Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's now five years since COVID fear gripped this nation, and we can't forget. People were left to die alone in hospital beds, with their families prohibited from visiting them, and funerals were restricted, with those in attendance being forced to wear masks and to socially distance. People bumped elbows instead of shaking hands, and children and young people were locked in their homes away from their peers. Today the COVID narrative has fallen apart, yet sadly the entire episode has triggered a 25 per cent spike in youth anxiety and depression.

But, when it was in force, people were afraid to contradict the narrative, thanks largely to the messaging of the mainstream media, which refused to question the restrictions and signalled that to do so was to confirm a person as being a conspiracy theorist, a social menace or a threat to public health. Almost every media outlet, with a few notable exceptions, let the fear porn for lockdowns travel. They pilloried those who questioned mandates and they ignored the actual truth of the fatality rates and the glaring harms of the restrictions. Lockdown critics were branded selfish, and the lockdowns themselves were praised. In fact, an article from the Adelaide Advertiser said: 'Take a deep breath. COVID-19 lockdown is helping SA's environment as air pollution plunges and more of us get back to nature.'

Later, when the antilockdown protests took place, those who attended—many of whom were generally peaceful—were portrayed as a bunch of rabble-rousers, rather than everyday people concerned about government overreach. These were people who'd been through a lot, but that wasn't the end of the bad press. Indeed, the antilockdown movement was often characterised as far-right. Today, lockdown defenders are actually scarce in numbers. Everyone knows they were wrong, but the truth is we didn't need the hindsight. The damage was predictable, and those who saw it coming and talked about it were ignored and even mocked.

So what do we do? Well, cue the inevitable revisionism from the media. In South Australia, the Advertiser newspaper has recently produced a four-part series featuring interviews with parents and students reflecting on the lockdown experience, and it's called Lockdown Kids. It depicts how lockdowns unsurprisingly brought on a wave of depression and isolation, the loss of opportunities and, tragically, sometimes even the suicide of our young people. We know; we tried to tell you five years ago. But there were people who weren't silent about this at the time, and we were dismissed, ignored and mocked.

While media outlets and government departments now act as though the damage from lockdowns was unforeseeable, we know it wasn't. Those of us who said so just weren't listened to at the time. Pointing that out was obviously madness, and that's what was called 'madness'. Everyone now wants to pretend they were against all of this—mandates and lockdowns—but we need to ensure that we never let fear drown out reason again. When fear drives policy, dissent is silenced and the madness of the crowds prevails. But it's the courage of the few—the people out there who spoke truth in the face of hysteria—that'll ultimately safeguard our society.