australia has fallen.”
Others used it to make bad faith attacks on Australia’s COVID response. “Look at the gun to make sure you are safe from a virus,” conservative speaker and author Melissa Tate tweeted to her nearly 500,000 followers.
Acts of what appear to be police brutality also fuelled concerns. One viral TikTok shows a man violently slammed to the ground in Flinders Street police station with the caption: “Victorian Police slamming people UNCONSCIOUS for ‘public health’………. Stop this Draconian Tyranny!”
Victoria Police has suspended the arresting officer while it investigates the conduct.
Conspiracy theories have fed the anxiety behind this campaign. A popular US Republican Facebook page claimed that Australia had cut off its internet to limit coverage of the protests. (USAToday published a fact check saying: “No evidence Australian government is limiting access.”)
Other theories claimed police weren’t actually police, but people working for a private security company. Others attempted to co-opt the #AustraliaHasFallen hashtag into something more innocuous by posting that Australia had fallen.
The #AustraliaHasFallen hashtag seized on a legitimate fear — were Victorian police officers using appropriate force and tactics? — and amplified it to paint Victoria as a dystopia. Addressing real concerns about police militarisation, police brutality and the proportionality of COVID public health measures is harmed, not helped, by distortions about what is really happening on the ground.
This whole “Australiahasfallen” bs is manufactured for US consumption, and says more about their unravelling society as opposed to anything accurate about ours. It’s just another “around the world” story added to the growing canon of lies being fed to disgruntled Trumpians, to keep them on edge and revved up for the next election.
It’s handy using international material, because
a) in general they don’t have a clue about these countries, they’re just somewhere out there in “not-America” and
b) it feeds the paranoia that they are becoming the last bastion of democracy in a world that is being subjugated by forces they can’t even identify.
This is their dystopia, not ours, we’re just bit players dragged in for a small cameo in the main production.
Good one.
I went into a link to American Conservative (curtesy of one B. Keane) to see what the US thought of our Covid restrictions. A side story on that site postulated – heavily – that Australia’s freedoms were being erased by Leftist, dictatorial governments who’d sent the jackboots out to deal with righteous citizens who didn’t want to wear masks or be forcibly vaccinated. The article and accompanying comments all agreed that it was easy to trample on our Rights due to the fact that we’d had our guns taken away, and what we needed to win back our Rights was more guns, big guns, firing lots of bullets… This sounds like a joke, a send-up. It wasn’t.
Do the ignoramuses of the Murdoch misinformation media understand that there are surgeries being delayed and pain endured for months due to selfish rights campaigners who demand their bed when they succumb……without even considering the total exhaustion nurses are enduring.
Are Rupert and Lachlan proud of their profitable exploitation of the gullible ?
Every bit as aware of as of knowing that their rhetoric will foment civil unrest and spread covid imo. For reasons that still elude me conservatives want covid to rip no matter the cost to others. The figures would be different since our deaths have risen but at the time the US was 600k cases I applied our then per capita death rate of 3.59 per 100k to the US population and 588,000 Americans wuold be alive had they blessed to be here. We have a vaccine for under 12s near at hand due to urging by the American Academy of Pediatrics with cause and even kids don’t matter to that ilk.
Reasons? They’re wrecking the joint, April.
I have always been left-leaning in my political preferences and votes.
In these times I cannot say that I am uncomfortable with Australia being labelled as dystopian. I don’t care at all what the Governor of Florida, or any other US state governor, might think of us.
But as a daily reader of Crikey I feel that I cannot disagree with his labelling of what Australia has become – even though my reasons may differ widely from his – because I do not like it at all. Our politicians are liars and resist any close inspection from the few integrity bodies that do exist. We are not the country we were and I resent that situation.
Unless we accept what we have become we will continue to lack the ability to change to the fair nation we like to tell ourselves we are.
Hey, what the US Fox-led media are doing to Australia in the US is exactly what Berejiklian and the Australian Murdoch press were doing in WA – painting the state government here as tyrannical when we were the ones without the health crisis. It’s the best way of diverting attention away from what a crap job the media-favoured government is doing.